From Victim to Leader

I was attending a legal tech conference last week, as part of my day job, and I was listening to a presentation about professional leadership and something the speaker said really struck me as applicable to survivors.

She talked about how the best leaders are capable of leading themselves first. Meaning, they have the ability to see themselves as the sum of their life experiences, and understand how those experiences color their outlook and can separate the fact from fiction in that outlook, thereby making sound leadership decisions.

As she described the process of being aware of your self, your strengths, your weaknesses, it really sounded a great deal like doing a bit of therapy. It also made me very aware of the fact that because I had gone through therapy, and years of learning about how my childhood effects my view of the world, I was way ahead of the game in this regard. Most people don’t take the time to truly learn about themselves. Survivors who are truly trying to overcome and become more than victims, have no choice but to go through this process.

Does that mean that survivors make better leaders? Not necessarily, but the healing process that we go through brings with it a lot of power and skills that many people don’t bother to excel at in their every day lives. Isn’t it nice to know that all of that struggle and work will have even more benefits than you planned on?