Authentic you: lessons from an unlikely source

Liz Handy just sent us a copy of a booklet for which she did the photography. It's a project she put together with a carers' group in part of the UK. Liz has a technique developed from David Hockney's montages (he did a huge Grand Canyon by sticking together Polaroids, you may remember). Liz's approach is to take photographs of people that represent different aspects of themselves, then put them into the same picture; so you will have three different versions of someone in different poses in the picture, representing the different facets of their life.

Liz sent me the booklet as she knows I spend a proportion of my time caring for my wife, who has Huntington's Disease, so she felt an insight into the lives of others would resonate. Which it does. But, there is something else here, which I find useful and am sharing here.

The great emphasis on 'being authentic' in leadership has left a lot of people in leadership positions slightly uncertain: they want to be as authentic as they can be, but there is a 'persona' we all develop that goes with each role in our life, and deciding which of the other aspects of the authentic 'us' to damp down or exclude from our work persona is not easy. We easily end up being different people in different situations.

Liz's visual work helps here, I think, in reconciling the different aspects of ourselves into a whole. For her and Charles Handy's book The New Philanthropists, they asked the people Charles interviewed to each represent themselves with five objectives and a flower, which Liz composed into a still life for each person.

Bringing the five most important aspects of yourself to life visually in this way makes you think deeply about who you are and what you value. Some of the business leaders Charles and Liz worked with said this was among the most self-revelatory exercises they had been through.

Liz's Suffolk Carers' booklet is downloadable from her website, below, under 'latest work'. I find another layer of inspiration in it that you may want to share: the resilience, good cheer, good grace and love with which the people in this booklet lead lives of everyday heroism would create one of the most dynamic workplaces in the world if it could be bottled. The young carers, in particular, display qualities of responsibility and leadership that, if and when they apply these to their chosen place of work, should make them immense assets.

Anyway, just a thought to muse on: what five objects would you choose to represent your life, purpose, values, the things you hold dear, how you spend your time, how you lead?

Liz's website is here with some examples: www.lizhandy.net