Welcome to shameless leadership. I'm your host, Sarah Dean. This show is for women, transgender people, non-binary folks, as well as allies, who are committed to advancing their leadership while also advancing the leadership of those around them. In each episode, we will offer practical tips, leadership strategies, and inspiring

stories to help you become a more confident, compassionate, and inclusive leader. The truth is,

you were born to lead. What might happen for you if you were to wholeheartedly embrace that

part of yourself? So let's start now, together. Hello, shameless leaders. I'm so happy to be here today and really excited to be talking about thought leadership

today.

What I love about this topic in particular is that oftentimes when I talk to leaders and people

who don't even identify yet as leaders about thought leadership, that they start to see

themselves reflected in different ways and see where they

could maybe step into owning thought leader as part of their identity where they maybe didn't

previously think they were qualified to own that title. So I'm hoping that by the end of this

conversation that you feel more qualified to own your space as a thought leader because you'll have some tools to

really see how you can embody thought leadership as a skill set, but also how you can see that

there's a lot of misnomer's around thought leadership. And especially for women leaders,

we hold ourselves back from really embracing some core parts of who we are that we could be stepping into

more fully and giving ourselves a bit of a bigger stage in order to show up as thought leaders in

ways that are aligned with who we currently are, skills sets that we currently have, messages that we're

currently already broadcasting, belief systems and values that we want to share,

and ways that we really already have the capacity to have impact, and we're not just fully owning,

embracing, honoring, and stepping into. So let's dig into this. We're going to talk about the myths and realities of thought leadership today, what thought leadership is, what it isn't,

how leaders at any level can build credibility, visibility, authority, and influence in ethical ways. I always have to put that in there. In ethical ways, we're not trying to brainwash people without feeling like they have to be the smartest person in the room or the person who knows the most about something in the room. That's where we often get in our ways is we think, well, there's other people that know more about something than me, so I can't possibly be a thought leader. And that's just not true. And we're going to get to some of that ego stuff in a little bit. So we're going to talk about some of the misnomer around thinking that we have to have a certain level of, I don't know, popularity or influence or a certain number of followers on social media and these kinds of things before we can really own our voice in a big way and build a platform around it. Owning your voice doesn't require that you already have an audience. And so let's start with that. Today we're going to be really digging into what makes someone a thought leader. And then how do you know if you already are one or if you already have that capacity kind of built into things that you're already doing.

So let's start with the definition of thought leadership. A thought leader is someone who shares ideas that shape, shift, or expand how others think, act, or lead. So those are really important verbs in there.

So let me say that again. A thought leader is someone who shares ideas that shape, shift,

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