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All of us, by the way, are leaders in some capacity or another, whether it be the leader of your home, or whether you’re a leader of the community, we are all leaders in some aspect, according to Kim Dudash, certified life coach.

A recent Women in Business gathering – hosted regularly by the Morristown Area Chamber of Commerce – provided the opportunity for Dudash to share an abbreviated version of the group sessions she offers to executive and management-level members of the business community.

“I work with leaders to help them go from good to great in their leadership life. I work with a lot of executives. I work with some of the best and brightest leaders across the U.S. A lot of my work is not necessarily in the area, but it’s across the country,” Dudash said. “I work with teams to help them work better together. You might have a lot of people in your workplace that independently are rock stars but you get them together and it all falls apart.”

She initiated a mini-workshop that included discussion among attendees about making and meeting goals.

“Take a minute and discuss with the person sitting next to you this question: if you could do anything you wanted to do or be anything that you wanted to be, what would it be? And, what’s keeping you from doing that?” Dudash said.

Restaurateurs, Broadway stars and basketball champions were just a few of the missed career opportunities in the immediate vacinity. In contrast, there were those in the audience whose careers were exactly what they had dreamed of doing as a younger person.

Whether speaking to a group or working one-on-one with clients, Dudash says the one thing she helps them to understand is that there are two ‘game of leadership.’

“There are two ways of being. There’s the way we show up everyday; there’s our outward actions, our outward behaviours – it’s who people see when they interact with us. It’s all of those outward behaviors we have,” Dudash said.

“The inner game is everything going on beneath the surface, what I call the internal operating system. Just like your iPhone, you have an IOS. It’s all the unconscious biasis you have developed over the years, the patterns of thought you have, the way you make decisions. It’s also the big assumptions that you make about yourself, or about the environment or about your community. All of these things are really running on autopilot in your unconscious.

“We’re not even aware of everything going on inside of us that actually affect how we show up outwardly in our lives everyday,” Dudash said.

“A lot of times we’ll set goals for ourselves – for me it was, ‘I want to start my own business; I want to be an executive coach,” Dudash said. “But I’ll be honest with you ladies, at the time I was a single mom. This was a dream I had had for a very long time. I was divorced and single for 15 years. That whole time I had this vision, a goal, of what I wanted to do, of what I wanted to be. But I kept coming up with all these reasons why it wouldn’t work: ‘I’m a single person; I can’t start my own business, how would I ever? I can’t do this. I can’t speak in front of people.’ There were all these things that I kept telling myself I couldn’t do.

“Now, was all of that conscious, on a conscious level? No,” Dudash said. “A lot of it was in the back of my mind. I call those ‘gremlins,’ those little gremlins that keep telling you the things that you can’t do.

Research shows, according to Dudash, that human beings are wired for two things.

“We are wired for safety and we wired to try to protect ourselves from dying. So, as our technology has evolved – everything exponentially is evolving into something greater – we as human beings, we really haven’t evolved that much. So we are still trying to protect ourselves.

Dudash explained: “Our bodies are wired to respond similarly as someone from the ‘caveman’ era trying to protect themselves from a bear or a dinosaur; when they are running, it is fight or flight. We do that with missed deadlines, speaking in front of people, we have that same physical, or biological, response. We are wired for safety and we are wanting to protect ourselves from dying,” she said.

That internal wiring doesn’t stop us from making extraordinary plans, however.

“We make lofty goals. For example, I want to start my own business. That was so big and lofty and that was really at the very end of the process. I had a lot of steps to take before I could ever take that one. What I really needed to do was make sure that the goals I was reaching for were actually aligned with the values I had for my life.

“A lot of times we start to make choices about our careers or the type of life that we want to have or the types we want to do and we’ve never, ever taken the time to really dig deep and understand ‘what are my core values, what is it that really drives me?’

“We make decisions or we set goals based on what we think we are supposed to do. ‘Well, I’m supposed to do this. This is the next step that I’m supposed to do:’ Things that we’ve learned throughout our lifetime, from our families, from our communities – ‘This is what I’m supposed to do next,’ or (we think this) ‘Everyone else is so much more important than I am.’ Now, do you think that on a conscious level? Maybe not. But I will tell you that I learned that I really had this unconscious idea that everyone’s happiness was more important than mine. So, the things that I did – I did because unconsciously I believed everyone else came first. I didn’t know what my core values were. I didn’t know what really drove me.

This looks really simple, but it is not easy. I’m going to ask you ladies to commit to taking care of yourself and set aside some time to focus on you and what you really want. Each page is going to take you deeper and deeper. A lot of my clients start here. It doesn’t matter if it’s the CFO, the CEO of an organization, we start right here. Let’s identify what our core values are and what we really want.

Utilizing tools that Dudash has developed, she encouraged the group to “really stop and take a minute and say, ‘How am I doing in these areas: health, relationships, recreation, spirituality, career, finance, personal growth?’

“We can’t figure out what we want in 30 minutes or less. Rate them from 0 to 10 as to how satisfied you are in that area. That’s going to be eye opening. I’m working with a client who wants to start a nonprofit. The process is overwhelming for her. What we’ve had to start with is to identify what is actually holding her back. She said, ‘That’s really hard.’”

So how did Dudash get where she is today?

“I had a coach,” she said “These things are hard to do on our own; and on our own, we’re not going to ask ourselves the hard questions. On our own, we don’t even know what the questions are. That’s why a coach can be so important. Identify ‘How am I doing?’”

Dudash encouraged the group to ask themselves questions.

“’What’s going well in my life? And then, ‘What needs improvement?’ And really think about it. What specifically needs to change? Getting down into it, instead of this grand ‘Yes, this needs to change … Oh well.’ What are the top three areas that you are most dissatisfied with? What specifically needs to change – and even further – what might this change look like. If I were to be able to change this particular thing in my life, that would make me more satisfied, what would that look like?’

Dudash then let her audience in on a secret.

“We can’t fully let go of the life we are living until we can envision a life that we are heading to. There is a method to this madness. Now I can see what my life will look like if I make these changes. Because we can’t fully let go of where we are until we have a vision for where we might go. That’s an important step we (often) leave out when we are setting these goals for ourselves because we really don’t know what it’s going to look like. And then those aspects of our being that try to protect us and keep us safe – our psychological immune system – create a situation where we have one foot on the gas pedal, to move us forward to meet our goals and to be what and who we want to be, and then we also have our foot on the brake. This is all happening on an unconscious level. Do you realize that we only use 5% of our brain on a conscious level? Everything else is happening on autopilot beneath the surface.

Dudash shared her career goal.

“My mission is to enlighten and inspire leaders to hope, to help them raise their level of conscious awareness to begin living their life on purpose.”

Living life on purpose takes work – including a good bit of digging.

“Some of this stuff that lies underneath the surface that we either don’t realize is there, don’t want to deal with it or it is just happening for us,” Dudash said. “Life is so busy for us. Everything is going so fast, so fast, so fast that I can’t get involved with the things that I want to be involved in because I feel like my life is running me, I’m not running my life. We have to take that time to consciously decide that we are going to live life on purpose. It is a decision that we have to make; we have to stop and take time to breathe. And y’all, it’s takes practice. Stuff doesn’t happen overnight. It really takes practice.”

Getting started can be whittled down to one question, Dudash said.

“What’s the very next step that I need to do?”

For more information or to set up an appointment or group presentation with Kim, visit dudashexecutivecoaching.com.