Reply To: Exercise 13: Your Models for Leadership and Emotions

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Olivia Ong
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Leadership Step by Step Exercise 13: Writing my models for leadership

1. What is Leadership?
a. What is leadership? Leadership is getting someone to do something in the interest of growth and improvement. It could be oneself or it could be others. It could be for an individual or for a collective goal. I find that leadership can also be choosing to do something that someone wants to do but has a hard time doing naturally. It’s a skill and a muscle that can be practiced, but sometimes can be counterintuitive to human nature. I.e. it can look like doing something for the betterment of a greater collective, but can be unintuitive as acting in one’s self-interests is a more common/natural behavior.

b. How have my views on leadership changed over the exercises so far? With the exercises so far, my views on leadership have shifted much more to the individual rather than influence over others, simply from the order that we are going in. I used to find leading the self different from leading others, but I find that leading oneself can influence others in a less direct way. Perhaps it can be more effective long term.

c. What leadership experiences have I had so far? So far, I’ve done a lot of volunteering in summer camps across religious and educational organizations; whether that’s leading a group, or supporting the camps in the background. I’ve led a martial arts demonstration team growing up. Career-wise, I’ve managed technicians before and led organizations through making purchasing decisions for the factory. I’ve also influenced the effectiveness and efficiency of operations in the chip design world. In the personal finance world, I’ve led myself and peers to do things outside of our respective comfort zones. Within friendships, I’ve lent beliefs and poured into others, shared space, and held space for people to be themselves and share their thoughts.

d. Who are my leadership role models? My mom is one of my leadership models in terms of servant leadership. She often will serve others to her own detriment. I think I consider her a role model because while I aspire to be like her, I don’t think that I would ever get close to her ability. When I would go grocery shopping with my mom as a child, half of the town would know her. In her absence, people speak fondly of her. I would hope that I can be as approachable as my mom is and that I can inspire people to feel loved and cared for in the same way that others feel about her. Personally, my mom has also been a mad task master – never letting me get away with a sigh or a negative thought, she often holds me accountable to managing my emotions and beliefs better.

e. What do I consider success or failure in leadership? Good or bad? I evaluate leadership on the degree of authenticity of the relationships. Previously, I would evaluate leadership on external things, like size of organization and strength of people being influenced. Then I realized that people can follow a leader or be motivated by things that move them, but may not necessarily resonate. Things can be in a neutral sense, manipulated, to get people to do things, but if it’s forced, it’s not very sustainable. As of late, I’ve been feeling that true leadership raises the level of people (personally, professionally, degree of effectiveness) in a sustainable way that carries regardless of whether or not the leader is present.

2. What are Motivation, Emotions, and Self-Awareness?
a. What is motivation? Motivation is the reason why people do things. In my personal experience, ‘shoulds’ and feelings of obligation had been big motivators for me as I would fail to feel aligned with what I would do. I was very adept at unwilling and reluctant compliance. Currently, my motivations are more aligned with my core values and what resonates with me more. Health and wellness, connected relationships, and serving others in a practical way are some of my values. Over the last two years, independence, courage, competence, effectiveness, and fun have been core motivating values that I seek to align my actions with more and more.

b. What are emotions? From a physics perspective, emotions are frequencies of energy. The higher the frequency, the more positive the emotion. The lower the frequency, the more negative the emotion. I consider emotions to be magnets of other events and circumstances of the same frequency. Emotions are how we experience the world – they add qualifiers and descriptors to how we experience things.

c. What is self awareness? Self-awareness is being able to understand and perceive oneself from as objective of a point of view as is possible, to be aware of one’s influences and biases. It’s also the ability and willingness to observe changes, differences, and/or stagnancies in oneself, to scrutinize oneself and a willingness to be honest with oneself about who we are.

d. Why do they matter? Motivations, emotions, and self-awareness matter because they comprise so much of our lives. Whether motivations are those that we want or those that we don’t want, can largely influence our emotions. Emotions are how we experience the world and the quality of our lives is largely influenced by the quality of the emotions we experience.

e. How do they manifest in my life? Motivation, emotions, and self-awareness manifest themselves in my life every single day, all the time. I’ve taken a much closer look at emotions after coming back from my first week-long meditation retreat. I see emotions both as a way I experience the world, and how I proactively create the life that I want by using my emotions as a signal to trigger the environment around me. I believe that one can feel their feelings and after letting them pass through or having had time to let them run its course, I’m a believer in one’s ability and agency to change the narrative proactively from how an event or story was originally experienced. I’ve always been self-reflective, something I attribute to the challenges I encountered as a child. As time goes on, I continue to reflect often and pursue self-awareness as a means of trying to overcome myself. In part, I’m influenced by my overthinking. And in part, I’m trying to pursue greater self-knowing so I can continue to better pursue the person I want to be.

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