Helping Leaders Own Who They Are

This is the first of three posts I will release over the next two weeks on my learnings and insights from the 3-day intensive personal development workshop “iDiscover“, created and run by Gal Stiglitz. I won’t give out many details on the content of the course as I would only recommend you discover it by yourself! Anyone who wants to accelerate their inner search for identity and purpose will find tremendous value in what Gal has to offer… And I certainly did, which is why I want to share with you a piece of my experience.

This first blog represents the first day of the course, which is about the VALUES we live by. For me it was about realising which values I live by, as opposed to the “ideal” values that I think or wish I live by. Let me explain. When prompted about values, most people regurgitate universally accepted “ideals” because they want to appear pure, selfless, and praiseworthy (eg. generosity, honesty, loyalty, compassion, etc…). But we often don’t live by them. We would like to, because we think it looks good. In itself this is great of course: they inspire many positive actions and we should surely keep it this way. But the REAL values that you ACTUALLY live by are those which transpire through your actions. They are obvious in your daily routine, in the activities you partake in, the time you spend on them, the money you invest in them. Because they are hiding in what you value most.

For instance, I book lots of live trainings in hypnotherapy, coaching, NLP and personal development because that is what I am interested in; I purchase a lot of books on these same topics as well. My personal expenses are massively skewed towards hypnosis principles and practicalities, self-development and psychological understanding and theories. Hopefully this shows you rather clearly where my priorities are.

So what are the things that you like to spend your money on? Where do you dedicate your time without thinking twice? How do you structure and fill your personal space? What would people say about you if they had to describe your interests? What do you read? For every question, what you are looking for is what is beneath your answer: what benefit does your answer bring you. You might be surprised about what you find…

Another discovery and extremely valuable process for me was to go back over the experiences and memories from my early years and analyse what I learnt and developed thanks to them. It was extremely insightful and I did not expect to find so many things in memories I had never revisited. I have never really gone back over my childhood and thought about what I really learnt back then (at a deep level). You are more than you think you are. You simply have never taken the time to look into your own story to extract the genuine value you can bring to the world. Schools don’t teach us to do this. And therefore we miss out on many assets and resources we have.

By the end of the first day, I already had a clearer view of who I am and what I am driven by. I started to see some deeper meaning to my actions and my interests. I hoped this new meaning would help me find purpose, but I did not yet know how the following days would unfold to do just that. As Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”