Donna Lichaw: evaluation

Transcript context

…Along those same lines, what's interesting is you actually found that this idea of storytelling was actually much more effective in your coaching practice. Instead of helping them figure out the story of the product, it's the story of the person. And so transitioning into the meat of your approach to coaching, I think you call it story-driven leadership. Essentially, your finding is that story and the person's story is extremely important and powerful in helping them level up as a leader and also seeing them as the hero of their story. I guess just with that foundation, can you just talk about why that is so powerful, the idea of figuring out your own story and why you need to be the hero of your own story and just what all this means? We all as humans want to be the hero of our own story. It's how we live our lives, it's how we make choices, it's how we understand the world around us, and it's how we communicate back to the world. With leadership, it's much the same, which is we have a mission that we want to accomplish. No matter how big or small, it's something; we're driven to do something. If you're a leader, you want to be a leader. You have to be taking yourself and you have to be taking people somewhere. We also have obstacles, so that's a part of any great story. There are challenges. It shouldn't be easy. It shouldn't be so hard that you fail, that's a tragedy, but there are challenges, and it makes life more exciting. You don't do it alone. It's rare that a story just has a single individual. It happens, but that's not most of life. And there are other elements that I ended up uncovering when I looked deeper into what makes the most effective leaders effective, and the biggest thing is stories that we tell people, it's like the tip of the iceberg. And if anything, it even doesn't matter, I've worked with a lot of folks who their teams say, "Stop it with the storytelling. Stop talking at us. " And they don't want any of that. But the most effective stories are the ones that we experience as we live life and that we tell ourselves as well because we have the ability by saying things like, "Oh, I'll never succeed," or, "Oh, she'll never go for it," or, "He's such a jerk. " Or whatever the stories are, these are all stories. And they may or may not be true, they're usually not true, but our brain doesn't know the difference. It's the most powerful ability our brain has is to understand and see stories everywhere. And so once you can really understand that, you may as well leverage it to be that hero in your life. And even as I say it out loud, it sounds so cheesy, but it's true. This is neuroscience and psychology. We just want to be the heroes, and that's what our focus is. 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?…

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