Leadership Journeys [63] - Maria Pennanen - "Over the years you become more forgiving to yourself."

This is the Leadership Journey series on the Choosing Leadership Podcast.I believe we all have a lot to learn from each other's stories - of where we started, where we are now, and our successes and struggles on the way. With this series of interviews, my attempt is to give leaders an opportunity to share their stories and for all of us to learn from their generous sharing. If you know a leader whom you would like to see celebrated on the show, please send me a message on LinkedIn with their name.In the interview, Maria shares the role curiosity has played in her life to bring her where she is today. We talk about the fear of failure, how often people perceive her as being scary, and how she deals with that by sharing and being open about her own imperfections and vulnerabilities.You can find Maria at the below linkshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mariapennanen/https://twitter.com/PennanenMariaIn the interview, Maria sharesa feature that's missing from many of these kind of evaluation programs or let's say coaching workshops, is that they focus on the individual. And I realized that you have to always think about the whole team.my driver has always been curiosity,I think my mistake was always that. Mixed up empathy with sympathy and didn't understand that actually empathy is that you just have to understand that they, people have the right to think what they want about things And you don't have to agree with that. And for me, that was really a, you know, big Aha moment.what would you do if you couldn't fail? And I think we have all probably, inside of us this fear of failing that we are not, I don't know whether we are not good enoughsometimes it's very hard to, to admit that, okay, now it's time to just to stop and let the company go down.it makes us just humanyou can't force peopleI'm told that I'm very scaryI meditate every morning, 20 minutes and I do write this kind of thing called Morning paper. Which is like, just like a, brain flow on the paper, whatever is in your mind, or, and sometimes, of course, new ideas come that, that you want to use. Exercising, I think keeping yourself fit is very important.Less is more