Leadership Mindset

Hey friends, how are you? Happy day after Christmas, if you celebrate. Happy December for whatever you celebrate. And if you don’t celebrate anything, that’s okay too. Just, I’m glad you’re here with me. So let’s talk today as we round out this year. Let’s talk about leadership mindset. Here we go.

So welcome, holy smokes. We finished another one, y’all. Let’s do it. We got what, five, six days left of 2022. A beautiful year in so many ways. A lot of fog lifted, a lot of things moved. It’s been incredibly amazing to watch so many women that I work with be so successful. I have watched a lot of women that I know and have crossed in through the lab who have had challenging years with their business models or the products they sell.

You know, the truth about being an entrepreneur is that we’re all in the game of risk and it’s not for the faint of heart. And so for those of you who are out there doing this thing that we all are doing, which is trying to offer what we know we do best in the world and then also generate a life and revenue and income and all the things that we do, I just tip my hat to you.

I think we’re pretty amazing and I think we should be very proud of who we are and what we do. So if anyone hasn’t said that to you in a while, hear me say it because I think you’re amazing. I think we all are, and I wanna really think about next year. So getting ready to head out to Hawaii for January retreat, which I’m so looking forward to on so many levels primarily to see and spend time with amazing women. And also to have time to myself to think about this coming year.

And I’m really thinking about what I want this experience to be like. And I think a lot about leadership. I’ve written a lot about leadership. I’ve written a lot about leadership. I’ve never even published. I’ve written a lot about leadership. I’ve never talked about here, but I do think that I wanna have this conversation because I think that leadership is an overused word.

I think it’s incredibly dynamic. I think it means a lot of things to a lot of people. I don’t know that there’s a right answer. I only know what is right for me and from the vantage point from which I communicate, teach, coach, facilitate, advise, and in any other way that you can think about it, sort of, wrap my arms around leadership.

So I wanna talk with you about that because I know there’s quite a few out there of you who are clients. And so it makes for us to have a great conversation in the lab and in our, in our conversations, in our discussions. And I also think it’s, it’s really good for all of you who are not clients yet to get a sense of the philosophy that I bring to the work that I do.

The name of this podcast is Leadership is Feminine. I believe that women are incredibly powerful. I believe that women are born leaders. I do not believe that women are born passive. I do not believe that women are born too emotional, all the things that we’ve been told and taught for so many years about who we are.

But I do think that because we live in the shadow of masculine leadership for centuries, millennia, if you will, I do think that we still think collectively that the strong are the leaders. That the forceful are the leaders that the powerful are the leaders, that the ones who command the air and the oxygen in the room are the leaders. And I think that’s a lie.

Now, are there some people who are exceptional leaders who do that? Yes. Are there other people who are just really great orators? Yeah. Maybe not so great leaders. Are there people who have exceptional ideas that other people will follow and gather around, but they’re not really leaders. They’re just really good at ideating. Is that a leader? If somebody just has really great ideas and people follow them, maybe.

I think that if you are gonna be in a leadership position and assume a leadership responsibility in people’s lives, whether it’s through the ideas that you have, through the work that you do, through the effort that you take in the world, I believe that if you raise your hand and you say, yes, I have ideas that I think other people should listen to. I have ideas that I think other people should not just listen to, but change their lives around. I believe that comes with responsibility.

And believe that if you say, “I wanna share what I know, I wanna help others, I wanna make a difference. I want to sit at the top.” I believe that if you choose to do that for reasons that are self-serving and selfish, I do not believe you are a leader. I believe you are influential. I believe that people abdicate their power to you. I believe that you are manipulative, but I do not believe you are a leader, and I do not follow you.

But unfortunately, we don’t teach people how to have this discernment in most ways in their lives. We teach people to admire the loud, the powerful, the beautiful, the rich. We teach people to think that somehow they’re smarter than us, somehow they know more than us, so we better listen to them and not only listen, but do what they say and follow their lead.

And I think what we need to learn is discernment. And we have to learn discernment through having and gaining self possession, self-awareness, self connection. That’s why we have to know our own values. We have to know our own expectations for what we want from people in our lives, from those we allow in, and we have to know our own truth. If your truth is easily influenced by the loudness of another, are you really living in your truth or are you just being influenced and in some cases against your will.

