Authentic Leadership: It’s Hard to Live Your Message, But It’s Necessary

Living your message is not always easy. It’s human to make mistakes and come up short – this happens to the best of us.

I worked with a leader who once told me that being a good leader is hard. He’s right – it takes courage and consistency, as well as self-reflection and empathy. But in order to be a person of integrity and the kind of leader you always wanted to be, you need to actively work on applying what you know and being true to your word.

Keep Self-Reflecting, Keep Growing

With some of my own self-reflection here, I can testify to living your message being a challenge. This is not a question of integrity. What I’ve found is that the experience of something often differs from the theory/idea of something. It’s one of those where you learn by doing. From this perspective, mistakes are good and you can course-correct along the way.

This is extremely nuanced because I am actively on the front lines practicing what I preach (I say that in a humble and sincere way) – I’m talking about everything from suicide prevention to anti-bullying, sharing my story with people all around the world and helping others. This is not a matter of not making the effort. Also, I can be hard on myself – I need to give myself credit for putting myself out there in vulnerable ways as much as I do. When it comes to being authentic, I can genuinely say from the bottom of my heart that I’m living it.

With that said, there are two areas that I’ve found to be very challenging in practice (I had the idea and theory down pat, but in practice found it challenging):

1. Finding the balance between letting things go and standing up for myself. When I was younger, I was bullied in both high school and college, and I always felt like other people were walking all over me. As I got into my mid to late twenties, I started standing up for myself more. This is wonderful and I’m proud of myself for this. Yet, I got to a point where I stood up to everyone about everything. Maybe I’m slightly exaggerating here, but not by much. Standing up to all the dysfunction took a lot of energy out of me. I wasn’t choosing my battles and I became a sort of warrior battling with the whole world. I ended up going into a burnout. In theory, I knew that I needed to let some things go. In practice, in my late twenties, I defaulted to standing up to people all the time because of my traumatic past and because I was tired of putting up with dysfunctional people. This is nothing to judge myself for – I simply needed to course-correct and let things go more, being a bit more choosy with my battles! I needed to reframe certain situations, realizing that how someone acts is a reflection of them, not me. Also, I went deep into my unconscious mind through meditation and therapy to help address and release some of the traumas of the past.
2. Learn from the experts, but trust yourself and don’t listen too much to others. Without a doubt, we all need to learn from experts. At the same time, we need to know when particular advice isn’t meant for us. In this December 2016 video, I talk about the importance of doing what works for you. And in some ways, I did that for myself, no doubt. At the same time, I started to put too much weight into the advice from successful entrepreneurs and YouTubers. For example, there are some entrepreneurs who work insane hours and pride themselves on that, saying that working insane hours is necessary in order to become successful. I tried this and it didn’t work for me. My truth – and I’m speaking only for myself here and not someone else – is that I’m both happier and more productive when I live a balanced and well-paced life. Yes, we all need to make some sprints to the finish line from time to time, but that needs to be the exception, not the rule (at least, for me). Instead of trusting myself, I found myself in the past getting caught up in the advice from some of these successful people and I started overworking myself. This negatively affected my health, relationship, and other parts of my life as well. It’s great that working 18-hour days works for some people, but it doesn’t for me; I learned that the hard way. I’m now focused on doing less and saying no more often. I learned to be less afraid when it comes to trusting myself, disregarding the well-intentioned but sometimes over-the-top advice of others.

This Post Took Some Courage to Write

This post was a bit scary to write because I don’t want to give the wrong impression or be misunderstood here – I pride myself on living my message and practicing what I preach. In a world with a lot of hypocrites, I’m not one of them. I just wanted to point out a few areas I had some struggles in fairly recently as a way to show that even as you’re living your message, it’s important to continue to grow, self-reflect, and face your traumatic past (if the trauma is affecting your default reaction mechanisms like it was for me). This, in turn, leads to course-corrections and adjustments along the way. We all face challenges and holding yourself to high standards doesn’t mean you have to be perfect.

As Brian Tracy says, a plane is off-course most of the time, yet still tends to take off and land on schedule. Making mistakes and learning from your experiences is what leads to growth, wisdom, and enlightenment.

Jeff Davis is an award-winning author, most recently publishing The Power of Authentic Leadership: Activating the 13 Keys to Achieving Prosperity Through Authenticity. He’s also an authentic leadership keynote speaker and Executive Coach to leaders and CEOs, offering individualized coaching. Follow him on Twitter.