The Discover Your True North Fieldbook. Bill George
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PART ONE
EXAMINE YOUR LEADERSHIP JOURNEY
When you're in trouble and all your defenses get stripped away, you realize what matters and who matters. That's when you need to get back to your roots and to your values.
Your life story provides the very foundation for your leadership. Your development as an authentic leader begins by analyzing your story and most formative experiences. As you reflect on your past, you will develop tools to see yourself more clearly, understand your leadership achievements, and embrace your goals for future development.
In Part One of this guide, we begin with your life story.
1
LIFE STORY
We are the mosaic of all our experiences.
The process of becoming a True North leader begins by unpacking the fundamental question: Who are you?
When you first meet someone and they say, “So tell me a little bit about yourself,” how do you respond? If you are like most of us, you share selected highlights of your life story. In many ways then, we are the stories we tell others about ourselves.
In this chapter we ask you to reflect on your life to gain a better understanding of who you are. You will be exploring how various aspects of your story fit together to define you as a unique individual. This is the starting point for gaining greater self-awareness and for understanding what your life and your leadership are all about.
In the 125 interviews we conducted with authentic leaders for True North and the additional 30 we added preparing this revision, leaders consistently told us that they found their purpose for leadership by mining their life stories. Having a clear sense of their personal narratives enabled them to remain grounded and stay focused on their True North.
These leaders did not define themselves by a list of characteristics, traits, or styles. Although some tried to emulate great leaders early in their lives, they soon learned that attempting to mimic others did not improve their effectiveness as leaders.
Some interviewees did not see themselves as leaders at all, even though they had been identified by others as exemplary leaders. Instead, they viewed themselves as people who wanted to make a difference and who inspired others to join them in pursuing common goals. By understanding and framing their life stories, they found their passion to lead and were able to discover their True North.
Exercise 1.1: Your Path of Life
In this first exercise, you are going to draw the path of your life to date. See Figure 1.1 for an example of what this might look like. On the facing page is a workspace for drawing your own path. Label the lower left corner of the page “Birth” and the upper right “Present Day.” Begin drawing your life's path from one corner to the other.
Figure 1.1 Path of Life Example
Let the terrain of your journey be unique to who you are. Include mountains and valleys, cities and wilderness, forks, bridges, and cliffs.
Add in houses, buildings, and so on along the way, each representing places you have lived or worked. Likewise, indicate key people and important events with pictures or a diagram along or across the path.
Add representations for your family, work, hobbies, spiritual life…anything that is meaningful to you.
Be creative and allow your story to unfold in front of you.
Looking at the path, divide your life story into four or five chapters marked by major changes or critical transitions in your journey. Give each chapter a descriptive title and add it to your path.
Learning From Your Life Story
The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.
When trying to discover our authentic selves, a good place to start is to examine our life stories. We are largely the stories we tell about ourselves. Stories are the way we capture our experiences in a way that we can understand and in a format that we can communicate to others.
However, as you might have experienced when attempting to draw your path of life, it's not quite that simple. As novelist John Barth reminds us, these “stories” are not our lives; they are our stories. They are social constructions, and as such, they have a great deal of play in them. There is no one single, true, and right story of our life.
You've no doubt heard the saying: “You are the author of your life.” Look at the path of life you just drew in Exercise 1.1. Now take a few minutes to reflect on the following questions:
● Which story did you ultimately choose to tell when you “authored” this version of your life?
● How did you decide what to include and not to include?
● What's missing and why?
● Imagine all possible versions you considered when drawing your path of life.
◦ Which one reflects the real you?
◦ What can you learn about yourself by reflecting on the version you ultimately decided to draw here today?
● What audience did you have in mind when drawing this version of your life?
● Would the path you drew look any different if you knew someone else would see it?
● How different might it look if you were drawing it for your best friend? Your boss/teacher? Your parents? Your partner? A prospective employer? A prospective date? A newspaper reporter?
Our life stories are just that; they are stories – personal narratives constructed out of recollections from our past. And since our memories are far from perfect, we have a great deal of freedom in how we author the stories of our life. Context matters. Who we are and whom we plan on sharing them with greatly influence the stories we tell about ourselves. Of all the possible stories we might construct about ourselves, which are the most useful?
For our purposes, we find it helpful to draw a distinction between telling your story as a hero, a victim, or a knowledgeable bystander. We believe that your story work will be most helpful if you cultivate the perspective of a caring, knowledgeable bystander rather than that of a hero or a victim. If you are a hero, you miss out on what you need to work on. As a victim, you miss out on your strengths. As a knowledgeable bystander, you can be your own best friend or mentor, someone who knows you intimately, doesn't pull any punches, but who is definitely on your side. Adopting this perspective is best when authoring our life