Episode 6: Leading From Your Authentic Best

EPISODE 6

Leading From Your Authentic Best

Radical Recentring with Nonie White

This is Radical Recentring with me, Nonie White. The show for ambitious women who are done pushing, proving and performing, and who are ready to build something unshakeable from who they are at their authentic best. If you're at an inflection point, ready for your next level of success, personal power and impact, and you want to do it differently, you're in the right place. Let's go.

Episode 6, leading from your authentic best.

Most leaders want to become super confident. At best, they think confidence is something that you can learn through leadership strategy or build through proving yourself enough times. At worst, they feel they should just be confident and know all the things already. But that's not how it works. Real confidence, unshakeable confidence comes from somewhere deeper, and it's probably not what you think.

What actually builds confidence. Most people chase confidence the wrong way. If I achieve enough, then I'll feel confident. If I get enough validation, then I'll feel confident. But this creates confidence that's always conditional. It depends on your last win. It depends on what other people think, which keeps you worrying about being judged. It needs constant refilling. And that's not true confidence. It's a recipe for anxiety.

So what actually builds real grounded confidence? There's a model that I use with clients that shows how three specific elements work together to create real grounded confidence. They are perspective, self-efficacy and self-advocacy. I'll explain these.

Perspective is literally your lens on the world. So you want to be seeing things clearly. You don't want to be catastrophising and you don't want to be minimising. You need good wellbeing in order for perspective to come easily. And that's what we covered in Episode 5 when we talked about psychological fitness.

Self-efficacy is the belief that you can do the thing. It's the power of I can. Self-advocacy is your capacity to speak for yourself and your beliefs, and to take action and to make decisions.

These three create grounded, unshakeable confidence, but they're intrinsically connected to foundations of authenticity and having good wellbeing. Without wellbeing, you can't access authenticity. And without authenticity, you're not being yourself and everything becomes wobbly. So you might have perspective day and then lose it when you're exhausted. Does that sound familiar? It certainly does to me. You might believe in yourself for some things, but not for others.

And this is why the Unshakeable Method is built the way it is. Foundations first, then psychological fitness, then who you are at your core, at your authentic best. Each stage compounds and creates the conditions for the next. It's not a once and done thing. It's the sort of process that we just keep on doing throughout our life as we meet new challenges and get to new levels to reach.

You can't build unshakeable confidence by skipping to the top. You have to build from the bottom up and keep those foundations strong at all times.

What authentic best actually means. Your authentic best is you operating from your most natural state, being and doing at your best. It's your authentic edge. It's your superpower, the thing that makes you uniquely brilliant. When you know how you think at your best, how you decide at your best, how you lead at your best, clarity follows.

And it includes four things. Number one, your needs and your preferences, what you require to thrive as a whole person. Number two, your values, what's most meaningful for you and creates purpose. Number three, your character strengths, what comes most naturally to you, fully engages and energises you. And number four, your way of being, doing and leading, how you're designed to operate at your best.

Most leaders have never clarified this. They've been far too busy achieving to understand how they achieve at their best, or how they can do better work and feel better too. Instead, they've adopted an operating system that isn't really theirs. It's built from conditioning, from what they absorbed about how they should be, about how leaders should be, from copying what seems to work for other people. And that creates a gap between how they're operating and who they actually are at their core. And managing that gap is exhausting.

But when you lead from your authentic best, the gap closes. There's nothing to manage. There's nothing to perform. You're simply being you. Your identity that you're leading yourself and others from is built from you, not borrowed from somewhere else. Real authority isn't performed. It's built from what only you can do. In fact, one of my founder clients loves this phrase. She constantly repeats to herself, only do what only you can do, which is a bit of a tongue twister, but it works.

Why this changes how you connect. When you're authentically you, you're not just more confident, you're actually present. You're more connected to yourself because you're not lost in your head and therefore you can connect better with other people too. Think about what happens when you're performing. You're stuck in your head, you're monitoring yourself, you're checking yourself, you're editing yourself. How do I come across? Am I doing this right? Did I say that just right? What do they think of me?

