1: Could Magnetic Authenticity be Your Hidden Superpower?

Is authenticity the key to unlocking your full potential at work? Join us as we explore the transformative power of being true to yourself in both personal fulfillment and leadership. We'll share eye-opening insights from the Be Yourself at Work global survey, revealing that only 24% of people truly know themselves and a mere 16% feel they can bring their real selves to work. Through a reflective moment on a draining train ride home, we'll contrast the soul-crushing monotony of a disengaged workplace with the vibrant energy of a team that embraces authenticity. Discover how workplace culture directly impacts individual well-being and global potential, and learn why creating environments where people can be their true selves is not just a luxury but a necessity.

Ready to navigate the complexities of a VUCA world with Magnetic Authenticity? We'll dive into the challenges of traditional leadership systems and why they often fail, backed by the startling statistic that 70% of change initiatives don't succeed. Hear about the alarming rates of stress and burnout among leaders and the importance of self-awareness and genuine connection in building trust and credibility. Through personal anecdotes and research, we’ll guide you on a journey to discover your authentic leadership potential, identify your strengths and shadow strengths, and inspire others from any position—not just by title. Tune in to learn 3 ways to unlock your Magnetic Authenticity to drive meaningful connections and positive change in your professional and personal life.

References
Empowering Authenticity at Work: Key stats | #BeYourSelfAtWork. (n.d.). https://www.beyourselfatwork.com/byaw-stats-facts

Nohria, N. (2015, July 13). Cracking the code of change. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2000/05/cracking-the-code-of-change#:~:text=The%20brutal%20fact%20is%20that,an%20alphabet%20soup%20of%20initiatives.

Sutton, A. (2020). Living the good life: A meta-analysis of authenticity, well-being and engagement. Personality and Individual Differences, 153, 109645. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109645

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I am a Confidence and Success Coach for leaders, Organisational Development Consultant and independent Leadership Circle Profile® Certified Practitioner. Information shared about this tool is courtesy of Leadership Circle®, all rights reserved. www.leadershipcircle.com

Chapters

• 0:00 What is Magnetic Authenticity?
• 5:37 Magnetic Authenticity in the VUCA environment
• 13:38 3 ways to tap into your Magnetic Authenticity

Transcript

Jolynne Rydz: 0:35

Only 24% of people know who they truly are and 16% of people feel they can bring their real self to work. This was a statistic that I stumbled upon, done by the Be Yourself at Work global survey. I found this fascinating because you think it would be simple right, just be yourself. But it's not. Have a think. Do you know who you are? Can you answer off the top of your head what your strengths are, what your values are, what you stand for in this world, what's your purpose and how do you make your biggest impact? For a lot of us, we don't know this, and it's a journey to get there. I'd love for you to reflect on a time where you've met someone where you just are drawn to them. You just want to be in their presence and do whatever it is they're doing, because you want to be a part of it. They know what their strengths are. They are so present in the cause, they know the purpose and they know how to engage others on the journey, and to me, that's an incredibly powerful superpower in leadership and beyond. In today's episode, I want to talk about magnetic authenticity and why that just could be your superpower.

Jolynne Rydz: 1:59

About 20 years ago, I remember walking onto a packed suburban train on my way home from work. I was in uncomfortable high-heeled shoes in a suit when my usual get up at home is tracksuit pants and something comfortable and I was looking around at everyone on the train and there was just this soul-sucking draining energy. People were exhausted, people were zoned out, no one talked to each other and I just felt this was so demoralizing To me. It was really clear from a lot of people not everyone, but a lot of people sitting in that carriage that they were stuck in jobs on their way home, just like me, from a job that they didn't feel was meaningful, where they couldn't use all of their talents, and to me that's a global waste of human potential. It's not just an individual issue If you multiply that by all the people commuting home on a train, just going oh I'm glad that day's done and doing what they can because they need to, and everyone needs a job to do what they need to do as a family or for their own personal lives. But is that really it? And I think part of the problem is that when you go to work, often in a lot of workplaces, you do need to maybe put on a uniform, or you put on a suit or you leave your emotions at the door because you're not allowed to cry at work. You've got to be professional. Maybe you can't be overly personable, maybe you've got to take certain jewelry off. Maybe it's not okay for you to be out in that environment.