So the leadership mindset that I wanted to talk about today is from the standpoint of a woman who says, “Yes, I have something I believe matters. I have something that I believe is going to help people make a difference, provide a service, deliver a product, do something interesting that will have a positive impact on the people that either work for, work with me, or that I support through the product or service I deliver through the business that I run.”

I’m talking to that woman who is choosing to lead even if she doesn’t enjoy it, because I believe that the reason that you want to stand at the front and own this space is because you are compelled to, you feel compelled to do what you do to put this thing in the world. But at the same time, you also have this essential responsibility to understand your own mind.

We just had a quote on my Instagram the other day, right? How can you ever expect someone to follow your ideas if you don’t even understand your own mind that generates them? Do you have awareness of yourself? Do you evaluate yourself? Do you live defensively? Do you self protect to the point that no one can tell you things?

Are you accepting of feedback? Can you be told you’re wrong? Can you make a mistake and tolerate it of yourself? Can you tolerate the mistakes of others? Do you think you can wield power to solve problems? Because when you act in these ways, you, I believe, are not being responsible with the role that you have.

You see, leaders have a tremendous impact. I say this often, that the leader has to understand the wake she leaves behind. You know, when we think about being on a lake and a big boat comes through, there’s the big boat, there’s the little boat. A smart boat driver. A thoughtful boat driver. A boat driver who is taking responsibility for the impact of his or her wake, will adjust the speed of his boat to ensure that the wake that the boat creates does not topple the smaller craft around it. Do you do that? Because just by being the founder, just by being the CEO, just by being the owner, you carry weight. Your wake is big, my love. Your mindset, your awareness of who you are, not just that you’re powerful, but that you have that power to be disruptive as much as you do to lift up, that is critical.

As you think about your mindset, have you allowed your mind to be cracked open, chewed on a little bit. Do you allow yourself to pursue the discomfort of growth or do you sit only surrounded by those who make you feel good about who you are? Leadership is a mindset. It is not a position.

Now there’s a lot of people who think it’s a position and I’m just trying to make a difference with the people I can confront and talk to at a time. Like, I know this is a big, hairy, hot, squirrely mess in the world. We witness it every day. If you watch the news, it’s every day. It’s everywhere. Watching the posturing and how people can’t accept the feedback.

In fact, I just watched, we went and watched the Niners play the Buccaneers in San Francisco this past weekend. It was so much fun. My family and I went and we watched Tom Brady just get nailed, man. He lost so bad. 35 to 7. But he said something after the game and he said, “You know what? Every time you step on the field, you have the opportunity to get your ass kicked or to kick someone’s else ass. And today, we got our ass handed to us.”

As much as a lot of people will like to hate on Tom Brady, I can’t. I love this guy. I think he’s an incredible example of honesty and perseverance and, and persistence. I think he probably has work to do and he probably knows he’s so influential, right? And he didn’t wanna be a leader. He just wanted to play football. So just because you now have all this impact, doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility just cuz you didn’t want it. You got it. It’s part of the assignment.

And so I just, I wanna challenge you. This probably feels a little challenging. I might get some feedback that it’s a little confronting. I don’t know. Maybe you’ll love it. I don’t know. But I think we all have to be honest. Do you think about it? Do you think about who you wanna be as a leader? It’s essential, love.

It’s essential because eventually it gets you. How many more people do we have to watch the rise and fall of when they get to this point where they think they’re so invincible, they’ve achieved enough power, enough wealth, enough influence, they think they’re untouchable, and guess what? Lies.

But then you can look out there and you can see people who are very successful leaders. They have great followership, they have great ideas. They continue to have impact and they don’t meet this moment where they’ve reached a pinnacle. Why? What’s the difference between that person and someone who was sloppy? With leadership, it’s awareness. It’s personal growth. It’s personal development.

It’s recognizing that you and your brain are the vessel to your growth and your opportunity, not your influence, followers, wealth, or anything else. It’s who you are becoming, not who you are. Covey always used to say, “You gotta sharpen the saw. You have to keep pushing if you want to keep ascending and having a greater impact. You have to keep the one person you keep developing is you.”

I know this is true for me, and I go through seasons of my own profession as a coach and as an advisor where I can tell I’ve hit a spot where I don’t have enough left in my tank to give. And so then it’s time, or I keep making the same mistakes over and over again, or I keep having the same conversations. It’s not getting me ahead anywhere, or I keep getting triggered by the same thing over and over again. Right?

