Her resume is wildly impressive: best-selling author, award-winning screenwriter, successful entrepreneur, celebrated fitness trainer and health activist — she even won Miss Congeniality at the Miss California USA pageant. But Kimberly Spencer’s accomplishments hid her demons — bulimia, trying to be who others wanted and expected her to be, a victim of emotional self-sabotage.
She baked her first batch of cookies in the California sun at age 3 — with mud as the secret ingredient. Ever since that day, Whitney Singletary-White has dreamed of being a baker, and she’s made that dream come true with her gourmet Nuttin’ Butter Cookies.
We know them when we’re in them. Or avoiding them. Uncomfortable conversations when it feels like one wrong word — or even one right word expressed wrongly — can explode like a hand grenade.
Want to be a leader known as strong, confident, honest, transparent and secure? Vulnerability can pave your way to all those adjectives — if you employ it wisely. Host Warwick Fairfax discusses with co-host Gary Schneeberger the helpful and the not-so-helpful ways you can be open about yourself. When vulnerability works, they explain, it can help your team members weather crucibles they’re going through today — and inoculate them against those yet to come.
We hear in our culture that we need to be authentic, even vulnerable. But what does that mean, and can you be authentic and vulnerable, even after being broken, and still be successful?
At 19, Ryan Campbell became the youngest pilot to fly solo around the world. Two years later, a horrific plane crash threatened more than the dream he birthed at 6 to make a life and a living streaking through the skies.
In 8th grade, after dreaming for years of competing in the finals of the National Spelling Bee, Adom Appiah got knocked out of the competition early. Instead of wallowing in the disappointment of that crucible, though, he turned his attention to consoling the other kids who had also fallen short.
It’s hard enough to get through failures and setbacks — we only make them worse by beating ourselves up or trying to move past them too quickly.
It can make a professional paper cut feel like a full-fledged crucible. It leaves you wondering why you and your work are never good enough. But perfectionism, for all its insidiousness, can be overcome.
I have always been drawn to heroic leadership. Great leaders faced with impossible odds doing great deeds. But in an upcoming episode of the Beyond the Crucible podcast with Professor Joseph Badaracco of the Harvard Business School, we touched on another approach to leadership: quiet leadership which he discussed in his book Leading Quietly. We went on to focus for much of the podcast on Professor Badaracco’s latest book Step Back, which explores how leaders can reflect during their busy lives.
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