5 Steps to Empowered Leadership

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Shedding the Corporate Bitch, the podcast that transforms female corporate executives into powerhouse leaders by showing them how to shed the challenges and overwhelm along with any fear, insecurity, self-doubt, and negativity holding them back. I'm your host, Bernadette Boas of Ball of Fire Coaching, bringing you powerhouse discussions each week to share tips, advice, and sometimes tough love so you create the riches in your work and life you deserve. Let's do this. Do you know what it takes to be an empowered leader? The answer is simple, yet the steps to achieve it can oftentimes cripple many leaders. Let's talk about that and 5 key steps that you could be taking right now to become an empowered powerhouse leader that you're meant to be. On a recent episode, I spoke with Barbara Teicher, all around Propel Her Influence, and she talked about 3 imperatives that leaders need to have to be successful at work and even at home. They are insight, influence, and impact. And it got me thinking, even based on all the work that I do, and a lot of it has to do with self-awareness and one's self-perception, but also the perception others have of someone. And I thought to myself, well, without self-awareness, without personal accountability, one might not even know if they have the insights, they have the influence, and therefore they're making an impact. And At the same time, that impact that they are having without the self-awareness and personal accountability could actually land up being negative as opposed to the positive, empowered powerhouse perception that one would want. Now, you can check out more of what Barbara had to say in a recent episode that we just did, and you can find it on sheddingthecorporatebitch.com, all about Propel Her Influence. So I want to talk through today and give you 5 key steps that you could be taking in order to really become an empowered leader. And it's going to be through self-awareness and personal accountability. So self-awareness is pretty clear. Self-awareness is you're well aware of who you are and how you're behaving, how you're thinking. How you're feeling, how you're then projecting all that in either your words or your behavior or your actions. That's all self-awareness. Now, personal accountability means that you are actually taking accountability for really understanding who you are and what it is that you're contributing or taking away from in regards to the people, places, and things around you. And so in order to find self-awareness and accountability, there are these 5 key steps that you could be taking. I call it our Shift to Riches Formula. These are the same 5 steps that I actually discovered through my own, what I call, excavation of my soul process that I went through beginning in 2008. I continue it today, but at the same time, predominantly from 2008 to about 2012. And when I was assessing exactly, you know, what I had become and the journey that I had been through and the steps that I had taken, I realized that I went through these 5 stages or 5 steps in order to really become self-aware and take personal accountability for who I was and learning who I didn't want to be to becoming who I am. So to summarize the 5 key steps, they're Discover, Confront, and Shed so you can Create and Accelerate. All right. And we're going to go through each one of them to really help you understand. And actually, you can follow along with it and actually start implementing it as early as right now, as early as today. And I can guarantee you that if you put attention, intention, and focus on walking through these 5 steps, you will absolutely become a self-aware, personally accountable, empowered leader. All right. So let me share my story real quick so you can understand exactly what took me on this journey of excavating my soul in order to then find these 5 key steps. Very quickly, in the end of 2007, Unbeknownst to me, I walked in on the Monday morning after Thanksgiving, all excited about closing out the year, starting a new year, and half hour, 45 minutes later, I found myself standing in the middle of the parking lot with a pink slip in my hand. Now, you can only imagine all the emotions that were running through me, everything from bitter to angry to hurt to feeling betrayed, at the same time feeling excited in this very small space within my gut. I was just excited, although I didn't know why. So I decided that I needed to figure it out, and I quickly learned that I was completely blind. I was so not self-aware, and I certainly wasn't taking personal accountability for the type of woman and leader I had become. And that also kind of turned into my book, Shedding the Corporate Bitch. So that describes it right there, is I had discovered this nasty individual staring at me in the mirror, and I wanted nothing to do with her. I did for many years, several decades. But in that moment, standing there in the middle of the parking lot with a single box of my 25-year career, I had decided that that is not who I wanted to be. And so I had to figure out who I was. So in the first step of Discover, it's exactly that. You're discovering everything and anything there is about you. Now, this is a self-discovery, though you can then take it to the next step and go out and assess or talk to or even interview. I did all of those things to really understand other people's perception of you. But the