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What does your leadership canvas look like so far? Is it full of powerful images or is it quite sparsely populated so far? Is it mainly positivity and light, or is there some negativity and darkness that is in urgent need of being surrounded by something more hopeful?

We’re going to add some broad brush strokes to your canvas in the form of a series of related questions. What I’d like you to do is consider these questions carefully, and write out your answers (physically, in a notebook, if possible).

The most critical answers you uncover are going to find their way onto your leadership canvas and help you turn your masterpiece into something you can proudly hang in your mind palace.

• What kind of leader do you want to be?
• What kind of leader would your team describe you as being?
• What kind of leader might you have been falsely assuming you should be?
• How do you feel about the idea of someone referring to you as a leader?
• Is your work personality the same as your “at home” personality and, if not, why not?

Your leadership philosophy

When our family engages in our dinnertime ritual of going around the table and identifying something that we’re grateful for, occasionally someone will struggle because, frankly, they’ve had a crappy day. It happens to all of us from time to time, and when it does it can be very difficult to find something meaningful to contribute. Present pain can blind us to the joys and blessings that still exist. When that happens, that person is given a free pass—not to say nothing, but to simply affirm that they’re grateful to be sitting at a table with food on their plate, surrounded by people who love them. In truth, even then, that person might not be feeling gratitude in the moment. But it keeps the routine going and strengthens that gratitude muscle that helps us avoid falling into negative patterns of thinking.

You can take the same approach with our leadership canvas and the personalized model that we’re putting together. Your method is unique to you and, as you apply the brush strokes of your leadership philosophy to your canvas, you can learn to connect your strengths and abilities with your values and priorities.

This must be a very deliberate act. The answers to the questions in the previous section that you’re writing down and the other observations that you make about yourself create a unique image that will help you visualize the kind of leader you were always destined to become.

And there will be times when the picture becomes hazy. When you’ve had an uncomfortable conflict or you’ve made some bad decisions or received some negative feedback, it can be difficult to maintain confidence in your methods. But in the same way that even a bad day can contain reasons for gratitude, so, too, shortcomings in your leadership abilities can reveal hidden strengths and resilience.

In those moments, recall those occasions in your career—and even earlier—when you demonstrated elements of your leadership abilities or witnessed the positive effects of your actions.

• Someone specifically asked to be on my team because they wanted to work with me.
• A project I helmed was a rousing success and helped a number of other participants move up in their careers.
• I mentored a junior executive who is now in a senior leadership position at a Fortune 500 company.
• I led my college basketball team to a state championship final.
• was one of the founding members of an amateur orchestra and I was instrumental in keeping the group together, playing every Friday night, for five years.

You will find it helpful to write these down, so you can easily refer back to them whenever you need, especially on occasions when you find your confidence wavering and you’re finding it hard to keep the faith.

These memories are fixed points in your life that are the key images in your leadership canvas. They’ll help you through tough moments. But, even more importantly, they will spur you on to be the leader you need to be.

And don’t wait.

You can be a leader wherever you are, in any job position, with any personality type, and with any management style. But it won’t happen unless you make it happen. Have confidence in yourself, in who you are, and in the unique combination of abilities and values that you bring to the table. It’s your individuality that makes your voice valuable and worth sharing.

Sometimes people are afraid to speak because they think that if what they had to say was worthwhile, someone else would already have said it. This is flatly untrue. It’s impossible for someone else to speak up and express something that comes out of our own unique point of view. So, when you censor yourself, you’re not only placing unreasonable limits on yourself, you’re also robbing everybody around you of your valuable contribution.

Your true value is in who you are. The real you. The authentic you. The voice that is yours and yours alone. Once you understand that, you can go do great things.

This excerpt from Brilliant Leadership: Patterns for Creating High-Impact Teams, by Suzanne Martin is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

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