Jolynne Rydz: 3:42

There's all sorts of masks that we sometimes need to put on when we enter a workplace, and I'd love for you to reflect on which environment would you rather be in. I remember one organization, the organization I was actually coming home from on this train trip. That the organization I was actually coming home from on this train trip, was one where I'd get into work and at the time there were layoffs going on constantly and you would walk in there and people would just not talk to each other. They would just sit at their desk, do their job, get up and go have a coffee or get lunch, come back, sit down again, keep typing away at their desks. Now, would you prefer that, or would you prefer to be in this environment where your team comes in? They're high-fiving each other, they're talking about how amazing things were for them on the weekend and, you know, in a team meeting, they're laughing uncontrollably about something that's happened and then getting straight back into what they need to do, energized and loving being there and being around people. I think that's incredibly powerful and also incredibly underrated, and from my past, I've spent the last decade working in different environments and organizations, looking at corporate culture, looking at how we develop our leaders, how we develop individuals, and I'm seeing you know the statistics are also showing that engagement's dropping across the globe and people are feeling like there's a lack of meaning sometimes in their work, and when I talk to people, so often I come across people telling me horrific stories about how they're treated at work and how that makes them feel, and then the impact that has when they take that home. These toxic environments are more common than they should be, and we're also.

Jolynne Rydz: 5:38

The issue, I think, is we're working in this VUCA environment, so if you're not familiar with the term, vuca, it stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and it's increasing. What this means is that some of the ways that our systems as organisations have been set up, some of the ways that we've been trained to work and rewarded for in the workplace, are not working anymore in this environment, and it's why there's this crazy statistic. I'm going to pull a statistic off the top of my head, which I know I shouldn't, so take this with a grain of salt and go research it. But the statistic is something like 75% of change programs fail. Hi everyone, it's future Jolene here. I didn't want to just make up a statistic, so I'm editing it right now. I've looked it up and I was pretty close. It's actually 70% of change initiatives fail, and that was reported by the Harvard Business Review.

Jolynne Rydz: 6:41

So let's dive back into the episode. So an organization introduces a change they work so hard at it, so much effort goes into it, and people revert back to the way they were operating before, or they revert back to the system they were using before, or they make all these workarounds to try and get back to their comfort zone of what they were doing before. And I truly believe that there is so much in this space to explore, because we need to, because things are changing so rapidly. There's a, you know, increase in AI and what that means for the way that we work. There's so many things that we don't know of right now. What could happen and what I'm also seeing at the moment is people's well-being and stress, this overwhelm and burnout, and you've got to do more and more and more and you hit this goal and then the next one comes along and people are stressed and getting burnt out.

Jolynne Rydz: 7:36

And recently actually, I was in an organization and doing a talk at a leadership summit and I did a little survey check. There was about 130 leaders that came through and 58% of them felt they were rushing and multitasking within the past week. 49% of them always felt busy and 38% of them felt they had to be perfect. And this is just one organization, but I do believe that that's not something unique to that organization. I'd love for you to reflect and go. Have I ever experienced any of those things myself?

Jolynne Rydz: 8:15

And so when there's environments and there's also leadership and systems that might feel like out of our control, what can we control? The one thing we can control in all of this is us. One thing we can control in all of this is us, and what I found is that magnetic authenticity is like a superpower that is untapped in so many people. It's like we've forgotten how to be ourselves because there's so much societal conditioning, both in the workplace but beyond that. When we grow up as kids, we're taught to behave a certain way. An example of this is.

Jolynne Rydz: 8:54

I have a couple of kids and when they start crying, I noticed that some people are uncomfortable with that and they might go and give this person a chocolate to help them stop crying. And I'm not saying that's good or bad, but what I'm saying is it sends a message that, oh, it's not okay to cry. And then we carry this message through as we grow up and as we enter the workforce. Maybe you people I've actually seen people and I've done this myself I've gone into the bathroom to have a cry. Now there's environments that I've been in a workplace where that is totally acceptable and okay and embraced, in a workplace where that is totally acceptable and okay and embraced and there's environments where they're like, no, you need to cry alone and we don't want to deal with that here. And the impact of those two different environments is so vast because in one environment, you can't be yourself and it's not okay, and in the other one, you can and you're embraced and you're supported, and the energy in that is incredible, not just for the individual, but for the team around them and then the broader organization.

