by Kelly L. Campbell, author of “Heal to Lead: Revolutionizing Leadership through Trauma Healing“
Emerging leaders can be drawn to entrepreneurship for reasons that are not entirely clear at first. You’re passionate and driven, motivated to create something powerful, build something meaningful, or subconsciously prove to ourselves and others that we’re inherently valuable.
If you’re anything like I was as a young CEO, you possess some level of self-awareness that your decisions and behaviors aren’t always in complete integrity. When you allow that thought into your conscious mind, however, you immediately distract yourself with anything else. This was how I existed for the first decade of my early career as a founder. I worked longer hours, made unhealthy food and beverage choices, made some poor financial decisions due to money trauma, and I didn’t maintain my friendships very well. Nearly everything I talked about, thought about, and did was in service to the company I founded and its success.
I didn’t actually know who I was without my title and team because I was outsourcing validation instead of trusting myself. It wasn’t until I started allowing myself to get curious about why I reacted the way I did, did I realize that I had to do the necessary work of healing my childhood trauma.
Founders who find themselves in positions of power for the first time, especially if they’re operating from a place of core wounding, can focus so narrowly on the business that they feel overwhelmed and can even burn out at an early age. They may not see how their wounded behavior impacts others on their team, which is felt even more deeply within a small startup. All of this can lead to significant distrust, resentment, and a lack of respect— and that makes its way to the bottom line, leading to fiscal instability.
Once your team starts to lose respect for you as a leader, there’s only one way forward. And that is to start working on you—by taking ownership for the ways in which your past trauma is influencing your present leadership style and leaning into the discomfort that will bring about personal evolution. If your team hasn’t lost respect for you, you can get ahead of a potentially inevitable trajectory by taking the following four-part guidance to heart.
“As leaders we have a responsibility to work on our own emotional maturity
in order to serve others from a place of integrity.”
From Heal to Lead, the four interconnected fundamentals of high-conscious leadership include:
1. Integrating Trauma.
So long as unintegrated trauma from childhood remains stored in your body, the little version of you will be running the show. Your company requires a wise adult at the helm. Beginning with introspection, it takes courage to challenge your own ego, to work on your emotional past, and to actively change the ways you show up as a leader. It requires pattern disruption to carve new neural pathways away from deeply engrained beliefs about who we are, based on the coping mechanisms we employed during youth to get our basic needs met.
2. Embodying Vulnerability.
It takes courage to lean into the discomfort of being true to yourself above all else, which requires a different kind of strength than the one we’ve all been taught to associate with leadership. A leader who learns how to embody the practice of being vulnerable forges trust and creates a supportive environment in which people can feel safe to bring their ideas, concerns, and feedback to the table. Think of the collaboration and innovation that becomes possible when these characteristics are foundational components of a company culture.
3. Leading with Compassion.
Studies show that most employees leave startups because of poor leadership and the culture that is created as a trickle-down thereof. Well-respected leaders are more than sympathetic or empathetic when people issues arise. Beyond feeling with those under our stewardship, compassion contains an action orientation that compels leaders to support all stakeholders in meaningful ways — feeling with and taking action that’s within our capacity. When your people know that you care about them beyond the bottom line, they respond with reciprocity in the form of loyalty, productivity, and conscious communication.
4. Lighting the Way.
We must cultivate an abiding trust with our primary partner — our self. After all, how can others trust us if we cannot trust ourselves? Once you become self-resourced, your ego and need for approval in workplace environments no longer gets in the way of your leadership. Lighting the way also requires letting go of antiquated methods of success measurement. When it comes to seeing the whole human in each of our employees, see the heart before the hard skills, not the other way around. When you hold space for healing, you create meaningful and honorable partnerships with your people. When you make the conscious choice to engage in relationship as a sacred path, you are revolutionizing healing for yourself, others, and the systems in which we operate.
As young leaders, if we want to feel fulfilled, a deeper sense of connection, and success on a soul level, it’s time to reclaim our relationships and rebuild broken ways of doing business. The path forward starts with awareness, courage, and compassion. By creating a nurturing environment, leaders empower those they lead to gain strength, share their gifts, and play a role in creating a better future for the organization and far beyond it. That’s respect on an entirely new level.
Kelly L. Campbell writes about trauma, leadership, and consciousness — “The New TLC” — on Substack, for Entrepreneur, and formerly for Forbes. They are a Trauma-Informed Leadership Coach, keynote speaker, and the author of “Heal to Lead: Revolutionizing Leadership through Trauma Healing“.