Discover phase kicks off with you really drilling into who are you. So some questions that you would ask in this step would be, who am I? Now, oftentimes when that question is asked of someone, they give very surface, very kind of psychographic, geographic, demographic type of information. Well, I'm Bernadette Boas, one of 12 kids. I grew up in Philly, live in Atlanta, Georgia. I am an executive coach and author and speaker and podcaster and so forth and so on. Who are you? What makes up Bernadette? What motivates me? What drains me? What excites me? What pisses me off? You know, who are the people in my life that, you know, make me feel loved? Who are the people that make me feel little? What are my values? What are my traits? What are the qualities I love about myself? What are the qualities I don't love about myself? So who you are, who you want to be. I don't care if you're 20, 50, or 80, you still want to evolve. You still want to be growing. So who are you and who do you want to be? Whether that's specifically a role or a position in a company, or it's you personally. Who do you want to become? In this case, we're talking about becoming an empowered leader that isn't talking to or tying itself to a certain title in a business. You just want to be an empowered leader at home, at work, in the community, so forth and so on. So who do you want to be? Who do you not want to be? And this is the question that I sat with for a very long time. Though again, on the surface, who I didn't want to be came very quickly and very clearly. I obviously, you know, was let go of my 25-year career, fired from my 25-year career for being this, you know, nasty individual. And I didn't want to be that person anymore, whether it had anything to do with the next job I took or it just had to do with the next interaction. I had with family, friends, lovers, whomever. And so who you are, who you want to be, who do you not want to be? Then you do want to drill in even further around some of those other aspects that I had mentioned. What are your qualities? What are your traits? What do you stand for? What are your beliefs? What are your values? Really getting a clear picture, a 360-degree picture of who you are. Now, why this is important is, again, so many of us lack self-awareness. So the next stage of this step would be to answer those questions and really get a good, almost like an avatar of yourself. How do I believe I'm perceived by other people? Again, this is still self-discovery. This is still you owning up to and taking personal accountability for how you may be perceived, how you believe you're perceived by others. Now, of course, again, in this stage of this first step of Discover, people will be like, well, they say I'm funny, they say I'm smart, and all those things are valid, and all those things are critical for you to hold on to, and we'll talk about that in a minute. At the same time, though, you also need to kind of put yourself into other people's choose when it comes to engaging and interacting with you? Because the answers may be very different. The answers could be, well, I'm a perfectionist. I am demanding. I'm supportive and compassionate and empathetic. Could be that they say that you may be nasty or abrasive. I came up with in my own self-discovery that I was very curt and demeaning and egotistical and had an attitude, maybe even to some degree at the time narcissistic. So the self-discovery, if you really want to become self-aware, therefore empowered, and empowered being confident and you know who you are, you have to look at all of that. I want you to kind of be making two lists, you know, all the riches And those are all the beautiful things that you love about yourself and that other people, you believe, perceive you as. But then you need to look at what I call the bitches. You need to look at all of those things that are definitely working against you. They're your fears and insecurities and negativities and limiting beliefs and behaviors and attitudes, you know, that are coming into play, um, in everything that you're projecting out into the world. Now, as I mentioned, you could go to the next step and you could say, okay, I want to go and talk to other people and get their ideas. Now, you might think that that's crazy, but you in the workplace, you do it through 360s. But trust me when I say it could be a real eye-opener when you actually go to your family and friends and say, look, I want you to remove all your blind spots. Where I'm concerned, and I need you to give it to me straight and tell me what you feel and think about me. And so I did this with 4 of my sisters and my mother around the 2008-2009 period and took them out for cocktails while we were at a beach trip and gave them a couple of martinis. And boy, did they spill. And they spilled pages. I think I had about 2.5 pages of one words. I said to them, just describe me in one word. And they were everything from, you know, kind and sassy and precocious to curt, abrasive, demeaning, so forth and so on. Right there in that discover step, you have uncovered so much about yourself that you may not have even sat down and reflected on or considered good, bad, or ugly. And that's what is absolutely key, not only to become an empowered leader in the workplace, but even in your own life. Why walk around blind to actually who you are and who you want to be? What are your goals? What are your aspirations? What are your dreams? What are your fears