Why nasty feelings build better leaders

I was thinking leadership It was about knowing the answer. After all, some of my biggest leadership growth came from feeling completely from my depths.

My first major cross-cultural experience was 11 years old and traveled to India with my grandmother. I couldn’t prepare me for what I saw: Poverty that previously only existed on pages of National Geographicthe nonprofit leader who casually spoke about ancient ruins older than Western civilizations, and reaching thousands of lives, is not on a scale unimaginable for 200 town children. This experience didn’t make me feel wise Or brave. It made me feel small. It made me feel stupid.

That feeling, as I began to realize, was sacred.

Over the years, I followed that feeling. At the age of 13, I went to Ecuador and witnessed the aftermath of the landslide and the impact on the health of women and children. In my twenties, I traveled to Mongolia during the brutal winter when half of the national livestock died. At one point, a veteran missionary knocked on our door and said, “I’m done,” and left ten years later. The crisis hadn’t made the news yet, and I have seen people endure quietly the coldest winter of 30 years. Note Or rescue.

After that trip I didn’t want to travel anymore. The weight of what I saw made me sarcasm. But in the end I realized there were two options. It’s about forgetting what I saw or learning how to prevent such pain. That fork on the road led me to psychology.

What I understand now is that cross-cultural experiences do not just explore the world. They are leadership training.

They force us to abandon the illusion of control. They ask us to listen more than we can speak. And perhaps most importantly, they help us develop the very muscles that real influences require: humility.

Some leadership models, such as the 70-20-10 framework of the Creative Leadership Center, suggest that 70% of learning comes from challenging and hands-on experience. But what they don’t always say is that those experiences often make us feel stupid before we make us smarter. As a study by psychologist Carol Dweck Growth thinking Reminiscing us and embracing failure is often where real growth occurs (Dweck, 2006).

And it’s not just Resilience-That’s what Angela Duckworth calls Grit. It is the ability to endure set-offs, confusion, and discomfort while working on growth (Duckworth, 2016).

In a world where many people have volume, bravery, or power and influence, I have come to believe that the real impact, the kind of things that change people, build trust, and maintain movement, is built on humility. It is not a type of performance, but a type born from living disorientation. Be aware that your path is not the only way to step into a new country or culture and realize that you are not the smartest person in the room.

That realization will not reduce you. It will make you grow.

Today’s classrooms teach students from all over the world. There are also immigrants and immigrant children. For them, discomfort is not an option. Every day. I’ll try to respect that. I also challenge American-born students (and me) to intentionally seek such discomfort. Whether it’s travel, learning languages, or simply listening, we have to train ourselves to feel stupid again.

Because when we do that, we step into the growth cycle we build. Emotional intelligenceintercultural urgency, and authentic leadership (Foster, 2010).

My invitation is as follows: If it wasn’t ridiculous for a while, it might be time.

Leadership is not a comfortable experience. It was born humble. And humility begins with being willing to feel small on purpose.