How to find your embarrassing story & create the impact you were born to create

“He doesn’t like me!” I told my mother after I went home from school.

“How do you know that?” My mother asked.

“Because he wouldn’t dance with me.” I replied.

This was the beginning of the discussion my mother and I had when I started 1st grade.

There was a boy in my class who wouldn’t dance with me when we were preparing for a Mother’s Day performance at school that included some dancing.

I could say that what my mother said that day made a huge impact on me… but that wasn’t the case. I forgot it right away.

I was too young and not receptive to rejections yet. I got assigned another boy to dance with and that solution worked for me.

Only years later did I remember what my mother said when a similar situation happened.

I was in high school and had just joined the Hungarian Folkdance Club. Not because I really wanted to. I really wanted to join the Drama Club but the teacher couldn’t start the club because there weren’t enough students to start a club with. My best friend and I were not enough drama club members, according to her. So, she sent us to the only other after-school option available – the folk dance club.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like dancing or that I wasn’t good at it… I simply didn’t want to be in the same club with my older brother and his classmates. I have already been “known” as “the sister of” and not by my own name of Andrea, so I didn’t want to fight for my identity yet again.

So, reluctantly and not excited I went along when my best friend dragged me over to just “check it out.”

And that first day, one of my brother’s classmates refused to dance with me. I mean he didn’t say it out loud, but he did pretty much everything he could to not be next in line to dance with me.

Upset and mad and to no surprise to my best friend, I refused to return to the club again.

Until one afternoon I was walking home from school and I remembered what my mother said to me when I was 6 years old:

“You don’t want people to like you. You want people to respect you for who you are.”

My mother was teaching me the difference between being liked for my looks, my clothes, for what people assumed and expected of me versus being respected for my values, my beliefs, my behaviors, and my actions.

She said “If you see your friend with a piece of spinach stuck in their teeth and you don’t say anything, they will still like you tomorrow. But if you see them with a piece of spinach stuck in their teeth and you let them know about it, they might not like you but they will respect you for speaking up and giving them a chance to not make a fool of themselves in front of the whole class and their teacher. Would you want to know about the spinach in your teeth? If your answer is yes, do that for others.”

The next day I showed up at the dance club.

I have decided I wanted to become the dancer that everybody respected even if I was not liked by everyone.

That conscious decision has helped me find my way back to myself - who I was, and who I am ever since.

If you have spoken with me before you might have heard me say “If you don’t like me, it’s O.K.”

I believe we all have made such decisions in our early lives.

I was 14 years old when I awakened to the power of my choices.

You might have been younger or older. Yet, we all have such guiding principles that shaped our behaviors and thus our lives since.

[When I left Romania to come to the U.S. for only a summer, I was seriously considering applying to the National Dance Association to train and become a professional Hungarian folk dancer.]

Why Find Your Embarrassing Story?

In my work to discover engineers’ and leaders’ personal values and beliefs as they are transitioning from a previous role into a new role or transitioning to a new level of management in their work career, there’s a brief exercise we do together where I introduce my embarrassing dancing experience and share the details with them.

Then I ask them to tell me a similar story from their lives.

Once they remember their stories, like I did, we dig deeper to discover the gem below the story: their guiding principle.

Then we lay this guiding principle over some of their recent experiences and start looking at their behaviors and actions through this new lens of knowledge.

Suddenly it all makes sense!

Suddenly they understand their actions and find meaning behind their decisions.

They suddenly understand themselves better and can feel compassion towards their younger selves.

It’s like they are meeting themselves for the first time – it’s awkward, it’s uncomfortable and it’s exciting at the same time.

So, finding your embarrassing story will lead you to meet part of you that has been leading you for all these years without you knowing why.

What’s The Biggest Benefit Of Knowing Your Guiding Principle(s)?

Now that you have found your guiding principle(s) you are literally seeing yourself differently in your environment. Though you haven’t changed. What changed is how you see yourself from inside out and how you perceive yourself in the external world.

People won’t see a physical change in you; for the rest of the world, you are the same person who you were before you discovered your guiding principle.

What shifted was your response to the world.

Just like my response was: I went back to the dancing club.

What changed was I knew why I was there.

I knew what motivated me when we were outside running our laps to train for performance fitness, agility, and strength.

I knew how to let go of the days when I failed to learn a dance sequence or I missed a turn.

The biggest benefit of knowing your guiding principle(s) is that you become crystal clear on who you are and what’s important to you. You will be able to make better decisions faster and with more confidence. You will be able to let go of temporary disappointments and failures and bounce back much easier and quicker because of your knowledge of you, yourself and your guiding principles.

How To Create Impact Using Your Guiding Principle(s)

I have been using my guiding principle since I was 14 years old to discover more about who I was and how to belong in any social setting, indifferent from any cultural, socio-economical, economical, or financial differences.

I learned what worked in the dance club was replicable, so I leaned into my talents and strengths with the intention to create value for every group of people, every club, every team, and every community I was part of.  

