How Being Ourself Increases Our Impact and Our Success

It’s remarkable how interpersonal dynamics can have a profound impact on the success or failure of our work.

We can be brilliant technical experts in our field. And yet, if we aren’t respected or valued, if we alienate those around us or go unnoticed, our work is undervalued or overlooked.

Value and respect are directly related to how we show up on a daily basis.

When we are unhappy at work or with our peers, we are short-tempered, we are anxious, we say no to everything or we over accommodate all requests. We dig into the weeds and lose the bigger picture. We show up as our worst selves.

When we are our worst selves, we lose credibility with those we work with and undermine the quality of our own work.

Often a reason for showing up as our worst selves is that we are in conflict with our inner values.

When we are in conflict with our inner values we experience inner turmoil.

That inner turmoil then translates to outer dis-ease.

Often as leaders, we are our best selves when we have confidence in who we are and what we have to offer. We have perspective and therefore we are able to set a clear direction. We respond instead of reacting.

I guarantee that your best self shows up when you are aligned with your value set. Your value set could be anything from, getting things done to make people feel heard, to making informed decisions, to connecting to a bigger picture vision to finding deeper meaning in your work to having flexibility.

The good news is when we honor our inner values, we show up better, we have a larger impact and we are well respected by our peers.

This is what is called authentic leadership.

How do we lead from a place of authentic leadership?

1. Identify our core values.

(This is not so easy! A way to start is to track how you make decisions and why you make decisions. You will start to see a theme of what is important to you.)

2. When encountering interpersonal friction ask, where is there a conflict with my value set?

(This can be superficially obvious or incredibly subtle. Get curious. Start to notice what sets you off and why.)

3. Respond to the interpersonal friction from a place of your value set.

(Leverage your superpower to solve for the friction. Your values are also what you are good at.)

The more we honor our value set and leverage it to navigate a difficult interpersonal dynamics (ie: we have to work with a colleague who we struggle with, a direct report is undermining us), the more successful we will be, the more people will seek out our expertise, the more people will leverage us as a thought partner – EVEN those who we may find difficult now will become allies the more we operate from our inner values.

I’m incredibly excited to announce that I am offering a program with content only previously available to companies in-house and 1:1 clients.

This program is the bridge between your outer struggles and your inner values so that you can show up as the leader you’ve always known you can be. I’ll be sharing more information soon! Stay tuned!

Rachel Rider
Executive Coach, Leadership Consultant