Redefining Leadership: A Walkthrough with Ashley Barnes

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi everyone. My name is Wendy Manganero and I am the host of the Wellness and Wealth podcast. I'm so happy to have you find us and if you could take a moment and hit that subscribe button, I'd really appreciate it. This is the podcast where we believe when you show up better for yourself as a woman business owner, you show up better for your business. So sit back, relax and learn from the practical to the woo-woo how to best take care of you. Have a great day, stay blessed and leave a review when you're done listening to the show. Thanks so much. Hi everyone. Today our topic is leadership is an inside job. I have special guest, ashley Barnes. I'm going to read her bio and then we'll get right into it. Ashley is a recovering people pleaser and rule follower, multi-passionate, creative and liminal being of leveraging her experiences as a neurodiverse, corporate learning and development leader, ballistic coach, poetry author and Reiki master teacher. Ashley guides and inspires women to do their inner work that makes their lives better so they can positively impact the world around them. She does this through her writing, particularly poetry, and through her Reiki for leaders programs, where she both guides women through healing processes and teaches them how to use energy techniques to improve their own lives, work or businesses. Welcome, ashley. Thanks for coming onto the show. Hello, thanks for having me, so I'm excited. I love talking about leadership. I think when it comes to women in business, sometimes we don't talk about that enough. So I'd love to know from you what does leadership mean?

Speaker 2: 1:44

Yeah, so that's a heavy topic For me. Over time it's meant a lot of different things, but ultimately where I land with leadership is that we are all leaders in some way. I don't go by formal title. We all have opportunities to influence and impact the world around us, whether it's at work, whether it's in our businesses, whether it's the people we coach or manage or mentor, whether it's at church or at school. We all have opportunities every day to be a leader. I am really big, especially in the world we're in right now, on looking at leadership much more broadly, because I think it strikes fear in people, this idea of being in charge as opposed to having an impact and influence on the world around us.

Speaker 1: 2:30

Yeah, and I like that you said that, because I do think that when people think about being in charge, there's a certain amount of negative stress that goes with that ideology, as opposed to being able to impact people, because you come from a different place when you're impacting people than you do with the stress of being a leader. So I like the difference that you pointed out. And the other thing about leadership that you're talking about is influence. I'd love for you to talk about that more, because in today's age, there's online influence. So, although some people may not see that as leadership skills, but the ability to grow and to be able to be seen and put yourself out there actually is a leadership role too.

Speaker 2: 3:13

Yeah, absolutely, and I think so many of us have had negative experiences with leadership from an authority standpoint is why a lot of people are really shy away from this idea of I'm not a leader, I'm an influencer, or I'm a coach or fill in whatever title that you feel like is more accurate. But it's so important to know and I think one of the distinctions I guess I'd like to make is that we're often we're leaders by default, we're a parent, we're automatically a leader, but what really makes the distinction, I think, is the intentionality around what we're putting out there. We can all show up and we end up in some kind of leadership type position and we're just doing our thing and we add that piece of intentionality. And I think it's so important because we are interacting with other human beings, so there's always going to be some influence or impact and that might be negative if we're not being intentional and thoughtful about how we are showing up, which is where that inner workpiece comes in.

Speaker 1: 4:09

Yeah, absolutely, and I don't know about you get a little bit into your journey. But the first time that I was a quote unquote leader was intentional. I worked in retail and, for whatever reason, I got into management right away and I went from an assistant manager of a little boutique store to the assistant Assistant manager of a large gap store, a level store. The only reason why I tell this story is I had all those old connotations of leadership where I thought I was going to go in and reign supreme because I had no idea. When I was the assistant manager of the boutique, it was really just me, but they gave me this fancy title. But now I really had people to lead and what happened was, strangely enough, they all rebelled and nobody like working for me. There was not an intentionality. I wasn't looking at people of how I can make an impact to help things. I was trying to get them to do what I wanted in a way that was negative and actually the best experience I could have had, which was, at the time, mortifying. So I had a regional manager come in and sit me down and say not only are you not leading correctly, I want you to get to every employee apologize and ask them how you could be a better leader and what they need from you. And I tell you, looking back, as somebody young in their 20s, it was so humbling to do that, but it really changed the way I looked at being impactful, being myself and looking at what people could bring and how we could work together. But I never would have thought that mire to that very at the time. Embarrassing but yet humbling experience. But it was one of the best things that could have happened to me as I took other leadership roles going forward. So I'd love to know a little bit about your journey of becoming a leader. I don't know if you have any experience exactly like that, but that was an interesting time in my life where I was so thankful for that after the fact.

