Susan Scanlon writes about the Leadership Story in The Type Reporter, a newsletter about [Myers-Briggs] personality type “and how it affects you in all stages of life.”
Her husband, John, developed the concept of the Leadership Story, “a narrative that excites people about what you stand for.” John, she said, “began to discover that everyone, armed with a leadership story, can become a leader.”
Using the aspects of Myers-Briggs types, Scanlon talks about:
- Feeling: “We become leaders when we become enthusiastic about something.”
- Sensing: “The ‘defining moment’ … tells about a specific moment, with specific sights and sounds, so it lets people experience what we experienced. We can feel what they felt, and it can be a defining moment for us too.”
- Intuition: “Defining the future we want to see adds the Intuitive part to our leadership story, where we ‘see’ what isn’t there yet. It advances us from saying ‘I want to go somewhere,’ to “I want to go THERE.'”
- Thinking: “This is the final piece to our leadership story, the Thinking piece, where we design a game plan to lead us to our goal.”
The other view of the Leadership Story comes from Katie K. Snapp, writing on the Neuroscience of Leadership on her Better-Leadership.com site. She writes:
A life story — whether we read it in a bestselling memoir or participate in it each day –contains silent assumptions and emotional scripts. Our assumptions tell us what to look for, and how to perceive and process experiences.
What about your identity as a leader in that story? Who defined it up until now? What events formed it? Were you an agent of the change or were you a victim?
Change is not simple …
The good news is that we are not hard-wired for life. With new experiences, new neuronal pathways and new neural networks are formed. New highways to new communities in your brain. And, some remarkable new research shows, consistently repeating new experiences even alters gene expression. When we write a new story–and change our minds — we change our brains.
Snapp goes onto detail four principles of change, one of which is: “A new story can only occur by living in the present moment.” I have trouble with that one. The message has been coming at me from several directions — yoga class, my brush with Eckhart Tolle’s teachings this year — but I still find it a hard concept to embody.
She closes with: “The powerful use of story to examine what your leadership history leads to intention. Take control of the author in you. Rewrite what needs a change.”
I believe my life is slowly leading me in a direction in which I can impart this message to to others: Change the story, change your life.
Snapp teaches a 3-part workshop that seems similar to what I’d eventually like to teach: Reinventing Your Leadership: Using Brain Business and Mind Matters to Author Your Future.