Jolynne Rydz: 9:57

So what's some of the evidence around this? So Anna Sutton from the University of Waikato did a meta-analysis in 2020 and what they found was that there's a relationship a positive relationship, between authenticity and wellbeing and engagement. And that's just one study. There's a lot of other studies that are increasingly showing that when we can be authentic, when we can be vulnerable, when we can be courageous and when we can be ourselves, it has a ripple effect on the people around us and our impacts. Robert Anderson and William Adams have written a book called Mastering Leadership, and they've actually created this incredible tool that helps leaders to understand themselves, and one of the things that they write about is that authentic leaders create trust and credibility, and trust and credibility is so important in leadership because it allows people to open up, it allows people to lean in, it allows people to step into discomfort, especially when there's a change going on. You want people to have a sense of trust that they're going to be okay, and when you can do that, leading that team becomes effortless because they're there with you. A big part of all of this is having self-awareness.

Jolynne Rydz: 11:17

Recently, I was doing a project with an organization really leaning into and exploring a section of their employee experience, and I'd worked with this organization in the past employee experience, and I'd worked with this organisation in the past, and what you need to know is that in the past, I felt that I needed to be really professional and stick to the facts, stick to the rules, follow the process, follow the norms, follow the templates of how things were done. And I was about to give a presentation to the senior executive team and I thought we'd done so much work to really hear what employees were experiencing and I wanted to do that justice, and I didn't think a couple of graphs on a PowerPoint was really going to get people to understand and feel what it was like from the employee's perspective. So I decided to do something a little bit different. I decided to be all me.

Jolynne Rydz: 12:15

Now what you need to know also is, as a hobby, I love making videos that make my friends laugh laugh till they cry and feel amazingly honored because I've put this creative effort into making a video for them. It's something I'm incredibly passionate about. So I thought I could bring the two together. So what I created was this instead of this boring PowerPoint presentation with stats and graphs and a couple of words, I basically reenacted the process of the employee experience using real emotions, using the real words people said, the real events that happened and even did a video at the end to show what happened in a certain part of that employee experience, and the result was incredible. People were engaged, they were leaning in and we got approval for the thing that we wanted to do. And, having worked with this organization before, I know an approval at that level can sometimes take multiple meetings and multiple reports and attempts and things to get it through. So to get it through on this first go was absolutely incredible and so confirming about when you step into your magnetic authenticity, that people lean in and people want to hear what you have to say and people want to come along on the journey with you.

Jolynne Rydz: 13:39

So how do you tap into your magnetic authenticity? Well, I'm glad you asked, because that's the whole premise of this whole podcast, because it's not something that you can just switch on and it's not something that is one dimensional. It's so multifaceted and there's so much to explore here and some of it's going to be maybe confronting. Some of it's going to be fun. Some of it's going to be based on research and it's going to be all sorts of stuff in here based on research and it's going to be all sorts of stuff in here, but my real hope is that this podcast helps you to step into your own magnetic authenticity, to really discover what your strengths are, what lights you up?

Jolynne Rydz: 14:23

And that's really the first step is do you actually know who you are, how you operate? How do you show up when you are under stress? How do other people perceive you? So what are your strengths? What are your shadow strengths? That are actually strengths, but if you overuse them, they can actually have a detrimental effect to yourself and to those around you. One example is perfectionism. I call myself a recovering perfectionist, so what that means is I'm very aware that I have this tendency to want to do things perfectly and, yes, sometimes it can make me strive to do things to a higher quality, but other times, when I'm too fixated on trying to get something perfect, it means it takes me too long to get something done. So do you know what these shadow strengths are for you? What's the impact of that? Because everyone has an impact, but we want to know whether it's a positive, a negative or somewhere in between. Do you know what lights you up?

Jolynne Rydz: 15:23

I remember when I was a finance analyst in a previous role life. I just remember the feeling of that job and it did not light me up. One of my tasks was to edit a number on a PowerPoint report that said how many people we'd gotten rid of that month and it was just, for me, soul destroying. I didn't find any meaning to it. It was just these people had been depersonalized and they were just now numbers in this tiny box on the top right-hand corner of this PowerPoint slide in this big pack.

