19 August 2024
A transformational guide to stepping up and standing out
Good leadership requires authenticity, assertiveness and adaptability. It takes courage. Yet many of us are stuck playing it safe and striving to fit in.
Dispelling the myth that caring is a weakness, Alina Addison shows how the things we care about most can fuel our most courageous acts. Combining deep research with her own expertise – as a pioneering corporate leader, Emotional Intelligence coach, and mother to a son on the autism spectrum – Addison presents the eight life-changing principles behind audacious leadership.
These practical, proven methods will help you identify the things that set you apart, inspire others and dare to create the life and career you truly want.
Read an extract of The Audacity Spectrum below.
Acknowledge
Uncertainty.
Dare
Authentically.
Care
Intensely.
Trust
Your yes.
Audacity Unpacked
When people ask me what I do, I often reply: ‘I give people courage.’ Much of my work with clients focuses on helping them reframe the aspects of themselves they feel they have to tone down or smooth out.
Too often, leaders think of themselves in terms of ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’. We are told we are not patient enough, or not nice enough, or not polite enough. We are too emotional, too intense, too demanding, too bold, too direct. When you hear this from a young age, you spend your entire life trying to be less than your most authentic self because you make others uncomfortable. And when this is the case, you are likely to approach self-development as self-improvement, making the assumption that there is an ideal leadership norm – a perfectly balanced, generalist ideal to aspire to.
We are flooded with messages that too much of anything is bad, even when it starts as something good. Too much resilience makes you stubborn and inflexible. Too much persistence and you don’t know when quitting is right. Too much excitement makes you susceptible to anger. Too much perseverance turns into obsession. Too much compassion leads to burnout. Too much bravery can lead to recklessness.
But what if we thought about it in a different way? When you feel ‘too much’ in one way or another, you often experience the world deeply: when something affects you, it moves you to your core. If you’re a high performer then you’ve likely had lots of extraordinary highs, as well as some epic lows. You can be extremely perceptive. You know when someone is in a bad mood or masking their emotions: your bullshit radar is hypersensitive. You won’t put up with hypocrisy or inauthenticity. Yet, being told you’re too much often makes you feel not enough. You need to remember that ‘too much’ is someone else’s perception and has nothing to do with you.
In my work, I find that these ‘extra’ abilities aren’t ‘too much’ at all. When they are channelled in the right way, ‘too much’ traits can be found in many of the best leaders; leaders who are able to use their gifts to better the world.
An Unconventional Definition of Audacity
What do you think of when you hear the word audacious? Do you see it as a positive or a negative? Your relationship with this one word can change your life.
The noun ‘audacity’ comes from the Latin word audacitas, meaning boldness and daring. Someone who shows audacity makes bold moves and isn’t afraid of the consequences. Over the years, some negative overtones have crept into our use of the term. The Cambridge Dictionary defines audacity as ‘courage or confidence of a kind that other people find shocking or rude’. Dictionary.com defines it as ‘boldness or daring, with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety’. Often people use audacity in a way that suggests a mixture of awe and judgement. Think of expressions such as: ‘They had the audacity to. . . [say/do such and such]’, which combine admiration for someone’s courage and disapproval of their breaking of ‘rules’. Inherent in the idea of audacity is a tension between opposite, yet coexisting, impulses.
Increasingly though, audacity is shaking off its negative connotations. It is being embraced as a sign of bold risk-taking, a necessary ingredient to success. The Audacity Spectrum aims to reframe and shift the way we view audacious behaviour and embrace it as a superpower.
Audacity can be associated with both admiration and arrogance. It exists on a broad spectrum, on which leaders are engaged in a constant dance between daring and caring. To better represent this, I have developed my own definition:
Audacity: daring and caring when it matters, and not at all when it doesn’t. Caring enough to dare to take risks where necessary, without caring about other people’s judgements.
Someone who represents this for me is my friend Angela Tennison. I met her through 4PC – the 4 Percent Club, a community of toptier performance coaches and leaders founded by Rich Litvin in 2014 – and she has since become one of my key role models for audacity. In 2007, Tennison was inspired by a man with a vision so big that it sounded crazy. Despite this, Tennison believed in his vision and did what most people thought was an equally crazy thing: she followed her heart, left behind a secure job, and took a year out of her life. She didn’t care about what those around her thought; she cared about supporting this man with his mission. That man was Senator Barack Obama, and his mission was to become president of the United States. The story had a happy ending. He won the presidency and Tennison continued to support him in the White House for almost seven years.
However, like all happy endings, there is a lot of hard work in the middle that gets forgotten; the invisible graft that’s inherent in any success. Central to this graft is often an unshakeable belief: the desire to stand up for something bigger than yourself and to make a positive difference – the audacious moment when you say: ‘I care about this, and I don’t care what other people think.’
When Tennison declared to me that she wanted to care less, I knew she meant the opposite of becoming ‘careless’. She wanted to make an impact in the world by standing up for what she cared about and caring less that other people believed it was impossible.
And so, we come back to my definition of audacity. Tennison dared and cared when it mattered, and not at all when it didn’t. She cared so strongly about something that she took the risk of quitting her job and moving across the country, without a care for other people’s judgements. Her willingness to take the leap and then keep going in the face of uncertainty and difficulty characterises the sort of life-changing audacity that many of us aspire to, and which we can all find within ourselves to inform our approach to our everyday life and work, if we choose to.
Of course, there is also an ego-driven version of audacity. I am not advocating the type of audacity that shows up as unrestrained, reckless or defiant (think Elon Musk and his controversial behaviour at Twitter, now X). Neither am I advocating for the version that shows up as not caring for yourself or others or for the consequences of your actions. I’m advocating for an emotionally intelligent version of audacity.
The type of audacity that I subscribe to is:
- Kind confidence that can be creatively bold and inspiring.
- The audacity to say yes to the right opportunities.
- The audacity to ask for what you want and graciously accept a no when you don’t get it.
- The audacity to care deeply enough to ask again.
Here are some of my clients’ ideas of audacity:
- ‘To speak your truth and have no fear in doing so.’
- ‘To see the positive side of life every single day. It’s easier to see faults and shortcomings in everyday life. It’s audacious to acknowledge those and yet choose to see the positive side of everything.’
- ‘Daring to be defiant. Because people want to put you in a box. The world puts labels on you. There are certain things that are expected of you. And so being audacious is defying that gravity.’
- ‘Being scared and doing it anyway.’ These definitions show a range of ways you can make audacity your own: not just in big life shifts, but in daily ways of showing up for your work, family and life.
I hope this book gives you the courage to show up fully in your work and life. To live audaciously.
