It seems to me that the bulk of what passes for leadership development currently is actually training to improve your ability to be someone else. By that I mean training to fit yourself into what the world seems to want. The issue isn’t confined to just leadership training. Reading resumes has become almost worthless because counselors have taught most people to write them in a way that claims credit for all sorts of spectacular results and uses lots of key words that show up in headhunter searches. Author, speaker and workshop leader David Whyte offers the following perspective: “…human beings have never had the luxury of choosing between an untouched and interior foundational self and the necessities and often overwhelming revelations of the outer world.”

Since effective leadership is so dependent on trust, how will you get people to trust you if you don’t put all or at least most all of your cards on the table? How much of what you call “yourself” are you willing to make available to others? Easily said and not so easily done.

What if you committed yourself to be all you can be? To be fully self-expressed and let the world choose how much it wants of you? Does that question scare you to death? Does it bring up “what if nobody wants what I have to offer when I am just me?”

I have recently been reminded of two situations where a firm was willing to hear what a young person said they were interested in, wanted to work on, and thought would be valuable for the firm. While no one understood it at the time, both firms were really on to something. In fact, one of these two people is now President of his very successful firm. One of the keys to their current success is what he has brought to the firm’s strategy as he did what he loved, the way he loved to do it. I suspect we will see much more of this evolutionary process over the next couple of decades as the millennials assume leadership.

If you are willing to get to work on integrating “your interior foundational self” and the “outer world” start sharing things that you may have been unwilling to share before, especially about your fears and concerns, your dreams and aspirations, and things you love in life. We have been doing this in one of my Vistage groups using collages to spark the inner self and then sharing what the collage means to us as a way to facilitate putting language to expressing the inner self.

The more you share and find that you don’t “get your vote cancelled,” the more your confidence will build. Further, you will start attracting the kind of people who appreciate who you really are and shedding those entanglements in your life that aren’t for the real you.

I personally aspire to Janice Joplijn’s line “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” For me that means if I have nothing to hide, I’m totally free…a delightful place to be!