These are three ways I continue to create value today.

Here are three ways you can start creating impact in your world, too.

1.    Share With Others

The first person I shared my guiding principle with was my best friend, the one who dragged me to the dance club. She totally got it as soon as I shared it with her. Later she figured out hers and shared it with me. Our friendship has been going strong ever since; we have been friends for many many years.

• Share them with your friends.

The friends who will get it will do so with a smile and those who won’t, well… they haven’t been getting you for a while now anyways. Make it official, separate from them and create space for new friends to show up in your life who will get you.

• Share them with your family members.

Your family members will think they already know you inside and out, so there’s nothing new you could tell them. Yet, take the courage to share your guiding principle(s) with them and see where your discussion will lead you. Do not expect them to approve of them because you DO NOT NEED THEIR APPROVAL to be you. Just remember, even if they don’t understand it, they will be happy to know what your reasoning is behind your decisions and actions. But your life is your life. Choose to live it the way you want to live it. Just like they are choosing to live it the way they want to live it.

• Share them at your work with your team members, your boss, your boss’ boss, your mentor, and your coach.

The first thing I did at my corporate jobs was to post my guiding principles, beliefs and values on my cubicle walls, on the door, on my chair, on my locker, on a white board and everywhere I was allowed to. It generated numerous conversations, and it allowed space at work for me to show up and be seen for who I was. Start small and start intentionally just like Caroline Wanga did in her conversation with Ryan Roslansky, CEO at LinkedIn (The Path: With Caroline Wanga).

2.    Listen To Hear Others’ Guiding Principle(s)

Once I discovered the power behind knowing my guiding principle, I started being curious about others’.

‘What drives someone to make a “bad” decision?’ turned into ‘What’s their lens they see the world through and what are they protecting by making that particular decision?’

One of my early mentors told me once “Not all questions are the same. Put your focus on learning how to ask quality questions. Because through your thoughts you elevate yourself let your wise soul speak.”

When you start listening to hear others’ guiding principles, you stay open to hearing their words between the lines, their untold wishes, their deepest desires and fears, and their dearest dreams. You cut through the noise, and you are able to connect straight to their heart.

One of the most beautiful experiences in this world is to hear the other person’s heart sing (read more about my experience of my heart singing here.) 

3.    Transform Your Environment

“Who you are, is who you are. If you cannot be who you are, where you are, you change where you are, not who you are.” Caroline Wanga said, “Do not stop until you find the’ where’ where your ‘who’ is best. This generation has an opportunity to change the way of working that centers on the ‘who.’ ”

Similar to Caroline, I have been following who I was by changing where I was. I was not able to be myself where I grew up, so I followed the opportunities to live in Germany and now in the U.S.A. In contrary to what people think of me, I have not sought out either opportunities. They showed up in my life and I was able to choose them because I respected myself and what I wanted, above everybody else’s expectation of me.

To transform your environment, it can look like this:

• You transform your environment by starting to create value from within, from where you stand in ways that fits your talent. E.g., My talent is to organize events and to create detailed and inclusive plans. I let others deliver the plans and shine the day of the event.

• You transform your environment by creating a space where people can share their guiding principles and can talk about their embarrassing stories in a safe way. E.g., Once I asked my HR boss to buy us a whiteboard, for the team (she already had one in her office), so I could put it up in the common area and invite our team to start sharing a little more about who they were.

• You transform your environment by bringing new ideas, new concepts, and sometimes new people into it. E.g., Once I invited the finance team to meet with our HR team to “compare notes” a.k.a to discuss one particular process that we both were part of and were failing at (bad handovers and lots of re-work) and to find way to collaborate and improve both our team’s morale and performance.

• You transform your environment by saying no to it and saying yes to an invitation to step outside of it for a while to visit another environment. E.g., Once I took on a special project to help another organization develop their functional excellence. Not being available, other team members had stepped up and had risen to the occasion to learn some of my responsibilities and thus become eligible for promotions.

• You transform your environment by moving on. Sometimes we outgrow an environment and it can be hard to say goodbye. Yet, to continue our personal and professional growth we must stay receptive and notice where our next opportunity to serve others will be. When you don’t resist what could happen next (the flow of your life), you will stop searching and you will start being invited to cool opportunities – the ‘where’ will just show up without really looking for it. Just the other day someone asked me “Why me? Why is all this happening to me?” and my curiosity was more around “Why not you? Why are you the person for this opportunity?” Don’t let your fear of growing become an immovable obstacle. Going with the flow means moving towards something that you want. If that’s not the case in your life, have the courage to recognize you are not moving and decide what’s next for you.

So, find your embarrassing story and start sharing it with others, start listening to hear others’ guiding principles and transform your environment to create the impact that you were born to create.

If you would like support in finding your embarrassing story, I have opened up space in April to work with 10 individuals, privately and one-on-one. All proceeds will be donated to support my son’s team, the Mukilteo Robotics Team, to get to the World Vex Robotics Competition in Dallas, TX (Mukilteorobotics.org).