0 A New Journey For A New Year

Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year to you all! Hoping this one is better than the last. We are glad to be on this journey with you, and 2012 surely was a journey. Amongst Certifications, Authentic Leader, Leadership Profiles and Culture Surveys, The Leadership Circle held its very first one-day leadership conference for practitioners and their clients, held in Gaithersburg, MD. With over 100 registered participants, I'd say it was a great turnout. I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce myself - to give you a sense for who I am and how I will be involved with you. My name is Katherine Anderson. I'm a single, active, young woman living in Windy City, U.S.A, known as Chicago, IL. I work for Full Circle Group, a partner to The Leadership Circle, as a Project Administrator and have recently taken on the exciting challenge of becoming the Manager of Practitioner Care for both Full Circle Group and The Leadership Circle. In the Practitioner Care role I will be, hopefully with your help, figuring out how we can better reach and engage you, find out what you'd like to hear and learn about, read about in this newsletter, what kind of events you would like to attend, and how we did as it relates to our Certifications, Authentic Leader program, and our customer service. All the while I will still gladly be supporting the highly skilled consultants at Full Circle Group. My journey thus far: Shaped by the 90's internet-explosion (oh, dial-up, how I [don't] miss thee) and the Facebook revolution, I'm trying to find my own way; carve out my own path in this digitized age. It's proving to be a difficult task. Connection is expansive and limited, touching everything and no one all at once; Knowledge is wide-spread, readily available at our fingertips making us all experts at all things, for better or worse; And the growing complexity of this world demands of us to be bigger, better, faster, smarter, more creative, innovative, and above all, a leader. A daunting task! I used to have this dream, often, and repetitively, where the steepest hill ever imagined lay before me. It was a hill so steep that you were scared of peeling off and falling backwards to your demise, but it was the only path to your destination. If and when you made it to the top, the road disappeared, curled beneath your toes, and you just had to jump. I have had the blessing of bearing witness to the power of The Leadership Circle at a young age and the privilege to have the influence and support of some amazing role models throughout the course of my life - some of which were your Certification or Authentic Leader instructors. My first real exposure to The Leadership Circle was at the ripe old age of 16 when I took over printing, shipping and tracking all orders that came through The Leadership Circle. My understanding was basic: a mushroom-shaped profile = good, an up-side-down one...well, room for improvement. Additionally, I was in an AP Statistics class in my high school and this, the Profile, was a very tangible example of a real-life application, which seemed to make it more significant, more real. It connected me to the work in a very rudimentary way. I gained a deeper understanding along with great appreciation and awe for the Leadership Circle Profile when I had the opportunity to sit in on a Certification. I was 19 and mid-way through college. Knowing little about Organizational Development, the industry, the tools available, I was intuitively aware of how integrative this tool was. I was struck by how violently people reacted to the profile: some embraced it; others utterly rejected it. How was it that a person could be reacting with such passion to a bunch of data? In the end, though, everyone came around, and they, too, were enchanted. Awe only scratches the surface of its impression on me as I saw the impact it had in the lives of individuals - and the resulting domino effect it can have. Post college graduation wasn't quite a breeze either - or at least not the breeze I was hoping for. I graduated in the pits of the recession and jobs were hard to come by. I lived at home, waited tables, saved up my money and searched for jobs. Roughly a year into this routine, as I was beginning to plan a move to Chicago, I was introduced to Full Circle Group where I have been for the last 2.5 years. My role has grown from part time, to full time, to now a dual-role in The Leadership Circle and Full Circle Group. I forget sometimes what an advantage I have being a part of this work and network, and the amount of dormant knowledge I possess about what good leadership is and is not, about personal transformation, about cultural change. Concepts, that to me have been apart of my life since I was 16, are new and foreign to some. Yet there is still so much to learn. Recently I had my own profile and debrief done. It wasn't quite unexpected as it has been a very introspective year, a year of navigation, but the extent to which my data pointed one way or another was a little staggering. If you haven't figured the connection out, Bob Anderson is my dad. Needless to say, The Leadership Circle has been a thread in my life. Now I'm trying to find my own voice as an individual, as leader. A voice that feels it has little ground to stand on, or experience to speak from. And yet, here I am, standing not-quite-tall, working on creating a path - and I begin my journey in a Leadership Development company. Coincidence? You tell me. I have been working with Full Circle Group for over 2 years as an admin and project manager. It has been a great, and challenging experience. I am just fine at organizing and details, but I knew, and as my The Leadership Circle Profile screamed, I am very relationship-oriented. I am here to grow, strengthen, and leverage that. I'd like to start with you. I'm taking control of this wonderful newsletter and I'd like to hear from you. What do you want to read more of? Hear more of? Do more of? What topics are of interest to you? What have you read in Leadership Quarterly and really enjoyed, or not enjoyed? I want to know it all! Please email me: Katherine.anderson@fcg-global.com, I would love to hear what you have to say. Lastly, I want to say thank you for being apart of our journey to extend our reach and to spread the practice of conscious leadership globally. This is not a solo journey and together we will leave a footprint - maybe even a path. HAPPY NEW YEAR!