and challenges? What are your insecurities and limiting beliefs? All of that would go into you really discovering who you are. All right. So after discover, you have to confront all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You have to look at all of this data now that you have, and you have to kind of say, okay, before I even decide what I'm going to do with it, what is it? And how can you construct it in such a way that it is then leveraged as a transformative tool, a transformative mechanism for you to really become self-aware. For me, I am a journaler. My dad passed it down to me. I started journaling when I was 8 or 9, and I've kept hundreds of journals. But I wasn't going to go back and read the journals just yet. I never have. I write and I move on. I instead, I just went and bought a whole bunch of journals and just started answering all of these questions and purging them in a journal. And then I kind of went back and started highlighting and pulling things out because I also learned very quickly that I wanted to turn my story and experience and this journey I was going on, I wanted to turn it into something that other people can learn from and grow from. And so I turned it into my book, Shedding the Corporate Bitch. So in the confront phase, you're pulling out all these pieces of who you are and you're confronting it. You're kind of acknowledging it. You're even apologizing for it. You're praising yourself for those things that are your riches that you're discovering about yourself, but you're reconciling all of it so you can understand how they have influenced who you are. And how they'll influence who you want to become. The confront phase can be very hard for most people. I was so ready to kind of put this bitch, you know, behind me that I welcomed it. I embraced hearing some very hard personal things about myself. From not only, you know, other people, but even myself. I had to acknowledge, you know, what and why I had become the woman and the leader that I had become. The confront phase, you can do it on your own, and I certainly did. But eventually I started to lean on other people and lean on coaches and mentors personally and professionally. To really work through how I was feeling. And even my editor of the book, she even was picking up on my writing process and my purging into this structure of a book. She even noticed that I was hitting on some hard parts of my story, hard parts of my discovery, because I stopped writing at various points of my writing the book. And so she even became, you know, an accountability partner, actually, to help me walk through that. So the confront phase, critical. And keep in mind, you're doing this for you. You're not doing it for anybody else. You don't need to publish it. You know, people thought I was crazy that I was going to be putting all of this, all this dirty laundry out in the public for them to then judge and ridicule. And comment. And trust me, they did, both pros and very bad cons, very bad comments. However, depending upon where you are in your journey and what it is you're trying to accomplish, then, you know, you don't have to go to those extremes. This is just for you. So keep that in mind. In the confront, I also want to mention we always seem to first go to all of our negatives. First go to all of our bitches, all the things that, you know, are diminishing to our self-worth. And what I really want you to focus on in the confront stage is to honor your riches. Remember those two categories, all those beautiful things that you love about yourself and other people perceive of you, even others that say about you, and those things that are negative and not working for you. Your fears, limiting beliefs, negativities. Look at both of them because all of your riches will help you pull through dealing and confronting all of the bitches. All right. And if you want to talk more about this, you can always reach out to me and even schedule some time with me at coachmebernadette.com/discoverycall. All right. So that's discover and confront. Now, the shed— shed is where it's a decision point that you have to make. It's a turning point. This is where you start transforming. You have to make decisions about what you're going to do with all of these things. What are you going to keep and hold on to? Because they do enrich you. They do enhance you. They do lift you up. They do motivate and inspire you. But what are you going to do to shed all of those things that are working against you? All those fears, limiting beliefs, negativities, insecurities, that as you're working through all this, all those things could include people, places, and things. And what I mean by that is there could be people that are really working for you and against you. There are places that you go or hang out or socialize in or work in that are working against you versus for you. The same with things work for you or against you. Maybe it's drinking, maybe it's shopping too much. You want to look at all of those things, the people, places, and things, as well as yourself when you're looking at the Discover, Confront, and Shed, especially the Shed. So a quick story is I started this process in early 2008. I would say by October of 2008, as I was going into the holiday season, and I typically throw this lavish big Christmas party at my house. I had very few people from the 60-some that I would had previously. And I found myself for the next year, year and a half sitting