Authentic Leadership: Embrace Your True Self

Hello, and welcome to next gen leaders. My name is Bianca Cardenas and I am your host. hope you guys feel well rested and prepared to tackle this week. Today I want to talk about authentic leadership. What is authentic leadership? It just means being yourself. Being comfortable with who you are because you understand what you stand for. What your values are. Your strengths and your opportunities. And you're okay with it. It doesn't bother you. No matter what anyone says. You still know who you are, so it has no effect on you whatsoever. We can always feel when someone's authentic. Because when we're in authentic. It's like, we're not trying to just convince everyone around us.

We're also trying to convince ourselves, and this is something that can be felt by everyone. Us humans just have this intuitive sense when someone is trying to pull a fast one on us. Learning to be authentic is probably the most important thing that you can do in your career, your family life, and just for yourself, because it means that you're going to be living your true self rather than trying to be someone else. There's four things that we could do to make sure that we're authentic with ourselves and everyone around us. Number one is just really knowing yourself. What do you stand for? What makes you special? What are your things that you're constantly working on? I really learned this lesson during COVID. Because that's when I decided to quit my job. And go for my PhD. When I was in that experience, I felt so scared. I felt scared because I wasn't sure how my bills were going to get paid. And I wasn't sure how I was going to last two to three years. Just focusing on school. While living on my own in Austin and being far away from my family. What I did to help me cope with these feelings is I bought this book. And I sat down every single morning and I really got clear on who I am and what I stand for. This helped me in two different ways. The first way is I stood firm in my decision to leave because it didn't align with my values and who I was.

And second, I was able to go through school and eventually find leadership worth following. By aligning close to things that I truly value in myself and in others. So sitting down and getting clear on who I was, helped me understand that no matter what happened.

Second is getting clear on your principles. So why is this important? For one. Getting clear on your principles means that you're not going to stand for things that go against your principles. The reason I quit my job at the start of COVID was because I was working for this CEO who was a master manipulator and that's just putting it very lightly. At the start of COVID. Everyone was calling in because they wanted to get their VPN set up so that way they wouldn't be susceptible to hackers, stealing their company data. When we do this naturally it's considered project hours and it's three times as expensive as just doing a normal project.

Since there was just so much chaos, so many people calling in. The CEO decided not to let them know that they were going to charge some product hours. And he tasked us with it. That didn't sit with me because I spent so long building a relationship with my clients. I went onsite. I met them personally.

It took so much effort to build that trust. Then in an instant, it was just going to be gone because of someone else's actions. That's why I really decided to quit my job and pursue my PhD. Because I didn't want to continue working with people like that.

In fact, I wanted to make a difference in change that type of leadership. So getting clear on your principles is super important to understand who you truly are.

Three. Focusing on others. This means actively listening to them. When they're speaking to us. When we're listening to someone, our brains is just trying to figure out the best way to respond instead of just sitting with them and truly listening to them. This is because we're trying to figure out the best way to respond so we can sound smart . But. Really being wise is being able to sit with him. And really just. Parrot back what they're saying to us. You can try paraphrasing. Everything they said to you to make sure that you understood. And when you get that response of, oh my gosh, exactly. Right. Then, you know, you've done your job. Just focusing on other people is a great way to show people that we're authentically listening to them and focusing on them.

Number four. Is building great relationships. And this carries on to work , personal . And relationships with your neighborhood. Your community. You're a church anywhere that you're building relationships. These three ways to be authentic will make you fit right in. And that's because you're not focusing on being the smartest person in the room. You're focusing on other people and listening to them and putting them first and naturally you're going to be welcomed anywhere you go. If you do these four steps correctly, Then you'll really be living and breathing exactly who you are and not trying to be someone else to make people like you, but rather you're being yourself and you're making the right people.

Like you. Because we cannot keep this facade of trying to be someone else. Eventually our true selves will come out. And people are going to. think that we were lying to them the entire time. And that's the last thing we want to do is check people. So I hope this helps and.

It was great speaking with you again. I plan on posting a new podcast every Tuesdays and Thursdays at nine 30 central time. So I look forward to our next conversation and I will see you then take care.