Julie Foudy knows how important each part of her life matters to her. She can say what deserves her attention. She's aware. She thinks about these things and can see how the decisions that are important in her life fit into the big picture of what really matters to her. She missed her high school graduation for the National Team, but that was okay, because the National Team was more important to her. She learned how to make these conscious and deliberate choices based on what she cared about, what mattered to her, from her parents, who compelled her to make her own choices. And that led her to have the strength of character to demand, for example, to know if Reebok was using child labor and went to Pakistan to prove that, before endorsing their products. And that was a big risk for her, because she might have lost a lot of money in the endorsement deal, but she knew what mattered. She chose Stanford over the University of North Carolina, because it was going to be better for her in the long term with respect to her academic aspirations. Her belief in equality. Her fight for parity for men and women in the compensation that they were getting in the soccer world. All these choices were based on knowing what really mattered to her. So these were just some examples from Foudy's life and career that illustrate this skill. How can you develop, if it's something you want to focus on? Well, here's one exercise that you might try that might be useful. Imagine your ideal future self and think about the different parts of your life. Your work, your home, your community. See if you can identify a couple of features of each of these different roles. Let's say you're a mother. You're a friend. You're an athlete. You're engaged in community politics. Those are activities that you might be playing a role in somehow and in some time in the future. As you think about this ideal scenario of the different roles that you'd be playing, what are the most important aspects of each of those roles to you? What matters most to the person in that role as mother, as friend, as community activist, for example? And then, take a step back and ask yourself, well how confident am I in thinking that I could enact those roles successfully? You might even put that on a rating scale of one being not at all confident to ten being very confident. And then think about what evidence you've got that helps you to see whether you are accurate in your assessment, because many people have self defeating ideas that hold them back from pursuing what really matters to them. You might want to look at sort of accomplishments that you've already had. Or feedback from other people that would give you a realistic picture of what indeed is possible for you, as you think about what it means for you to be real, in the sense of pursuing what really matters. Knowing what matters and being able to pursue it. Let's look at the second skill of the Be Whole skill that Julie Foudy illustrates so well, and that is helping others. She looks for ways to help many different kinds of people. And as she does so, of course, her web of support grows helping teammates, colleagues, neighbors, and especially, the next generation of women athletes. She sees how relationships are an important aspect of enriching her life. If you look at the leadership academy, for example, it's a vehicle for developing the sport of soccer for women, but also for helping girls develop a sense of self esteem and confidence at the Global Girl Media as a spokesperson role she plays for that organization. Again she helps to mentor to train video journalists. Her aspiration, which she's been successful in many ways in achieving, is to empower young women, to help them develop a sense of purpose. So she sees herself as a role model for these kids. She's a part of Athletes for Hope, which assists people in need, star athletes from many different sports coming together to provide assistance of various kinds to people in need. She's also a part of Beyond Sport, which is an agency for bringing athletes together to create positive social change in the world. So for Julie Foudy, like many of the leaders we admire, giving to other people with her time, her passions, her interests, is a way of creating meaning. And ultimately building support from other people for the things that she needs help with. So, there's a lot of people writing and talking about the idea of giving and receiving help as social capital has become an idea that is one of great currency in the world of leadership development and growth. Here's another way for you to think about how to develop the skill of helping others. Most people, not everyone but most people feel good when they're helping other people, yet it is very easy for us to fall back to the natural human impulse to be acting selfishly. We are at some level, animals after all. So how do you appeal to the higher Good and take the time and effort to be helpful to other people. It's worth thinking about and we can learn from Julie Foudy's example, who helped many people on a much more public stage than you or I might. But there are things that you can do to strengthen this skill. So, for example, you might identify a goal that you've got that is good for you, something that you want. But that has a benefit to other people, especially once you start to think about, how does this thing that I'm trying to make happen benefit others? Let's say you wanted to become a member of a homeowners association in your neighborhood. To upgrade the value of your property and perhaps to help your neighbors. Well, who wins from your engagement in that activity and how do they benefit? How would you know? Well you might talk to some of your neighbors to find out what the association means to them and how your involvement in it would be helpful to them in their daily lives. That's just one small example, you can imagine many ways in which you don't really know how what you do helps other people until you think about how does what I do have a positive impact on people around me, either directly, or perhaps