I’m still feeling inspired from our 2024 LEAD graduation celebration this week. It was a beautiful moment to reflect on the amazing work these women have done and to celebrate the leaders they’ve become.
After working on storytelling in Summit #3, we had the incredible honour of hearing five women share their leadership origin stories. They were brave, resilient, vulnerable, and eloquent. I was blown away.
Each story had a pivotal moment that shaped how these women show up as leaders and as humans. Many of these moments stemmed from hardship, which reminded me of a podcast I recently listened to—Diary of a CEO with Trevor Noah.
At the end of the episode, Trevor introduces the concept of an "eraser" test versus a "pen" test. He asks: if you had an eraser button, would you erase the terrible things that happened to you?
His answer: "HELL YA!"
But he also suggests another option—the pen test. This test offers the button to decide how you write the story that follows those difficult moments.
As a leadership coach, this idea really resonated with me. This is why we work on origin leadership stories. When hard things happen, we don’t need to celebrate them or see them as defining parts of ourselves, but we do need to process them. Although hardships don’t define us, we
must strive to heal and survive them. Oftentimes, they form us and make us stronger.
While I believe in writing your own story, it’s also important to remember you don’t have to be grateful for everything that’s happened to you. It’s okay to wish for that eraser and still stand tall and share your powerful story.
To all those strong women of LEAD who have wielded their pen, you should be incredibly proud.
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