Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hello and welcome to your path to success with Ruth Kearns Bowman. I'm flying solo today and I'll be honest, it feels a little vulnerable. Because today I want to take a stand for something I deeply believe. That the key to greater impact for good is healthy leadership. Healthy leaders create healthy teams. And healthy teams create better, more sustainable impact for good. So that is where I'm choosing to focus as a leadership coach and facilitator. There, I said it. But what does a healthy leader actually look like? I'm not going to give you a list of competencies right now. Instead, let me start with what we all recognise. Because I think we know unhealthy leadership when we see it. often more easily in others than we see it in ourselves. Think about the leader who doesn't want to hear what isn't working. Maybe they shut it down in meetings, either subtly or not so subtly, so people stop telling them. Not because things are going well, but because it feels safer not to speak up. The leader loses touch with reality and the team loses trust. Or think about the leader who doesn't communicate their intent effectively. They know what they're thinking, but they assume everyone else does too. And in that gap, people fill in the blanks. And let's be honest, they rarely fill them in with the most generous interpretation. Rumors start, anxiety builds. Energy that could go into the work goes into managing uncertainty instead. Or the leader who avoids making tough decisions because they don't want to hurt anyone. It feels kind, but over time the avoided conversation becomes the avoided problem, becomes the avoided crisis. And the team, who could see it coming, quietly loses confidence. None of these leaders are bad people. I want to say that clearly. These are just patterns, understandable human patterns. And they're often rooted in a behaviour that made complete sense at some point in our lives. But as leaders, the impact ripples far beyond ourselves. Now let me show you what that looks like on the other side. The healthy leader is the one who stays calm enough to hear hard news. Not because they're immune to stress or emotion. but because they've learned to regulate their response so people feel safe enough to keep talking. Their calm isn't a performance, it's a practice. They're able to create space and safety for themselves and others to regulate. The healthy leader is the one who is clear, clear enough in their own thinking to say, here's what I'm trying to achieve and here is why. They communicate their intent, not because they have all the answers, but because clarity from the top creates room for others to think, contribute and trust. And the healthy leader is the one who cares, genuinely cares and dares to challenge at the same time, who can have the difficult conversation, not because it's comfortable, but because they care enough about both the person and the outcome to do it anyway. Care and dare together in the same moment, that is where the magic happens. These qualities and others like them are what I've come to think of as the six C's of healthy leadership. Calm, compassion and curiosity and then clarity, connection and courage. I'll be coming back to these C's. throughout this series on healthy leadership and healthy teams. Today I just want to plant the seed with you because here's the thing, these qualities don't develop by reading about them or hearing about them, they come from inner work, from knowing yourself well enough to catch yourself before the pattern kicks in and find another way forward, from being willing to look both at your greatness and your shadow, and work with both. That brings me to something I want to share with you today about how this podcast came about. I started by saying it feels vulnerable to record this and I meant it. To be honest there are parts of me that would far rather hide under a duvet or disappear down a research rabbit hole than go public with a point of view. Parts of me have been hurt by past experiences of public humiliation and shame when I stood up for something and have quietly vowed never to let that happen again. There are parts that manage that risk by going deep into research, hypotheses, data and conclusions, evidence I can stand behind, because those are competencies where I feel safe, whereas opinions feel riskier. Other parts of me work extremely hard to think about you every possible objection in advance before I open my mouth just in case. So to make today possible I've had to listen to these parts, acknowledge their positive intent in protecting me and ask them gently to step aside just for now because here's what I know, we all have parts like these, parts that are trying to protect us from something that once hurt us. And they do a remarkable job. In fact, we need these parts to do what we do. But they can also, without meaning to, get overactive and block us from the very things we most want to do and become. You see, our past experiences shape how our brains anticipate future threat. And on the positive side, our past experiences also... build our capacity to create safety for ourselves and others. Let me leave you with a question and a short reflection exercise. Think about your own leadership. What experiences from your past have shaped who you are as a leader today? On the positive side, you may want to think about your best boss ever, your favourite assignment. a community, a place or a moment where you felt truly at home, where you weren't worried about expectations or how you were perceived, you were just fully yourself and it was enough. What did those experiences teach you about who you are at your best? On the more difficult side, think about an experience that was harsh or hurtful. or maybe even humiliating, a moment where you came away consciously or unconsciously with a quiet promise to yourself that you would never let that happen again. What did that experience teach you or teach your nervous system about what to watch out for? And in what ways might that still be showing up in how you lead today? Most of us have had both types of experience, the positive ones and the negative ones. And many of us in our less glorious moments as leaders are unconsciously keeping that old promise to ourselves, to protect ourselves from a pain that belongs to the past. The invitation in this exercise is just to notice for now, not to fix it, not to judge it, just to see it a little more clearly. with compassion. And I'll leave these reflection questions in the show notes so you can come back to them in your own time and journal or whatever is your favourite way to approach that. As I come to a close, I want to say that this episode is the beginning of something I've been wanting to do for a while, sharing not just other people's leadership journeys and what we can learn from their amazing experience but also sharing my own thinking and experience about what makes leadership healthy, sustainable and genuinely impactful. So this series will run alongside my regular interviews and you'll hear from me solo and from leaders who are doing this work in the real world. If this resonates with you, or if you recognize yourself in any of what I've described today, or if you're just curious about what this kind of inner work looks like in practice, I'd love to hear from you. You can find me as always at yourpathtosuccess.ch, and you can book a curiosity call there on the book appointment link. And that link for the curiosity call is also in the show notes. If someone came to mind as you were listening today, Feel free to share this with them and keep doing your inner work. It changes more than you think it does. See you next time.