Bigger Than Leadership

Stories of Influence, Intention, and Inspiration

Brittany Do

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2021
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781637301340
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Part 1:

All About Leadership

Chapter 1: Leadership

“Life is a journey and sometimes we go around in circles.” —Peter Anderton4

Can you tell me about your leadership journey? In every interview I’ve done for this book, this is the question I chose to start with. Although this is a fairly simple and straightforward question, the stories I’ve heard are usually anything but; that’s what makes each person’s journey inimitable. The fascinating thing about life (and thus leadership) is that it doesn’t matter where or when your journey begins.

When navigating this wild journey called life, it’s so full of roots and trees that you end up lost in the forest without realizing. You don’t know where you’re headed or how to get there, but that’s perfectly alright. If you were on a long hike, too focused on which turn to take, at which moment, and how long you’ve been walking for, then you’d miss seeing the beautiful simplicity of nature in front of you. By focusing too much on the beginning and the end, you miss the best part (hint: the journey itself).

Leadership is Complicated

It was a normal Friday evening, and I was interviewing a fellow college student Beth about her experiences in leadership. Beth was telling me about a difficult time where she had to navigate a sensitive issue with a group of other students. She wasn’t feeling confident in how she handled the situation, but she was glad she had addressed the issue rather than left it alone.

As she told me her situation and how she reacted, I thought of an analogy—one that I repeated to her. If you’re trying to housebreak a dog and it ends up going to the bathroom on your new, lovely carpet, would you clean it up right away or leave it there? If you act immediately, you have a higher chance of erasing any traces of it; it will also decrease the chance of your dog going to the bathroom in the same spot again. However, if you just leave it there or ignore it by throwing a blanket over to hide it, the smell will linger and get worse. What you ultimately do is your decision, but it is important to recognize and understand the consequences.

Leaders face difficult situations—you’ll have to make some tough decisions, but this is almost expected. Step one is taking action despite fear or hesitation in these situations. Without change, progress is impossible.

We are the culmination of our experiences, good and bad. Everyone has their own unique story to tell, and you can’t know and understand every single tiny detail and facet of someone’s life. Life is a beautifully complicated thing, and so is leadership.

Definition

If you ask five people what their definition of leadership is, you’ll get five different answers—everyone has their own unique definition.

Through interviewing over eighty-five people about their respective leadership journeys, I’ve heard numerous definitions of leadership. Here are five that stood out to me:

• “I think when you take your ego out of it and serve a group greater than yourself, going beyond yourself, to me, that’s true leadership.” —Caitlin Logue

• “Ultimately, I think [leadership] boils down to two things. One is connecting with other people, and two is surfacing something within them that they may not see within themselves.” —Andrew Riis

• “There’s no cookie cutter right answer of how to do [leadership]. And everyone inherently has influence and inherently is a leader.” —Rayna LaFave-Clark

• “I would say [a leader] is someone who inspires another to take action, and it requires intention. But the ultimate kind of leadership is servant leadership. It’s about taking the ego out of the equation and putting another’s highest good in its place, which is a never-ending battle; it’s not easy. But what makes it easier is to have the humility to admit we don’t have all the answers.” —Madeline Steitz

• A leader is “being someone who can influence others to the extent that people change their behavior or...influencing a situation to the extent that it changes, whether it’s individual behavior or social structure and improving it or anything in between that spectrum.” —Ben Fields

• “I honestly think [leadership] is being able to find opportunities that make people say ‘oh my god, I thought I was the only one’...that’s a really powerful leadership act, to give people permission to not feel alone.” —Drew Dudley

There’s no singular definition of leadership because there are so many facets of it like humility, service, connection, inspiration, influence, intentionality, impact, and countless others. This is why leadership is in the basic essence of life.

Of course, there are certain categories and types of leadership, like transactional leadership, transformational leadership, autocratic leadership, servant leadership, charismatic leadership, and democratic leadership.5 I wanted to focus on something different, though. Something like life and leadership.

Life and leadership are connected more than you may initially think. Although leadership has been around for far longer than it has been studied, there’s still so much to learn about it. The concept of leadership began in the 1700s, but scientific research regarding it started in the 1900s.6

“Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.“ —James MacGregor Burns7

The more we begin to understand how much there is to leadership other than confusing it with management, siloing it into one part of our life rather than accepting that it is in all aspects and areas, and believing we are not leaders due to a lack of title and power, the more aware we are of it, especially in unexpected situations.

One way—and certainly not the only way—that I have defined leadership is through influence, intention, and inspiration. I’ve looked for these three elements in the people I know and stories I’ve heard when deciding which of the many I should include in this book.

The Beginning

Is there one story you’ve heard so many times before that you feel like you could recite it yourself? Maybe this is a family story or one in a book or video that you’ve read or watched countless times. For me, an example of this is actually John Norlin’s story. It was senior year, and John was the Associated Student Body (ASB) President at his high school; his ASB advisor Brent Grothe told him the other students were counting on him and asked him what he was going to do as president. I’ve grown so used to hearing this story a certain way and knowing John in this setting that I expected him to retell this story to me in our interview when I asked him how his leadership journey began.

However, when I was actually talking with John, now the co-founder of CharacterStrong, a company that focuses on teaching character development to teachers and students alike through social-emotional learning curriculum, he didn’t tell me that story. John told me how he started playing hockey at a young age and how he even went to hockey school at the University of British Columbia every summer. Here, they emphasized, “It’s who you are as a person, it’s your character, how we treat people, how you are while playing the sport.” In these moments, John realized when he was playing hockey, he wasn’t always being kind to others because of his competitiveness. At the hockey school, one thing they wanted the students to learn was getting into the habit of asking how they can help. This simple concept was emphasized, and John liked who he was in those moments more than when he was a “competitive jerk who [was] all about winning.”

Everyone’s leadership journey starts somewhere and in their own way. Even if you’re familiar with someone’s story, they might surprise you.

Similarly to how John’s leadership story began, when Daphne D’sa, a current college student at the University of Washington, started competing in the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) as a freshman in high school, all she knew was that she wanted to get involved immediately. It wasn’t until the second FBLA competition, the State Business Leadership Conference, when Daphne realized that FBLA “was this opportunity for students to really bond and get to know each other and be supportive of each other.” This was really encouraging for her because she hadn’t previously seen students support each other like she did in FBLA.

This led to Daphne joining another club similar to FBLA—this time in her sophomore year. She chose DECA, a student organization for high schoolers to compete in business-related events. There was an upperclassman in DE...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part 1: All About Leadership
• Chapter 1: Leadership
• Chapter 2: Act on Your H.E.A.R.T.
• Chapter 3: Catch the Leadership Bug
• Part 2: Be Intentional
• Chapter 4: Intentionality
• Chapter 5: Better Together
• Chapter 6: Inspire Confidence
• Chapter 7: Strength Redefined
• Chapter 8: Failing is Good
• Chapter 9: Work with Others, for Others
• Chapter 10: Listen with Your Heart
• Part 3: Inspire Your Life
• Chapter 11: Live Your Life Purposefully
• Chapter 12: It’s the Little Things
• Chapter 13: Learn How to Juggle
• Chapter 14: Lead Yourself
• Chapter 15: Reminders
• Resources
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix