Mayor Tory Whanau Recap: Why Vulnerability is essential in Leadership

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. If you would like to lead with more conviction, more confidence and more clarity, then I've got some incredible insights for you today. These insights come from a recent conversation with a guest here on Lead On Purpose, the amazing Tory Whanau Tori is the mayor of Wellington, New Zealand's capital city and she's the first Mori mayor of Wellington. How amazing. We had an incredible conversation. If you haven't listened to it, please go back and listen to it. Politics needs more leaders like Tory. If you go back and listen, you'll know what I mean. But I wanted to share a couple of incredible takeaways that I think will be valuable in your life and definitely in any of your teams that you're a part of. Number one, always remember who it is you're serving. So vital. Write that one down. Always remember who it is you are serving. All too often we see people get into leadership roles and get leadership titles and all of a sudden they stop leading, they stop serving and they start taking and they start blaming. So I want you to think about who is it that I serve and as I grow as a leader and as maybe I go into different roles and I want to remember who it is I serve. To me that was so powerful that she said that, she said that she moves from forward and remembers her why in three ways. This might be really helpful for you if you're thinking about what's my why, why do I do what I do? Why am I in this job? Why am I doing life this way? Why am I with this person? So here's Tories Number one, focus on protecting the vulnerable. Number two, protect the planet and try to impact climate change. Number three, do as much as possible to make an impact in the short life that you have on this earth. And I say do and I accent do because it's a doing thing. It's not a. We just think about it. We actually take action. Really incredible insights. Another thing that Tory shared I think is really valuable if you are wanting to develop As a leader, lean into your experience. Right. And what does that mean? Well, look, we always look at these leadership positions and often people who want to move up in leadership, it's a step up. It's not a lateral shift over to the side like we're moving up. And with that comes self doubt. With that comes imposter syndrome. You know, we've chatted recently with Karen Flug from Ikea, an Inka group. She's the chief sustainability officer and she talked about every one of her roles, including at Nike, having some degree of imposter syndrome. Right. So if you're wanting to develop as a leader, lean into your experience that you bring to the table. Because the role you're stepping into is not going to be the making of you. It's a small part of adding to your experience, adding to your wisdom. So why would you neglect all those incredible life lessons that have built up to that point where you've stepped into this role? Steve Hanson, former head coach of the All Blacks, came to our event last year, was sharing how, you know, he was very deeply passionate about horses, horse racing, and he understood different things about horses. And he actually was able to, with one of his top players, he was able to identify. I think he keeps getting that calf injury because he's carrying a couple of extra kgs, right? He said, look, what weight is he? Okay, great. What was he when he Wasn't getting injured? Oh, 2kg difference. He was lighter then. Great. How about we just find things up a bit and see if we can adjust his weight and see what the injury does. Lo and behold, injury disappeared. So to me, a great leader like Sir Steve Hanson was leaning in to his experience. So I'm going to pose a question for you. What are your experiences? What have you done in life that has shaped you? What are the tough things you've had to endure? What are the incredible experiences that you've stepped into? What are some of the jobs you've had? What are some of the things in your family that you've had to step up and really perform and help others. I want you to take a minute today, now, preferably to actually write down what some of your experience is. You know, maybe you're a great listener, maybe you're a person who motivates and inspires others. Maybe you're incredibly organized and go back and ask, why am I those things? And you'll find there's parts of your life, it could be jobs, you could be at school, could be some charity work, could be a family experience, could be a natural, natural disaster, an earthquake or pandemic. And it brought out these things in you. Whatever you're doing to develop your leadership, always lean in to your experience. Look, I want to share one last thing, and this comes from Tory. I think it's so powerful and really timely. Before I do that, please, if you can share this episode with one friend, just one friend, that's going to help us to continue bringing on more great guests. We recently got charted in the Apple podcast charts as number one in the business management category. So thank you so much for helping us to do that here in New Zealand. Now for all of our international listeners, we're charting in Canada, Great Britain, South Africa, United Arab Emirates. So thank you so much. I appreciate there's about 30 or 40 countries we've been charting in this last month. So sincerely, gratefully appreciate you the listener last takeaway. Always put people and planet first. I'm not going to repeat that and I'm not going to elongate and extend on that. I'm just going to leave you with that. And for now, please get out there and lead your life on purpose.

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