Leading With Old Wounds

"You're not really leadership material." 

Feeling like a fraud is one of the most common experiences leaders can have. It's a sensation that, at any moment, your community or organization will realize you're not qualified, prepared, or otherwise capable of leading.

Often these fears are connected to old wounds.

One of my earliest memories of trying to volunteer to learn leadership was met by an employer with a simple dismissal: "You're not really leadership material." She went on to describe what new role I would have in the organization, but all I could hear was that the roles I had aspired to as a teenager were not just being ruled out for the moment, but forever.

As much as I would like to let go of that conversation so many years ago, I still see it pop up. I can picture where we were sitting, which way I was facing, what the season was. And I remember the feeling in my stomach.

I had taken a chance with her, expressed my desire to learn, and was told I didn't have and likely would not soon possess the character required to lead. My vulnerability was met with a comment that felt as if I was being told "the emperor has no clothes" - and that's me.

When you lead, your vulnerability is a constant companion. Innovation requires us to risk rejection of our ideas. Emotional availability requires us to risk abandonment. Co-creation requires us to risk neglect. 

The hard part to deeply understand until you've experienced it, is just how real those risks are. Having acknowledged and prepared for the risks; we are still sometimes rejected, abandoned, and neglected.

And when our vulnerability is met with new pain, the old wounds are all too happy to remind us that we should know better by now. That we were previously warned of our inability to lead, and we were foolish to expect a different destiny.

There is a lot I could say about how one overcomes the sense of being a fraud and learning to lead with old wounds. But it is also an incredibly personal journey deserving of individualized conversations.

I will say this: your old wounds are real and valid and important to your everyday story. And, your old wounds are not the totality of who you are as a person or a leader. 

How do we hold these two things at the same time?

We can learn to see how our wounds influence our interpretation of experiences. We can learn to honor and attend to our wounds without being consumed by them. And, we can learn that our vulnerability and old wounds do not make us frauds, but fully human. 

Can't shake the feeling of being a fraud? Let's work on it together.