How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey)

Feb 25, 2024 1h 27m 17 insights Episode Page ↗
This episode features executive coach and bestselling author Donna Lishow, who discusses leveraging personal stories and "superpowers" to enhance leadership. She shares frameworks for identifying strengths, reframing imposter syndrome, and setting life goals, drawing from her work with top tech executives.
Actionable Insights

1. Leverage Your Self-Told Stories

Understand that the stories you tell yourself, whether true or not, profoundly impact your actions and identity because your brain doesn’t differentiate; leverage this by intentionally framing your narrative to be the hero of your own life.

2. Lead From Inside Out

Begin your leadership journey by focusing on yourself first, understanding your purpose and mission, as this inner fuel is sustainable and empowers you to effectively lead others, teams, and ultimately the business.

3. Identify Superpowers From Stories

To identify your strengths, analyze peak experiences from your past (childhood, recent projects) and your career path to find recurring themes that empowered you and made an impact.

4. Amplify Your Strengths

Focus on amplifying your strengths rather than expending energy trying to fix weaknesses, as leveraging what you’re good at leads to greater effectiveness, impact, and helps you achieve your goals.

5. Reframe Imposter Syndrome’s Function

Instead of denying imposter syndrome, ask yourself how this feeling serves you; often, it signals a growth edge and motivates you to learn and work harder, leading to improvement and eventually feeling less like an imposter.

6. Leverage Inner Kryptonite

Examine your “inner kryptonite” (perceived weaknesses or disorders like dyslexia) and identify how they might actually serve you or be linked to your strengths, such as visionary thinking or spatial reasoning.

7. Envision Your Ideal Future

To identify goals, vividly imagine your ideal future (decades, years, or quarters from now), engaging all your senses to visualize what you’ve accomplished and how it feels, then work backward to map out the journey.

8. Experiment for Personal Growth

Treat personal growth and new behaviors as hypotheses; start with small experiments to gather data, learn from the results, and then iterate by taking bigger steps, just as you would in product development.

9. Filter Experiments: Head, Heart, Hands

When running personal experiments, evaluate the results through three filters: “Head” (your thoughts and intellectual assessment), “Heart” (your emotional response), and “Hands” (your physical sensations and body’s reaction) to gain comprehensive insights.

10. Validate Self-Stories with Data

Challenge the stories you tell yourself by gathering real data, such as asking colleagues how they experience your leadership, to understand if your self-perception aligns with reality and identify areas for change.

11. Communicate Personal Work Style

If your team misinterprets your actions (e.g., being quiet in meetings), communicate your personal work style and processing methods (e.g., needing time to process) to foster understanding and better relationships.

12. Manage Your Energy, Not Time

Conduct an “energy audit” of your daily activities to identify what gives you energy versus what saps it, then prioritize doing more of what lights you up and find ways to outsource or manage energy-draining tasks.

13. Cultivate “Isn’t That Interesting?”

Adopt an “isn’t that interesting?” mindset to cultivate a non-judgmental, optimistic stance towards extreme or challenging life events, allowing for radical appreciation and more mindful, informed actions.

14. Address Persistent Work Dread

If you consistently wake up feeling dread about your job, recognize this as a significant sign that you may need to make a change in your career or work situation.

15. Use Fidgets for Virtual Meetings

To combat “Zoom fatigue” and maintain focus during virtual meetings, use fidgets or squishy objects to provide physical stimuli, helping to ground you and close neurological circuitry that’s missing compared to in-person interactions.

16. Find Your Purpose (Dolly Parton)

Discover your true self and intentionally align your actions and life choices with that understanding, as advised by Dolly Parton.

17. Pave a New Path (Dolly Parton)

If you are dissatisfied with your current life or career trajectory, take proactive steps to create a new direction for yourself.