For our inaugural ETK experience, Brunch for Thought, hosted in Geneva this year, ETK Leadership Solutions chose the theme “Unearthing and Unleashing the Power of You” – a clarion call for the women attending the workshop to dig deep to uncover and unleash their unique strengths.
Unearthing and unleashing who we are is an ongoing process – a continuous commitment to our personal development. And to that end, during Brunch for Thought, we shared practices that provide direction on this lifelong journey to discover who we are and our unique capacities to impact our world.
As we begin the new year, The ETK team members will be sharing personal accounts of how they unearth their power through practicing:
- Self-awareness through self examination and self evaluation
- Living silently in certain seasons
- Living authentically
Team members will also share experiences of how they unleash their power by:
- Equipping themselves with knowledge, resources and experiences
- Maxmizing their potential by becoming dependable and accountable to themselves
- Practicing being bold
- Practicing gratitude
But first, in this introductory video Dr.Elly dives into what it means to unearth and unleash the power of who you are, and why your power matters in your leadership and personal development.
Here are the main takeaways :
Conversations about how we effectively lead who we are to transform the world, and how we unearth and unleash who we are, must engage with how society’s, systems and “isms”, (sexism, racism, classism) impact who we become.
The need to talk about unearthing and unleashing the power of who we are as individuals is embedded in society’s limited expectations about our capacity to lead as women, to be great, and in its discomfort and fear of the full emergence of who we are.
Instead of learning what it means to live who we really are from a very young age, we start performing, we get good at responding to messages from the world about who we are supposed to be as women. Before we can capture what we truly want for ourselves and become proactive and intentional about building it, we start making decisions based on society’s pressure and expectations.
We find ourselves reacting to external forces and ever mounting pressures; to finish school at a certain age, build a particular type of career, get married, make a certain amount of money, have kids -the right kind at the right time, send our kids to the best schools, keep our husbands happy, figure out what to do when we retire.
How do we silence these voices, these expectations? How do we set our own terms about the life that we want to live? How do we give ourselves permission to live these lives? What resources and tools do we need to build these lives? How do we build community and form networks that facilitate that growth?
This conversation exploring concrete personal development practices we can put in place to unearth and unleash the power of who we are, is an essential first step in finding answers to these question.
It is a conversation that is centred around understanding that our superpower is our authenticity; and owning the fact that the best gift that we can offer our community and the world is the gift of who we are.
Keep an eye on this space as we explore the Brunch for Thought Unearthing and Unleashing Practices through the lens of our team members’ personal development journeys.
