Branding The Lie: Escaping The High-Achiever's Trap | Kendra Dahlstrom
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One is called the Compass Method, which is about coming back to your own core values and looking at what is your own internal compass. Not the one that you think you need to live by because the world tells you, but what is your own true north? What is your own internal compass? It's about awareness, reaching that inflection point, making a decision. What do I want to do about it? Then you move through the transformation, that rite of passage, the undoing process.
My mission really hasn't changed. It's actually quite comical. If you look at sort of the movement of entrepreneurship and how we roll, some of what I help clients with, I needed obviously to do my own work as well and realized that the Unworthy Leader podcast meant so much to me. We can talk more about it coming out of the hospital. It really resonated with me and I wanted to strike like a visceral chord with people. At the same time, I was branding the lie. not the truth, which is that they're really, people that feel unworthy are really just high achievers that are just in the continuous pattern of chronic success and achievements. And a lot of it really aligns with your TEDx talks. I'm super excited to talk with you.
Awesome. Well, let's get right into it. I mean, I, you know, let's start there. I really, I'd like to start with this idea of you branded the lie. What does that mean? And maybe talk us through that because that's a really heady idea.
Yeah. Well, what I came out of from my trauma-informed background and then some lived experiences was this idea that I was unworthy. And, you know, as a Christ follower and somebody who's done a lot of my own healing work, I realized, okay, I know that's not true mentally, but somewhere somatically and in my body, I still... felt those lies. And so I really wanted to message to all those leaders out there and really kind of cut the crap and have this conversation around all of these high achievers out there and all of these leaders that I've worked with over my 25 years in corporate, including myself, who underlying have this sense of unworthiness and whether they identify as imposter syndrome or whether just
selective unworthiness, maybe it's particular scenarios and situations, it's contextual or whether it's pervasive, it can really be all over the place. And so I think that I really wanted to speak to that and have the audience have a very visceral reaction and like, oh, she's talking about the unworthy leadership. I can relate to that. What I realized through my own journey of launching and then publishing 26 episodes in my first season of my podcast since last February was that I felt unworthy having a podcast because I felt everyone out there has one. There's so many to choose from. Why me? I'm not famous. I haven't written a book. I'm sort of always been known as the ghost in the boardroom because I work behind all these really successful executives, but I'm not really a huge known name.
I was struggling with my own feelings of unworthiness. And so as that's evolved, I realized that what I'm really looking to do is help high achievers and really circumvent the root cause that's driving high achievers to still feel so unfulfilled.
I can relate to this to an incredible amount. And honestly, a lot of my own work is maybe a different angle, but a similar path. I came to the realization very early in my career that I shouldn't say really early. I came to the realization in my career after a few major setbacks. And, you know, I had I had two jobs in a row. that I loved. Executive leadership position, one was a CMO position, one was a CEO position, and I loved them. And both times they ended up in me getting fired. And in having to go back, reflect on those experiences, your first instinct is... it's not my fault. Why did they do this to me? All this kind of stuff. And it was, that was really the moment when I started down my own path and said, and when I did some self-awareness stuff, it came back to ego, right?
It was always this sense of ego. And I think a lot of our unworthy feelings, and I'm very interested in your take on this, is ego.
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