Personal and professional experiences, training, feedback, coaching and mentoring continuously shape the leader you are and will be. Being passionate about Leadership and Neuroscience, I am aware of what it takes to become a positive leader. I have created Lead3 to grow self-aware, resilient leaders who lead with competency, agility and heart, and inspire high-performing teams.
In today’s world, there’s no such thing as top down management. Instead, self-aware resilient leaders who can unleash the full potential of teams and organisations are the new norm. I believe effective leadership is first defined by a good understanding of one’s inner self. As written by Chris Lowney in his book Heroic Leadership « If you want your team to perform heroically, be a Hero yourself ».
Self-aware leaders, who are conscious about their values, purpose, mental models and emotional reactions have a greater capacity to manage themselves and as such to be intentional about their impact on others. They have an increased capacity to unleash the full potential of people and teams, and ultimately to increase organisational performance and to navigate change.
Throughout my path, I have learnt to become a self-aware leader, connected to my mind, heart and intuition while having a clear purpose.
Developing to a self-aware leader
All through my international career, I have realised that a good leader has a clear purpose and has to combine a wide set of interpersonal skills, e.g. emotional intelligence, effective communication and collaborative skills, while caring about people and having a great capacity to be resilient.
Working with both good and bad managers was a great source of inspiration. By and large, three milestones marked my journey to self-leadership namely international exposure, burnout, and coaching.
Working (and living) in seven different countries in three different continents has given me new perspectives, redefined my values and principles, and most importantly helped me to make conscious decisions about the future drivers in my life. Malaysia and Chile were amongst the most enriching experiences. As a freshly graduated European woman I had to face a very different value system in Malaysia, which challenged my beliefs. At this stage, I realised the values and principles I was taught all my life were not universally shared and not always serving me. Like a fish out of water, I explored new attitudes, including slowing down, letting go, prioritising human interactions at work and respect for diversity.
My South-American experience took me to another level of self-awareness and leadership development. After more than two years as a consultant in an international consulting firm, I served as a marketing coordinator in an international company and moved to Chile. Besides a challenging and exciting work, I was collaborating with great leaders - and role models - in the different countries of this region. These leaders had common traits: a clear vision, humility and humor, and a collaborative mindset. In addition, they were trusting me, valuing my work and respecting me as a person. Meanwhile, I started to experiment the impact of the body on the mind and how dancing salsa was able to shift my mindset and emotions. This, combined to the positive relationships at work exponentially boosted my motivation and productivity.
These two international experiences deeply defined my current value system, including respect, curiosity, open mindset, as well as collaboration, and were the starting point of my quest to balance body and mind.
Moving back to Europe, I became a project manager for an international group. At that point, I experimented the impact of toxic management. My resilience, both emotional and mental, were constantly under pressure. Crashing down was just a matter of time before burning out at last. This burnout, although painful and challenging, was a gift: a forced invitation to stop and look inward. I realised my professional career was miles away from my initial dream to become a doctor and healing people. Over the years, I disconnected from some of my key values. From this experience, I understood that leaders have a responsibility and huge impact on people’s life.
I was determined to reconnect with my purpose, to develop my resilience at all levels, i.e. physical, emotional, mental and spiritual, while expressing my values and strengths, i.e. being curious, outgoing, collaborative, creative and thoughtful .
Focusing on leadership, resilience and team performance
My journey to self-aware leadership and living my purpose meant taking decisive actions.
As such, I worked hand in hand with a coach to explore my mental models and saboteurs, to uncover conflicting values, further clarify my purpose and identify my deep drivers. I re-introduced a body-mind balance into my life and activities enabling to express my values. Then, painting and photography helped me to boost my creativity while sports, dancing and massage allowed me to reconnect with my body. Mindfulness and journaling became part of my morning rituals for regular check-ins with myself.
My certifications in Coaching and NeuroCognitivism gave me deep insights on what drives individual and collective behaviours and performance. My following training programmes in NLP, systemics, Team Diagnostics & Coaching, NeuroLeadership and Co-Active Leadership further widened my horizon. I became passionate about the human brain and curious about how to use this amazing resource to increase performance. I looked into habits and rituals of highly performing people and worked on adopting these in my daily life.
I believe growth is a journey, and I continuously explore and experiment techniques elevating our capacity to connect to our three forms of intelligence: mind, heart and guts.
With this approach in mind, I joined the L&D department of an audit and advisory firm. Collaboration, trust, constructive conversations, transformation and growth would then become the cornerstone of my approach as a leader. My ambition was to build a team of learning consultants, expert in Neurolearning and in the latest L&D trends to grow our people in a sustainable way.
We grow leaders and build high performing teams
I firmly believe that your leaders and teams define the success of your organisation.
Today’s world is calling for a new kind of leadership, which includes new levels of self-awareness. Combining the three leadership brains that are mind (brain intelligence), heart (emotions) and guts (intuition) is a pre-requisite. Only leaders who can navigate change and unleash the power of their teams to support an organization in unfolding its strategy will thrive.
Driven by my desire to support Leadership in organisations, I created Lead3, composed of a team of seasoned Leadership and Coaching experts, to co-create advanced solutions for organisations. Together, we support companies in growing their leaders and in building high performing teams. Our ambition is to integrate the latest insights of neuroscience and adult learning in our programmes, while building interactive experiences with lasting impact.
Find out more about Lead3.
Find out more about our team.