Like, I think we can all relate to these sort of, that for me is when I go, “Okay, time for new teachers. Time for new lessons. Time for new sentences in my brain, time for new words to know and understand.” I need to shuffle the, shake, the snow globe. It’s time.

I don’t point at the world and say “They haven’t helped me”. I point at myself and say, “Plachy, time to dig in, mama. Unless you wanna keep beating your head on the same lesson. Where are you going?”

And as you’re coming to the end of the year, I really want you to think about this love, wherever you are in your life. Discomfort is not a stop sign. It’s what you must walk through to get to the other side. And the good news is, you walk through those moments and you do so with pride, and you do so as a owner of your life. You shift your mind and you become stronger as a leader, as a woman, as a model. If you stay in the discomfort and you live in there and you want others to be responsible for it, you will never, ever know the true potential of what was waiting for you on the other side.

So a leadership mindset says, I know the great Spider-Man quote, right? With great power comes great responsibility, and you believe, you recognize, that while you may just be you sitting at home in your bathrobe with your cup of coffee, to others you are a vessel for truth, for knowing, for answers, for solutions, for products they never dreamed of.

You are brilliant. You are somebody to pay attention to, and as soon as those eyes are on you, that means you have to notice that your growth is critical, not just to yourself, but to others. And those dark spots that we all have where we are overly emotional, we have triggers. We get defensive, we wanna shut down. We don’t wanna listen. We can’t use our influence and our power as an excuse to hide.

We have to use and leverage our power and our influence that we’ve been able to amass so far to leverage that to invest in ourselves to understand better. Because if you don’t understand yourself, then your wake is huge and you are rocking too many boats and you don’t even know it. And eventually people pick up their boats and they leave your lake. They don’t wanna hang out. It’s too painful. You know? It’s true. To hang out with someone who doesn’t see what they can do in the world that’s not healthy or damaging or hurtful, or to the very minimum, just ineffective.

So I really, I hope you know other leaders who would benefit from tuning into this dialogue because of course, my mission is to prove the power of one thriving woman. And I know that your avenue, the way to move through these things faster is self-awareness and understanding and self-understanding and self possession. It’s not by getting different employees or by the ideas or them not doing a good job or the mistakes that they’re making.

It’s you understanding yourself so that you can become not just successful, not just influential, not just persuasive, not just rich, not just beautiful, not just all the things that we think and have aspired to that we think make us successful and powerful and all those things. It’s really also being a human that has this awareness of herself in the space that she’s in and uses that opportunity that she has to do good, to make a difference, to love people and show people love.

What a beautiful thing that women can do in this world if we also keep growing and challenging one another to grow. I had a conversation with a girlfriend the other day, and I was trying to make a decision. It was such a hard decision and I was giving her a lot of resistance and she was just laughing at me and also with me, and also holding me and just kept saying, “I’m just gonna be a good friend to you right now”. I was slashing all over the place, not liking anything she had to say, and she just kept saying, “I’m just gonna be a good friend to you right now.”

She wouldn’t have been able to do that for me if she didn’t have awareness of herself. What she would’ve wanted to do was convince me that she was right. That instead, she was able to be with me to figure out what was right for me. And I think that’s leadership, a clean mind, a mind that is never actually pure and clean. We have brain keeping, we have mind sweeping. We have structures in our lives and people in our lives who help us stay on course when we inevitably fall off course.

So I tell my clients all the time that you are the asset to this business. And how you go, so too goes the business. So if you’re feeling stale, time for something new, if you’re feeling stuck, it’s time for something new. If you’re feeling self-protective and you’re hiding from truths, it’s time for something new. You’re in a position of authority. You have the responsibility to tend to the asset, because when you do, you will change your life. You will change the trajectory of your business and you will change the lives of the people who follow you for the better.

Thanks for tuning in love. Talk to you next time.

Outro: Hey, entrepreneur, you started that gorgeous business of yours to do some really good in the world. You probably didn’t start your business to manage people. But here you are having to figure out how to manage people to get work done, and maybe it’s not going so well.

So head on over to krisplachy.com/howtoceo, and let’s talk about how we can help you learn how to lead, manage, hire, fire, and all the things so that you can build a team that expands on your amazing dream.