Examined Leadership

Rise and Stride is a weekly newsletter for high-achieving women, focused on personal growth as leadership development, and exploring the inner balance that succeeds. The future of leadership success is already here.

Overthinking yourself into analysis paralysis...

…unlocks the door to the subconscious, to reveal intuitive, creative solutions…

…which rise as illusions—images that obscure other people, viewed through wisps of your fear, anxiety, or stored trauma…

…resulting in more overthinking, now lightly seasoned with self-doubt or a dollop of spicy Imposter Syndrome.

Un-examined leadership, in 50 words.

This series of steps may unfold in any leader’s life. And… if you feel no resonance with that dynamic?

Perhaps you continuously examine your life as a leader. Maybe high emotional intelligence, integrated self-awareness, and fierce self-honesty prevent such cascades.

Or you could be “delusional.” Not padded-cell insane, but attracted to misinterpretations of reality. Not hallucinating, deceived by your senses. Rather, your subconscious is writing questionable stories with “extra” sensory data from the basement of your mind.

Subconsciously created “leadership delusions” are also not ESP, not extra-sensory perceptions. They are post hoc interpretations of extra data your senses failed to notice earlier.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion. ~Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, U.S. journalist and author

A woman leader on the rise must regularly visit her mental basement. Confusion triggers the need. Stuck in an interpersonal wilderness of conflicting data, she turns inward. And carries a well-honed discernment down the stairs, ready to cleave truth from illusion.

Until that blade is sharp enough, leaders listen to and question their instincts, dividing the reasonable from the wobbly. Wobblies include:

• Victimizing: How could they?

• Globalizing: everyone, all the time, never, relentless, everywhere…

• Catastrophizing: worst case scenarios; no optimistic alternatives

• Absence of agency: I had to or I had no choice

• Blaming others and/or shaming yourself

If you aspire to greater leadership responsibility and authority, free yourself from intuitive “conclusions” like these. Until you fully sharpen that “cleaver of discernment,” question everything.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. ~Toni Morrison, U.S. author and winner of 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993

Real-time data that refuse to assemble meaning create “false flag” conclusions like I couldn’t help it. Drop your reliance on “Get Out of Jail Free” stories. Go deeper.

Discernment sharpens, carving away limiting stories (she never, I always). Your vault of stored impressions opens new files. Intuition refines and strengthens.

“Claiming ownership of that freed self” is leadership flex. Slicing away distractions like everyone, all the time, everywhere, generates radical personal empowerment:

• Full agency: choose actions, emotions, and intentions.

• Internal motivation: driven by purpose and passion, not external validation.

• Emotional freedom: release resentment, anger, and bitterness over false “intuitive knowings;” replace enmeshment and codependence with empathy and compassion.

• Inner peace: find emotional balance with less reactivity.

Leadership intuition is a gift… and it has a dark side. A successful leader carefully and consciously taps her vast stores of random impressions. She artfully supervises assembly of that sensory flotsam.

And she holds tight to discernment. Ownership of her freed self requires regularly asking: Is this real? Or is this a delusional story assembled from sparse data?