Jolynne Rydz: 16:01

And if I compare that to my experience when I'm coaching someone one-on-one or when I'm facilitating a development program, and I know people want to be there and they're ready to change and they want to dig deep and do the work and they want to step outside of their comfort zone but want a safe place to do that and a supportive place to do that. When I see people do that and see the results they get, it is so spine-tinglingly amazing. Is that even a word? It is so incredible. I literally, when I hang up on the end of a coaching call, it is like I've popped a pill. I have so much adrenaline in my body. I'm excited, I'm happy. It's like I've taken a coffee or a V or something. It is so amazing. Yeah, taking a coffee or a V or something. It is so amazing and so I know. For me that's something that lights me up, but it's also my strength. So knowing that is so powerful because when you can do more of that, you have more energy, but you also have more impact and you can have more meaning in life and what you're doing, knowing that what you're doing is having a positive impact on someone else.

Jolynne Rydz: 17:07

The second way that you can tap into your magnetic let's try that again the second way you can tap into your magnetic authenticity is to lead from anywhere, and what I mean by this is that you don't need a title. So I have been talking about leadership a lot, but to me, my definition of a leader is someone who's willing and wants to inspire people around them to take action for the good of themselves and the people around them. So that could be a parent in their family, it could be a sports coach on the field, it could be a health practitioner or a teacher. It could be someone in a formal supervisory or leadership role. If you are stepping in there and wanting to make a difference and you're wanting to do that with people around you, then I consider you a leader. So welcome. So I'll give you an example of this For a friend, very close friend, of mine I won't say who because I'll keep it anonymous for them, but for their 21st I wanted to create.

Jolynne Rydz: 18:07

This is when the video thing started. Right, I wanted to create a video. This is back in the VHS days. So I just want to say I was editing videos by playing, hooking up two video recorders together and hitting pause and play and record. So this is pretty funny. But so I wanted to create this video for them that had all these happy birthday messages and part of it was a parody of a song, a very well-known party song, and it required this person's best friends getting dressed up as cheerleaders and doing this whole routine.

Jolynne Rydz: 18:45

Now, two of the people that I asked to be in this video are so not into this. They would, you know, you would never see them get dressed up in a dress and you would never see them dance around, especially to choreography. They would be the people that you know hang on the back of the wall and prefer to just watch when they're at a party, right? So to get them involved in this project, I feel was an act of leadership, because they got in there. They did it, and they did it incredibly well and it was so funny and hilarious because they were just willing to give it a go. So that, to me, is leadership. You might disagree and go. What is she talking about? But to me, if you can get someone to do something that benefits someone else and them as well, I'm hoping it gave them some more confidence to just let go and have fun and not worry what people think. It's an incredible, incredible feeling when you could do that.

Jolynne Rydz: 19:44

Now the third thing that you can start to do to tap into your magnetic authenticity is to have the courage to be you. It does take courage Because I do believe that somewhere deep down we do know who we are, but it's often buried under layers of conditioning, of limiting beliefs, of other people's expectations on who we are and who we should be, and it takes courage to reveal that sometimes, and sometimes it takes work to even identify what that is and know that. And I think it's probably a very long journey for a lot of people and some people never get there, and that's okay. But if it's something you want to explore, let's explore this together.

Jolynne Rydz: 20:30

I remember one time it was probably about six years ago now, I was presenting again at another workshop and the speaker before me got up and this person was so confident you would never expect them to say what they just said, but they got up and they started their presentation with. This makes me incredibly nervous. I don't like public speaking. And then they went on to do their presentation and then the next person got up to speak and they said, oh, I really don't like public speaking either. And the weirdest thing happened is there were five speakers that day and every single one, myself included, got up and said oh, I really this makes me nervous. And for every single person that did that, you never would have known. So what that did is it created this environment where, oh, it was okay to be nervous about this, it was okay to not be this polished, perfect speaker, it was okay to share that with everyone. And what that encouraged then was other people to volunteer to step in and speak next time when they might've hung back because you had to look like you knew what you were doing. So it's incredibly powerful to tap into the courage to be you and I don't again.

Jolynne Rydz: 21:47

This is not a light switch moment that just flicks on and that happens. It's a practice and a journey, so I trust that somewhere in all of that there was some gold, and I'd love to know what that gold is. Feel free to leave a comment or a review wherever you're listening, because I'd love for this to be a two-way conversation. Otherwise, it's just me talking into this microphone on my own and I don't know where it's going, so I would love to hear from you. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn under Jolynne Rydz, so J-O-L-Y-N-N-E-R-Y-D-Z, and I'd love to hear your feedback or comments there. Send me a DM. It would be amazing to connect. So for now, remember you were born for a reason and it's time to thrive. I'll see you in the next episode.