Content Culture Diary
Leading Others is Leading Yourself
To create is hard. Do hard things. They make you better.
I love to listen to podcasts on my daily walks. Smiling to myself under the mask is the highlight of my days. One of the few upsides of walking around with a face mask.
Since I am a card carrying Gimlet media junkie, I was listening to an episode of Startup that really stuck with me. Startup is a podcast produced by Gimlet Media and hosted by their founder Alex Blumberg.
While the show is about what it takes to grow a business, this episode was about what it feels like to grow up as a leader. Alex drew back the curtains and bared his soul.
Being a leader is not all fun and games. You’ll have to deal with parts of yourself that you sometimes never want to acknowledge.
In the episode, Alex shares clips from his sessions with an executive coach that he and his co-founder Matt work with to navigate decisions as first-time founders. The coach shared results from a survey he ran. He asked people at Gimlet to rate Alex’s skills as a leader. Anonymously of course.
The feedback made Alex more emotional than he expected. While going through one comment, Alex broke down as he discussed it with his wife.
The next day, he hopped on a session with his coach to talk through the emotions that led him to cry. He was afraid. Afraid to grow up and become a full adult. Much like his father. The unconscious influence of observing his amazing dad relinquish responsibility.
A quote by Carl Jung stuck with me; “If you don’t make the unconscious conscious, it will direct you, and you will call it fate.”
What are you calling fate? Do you have self-sabotaging behavior?
Learn to face yourself so that you can step into the full responsibility of living, loving and leading.
To lead others is to lead yourself.
Who do you need to become to get to your destination? These are some of the essential questions on the journey into yourself.
There’s no shortcut to becoming a good person. Go through the hard things, feeling and moments. Let them teach you what you need to learn.
Do hard things. They make you better.