on my couch with my dog Charlie because I had shedded all of those people, places, and things around me that were working against me. There's 3 stages that are critical, but they are so worth it because then all of a sudden because of, you know, what you're discovering and the fact that you're confronting it, and then you're making decisions to either shed it or hold on to it because it's working for you. Uh, then you're like, okay, well, now I have new goals, I have new aspirations, I have new dreams, I have new relationships, I have new, you know, places I want to go and people I want to see. And all of a sudden, the world just starts opening up for you. Now, I should mention this is an iterative process, an iterative set of steps that you would walk through. You could be discovering and all of a sudden creating because you're discovering things that are giving you more self-awareness, more knowledge, more information about who you are, what you want, what you don't want, whatever the case might be. So all of a sudden, oh wow, you know, I definitely have a different goal I want to shoot for or an aspiration. Or a challenge that I want to take on for myself. However, if you also finishing through and you're discovering, confronting, and shedding, trust me when I say the exhilaration that you're going to feel about creating new, bigger, different, better is just— it's orgasmic. It really is. And then just think about As you're then creating all of those new things in your life and within yourself, well, then you want— you're loving, you're loving the change, the transformation, and all the beauty that is coming into your world that you want to accelerate it. And so then you're like, okay, I'm definitely going bigger, I'm going faster, I'm going stronger, I'm going better. And all of a sudden you want to accelerate it. And so in the create phase, you could be really looking at all of this information that you've been learning about yourself. You're confronting, you're starting to shed. You look at that point in time inward again and you're like, okay, let me write down my new goals. Let me define them. Let me define a path, you know, an action plan. Let me define the team or the posse I want to hang out with. Let me define what this is all going to mean to my family and my friends. So, you know, you just start really articulating it and then, you know, acting and living it. And then accelerate. You look at those goals that you originally had when you started redefining them and you're like, okay, wait a minute. I, you know, instead of, instead of going for this role that I'm— I've been ready for and I've been shooting for and now I've been transforming and changing. And I'm so much more capable to go to the next level. So yes, I'll be in this new role for a period of time, but now I feel confident that I can go to that next level. So you're, you know, you want to accelerate what it is you're doing currently. It is such a fabulous, fabulous journey to go on. And I would challenge any of you that if you do want to become empowered, but for even forgetting that, if you just want to really understand who you are and what you want out of this one life that goes really, really fast, then I would challenge you to make note of this episode and make note of these 5 steps: discover, confront, and shed so you can create and accelerate. And if you do, you know, walk through those steps, I can promise you, I'll guarantee you that your world will change and it will only change for the better. 'Cause once you do become self-aware, once you do start taking personal accountability for what's happening to you in your life, then there's no stopping you. There is absolutely no stopping you. And I should mention that when it comes to personal accountability, you have to recognize that anything and everything that you have or don't have in your life at this very point in time, you are responsible for creating. You are responsible for getting it or not getting it, responsible for doing it or not doing it, for achieving it or not achieving it. And so if you're not happy with where you are, if you feel that you deserve more, if you know that you're capable of more, then you have to do this work so you can uncover exactly what is it that is working for me or against me and what I need to do or change or transform into so I can achieve my ultimate goals. You're in total control. You're in total control. But again, if you want some help and assistance along the way, then feel free to schedule some complimentary time with me. You can go to coachmebernadette.com/discoverycall and we'll have a 30-minute conversation just digging into what your goals are, what your challenges are, and recommendations on where you go next. All right. And you can and will become that empowered leader. All right, so what did you take away from our conversation today? I hope a lot. And be sure to check out our previous episodes, including the one with Barbara Teicher, all around propel her influence. Also go out to Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or anywhere you get your podcast streamed, and be sure to leave a comment, Like it, subscribe, and tell other people about it. Tell other corporate professional women just like you who would love to really learn what it takes to become a powerhouse leader. And then go to sheddingthecorporatebitch.com for all of our episodes. And I'll look forward to having you with us the next time. Take care.