You both know that being an effective leader starts with the self. We talk about the self all the time. Effective leadership starts with really knowing yourself and the way you take. And so I'm curious how each of you thinks about that in your own leadership and your self-awareness and thoughts of self as it relates to the practice of leadership. Just curious, have a chat about it. I'll tell you this. When I went through my coaching training, we started with the coach as self. There's all of this work about in any bi-directional relationship, you have to pay attention to both pieces. And so when I think about myself as a coach, I recognize that I am going to influence the other persons. Whether they're open, whether they're closed, whether they feel comfortable bringing emotion, whether they are happy, whether they are sad, there's emotion contagion there. So I think about that as a leader as well. When I show up, I am bringing something to the relationship, to the team, to the room, and so I have to know what I'm bringing in order to make sure I'm not influencing things in a way I don't want them to be influenced, and it sounds self-serving I suppose to be, even something like am I smiling? Like am I bringing my good stuff? Am I inadvertently shutting somebody down because I don't agree with them? And so it's hard to pay attention to that, but that's how I think about it. For me when I think about related to myself and understanding myself is how it helps me recognize that I am not always the same as other people. When we aren't reflecting on that, we may be going through life with a lens like, well, everyone's just like me. We all think these things, we all feel this way, just taken for granted. Starting with that self-awareness that self-reflection helps highlight, people may be unlikely are different than I am in these ways, the same people that I'm having this bidirectional relationship with may bring a very different lens to that. And I need to take into consideration who I am and what I'm bringing and also the person I'm interacting with trying to influence, motivate, help, get help from, may bring a very different lens. And that's what's really a powerful piece of that to me. Listening to that, I'm thinking about, before we get into the chemistry, when I heard you talking about my influence on other people, I was almost thinking of a chemistry experiment with what you're bringing and how that impacts the other people, molecules in the situation. I'm also thinking about we can go too far and thinking about those reactions until we know what little molecule we are. I'm probably doing a terrible joke. Chemistry is not my area. Things like our values and our personality tendencies, experiences and our cultural beliefs. How we make decisions, what influences go into how we see a situation, the lens that we're bringing. There are a lot of things about just how our brains work as humans full of molecules that play out in some consistent patterns. That if we're not aware of them, we lose the benefit from understanding what's some of the influences that are on us in a particular moment and also work to counteract those things. With the movement right now toward really paying attention to and being intentional about mental health and psychological health and psychological well-being, a lot of that comes down to really checking in with yourself and seeing who you are, what stresses you out, what brings you joy? What helps you be the best version of yourself? What do you do when you get off track? And so it's almost like a little, I'm going to call this the therapy module, or at the very least the coaching module, really going introspective. I like the molecule thing to take a look at the molecule inside, that should be the name of the course. Take a look at the molecule inside. Well, I think these are great considerations as we move forward is thinking deeply about the self and who we are, and how we show up in situations. And how recognizing that all of the decisions that we make in any given day over the course of days. Use of the word patterns, noticing our patterns, and that if we don't reflect and keep ourselves well, how those patterns can go bad for us in our decision-making. This is an important next step in our learning journey. Start with the self.
