Being on a journey is longer than getting to a destination. Your leadership journey is like jumping on the Acela train bound for New York City. You may think Penn Station is the destination, but in reality, that is where the journey simply begins. Your leadership journey will bring you places you never knew existed, to meet people you don’t understand, to tackle problems you don’t know how to solve.

And therein lies the beauty, your journey will push you in ways that makes you stronger and less fearful.

First, places you never knew existed – this made me think of my inaugural global trip of my career. At this point in my life, I hadn’t traveled outside the US before, so the trip was new for a lot of reasons, but my wakeup call was when I worked with my colleagues in the United Kingdom, France and Germany and I was quickly met with “that’s not how we do it here.” My plan went from very well thought out to blown up in six words through two translators.

And that brings me to the second thing, people you don’t understand – on my inaugural trip, I was working with people from the same company, so why didn’t they want to follow my “excellent” plan? Simple, we have very different backgrounds, they were from Europe, I was from America, I thought I was being open, and they thought I was being closed. I was asking their opinion. They thought I was telling them what to do.

In that moment the three elements of fear began to set in and consume my entire being:

– I had a major twinge of fear of failure

– I was totally uncertain about what to do next

– And I doubted that I had the skills to solve this new problem

Well, I was early in my journey and luckily my leader John was with me and he was further along his leadership journey. He grabbed the reigns, brought his fearless leadership to the situation and helped me navigate the international peace process, which was mostly listening and then reasserting most of the original plan.

Lastly, I flew over to solve a “growth” issue, but what I learned is that I first had to overcome a culture issue. Fundamentally, I was solving a problem I didn’t know how to solve. In the end, the Europeans weren’t as against my plan as I had thought, I think they were not thrilled with my advocacy for the plan and lack of listening and inquiry. Once John took over, built a cultural bridge, allowed them to agree we had a growth issue, we could then and only then talk about my excellent plan on how to solve it.

A sincere thanks to John for coaching me from Penn Station to Piccadilly Circle while riding on the London Tube – I am so thankful to my mentors and leaders that have taught me so many lessons and helped me throughout my career.

So, no matter where you are on your leadership journey, please remember there is no final destination, there is no “arrival” location, there is no mountain top, there is simply more places to visit, more people to understand and more problems to solve.

b FEARLESS