indirectly? And once you discover what it is that your help can provide in terms of making life a little better for other people, try to provide it in a way that doesn't cost you very much, because otherwise you can burn out. So the big idea here is a pretty simple one, and it's imbedded in most of the world's religions, isn't it? Look for ways to be helpful to other people because it's good for you, and it's good for us. The last of the skills that I'll speak to in Julie Foudy's case is challenging the status quo. Julie Foudy challenges traditional assumptions about how things are done. She, over time, grew less constrained by convention, and bolder about taking on issues that she saw needed to be changed. She was willing to speak out and to try to make change happen in the world around her. She's less concerned about how other people might think about her, than about doing the right thing, and trying to make positive change happen. Going to Pakistan to assess their labor practices, that hadn't been done before, but when she did that, other athletes took notice and were inspired by it and started to do things like that. Battling against the forces of, that were trying to repeal Title IX, that was designed to create parity in women's sports. She expressed dissent and demonstrated a willingness there to challenge sexist institutional arrangements. And applied a kind of tenacity to that effort, the same kind of tenacity that helped her win world championships to her efforts and they were successful. When asked if she had a magic wand, what would she wish for in the future and what she said was, kids who believe they can become the leaders they want to be. She didn't have the kind of role models that she is now aspiring to be for the next generation. Her wish, is to ensure that the girls coming up after her are confident in being able to challenge the stereotypes that might be held for them to find who they are, whether it's an extroverted leader or an introverted leader pursuing whatever matters. But to have the freedom to do that despite social conventions. To be true to you. That is her wish for the next generation. Now challenging the status quo is hard, it's risky. Whenever you try to make something new happen, you hit resistance, whether it's inside of you or in the world around you. Through people who might be saying no, or regulations or traditional norms, maybe it is inside you, maybe it's your own fear, anxiety, ignorance about what's possible, guilty about trying something that might seem to be selfish. Wherever that resistance is, to be able to challenge the status quo is the first step in seeing how you can make a positive impact to make the world better, to change things. How do you build this skill? There's a lot of different things that you could try. Here is one evidence based method that is an exercise that might be useful to you. And that involves testing assumptions about small things. So imagine yourself to be a scientist, and the laboratory that you are working in is your life. Spend a couple of days, some small part of a couple of days like a scientist looking in your everyday life for something new that you might want to try, like an experiment that you haven't done before. Small step, but don't judge, just write down ideas for innovation. And what you might want to do differently to make things better for yourself and for other people. Choose one of those, maybe it's feedback on a prototype for a business idea that you've got, or maybe you'd like to try getting off of social media for some portion of some of your day. Or maybe it's trying some new way of delegating, it could be anything. The key part here is to think for a bit about what are the assumptions I'm making about why things have to be the way they are, that might be wrong? To challenge those assumptions, and to find somebody you can talk them over with. Because you could be wrong. Because those assumptions might well be worth challenging. By exercising those aspects of your mind, you become more skilled and more confident, in challenging assumptions wherever they might hold you back from having a positive impact on the world. Well, Julie Foudy, she knew what mattered to her. She presents an inspiring and vivid example of someone who, well, she had a dream, and that was the World Cup Team, the women's World Cup Team, that she helped to make happen. She saw inequity in the world and stood up for it and for other women athletes in doing so, her people. In the face of injustice, she had a sense of hope and optimism about leaving the world better off for the people following after her. She was able to and continues to reap the benefits that are available to all of us by thinking creatively about how to bring together the different parts of our lives in a way that creates a kind of harmony over the course of our lives. Through her career, the role she plays in her family. Now as a mother, and as a wife, as an advocate for women's empowerment, as someone who is keen to help other people to see how they can live healthy lifestyles. These all come together in the life and work of Julie Foudy. Based on her own experience and her awareness of how shifting girls' mindsets about what they think is possible, she committed herself to building their confidence through her leadership academy. And if you see the videos of people at her leadership academies, which you can do online, you'll be inspired too, as you see these girls screaming at the top of their lungs. Choose to matter. And how they are really internalizing that idea. She's making that happen for them. She got support when she needed it to challenge traditional assumptions in the world that were big issues, that meant resistance to her initiatives to try to make change. And she got that support. As we all must in trying to make new things happen in the world. Well all right, next up is our last exemplar, the Boss, Bruce Springsteen. We'll explore his life and career, the lessons it teaches us and then draw some conclusions from these stories, and what they mean for your future.
