The Co-Active Training Institute (CTI) frames leadership as taking responsibility for your world.
Jerry Colonna speaks of leadership as the art of growing up.
Kevin Cashman takes a stand for leadership as starting from the inside out.
 
Ultimately leadership is about taking responsibility for your impact. And that starts with you, by discovering your purpose and what is truly important to you, and with honestly exploring what you have made up about the yourself, others and the world. When you take responsibility for the stories you tell about your life, these stories stop living you and you move to a place of choice, where you are not just responsible, but also respond-able.
 
When you are at choice, you are less likely to react to external stimuli, driven by fear and seeking external validation. Instead you consciously seek to create an intentional impact, by acting and responding to the world in alignment with your purpose and values.
 
CTI, Colonna and Cashman all point to a movement from reactivity to creativity, from victimhood to self-authorship, from inertia to agency.
 
What is the impact of this shift in mindset? The graphic below from the Leadership Circle Europe post illustrates it better than the countless words I’ve used in the past.
 
Every person’s journey to leadership is different. Each person holds a lifetime of experiences to process and integrate. And, the journey to self-leadership is what enables you to lead with others in the world around you.
 
The journey to leadership is one we are called on by our purpose to make.
 
It is the hardest and longest journey I have ever undertaken. And also the most important.
 
Where are you in your leadership journey?