Thoughts from Gretchen – September 2022

My calling in the world is to inspire, motivate, and move CEOs and their teams to ditch their flawed habits and transform their leadership – and workplaces – into positive, productive, rapidly growing, top-flight work environments. 

We have one wild and precious life, and it’s undoubtedly too short to spend working with bosses who are transfixed by their ego, trapped in hierarchical thinking, and ruling with an iron fist. And yet, those kinds of bosses and work environments persist. It’s not as easy as sorting bosses into good or bad, toxic or generative. There are good, hard-working, high-performing people who become bad bosses. There are good leaders who get promoted and become failing leaders in their new context. People fail in leadership for various reasons, but at the core, their consciousness is not evolving at the same pace as their opportunities. 

Defying logic, we’re wired to hold onto the mindsets and beliefs that worked for us in the past, even when the environment around us has fundamentally changed. Even when we get increasingly poor outcomes. At some point, we have to decide to take the wheel, to drive our development, to be in charge of our outcomes. This kind of self-development and growth gets increasingly more complex as you move up in the organization because there is more “social proof” that your way of being works, more at stake, and more resistance to breaking old, familiar patterns in favor of promising, but untested, ways of being. 

Knowing what you want is an entirely different thing than waiting to see what you can get.
Be silly. Levity and creativity are best buds.
Be loving. Positive relationships are keystone to thriving.
Take the wheel. Keep reinventing yourself.

No matter where you are in your leadership journey, or how tired and crispy you are from navigating two-plus years of a global pandemic, you can take the wheel of your growth and development. It is exhilarating, empowering, and scary to decide that you are willing to know what you want versus waiting to see what you can have. When you’ve got the wheel, you are in steady reinvention – and so are the things and people around you. A positive leader is a leader who has a net positive impact on people, goals, and ideas, but more than anything, a positive leader is a leader who has a net positive impact and thrives in the process.

Until soon,

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Positive leadership is a practice.

Leading a

Team?

Read To Gain, You Must First Lose: Winning Your Leadership Journey Part 1 and Part 2 (written by moi). What becomes clearer to you when you think about The Four Levels of Leadership and your own journey as a leader?

Leading an

Organization?

Read To Gain, You Must First Lose: Winning Your Leadership Journey Part 1 and Part 2 (written by moi). You are a 400-level leader. Your organization cannot out perform your consciousness or the consciousness of the leadership team you lead. What do you want to do with that new awareness?

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