Speaker 2: 6:03

Yeah, I'm sure that's done, but what a wonderful leader you had that gave you that feedback. Instead of just assuming you should know how these things work. That they said specifically this is the kind of thing you need to do. This is how you need to make a I mean, brother to that person. Because I think, again, going back to some of our experiences with leadership, and why we have such an aversion to that top title, is that we've had bad experiences from leaders, leaders that don't give us that kind of feedback. And then there's that misconception about leader being boss, leader being the person on high that just hands down things. That people do it because you're the leader and perhaps in the past that is how the hierarchical structure worked. It doesn't work that way so much anymore. People don't want that interaction with their leader and I think leaders who tried to work that way tend to struggle. Now, from my perspective, or my journey at least, I became a leader with title in the corporate world, working training and talent development. So, interestingly, I train leaders and I train them on leadership development. I got an official title which made me feel like a leader, but I wasn't a leader simply because I just gained a title all of a sudden. Matter of fact, at that time I didn't even have director courts, I was a program manager, so I had to manage collaboratively because I did have people to dictate things too. So I had that experience early on. But I think what really cemented this whole well, one of the pieces at least I was the president of a board, a nonprofit board of directors, and when you are president of a nonprofit board you don't have actual power. You have all the responsibility when things go wrong, but it is incredibly collaborative because you have to take a vote on any decisions. You are not the sole decision maker, which I think a lot of times people think about Ligur and Oaget to be, like I said, in charge, and that's really not how these things work. But it's also those collective experiences and many others that really helped me to see that if we ignore the inner work piece of being just a human, leadership just doesn't happen. We might be able to go through the motions, we might have a title of leader, but unless we're doing our own work and, like your example shows, you're confronted with that work all the time as a leader, if you're recognized in any way as a leader, something is going to confront you about how you are showing up, and that is that inner work piece. That leadership is an inside job piece that I talk about.

Speaker 1: 8:38

Yeah, my son's writing his college essay as a piece, writing a little bit about it as non-traditional education, but more so that we raised him in a nonprofit. My husband and I ran one for eight years and being able to collaboratively grow something and serve those that you want, it really does make a huge difference, because you do some people go. Well, I'm the leader. It's only going to be my way. And that really does not work with that title. There's so many skills and I think the other side of that too and correct me if you think I'm wrong, but the show is so much about self-care and, as you're talking about that inner work, there are tough days when you are because you have that responsibility of I really don't have any control, but I have the responsibility if something goes wrong and to be able to learn from your mistakes and self-care from that, but yet also have that little, a little bit of a tougher skin to be able to stand up when you need to, as a leader too. But all of that takes a little bit of self-care because otherwise it could really throw you for a loop emotionally, mentally, in so many ways if you don't have that built up inside Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 9:47

Absolutely. Like I said, we are confronted with our wounds and our triggers at every turn. But once you are in some type of leadership role, recognized in that way man thinks just come out of the woodwork to question and really force you, if you're open and willing to do the work, to say OK. How do I respond to this? How do I make it so that a good situation is best we can for everybody? Or how do I make it better if I've messed it up, because we do that too.

Speaker 1: 10:15

Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. We all make mistakes, and I was reading something on perfectionism the other day how it's like this, a form of self-hatred, and that's the other thing I think, especially sometimes new leaders think they have to do everything right from the beginning and it's such a head game you can play with yourself because good chances are. That's not because I have to think that everything's going to be right 24-7. And so, yeah, that whole thing of like perfectionism can really play havoc when you're not sure what that leadership role really looks like without doing some inside work. So, for female entrepreneurs, what is the warning signs that they're not allowing themselves to be the leader they're meant to be?

Speaker 2: 10:56

Well, I think you pointed out something already when your experience, your team did not like you or they did not like how you were leading or they were pushing back. So that's always a big warning sign if you are trying to influence others and they are not responding. But I think what it all really comes back down to for me is knowing what our authentic self is and living that and when we get out of sync and out of alignment with who we really are. We're trying to, like you said, to do everything perfectly. We're trying to do everything right, we're trying to do all the right things, but if they're not authentic to who we are, it is really going to hinder our leadership ability. And I think along with that is the foundation of self-awareness, and it's not concrete. We can get a sense of self-awareness and cultivate that work, but it's an ongoing practice. As we grow, we learn more about ourselves, we learn more about the people around us, and new people create new opportunities to learn more about how we interact and how we flex, and so that constant work of self-awareness and being really authentic to who we are is so important in any relationship, especially in a leadership position. And I think those warning signs that we're not doing that are when we're starting to feel resentful, we're starting to feel overwhelmed. Things aren't going well, they feel out of alignment and maybe you can't quite put a finger on it or you're just generally feel like an imposter that's probably a big one, that imposter syndrome feeling or feeling like I'm faking it. And if you feel like you're faking it, there might be an aspect of you that is so exploring that a bit and saying what would be true and real for me and I could talk and show up a little more authentically, even if it means I have to apologize or say things or take a different direction or admit that I did something that isn't working and changing the direction that I go in in order to make this a better situation for everybody.

