Donna Lichaw: evaluation

Transcript context

…I want to delve deeper into that idea there. People listening to this might feel like, "Okay, cool, let me think about the story of my life. This sounds like a fun thing I could do." But I think your point is this is central to becoming a better leader, figuring out the story of you and that changing in your perspective on yourself and giving you more... Unblocking you I think is a big part of it. Can you just talk about more just the power and why this is so important? Because it not just like, "Cool, I'll sit around and think about, oh, here's my story. I was born here, I did this thing." Why is this so important to do? And it's a little antithetical in a way because it goes against what a lot of us believe, especially if we have I'll say product backgrounds or just business backgrounds or tech backgrounds or anything where we've built things for people. For years, we've had this idea that we build companies in a user-centered way where, all right, build for the customer first and all else will follow. And there's some truth to that on the one hand. And I used to think leadership was the same, which is, well, it's not about you as a leader, it's about who are you bringing along on your journey? And how do they need to be heroes? So how do you enable everyone you work with and everyone you want to follow you to join you and feel amazing with it? That's the user-centered approach where it's not about you, it's about who you're bringing with you and the impact you want to make. But what I learned is that it doesn't work that way. And you need to flip that, which is when you start with you first at the center of the equation, and then I'm going to do... Everything for me is a diagram. I'm thinking of concentric circles. Ken Blanchard has a great model for this where you start with you, it's the inner circle, then you are able to lead yourself, then you can lead others. It extends to one-on-one relationships. Then once you've got that, you're able to lead groups, teams, and then outward towards the business. When you figure that out and you come from the inside out, it's much, much more powerful because it's not selfish like I would've thought years ago, but it's purposeful. You, as human, we all are driven by a mission, by purpose, by a reason for what we do. And when we're able to have that power us, it then empowers us to connect with others so that we can bring it to life. And especially in a business context, but this is the case in anything, communities and family, but especially in business. It has to start with you. You need fuel from somewhere. And if it comes from without, it's like an eggshell that's just ready to crack. It's not sustainable if it comes from outside. Can you give an example of someone you worked with that changed their story and what impact it had on their career to make this even more real?…

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