And when your attention is turned inward like that, you can't actually be present with the person, or not fully present with the person in front of you. You're physically there, but you're not really 100% there. And when there's no gap to manage, you can actually connect with yourself and with the person in front of you. You're not monitoring yourself from the outside, you're fully present.

And here's how this links back to everything we've covered. To access your authentic self and actually lead from there, you need good wellbeing. When you're depleted, you default to your old operating system. So performing or people pleasing or going at a million miles an hour. When you feel good, your perspective broadens, your cognitive capacity increases. You can connect more easily to other people and you have access to more ideas, more flexibility of thought, innovation, creativity, more access to yourself. So this isn't about knowing who you are at your authentic best. It's about creating the conditions that allow you to access your authentic self and actually lead from there.

The invitation. One of my clients, let's call her Sue, ran a successful marketing agency, award-winning work and a really happy loyal team. From the outside, she was doing brilliantly. Inside, her brain wasn't working properly, her words. She was waking at 3am every day, terrorised by cashflow and worrying about what happened if she didn't have enough money to pay her team. When we first met, she was too scared to raise her prices by even a hundred pounds. And she was so exhausted that she was just really grumpy with everyone at home. She told me that her marriage had dissolved into house buddies who have a child. She put everybody ahead of herself. She'd buy her team lunch and forget to get her own.

She told me in our first session, I don't actually think I'm a very good boss. She had no idea who she was at her best. She just knew that this wasn't it.

When we did the strengths work, everything shifted. She discovered that one of her core character strengths is love. And suddenly it all made complete sense. What made her a brilliant leader and an incredible service provider? What led to her clients and her team totally adoring her? And she'd been overplaying that strength in love. So she'd been protecting her team, not giving them work because she didn't want them to be stressed or feel overwhelmed instead of trusting them. She was doing it all herself instead of delegating, leading her to be completely almost burnt out. She was prioritising everyone's needs except her own. And she discovered that leadership is also one of her signature strengths and she'd never seen herself in that way.

But when she stopped trying to be a good boss, what she thought a good boss should be like by everybody else's definition, and she started leading from who she actually is at her best, absolutely everything changed. She raised her prices. She let go of misaligned clients who were really the cause of some of her biggest distress. She talked about her values more, and she signed bigger, better clients who shared those values. She allowed her team to step up because she trusted them too and they actually said they wanted to do more and take stuff off her plate. She started campaigning on issues she really cared about and she attracted clients who admired her work, who were really aligned with who she was and the fact that she cared so much.

She told me, I'm not a traditional boss, but I've realised I'm a bloody good leader when I'm being me at my best. She wasn't a rubbish boss. She'd just been leading from the wrong messages and the wrong operating system.

Sue's story is exactly what becomes possible when you stop leading from someone else's operating system and start leading from who you actually are. This is Stage 3 of the Unshakeable Method, my four month one-to-one programme, and it's where everything starts to shift. The link to find out about working with me is in the show notes.

Your authentic best is already there. Your deep rooted, unshakeable self-confidence is already there. You don't have to create it, you have to uncover it. Underneath the low mood from low energy, underneath the conditioning, the shoulds, there's a version of you that knows exactly how you lead at your best. And when you build confidence from that foundation, it doesn't wobble. It doesn't depend on your last win. It doesn't depend on anyone else. It doesn't need constant external validation. It becomes unshakeable, deep rooted, grounded, yours.

So here's my question. Do you know who you are at your authentic best? Your core values, your unique signature strengths, your needs, your way of being and leading? Or are you operating from external messaging that you took to be fact, but actually you borrowed from somewhere else?

In the next episode, we're going to talk about what happens when you build on this foundation, how authenticity becomes grounded authority and how that creates the impact and influence that you're actually here for.

I'm Nonie White. This is Radical Recentring and I'll see you next time.

Thank you for being here. If today's episode resonated with you, check out the Leadership Identity Quiz. The link is in the show notes. It's free, takes two minutes, has 10 questions, and it will show you exactly how you're leading yourself and others now, as well as which patterns might be stopping you from reaching your next level of success. And if you know you're ready to do this work, there's a link to find out more about the Unshakeable Method, my four-month one-to-one coaching programme. I'm Nonie White. This is Radical Recentring, and I'll see you next time.