Unlocking Your Potential: Lessons in Leadership and Influence

What is influence and how do we build more of it? Those are the questions behind Laura Cox Kaplan’s weekly podcast, She Said/She Said. Laura joined us as we celebrated Women’s History Month to share career and leadership lessons learned from the hundreds of leaders she’s interviewed since she started her podcast seven years ago. From embracing different viewpoints and building resilience to turning failure into growth and having greater impact, she shared insights from entrepreneurs, C-suiters and more. Watch the replay for strategies, lessons and inspiration. 

Please note: Due to the nature of the replays, survey and chat features mentioned in the webinar recordings below are no longer active.

Summary

What did we learn? Here are the top takeaways from Unlocking Your Potential: Lessons in Leadership and Influence:

Building influence is key to unlocking your potential. While influence can come from a job title or position of power, most people build and create influence through their actions and by making connections, Kaplan said. Through influence, you can boost your visibility, get your point across and catch the attention of leaders who may be able to hire or promote you, she said. “Influence creates connectivity between us and the people who are at the next rung of the ladder for us,” she said. The habits you practice daily, from your mindset to how you handle setbacks, can either help build or take away from your influence, she said, adding, “How we think about ourselves is key to our ability to create influence.”

Learning to accept feedback with curiosity can help you build influence. Feedback is crucial for gaining support and approval from others for your idea, Kaplan said. Prepare yourself to hear less-than-positive feedback, she said. Her advice: Take the emotion out of feedback. “Make it less about you and more about curiosity about what you can learn from it,” she said.

Embrace a growth mindset to maximize your potential. Mindset is an important part of approaching obstacles constructively, said Kaplan, who advocates for the “growth mindset” described in the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck, a Stanford University psychology professor. A person with a growth mindset might say, “I’m probably not going to be good at this, but I will get better as I do it,” she said, in contrast to a fixed mindset in which a person tends to stay stuck. Having a growth mindset makes it easier to take risks, boosts confidence and helps you lean into opportunities and next steps, she said.

Know that the messy middle is where the most growth happens. Everyone who tries something new faces a “messy middle” phase, Kaplan said. “The messy middle is the part that most people never see. You’re stretching yourself, it’s uncomfortable and you’re failing, and you’ve got to start over or try a different way,” she said, adding that she went through a “messy middle” when she started her podcast. A lot of people give up at this point, she said, but those who push through the discomfort can reap big rewards. “The messiness is where the biggest growth and learning comes, and also where your confidence gets the biggest boost,” she explained. “Building that confidence muscle then helps you try the next hard thing, and the next hard thing, and the next hard thing.”

Reframe failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. “One of my favorite ways of thinking about failure is to stop using the word,” Kaplan said, adding that we tend to learn much more from failure than from success, meaning it’s one of our best teachers. “If you shift your mindset, it can be an opportunity to reframe and recalibrate failure, to craft a different narrative around this idea of failure,” she said.

Editing your personal story can position you to land your next opportunity. It’s easy to take a setback, such as a job loss, and make it part of your personal narrative, leading to unhelpful patterns of thinking, Kaplan said. But there’s another way: You can edit your story by reframing the setback or failure to set the groundwork for growth. For example, look at what you could have done differently, identify an unexpected benefit or come up with a lesson the situation taught you, she said. “Take what you learned, get rid of the part where you didn’t do so well and just move on,” she said.

Get clear on your unique value to avoid falling into the comparison trap. The first step is to figure out what triggers cause you to compare yourself to others and then identify what you bring to the table that’s uniquely you, Kaplan said. “If we can do the homework of creating more self-awareness about our own value proposition, that’s a great way of reorienting our thinking so that we don’t fall into this trap,” she said, adding that part of doing that work is looking back at your personal story, including setbacks or failures to reframe them as learning experiences.

Consider using AI to help boost your confidence. Believe it or not, AI tools such as Claude and Google Gemini offer a way to get instant feedback that can make you more confident, a topic Kaplan recently covered in her Intentional Iteration newsletter on LinkedIn^®. You can feed in your CV, your bio and a few additional details about yourself, along with a job opportunity you’re seeking, and ask AI to list five reasons you’re the right person for that job. Or you can explain that you’re having doubts about your capability to take on a certain opportunity and ask AI for steps to take to address those uncertainties. “That may sound like kind of a crazy thing to do, but these tools are incredible,” she said, adding that AI can be used alongside executive coaches, advisors and your network. AI is simply “part of a toolkit that can boost your confidence.”

Speaker

 
Laura Cox Kaplan
Host/Creator, She Said/She Said Media & Podcast

Host

Joan Woodward
President, Travelers Institute; Executive Vice President, Public Policy, Travelers