Is it Normal That My Break Up Made Me a Great Leader?

We all know that truly great leaders aren’t born – they’re made. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself what it was that made that person a great leader? What event was it in their life that changed their outlook, their attitude, and gave them the drive to become an amazing leader? There are probably a dozen answers to that question, but today I have one that you might not have thought of before, and that’s a breakup.

For this blog I was actually contacted directly by Devika. She emailed me about her research, wanting to know if I’d be interested in discussing it on the podcast. And of course I was so excited to know more! So today, we’re going to take a look at what it takes to be a great leader, and why a breakup could be the catalyst for leadership in certain people.

(And just to clarify, I’m not suggesting you go and break up your happy relationship just to see if it makes you a better leader!)

What we’ll cover:

• Devika’s story

• Self-trust

• Self-trust in Leadership

• Break ups as a catalyst for growth

• How to grow your leadership skills after a break up

Prefer to listen? Head to the podcast here.

Meet Devika:

Devika is Love & Leadership Coach who helps females in business and leadership use their breakups as a radical patheway to embody leadership from a place of worth and grounded confidence.

Linkedin: Devika Dey

Website: www.devikadey.com

Devika’s Story

Before we dive into why Devika thinks breakups could be the making of some people, I want to share her journey with you. Because this emotional rollercoaster is where it all started for her.

‘I had an arranged marriage, so I didn’t really know my ex-husband at all before I married him. It all started out pretty ordinary, but it ended up in a very toxic place. And towards the end I was dealing with my own lack of worth, and feeling quite ashamed of myself. Shame was something I felt a lot during that time of my life, even when I left. It was all feelings of shame and lack of worth.

“Shame was something I felt a lot during that time.”

But I was in a situation where I was getting bullied every day, suffering emotional abuse and horrific levels of gaslighting. To the point that I wasn’t actually able to say no, this is enough, and leave. He had to be the one to set me free. So that even after my marriage ended, there was a lot of shame, unworthiness, and that became my whole existence.

But I had been blessed with an amazing family and amazing friends. Even though I had been kept isolated from them most of my marriage, they saw that I needed help and support, and they threw themselves behind me. And from then, I started to heal.

I went to counselling sessions first and started to unpack everything that had happened. It was amazing how much I unpacked, and essentially after that I was just hooked on this healing juice. I got a yoga and meditation certification, I talked to crystal healers, shamans, psychics, coaches. Everything I could do to propel me on this inner adventure I’d started without really meaning to. It was a beautiful journey of self-discovery, and finding out who I was and getting to know myself after 35 years.

“I just had so little trust in myself to do the job.”

It also made me look at the narratives I’d been carrying around my whole life, and what they’d been doing. Things like imposter syndrome. I used to work in business banking and wealth management, and when opportunities to progress into new roles or projects with more visibility and leadership potential came up, I always tapped out. I just had so little trust in myself to do the job. And I always wanted to work for someone else, because who was I to own a business? So all of this stuff came up for me off the back of this break up, and it made me really examine why I was carrying all of those crappy narratives in my head, heart and body.’

Honestly, even after typing that I need to take a little breather. Devika’s story was such an emotional journey, with deep lows and huge highs. There are so many places we could start the conversation from there, but I opted for the issue of self-trust.

Self-Trust

One of the things Devika mentioned that I found interesting is that self-trust isn’t a thing that just exists as you are now. It actually goes all the way back to childhood – to our cultural and social conditioning. When you’re very young, it’s almost seen as dangerous to have faith in yourself and actually put yourself forward in the world. Because what if you failed? Parents are so keen to protect their children from any negative feeling that they actually strip away their sense of self-trust. Don’t go too high, you could fall. Don’t go too high, because maybe you’re not that exceptional, and you might find that out. But self-trust and self-awareness are built on failure, and with that social conditioning we don’t necessarily get that experience and confidence – instead we get a feeling of self-consciousness.

“Don’t go too high... you might fall.”

But when you’re an adult struggling with self-trust, not aiming so high can be a good thing.

Devika mentioned that it certainly helped her in her journey towards healing, as it meant she kept giving herself just short goals, which were less overwhelming to try and hit.

Eventually, she realised she could do it, and maybe she could do anything. It’s a pretty classic technique for fitness trainers actually. When a client comes in expecting to go from couch potato to weightlifter right away, they set smaller, more achievable goals as stepping stones to success, so they aren’t discouraged by not hitting the big goal right away.

The Link Between Self-Trust and Leadership

What does that have to do with breakups and leadership? I’ll let Devika tell you.

‘All of this played out with my ex-boyfriends, and definitely with my ex-husband. Because if I’m 100% frank, I didn’t want to marry him. I didn’t. But I just did it, because I was thinking, well that’s it, you’re an old fart now at 30 years old, and you don’t want to be buried alone and left as a spinster on a shelf. I married him because he existed, because we had a conversation and because ultimately I didn’t believe I could get anything better. I didn’t believe that I could get what I actually wanted out of a relationship. So I settled for what was there in my relationships, just like I did in my career.’

“I settled for what was there in my relationships, just like I did in my career.”

