🔥 5 Minutes of Leadership Fuel
✉️ This post is part of The 5-Minute Mentor — my weekly leadership newsletter. If you’d like to get it delivered straight to your inbox, click here to subscribe.
Welcome to The 5-Minute Mentor — your weekly dose of leadership inspiration, curated resources, and practical action. All in under 5 minutes.
Activating Your Genius in 5,4,3,2,1… 🤩
🫶 A Dose of Inspiration
“You don’t have to choose between being wholehearted, loving, kind, and soulful or winning. You can do both, but the bridge you must cross is vulnerability.”
— Dr. Pippa Grange
Somewhere along the way, many of us picked up a false choice: be impressive or be real. Guard the image or risk the connection.
Dr. Pippa Grange, the sports psychologist who helped England’s football team compete with less fear, says the choice was never real. But the bridge between the two is one we have to walk across, not around.
Ready to take the first step… together?
📥 Download the quote graphic to use in your next staff email or meeting.
🤓 A Dose of Learning
Anne Lamott has written twenty books about faith, family, writing, and recovery. She has never, to my knowledge, written one about leadership.
And yet.
On a recent episode of The One You Feed, Anne sat down with host Eric Zimmer to talk about her book Somehow: Thoughts on Love… and I couldn’t stop hearing the leadership lessons within. Here’s the thing: leadership lessons are everywhere, if we’re paying attention.
Three ideas that resonated with me, each worth carrying into your world:
🛡️ Perfectionism is a bodyguard, not a strength. Anne describes the polished, impressive persona we present to the world as a bodyguard, something we built long ago to protect ourselves. The problem? The bodyguard doesn’t just keep criticism out. It keeps connection at arm’s length, too. For high achievers (I’m looking at you 😉), perfectionism can masquerade as high standards. But no amount of being “beyond reproach” ever delivers the validation it promises. As Anne puts it, healing is an inside job.
🙅♀️ Your inner critic is not telling the truth. That voice insisting you should have done better, faster, more? Anne calls it a parasite… a leftover safety mechanism from childhood, not an accurate report on your worth. Her practice for meeting it: awareness (oh, it’s you again), acceptance (of course I have this), and action (respond to yourself with the gentleness you’d offer a friend). Imagine a leader who models that. Imagine a team that learns and supports it.
🤝 Imperfect community will still change your life. Back in What Are You Busy About?, we explored the 80/20 Rule: focus on the vital few, courageously minimize the rest. Anne’s math flips it. Most of any meeting or gathering, she admits, might feel tedious, even beneath you. But the small remaining portion will save you… and you can’t eliminate your way to it. The imperfect 80% is the price of admission. Your work rewards ruthless focus, your people reward patient presence. Many of us throw away what would save us because we think we don’t have time or can’t tolerate the rest. Connection doesn’t require a perfect room and, thankfully, it doesn’t need a perfect us. It requires walking in anyway, which, Anne says, builds muscle like anything else. Every imperfect showing-up makes the next one easier.
Your team doesn’t need a perfect leader. And you don’t need a perfect team. But we do all need each other.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation here: The One You Feed: Why Community Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect to Change Your Life | Anne Lamott
🤔 A Dose of Reflection
This week, find a quiet moment with these. Honest answers, not impressive ones. (Anne would insist.)
For you: Where is your “bodyguard” on duty right now? What would it look like to give it the day off… even for one conversation? (Anne sends her inner critic to the library. Just saying.)
For your team: When someone on your team brings you something vulnerable, what do they learn from your response? What would awareness, acceptance, and action look like… together?
For connection: What imperfect room have you been avoiding – a meeting, a group, a community – because 80% of it feels tedious? What might the other 20% be waiting to give you?
You got this. Let’s lead with belief.
In your corner,
Melody
Founder, Culture of Belief
PS: Consider this your comma relief… 🤓😂
Send them this link to join The 5-Minute Mentor.