Real Talk Leadership

I’m a recovering perfectionist, and if I’m being honest, I still catch myself slipping back into it sometimes. Wanting everything to be just right. Replaying conversations in my head. Overthinking decisions. Spending too much time trying to avoid mistakes or prevent criticism. The problem is perfection is unattainable. We are human beings, not machines. We are all perfectly imperfect. I also think many of us did not develop perfectionist tendencies out of nowhere. Society ing

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about follow through. Not perfection. Not never making mistakes. Not expecting people to operate like robots. We are all human and sometimes things absolutely fall through the cracks. But I keep noticing something that continues to puzzles me. When someone actually does what they said they were going to do, it feels surprising. Almost impressive. They said they would follow up and they did. They said they would send feedback and they actually

Most people do not avoid hard conversations because they are bad leaders. They avoid them because they are uncomfortable. I know this because I’ve experienced it myself. I’ve had leaders in my career who avoided confrontation almost completely. It created confusion, frustration, tension, and a lack of trust. People were left guessing instead of growing. And if I’m being honest, I haven’t always gotten these conversations right either. I’m human. I’ve had conversations go side

We kicked off the April Leadership Lab with a simple question: Think about a leader you enjoyed working with. What did they do that made them stand out? Before we even got into content, the chat filled quickly. People shared things like: transparency honesty respect giving their team the tools they needed to succeed It was a great reminder that strong leadership is not complicated. It is intentional. From there, we talked about some of the most common challenges leaders face.