Change Yourself to Change the World

Change is pretty top of mind this week at theglasshammer.com as we prepare for our panel discussion tomorrow as part of our 5th Annual Navigating Your Career event ( no seats left, sorry!). The topic is “So, you want to be a change leader?” and we will chat with our panelists on how they have affected change when it comes to succeeding personally and improving things for people around them.

This is very close to my heart as I undertook a Change Leadership masters at Columbia University in the City of New York (I highly recommend this course to all executives, it is life changing. ) and a big part of the work we did there was using ourselves as tools of change by first understanding who we were, where are biases lie and looking at our appetite for challenging the status quo. That is what change work is! And you would be amazed at the levels of denial most people have around what constructs we all collude to keep in place.

So, start with you. Don’t say you want to have more diverse people in your team and then hire a man, don’t constantly look to men as the authorized experts on every topic and don’t discount yourself as the expert either. If you have got it, flaunt it as so many women I know are less aware than they should be off how equally or possibly more skilled they are than other counterparts yet are happy to defer to them.

Ultimately, it is about owning your influence to effect change!

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work