Is your leadership about offering guidance about an area you’ve come to know well?
As well as working with leaders who are stewarding new and innovative ideas into the world, the other strand of my work is guiding people whose leadership is about being an inspiration and a guide to others.
You have pioneered, you have led the way, you’ve had an adventure and now you want to reflect on what you’ve learned so you can show the way for others.
You have taken some grit, an area of pain and suffering, and transformed that grit into some kind of pearl of wisdom for yourself. Your natural inclination is then to want to share the wisdom with others to help them get to a better place. It is an impulse of the heart as much as a business decision.
I am particularly proud of my book Mum, Me, White Lies and Tea that I published in 2019. I shared my experience as my mum was diagnosed with dementia and her illness progressed. It was heart-breaking, heart opening and at times, very funny. It was not a journey that I consciously chose, but I took the grit of that experience and mined the pearls of wisdom. I then offered those pearls to others through that book.
One of the motivating factors for me was seeing two specific friends suffering because their aging mums also had dementia, and they simply didn’t know how to relate to their mums as their dementia progressed. One of them, Jane, said to me, “When are you going to write the book about what you’ve learned from your journey with your mum? I really need to read it!” That galvanised me into action.
I still am surprised deeply touched by how simply sharing my own experience and the insights I developed has been valuable to others. I am not an expert on dementia and never want to be, but I still have something of value to offer.
So what grit in your life have your turned into pearls of wisdom? Or could do?
You don’t need to become the expert, relative to those you can help you do have relative expertise gleaned from your lived experience. But you may not necessarily know how to transform your lived experience into pearls of wisdom, so next time I’ll share some of thoughts of the most important process you can actually use to transform the grit of your experience into pearls of wisdom.
If you are in leadership and think you would find it valuable to have a conversation to explore how you can create pearls of wisdom from the grit you’ve experienced in your life, just send me an email at nick@iamnickwilliams.com and we’ll arrange that
