Designed to Lead
If you had the pleasure of growing up on my block as a kid, you know this bold statement is true, I was born to lead. Or at the very least, I created opportunities for myself to lead others, and often times they followed, like founding my first business at the age of 12, The Club, and naming myself President or serving as CEO of 3 companies. I admit I’ve never taken a leadership class from a professor at Harvard, instead I chose the Harvard of Life, practice leadership, reading about leadership, and practicing it again.
As a natural-born leader according to Human Design and Gene Keys, there are 3 key ‘gifts’ that I’ve naturally cultivated over the years to support my leadership development. You don’t have to be born with these gifts to practice developing them. If you happen to have them in your chart, (yay!) now you can be more intentional about using these gifts. If you don’t, you can learn from people like me how to cultivate and tap into the power of listening, loving, and influencing those around you.
3 Gifts to Cultivate Leadership
1) Gate (13) of the Listener
With this gift, I innately come across as a great listener, and make other people want to open up to me and tell me things without even knowing why. This is because I am here to absorb all these tales of life experiences, glean insights from them, and turn them into wisdom we can learn from. When I am out in the world, I naturally collect information about what people are doing, thinking, and going through, teaching me things so that I can draw conclusions or patterns or life lessons out of them. I listen to learn.
I have the gift of hearing, seeing, and storing information, providing continuity between the past and the future in my role as a listener. I recognize the right moment to share what is most valuable, and the important lessons which can only be learned through experience. I listen to share.
It OWL makes sense why I started the Outstanding Women Leaders podcast with a mission to host 100 million witty and wise conversations. That’s a whole lotta wisdom and important life lessons out in the world and I truly love every minute of hosting these conversations. I learn so much about myself and the world through my guest’s eyes!
To become a better listener, you first have to genuinely enjoy hearing people’s stories, adventures, victories, and challenges. And when you truly enjoy hearing them, you keep asking questions, and you create space for them to ask you questions too. This is why people feel comfortable sharing their stories with me. They can feel that I have created space for them to share openly.
In order to lead people, you must first listen to OWL the stakeholders—know what is important to them, what keeps them up at night, and what they value outside of work—listen to learn, so you know what is valuable to share.
2) Gate 15 - The Love of Humanity
With this gift brings a love for the extremes of my own rhythms, so that I’m capable of accepting other people’s extremes without judgement, thereby bringing diversity into the flow of life. This gift required me to step into self-acceptance of my own extreme rhythms (ADHD, and whatever my soul is calling for me to do), and understand the way my own water wants to flow through the diversity of life, so that I can acknowledge and accept the diversity of others. I listen to appreciate.
I feel drawn towards extremes because I have a need to explore, a need to go to the edges of what the spectrum is for all of us as humanity. I explore it, I understand it, and shine a light on these extremes for people, showing you that there’s actually some good, upsides of these edges that we could all maybe bring into our lives, without needing to go to that extreme or learn those lessons ourselves. A soul called to explore is not a waste of time or a rabbit hole to be avoided—my soul OWLways knows what’s valuable for ‘future’ Katie.
This gift allows me to influence how extreme rhythms or patterns are made ‘modest’ and are balanced and integrated into the collective (insert coaching here). I truly love diversity and all that it creates in this world. As I say on my podcast, You will be seen here. You will be heard. There is space for you. I listen to learn, appreciate, and share valuable insights with the world.
3) Gate 31 - The Gate of Influence
By my very nature I am influential. Whether that is through the public eye or behind a computer supporting an influential leader (my favorite type of influence!), I am here to infuse my power of influence in everything I do. I provide the vision for new direction, showing others how to achieve it, rather than doing it for them. My power of influence is infused into whatever I put my energy into—when I focus on what I love, the influencing happens naturally. What I love is providing solutions that help people SOAR in leadership and life!
In order to lead with influence, you need to be a leader worth listening to: a leader whooo trusts that people are creative and capable of doing it for themselves, a leader whoo learns from their people, appreciates and acknowledges their diversity, and lives in alignment with their own extreme rhythms, naturally influencing those around them to live in alignment with themselves.
As you contemplate these 3 gifts and how they are expressed/not expressed in your own life, consider the following questions: What do OWL the people that you influence value? What do you still need to accept about your own ‘extreme’ rhythms, so that you can accept others as well? More importantly, what ‘feelings’ do you want to influence in others? People OWLways remember how you made them feel—feelings are ‘sticky’ and influence our decision-making at every level…just ask anyone in marketing.
