Leadership: How to be Authentic in a World of Labels

Navigating the Boxes…

The question in the headline can only be answered by you, for you, and it was the main focus for a recent the lunchtime leadership sessions.

We were talking about how to ‘Be More of Who You Are (leadership beyond the personality profile)’, that age-old subject of who are we and how do our labels help and hinder us.

So much of the value of those sessions is in the experience, but maybe in relating a snippet of the experience, you will find a gem that is useful for you?

I know an hour can’t do this topic justice, nor can a short post like this one, so let me simply highlight a couple of places you can go for a deeper reflection, maybe some questions to ask that might allow new insights to bubble up to the surface.

The Label

It’s so normal to put labels on things. To shorthand something into a category, or a diagnosis, or a profile. It makes it easy to generalise from, to make sense of, and to put together with other similar experiences and things.

Seeing patterns is a natural human tendency, so let's not resist it, but let’s try to understand what we are doing, and, therefore, where it is freeing and where it is limiting.

The Category

The first piece is often easy to see, we know, instinctively, that labels can be helpful and hindering. We have a sense that we are boxing someone in with their MBTI, or their diagnosis, and we will try to see beyond that.

We’re less good, in my experience, at giving attention to where some of these categorisations come from, and what assumptions and judgements are baked in.

It’s one thing to, for example, use a personality profile, or a scoring scale, but they came from somewhere, they started with someone’s idea, that was a result of that person’s context, culture and conditioning, with good intent no doubt, but are they fit for how we want to box and group things in our world?

What's the difference between 'slow' and 'struggling' as a simple example? Does it even make sense to apply a stop-watch? Do we see the implicit and explicit hierarchies in the language and the choices? So much of this goes unseen and, therefore, unquestioned.

I’m not suggesting you live life as a challenger, nor do I want to discourage you from using what is helpful, but it can be useful to understand what you are using and, hopefully, hold them as imperfect by design.

The Potential

Always present in the conversations on these leadership calls, the content turned, finally, to the feeling and expression of potential.

What can we be without our labels and who are we before them?

This is an endless exploration in my experience, and a beautiful one, and I shared with the group this long-ish passage from Thich Nhat Hahn from his book, Fear. He's talking about life and death and 'the wave' as a metaphor for birth and death, but I think it also applies to the idea of becoming and unbecoming, being one thing and re-creating into another, and that even our ideas of becoming are made of the same stuff as the 'thing' or the label itself.

"We can ask metaphorically, “Where does the wave come from, and where will it go?” And we can answer in the same manner, “The wave comes from water and will return to water.”

In reality, there is no coming and going.

The wave is always water; it doesn’t “come from” water, and it doesn’t go anywhere. It is always water; coming and going are just mental constructions.

The wave has never left the water, so to say the wave “comes from” the water is not really correct. As it is always water, we cannot say it “returns to” water. Right at the moment when the wave is a wave, it is already water."

So freeing to be able to see with that kind of clarity that we are not who we think we are, and that we are the unlimited potential for the ‘coming and going’ of daily life.

With love,

Cathy