I have to say, the idea of not trusting yourself and so not taking the steps you need to succeed is very familiar to me. For most of my life the narrative has been that I’m not assertive enough. And so I bought a book called ‘how to be more assertive’ around 5 years ago, but I never read it.

And I realised while talking with Devika, that the reason I didn’t read it was because I didn’t trust myself. Early on in my career I didn’t speak up in meetings or put my input into a project because I always assumed I was the least important voice in the room.

I just didn’t trust that I knew what was right, or that I should have an opinion. And you can’t read a book about being assertive if you don’t trust yourself, so it got left on the shelf. Self-trust is important at work and in relationships – after all, you can’t assert a boundary or communicate clearly if you don’t trust yourself and believe in yourself.

As Devika puts it, the more you learn to trust yourself (both in a relationship and in general), the more assertive you can become as a leader. One of the most commonly recommended speakers and authors on the topic of leadership is Simon Sinek, who talks a lot about building the circle of trust in leadership. But you can’t build that circle of trust if you don’t trust yourself – it’s like building a house on half-finished foundations. It’s going to be shaky, unstable, and ultimately not succeed in it’s goal.

“You can’t build a trusting environment as a leader, if you don’t trust yourself.”

Breakups as a Catalyst for Growth

From speaking to Devika, it seems as though breakups and divorce can become a catalyst for an intense period of growth. You go from being in a unit to being an individual, and it sparks the need for self-awareness and self-growth in order to move forward and become successful as a unit of 1 again.

For Devika, that meant realising that she had been a people pleaser within her marriage, and realising that she didn’t have to be that way in order to get the things she had always wanted, but never felt like she deserved. That served as her catalyst for becoming more assertive in her life, which is one of the qualities you need to be a great leader.

‘When anyone goes through a breakup, what they’re immediately faced with is shame, lack of belonging, unworthiness, lack of trust. A breakup annihilates all of those things. As humans we have a need for belonging, for trust and for self-worth. And those are the exact skills you need to be able to step into the role of the legendary leader.

I recently read a book called Grit by Angela Duckworth, and she made some interesting points about this. She looks at how leaders cultivate trust, belonging and self-worth in their leadership – because you need those things to have a high sense of self-worth in the first place. And it’s not just about trusting yourself, but about trusting others, being willing to trust others to delegate. Great leaders don’t take on every job themselves – they give it to someone else to do, and they can do that really well.

And in terms of belonging, this actually builds on the whole Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs thing, with the need for self actualisation. This hierarchy was all about belonging from a very social angle, and we need to take that on board and own that in our personal and professional lives.

All of this is exactly what we’re faced with during a breakup, and it’s a great opportunity to analyse, examine it and pivot to something more positive. But most people don’t, because a breakup hits us where it hurts, sometimes to the point that we feel like we’re about to destroy ourselves. This is something I’d noticed about the women I work with, is that the traditional ways of coping with a breakup are to keep yourself bust, knock yourself out, binge watch Netflix, go shopping, go partying, get blind drunk – just trying to numb yourself to the experience.

I did the same thing after my divorce, but I realise now that because I was trying to avoid feeling what was going on inside me, the healing never really happened. But it’s in the healing, the examining, analysing and action, that the true healing happens. It’s always in the healing that you can cultivate these things in a much more sustainable and healthy way to then apply it to leadership as well. So that’s where breakups are powerful, at least from my experience and my research into it, because it goes right to the root of the crap we carry.’

Looking back on past breakups, I absolutely agree! They have a way of pushing us to exercise our resilience and our courage, and presenting us with the tools we need to not only move through the breakup, but evolve into a better, stronger version of ourselves as well. Breakups give us all sorts of skills we never even think of that are essential for leadership – like:

·        Having difficult conversations

·        Processing emotions

·        Letting go of toxic positivity

·        Dealing with conflict

·        Speaking the truth with confidence, and trusting yourself to do that

For Devika, her divorce was the catalyst for her to move away from the industry she was in, realising it wasn’t a good fit and actively moving into a new field that she had never been in before. For both of us, breakups gave us the self-worth and the confidence to believe in ourselves and start our own businesses – something we had never done before because we didn’t believe we could. Like many of the women Devika supports through breakups, we became comfortable with our voices and using them in a more powerful way.

I asked Devika if she had any parting advice, maybe for those who were going through a breakup, and how they could use that experience to build their leadership skills.

‘It’s going to be hard, but you need to look straight up. If you need things to distract you for a little bit, that’s totally OK, normal and healthy. I had lots of distractions, and I needed them for a time, they made me feel good. But when you decide you’re ready to do this journey, grab your paintbrushes and your pastel crayons and start mapping out your processes in words and pictures. From there, get yourself some nervous system nourishment – yoga, meditation, something like that. It will help you feel love and compassion for yourself, and for others. Offer yourself love, compassion and forgiveness (that last one is hard). And remember, it’s shit going through all of that. But manure is also shit, and beautiful things grow from it every day.

Well, that was certainly an eye-opening conversation! Breakups don’t have to be some big sad thing you just move on from. If you really look at them in a proactive way, you can use them to transform yourself, evolve into a better version and a better leader. It’s an opportunity for growth into a fabulous, wonderful leader. As always, if you want to know more, you can find Devika here, or you can get in touch with me to talk everything relationships. Until next time, take care of yourselves.

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