Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk: 5 Ways to be True to Yourself
Knowing Self-Aware Leadership
Hello KSKOers
I’m often asked whether I’m going to make the leap into solopreneurship and turn Knowing Self Knowing Others into my full-time career. My response? No.
As I ponder and plan my next career step, I’ve talked to lots of people. Some are employed, some are freelance, some are consultants, fractional, interim and volunteers. People are walking all sorts of paths to achieve their purpose. Here’s a bit about my thoughts on my professional journey, and how being true to yourself is the only route to take.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
Commentator and Practitioner
Wherever you’ll see my bio you’ll see the phrase, ‘talking the talk and walking the walk'‘. I’ve been walking the walk for 26 years, and talking the talk for about 8! I like what I do and I’m loving learning and getting better at how I do it.
‘What’ I do is that I’m a director of a children’s charity (for now). How I do it is through self-aware leadership.
I like being part of a team, innovating and problem solving and implementing change alongside others. I want to be both a commentator on leadership as well as a practitioner of leadership.
If I’m not walking the walk, how can I really talk the talk?
It’s the question I keep asking myself.
If I’m Not Walking the Walk…
How can I share thoughts and ideas if I’m not experiencing leadership at the sharp end every day? I fear I would become an observer and commentator on the things that others are doing. I worry that I’d loose
that familiarity with the emotions and feelings you get when things go right and when things go wrong. I would no longer be a part of a team but a critical friend to someone else’s team. I’d be concerned that I’d loose the ability to have real empathy with leaders who are walking the walk and would become a thought leader from the sidelines not the epicentre.
When Others See You Walking
The seventh direction of the self-awareness compass is behaviour. Specifically, behaviour modelling.
As leaders, our behaviour is observed from every angle, and copied, emulated and imitated by the people in our care. If the chief finance officer can show up late, so can the accountant. If the medical director throws surgical instruments around the operating theatre then so can the junior doctors. If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for everybody else. If you want to be an expert in self-aware leadership, you have to model self-aware leadership. And in the context of modelling, it’s your role as a leader to model the behaviour you want to see.
Learning as You Walk
Experience is the ninth direction of the self-awareness compass.
It’s all about experiential learning. As a leader it’s your role to create your own opportunities and seek out experiences to gain knowledge, learning and skills. It’s also your role to actively share your learning with others by creating experiences for everyone. You need to create irresistible developmental opportunities for those that want to grow.
Walking and Learning
When you put experiential learning together with modelling behaviour, it creates an inevitability of practical application. It harks directly back to my endearing beliefs that it’s not what you do, it’s the way you do it that counts. If self-aware leadership is more about the ‘how’ than the ‘what’, then you have to have skin in the game to really live it.
Working in an organisation and experiencing the same changes and challenges as everyone else gives you a realistic, empathic outlook. Working with a challenging stakeholder who creates problems for your organisation to fix provides you with the perspective of life inside the organisation. When employment law changes, you can speak from insight.
Walking a Different Path
Solopreneurs will be able to share a million reasons why my observations here are narrow. They can tell me why self-employment is better than employment: autonomy, freedom, flexibility….. And I know this and appreciate it. My thoughts here are not about disrespecting those who can, it’s about explaining why I can’t. Flying solo without a team to fight for, being entrepreneurial without direct reports to do better for and being individualistic without organisational connection means my work would have less meaning and less purpose to me.
As a proponent of self-aware leadership, a socially-constructed concept, even as an introvert, I want to be where the relationships are. I want to be where organisational behaviours create living cultures. I want to be where line management and people management are the most interesting things I do. I want to be with greater thinkers who strive to solve social problems every day. I want to remain on the inside, speaking out rather than looking in and standing out.
Being True to Yourself
When all’s said and done, you can’t walk another person’s path, you can only walk your own. Here are 5 ways to be true to yourself and walk the walk…
💡1. Walk your own path: Whether you are a solopreneur or an employee, walk your own path with your head held high. Justify it to yourself before you even think about justifying it to others.
💡2. Know why you walk: Be clear about your values and priorities. Know why you tread your chosen path and know why you march with conviction. Have clarity about your passions and your direction and be authentically you.
💡3. Talk with authority: Have an opinion on everything. Share only the opinion that’s grounded in authoritative evidence. Speak from experience, speak from research, speak with curiosity. Watch out for misinformation and be your own researcher.
💡4. Walk to inform your talk: Learn by doing and do your homework. Experience the jobs, read the books, listen to the speakers, check out the science. Build your knowledge bank so that your walking informs your talking.
💡5. Talk to inform others’ walk: Share your opinions that are grounded in learning. Create opportunities to nurture and develop others with integrity and humility and an enduring passion for people.
The Last Word
In the end, staying true to yourself means embracing the path that aligns with your values and your beliefs. Being embedded in a team and actively practicing leadership is where I find greatest purpose and a sense of satisfaction. I believe in leading by example, modelling the behaviours I want to see, and learning through experience. It keeps me grounded and allows me to share insights from the heart of the action. By walking my own path with conviction, I can genuinely contribute to other people’s growth and continue to evolve as both a leader and a learner.
Hand on heart, are you genuinely walking your own path?
Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as a Director in a Children’s Charity.
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