Speaker 1: 12:52

Yeah, I completely agree, and when you were talking, the thing that I was thinking about in the case of being leader- you're meant to be. I'm thinking of the times that I thought that I had to be like somebody else in leadership. That's another big one. And the other one and I don't know if you experienced this as a leader or somebody who actually had an agency for a long time I had the expectation that everybody else would act the way I did, and it's a hard one to. I don't know a few of the experience that we're like. Why would they act like that? Why are they? Because they don't have a thing to do with you sometimes. But really, that's another one. I think that's a little bit of a harder lesson because sometimes again, we go into leadership thinking, well, this is how I do business, but that does not mean that's how everybody does business.

Speaker 2: 13:36

No, it does not. And expectations are so hard on everybody because when we have these really firm expectations about how either we're supposed to show up or somebody else is, we are setting ourselves up for failure. Expectations around performance, maybe, about how we interact with each other, but those are ongoing conversations in questions and help me understand more about what's going on here. Something happened that I didn't expect, so let's talk about it, and maybe I'm missing something. There's so much richness there in the conversations and the relationships outside of those expectations that are often built on things like, as we said, old models and old ways of thinking about things.

Speaker 1: 14:18

Yeah, absolutely so. My last question for you is for those who are struggling to be the leader they can be what's the first step to becoming who they're meant to be in a leadership position?

Speaker 2: 14:32

Yeah, I think it's important at this point to really just toss out all the things you think you know about leadership and really start with yourself that self-awareness piece. What are your strengths? What areas do you struggle in? Where are you really good at? How can you leverage that? And how can you then take those areas that I don't even want to call them weaknesses. We're just that good of everything. But how can we take those things and complement them with other resources, other tools, other people? Maybe it even gives us insight into something we're trying so hard to be or do. That just isn't right for us. So that constant practice of self-awareness and one of the reasons why I came to this whole conclusion, like I said, is I've worked for 16 years in learning and development and what I see happens is we learn a skill around leadership and then we're expected to apply it. But the piece we missed in the middle is that deeper application and integration of what we just learned, the shift that happens that says, oh, I just learned how to be a better communicator, thank you. But what was stopping me in the first place from doing this, like really exploring that more deeply, that self-awareness healing piece right In the center there. Maybe I need to shift something, maybe I need to do something, maybe I've got some weird old trauma, maybe it's just some fear or something I was mistaught. But doing that work in the middle before we really jump into okay, now I'm a better communicator because I went to this course or I learned this tool. And repeating that process over and over and over again, learning doing the deeper work and then applying that and then taking stock of how did that go? Where do I need to continue to shift and grow, and wrapped all around, that is a whole lot of grace, a whole lot of grace for being a human being.

Speaker 1: 16:21

Absolutely. So. I love this conversation and I like that you talk about this as a process, because it is a process. I think sometimes, as leaders too, and as entrepreneurs, we think that we're going to get to a resting place of okay, when my business is here or when I can get these skills, then it'll all be okay. But really it's such an ebb and flow based on the mix sometimes. So I think that there is such importance of what you're talking about, that middle space, of going deeper, of what was stopping me. Why do I think this is the resting place and why do I not think that it could even be better than this Sometimes? I think that's where we stop ourselves, too, as we go. We just accept that this is where we are, as opposed to saying why can't this be better? This has been a pleasure having you on the show with me. I know that you have an offer for our audience. I'd love for you to share about what that is, and I will have the link in the show notes.

Speaker 2: 17:15

Yeah, absolutely so. As you mentioned in the bio, I am a Reiki master, and so I've incorporated some of the things that I have learned from doing that work, which is so completely different in many ways from leadership work, but there's so much you can learn from doing that deep inner work, and so I put together a little guide of 10 leadership lessons that I have learned from being a Reiki master and doing that energy work. It's not about doing Reiki and you don't have to do that, but it's talking about what we've been talking about today some of the ways you can apply and think about leadership from a different perspective and 10 simple lessons. So that's a free guide that you can pick up. That's the link that you're going to share.

Speaker 1: 17:57

Thank you so much for being here today, Ashley.

Speaker 2: 17:59

I really appreciate your time?

Speaker 1: 18:01

Yeah, it was great to be with you. If you love what you heard today, please subscribe for more self-care tips as we go forward, and if you love what Ashley shared, please leave a review. In the meantime, have a blessed and abundant weekend. We'll catch you on the flip side.