A little bit about me
The journey to great leadership is the journey into the self.
‘What do you love?’ Someone asked me that question for the first time on a leadership course 12 years ago in Italy.
It left me perplexed. I’d never been asked that before.
Plus, my life to that point always had an undercurrent of self-criticism. Nothing I ever did was good enough and I always had unrealistically high standards of myself. I was working in a finance doing credit risk and it just didn’t feel right. I’d fallen into this career because I had a strong analytical brain and that’s what everyone told me to do.
I had a negative view of myself and at the core of this was an underlying unhappiness and dissatisfaction of where my career had taken me so far.
With that one question, I saw this clearly for the first time. Because someone had given me the space and guidance to see my true self more clearly.
Embracing my whole self
And so begun my journey of my really understanding who I was, what I cared about and what I wanted to do with my life.
I realised that embracing yourself, absolutely every part of it, the bits you don’t like, do like, the bits you don’t even know about is the foundation to get you through whatever hurdles you’re facing.
I saw that to be able to truly lead, to be present, to be able inspire others, you first must have leadership of your own self.
Who am I, truly?
I started to get to know myself better, my strengths and the areas that needed some development. And that’s when I began to understand what leadership was really about.
I started to reflect on my experience of leadership throughout my career and my personal life and it saddened and frustrated me that for good chunks of it I hadn’t felt inspired, supported or listened to.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve got to own some of that myself and the role I played in that. Not speaking up when I could have done or wanting to do things my way as examples. That’s why internal leadership has got to be the first place to begin.
I became passionate about what I felt true leadership should be and wanted to start affecting real change. Outside of work I started volunteering for an educational leadership charity as a coach and went on to be to a course director in a number of a European countries.
I loved this work, and was fortunate to get to work with people from so many countries and help support them on their leadership journeys.
Discovering my strengths
In all of this I discovered that I was a very intuitive and empathetic person.
I had started to trust my instincts and was no longer afraid to express my opinions. And I was able to provide space for others to do the same.
This didn’t happen overnight. I can’t tell you when exactly it happened, but that’s the beauty of change and having the resolve to do it.
What I can tell you is that I’ve done a lot of work on myself. And that journey never stops. As human beings I believe we must constant evolve and adapt.
And at the heart of this is always being curious in every aspect of our lives.
Embracing my intuition.
That’s when I knew and felt that my life’s calling had come to me.
I want to take a small stop at this point to highlight one enormous learning for me.
I had previously solely operated from my mind when it came to any decisions that I made or how interpreted any reactions I had.
I made a discovery. I had a heart and a body. Now I know that this might seem a silly thing to say. I mean its obvious right?
What isn’t so obvious is how powerful they can both be and what an immense source of wisdom they are. You can call it what you like - intuition, instinct, gut feeling.
Learning to be aware of it again and trust it was immense for me and it’s at the heart of my coaching practice.
To be a great leader you do not need to know everything. But you DO need to be confident in the experience and skills that you do have.
At the core of that is trusting your instincts.
Finding the right coach
The next step for me was clear. I had lots of coaching experience but I wanted to complement that with some more formal training and some more coaching for myself. I was quite particular about this because there is A LOT of coaching training out there.
I needed support and guidance on going deeper than the surface coaching issue.
Why? I knew from my own experience that it is never as simple as just looking at what’s on the surface. It’s like treating a wound but ignoring the underlying cause.
Our lives are always a culmination of everything that has happened up to that point and that cannot be ignored. From my research and experience I feel a lot of coaches and coaching training out there neglects this.
I was lucky enough to find the course that taught exactly what I wanted, and boy oh boy what an experience it was.
I’d never felt so exposed in my life with the depths that it took me but by the end of it I’d taken another big step in my own leadership journey.
Right now
So here I am now. A certified integral coach getting to work with a variety of people from careers ranging from education, finance, consulting and marketing on their personal leadership journeys.
I’ve also been a coach and course directed a number of transformational leadership programs throughout Europe working with over 400 people, supporting them on the next steps of their personal leadership
I passionately believe that real change happens when my clients don’t just focus on one barrier in front of them, but when they look more deeply into what’s going on in their wider lives. I’ve found the struggles they face are often built up from experiences and decisions made over time.
This ethos is at the heart of my coaching practice. And it is this that has led to my clients having transformational breakthroughs and creating real lasting change in their lives.
If you’d like to know more then get in touch me at:
john.ansell@gmail.com