Lead Into It

44. And We’re Back: Leadership, Growth & Authenticity

• Sara Greco

Share episode

Welcome back to Lead Into It! After three years of military orders, a coaching certification, and personal growth, I’m back with fresh insights on leadership.

Since our last episode, I’ve led teams big and small, moved from Charleston to Florida’s Panhandle, and had a huge realization: the best leadership happens when we stop trying to fit a mold and just show up as ourselves. Through coaching, I’ve learned to listen differently, create space for others, and lean into authenticity—because that’s what builds trust and real buy-in.

Leadership isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being you.  And as we shift toward a more authentic way of leading, I can’t wait to explore what that means for all of us.

Let’s keep the conversation going—connect with me on Instagram and LinkedIn, subscribe to my Sunday newsletter, or reach out at sara@leadintoitco.

Excited to be back with you!

Sara:

Hi, this is Sara and you're listening to episode 44 of the Lead into a Podcast. Hello, hello and welcome. It's been such a long time and I know and I recognize that I am so sorry for the delay, but I appreciate your patience as I have gotten my feet on the ground and kind of figured out all the different things when it comes to leadership, podcasting and just you know, life. It has been a while. It has been almost three years since I published my last episode. I thoroughly enjoyed that run of Lead Into it. It was such a journey. I loved learning alongside of everyone. The conversations I had were so amazing and enlightening and I got to build a really cool community. I'm just so excited to tell you about all the things that have happened over the past couple of years and where we're going and what you can expect from this podcast and a few other announcements that are happening. It has, overall, just been really really cool to kind of see what I have done over the past couple of years, what the world has done, where we're at, what the world means, and yeah, so we'll start with where have I been? Well, let me tell you I have been all over the place. The last episode I released, I was living in Charleston, but before that, you all probably knew, I had lived in Dallas. I worked for Southwest Airlines and then COVID happened and there was a lot of different things that kind of contributed to me leaving the company, which was nothing bad, it was just the timing. They were offering a voluntary separation pay and after some thought and decision which ended up turning into a quick decision but it felt really right I decided to leave the company and to kind of go on military orders for a while, which I've been doing for the past several years.

Sara:

Once I left Dallas, I in the thick of the pandemic. Can you believe it's been five years, by the way? I just cannot believe it has already been five years. It feels like yesterday and forever ago. But in the thick of the pandemic I realized I wanted to be closer to my family. So I moved and I decided to move back in with my parents for a couple months. My parents were great, they were loving, they love me and like nothing wrong with that.

Sara:

But uh, just you know, felt like I was in my teenage years again and so, overall, decent experience spending time with my family, getting to see them full time and during that time I received a call from one of the colonels that I worked for and he asked if I would help out a team in Charleston. And it was a team that he had asked me about the year before but I wasn't quite sure about it at the time. And then when he reached back out, it was kind of like a sign, because I was still in the thick of doing my leadership stuff doing some podcasting and doing some other things leadership stuff that I'll get into and I was like perfect, I'll really get to engage and be a leader again. And so I did that for a while and this team love them to pieces. Charleston will always have a place in my heart. It was a great team and, uh, I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about building teams. Again, they were in a rough spot when I first got there and I had to make a lot of really hard decisions when I got there and overall was a really good experience and I was happy to have taken the opportunity. And so I went to Charleston and met some great people and then kind of fell into a good groove there and I made a decision to move from Charleston to the Florida Panhandle and that is where I have been for the past three years to the area of Fort Walden Beach, and it is a really great area. I've come to love it and I have met some incredible people, built a really good community and I'm really grateful that I ended up here Over the course of this time.

Sara:

When I was in Charleston, I led a team when I so it was like a 20 person team. Then I came into the panhandle and I supported a four person team, which was a crazy dynamic shift to go from 20 something to four, such a close knit team going from such a larger team, uh, so that was a huge transition. And then I helped out, uh, an exercise in the Indo-Pacific area called mobility guardian and leading a huge project, huge project, um, I call it a. I sprinted a marathon. It was the coolest couple of weeks I've ever done, so intense and really, really cool to see the fruition of all of our efforts and that was just an incredible experience. And then I've just been hopping on and off orders since and it has been such a cool experience and I'm in the U S air force reserve.

Sara:

For the new listeners hopping on also, welcome. We appreciate you, and the one thing that I will say about the air force reserve is it is a choose your own adventure, and I have been able to choose my own adventure for the past several years and I'm so grateful for what was kind of supposed to be a side thing for me. It's turned into my stability and I'm just incredibly grateful for the people and the opportunities that continue to arise during this time, but the opportunity and the flexibility that I have surrounding it too. So that's really what I've done over the past five years. Over the course of this time of moving all over wherever I realized that leadership is still important to me and leadership is still needed in the community, in our culture, in everyday lives, and my passion for leadership has never wavered. It has been something that I continue to be passionate about. I continue to see the need for and I see a need for it in almost everything I do and touch, and it's incredible to see the impact that good leadership and it's sad to see how bad leadership can impact everyone.

Sara:

Additionally, I got my coaching certification and I'm working on my credentialing. For the credentialing, I still need a few hours before I can test. That should be coming up soon and I'm super excited to receive that credentialing. But with that, I have continued to build my coaching practice. Uh, that kind of is the other hand of lead into it, and this is one-on-one coaching. This is team coaching, team building. But it's pretty cool to say that I think a lot of businesses build their business and then decide to have a podcast. I'm proud to say that the podcast came first because I saw that there was a need for a source of leadership, training, information, inspiration for everyone, and so the podcast became that resource for me to bring people along in that journey. And now it has become a different aspect of my business and my world and I continue to see the value in how this podcast provides for people.

Sara:

When it comes to going through the coaching certification, let me tell you, you enter a program for coaching as one person and exit a whole, nother person. My listening skills and understanding skills and empathy and emotional intelligence skills have completely up-leveled. I didn't know how like I thought I was self-aware and now I'm seeing how much more self-aware I am today. And when it comes to coaching and leading, the way that I lead is totally different than the way I used to lead and I love the transformation that it has taken because of several things. First, I listen so much better than I used to and I listened to the whole aspect of the person instead of just what they're saying. So I look at their mindset, I look at their body language, I look at the words that keep coming up for them. I actually look at what I have heard, like what is actually going on in their life, because I'm so intentional about asking them about their life, because that bleeds from personal to professional. And once we recognize all these things, the way we lead changes. So when it comes to seeing how I used to lead to now, what I decide and how to lead, I love the way I lead now and I'm grateful for the opportunity. And it was really cool to kind of see how the style transformed from when I started the certification program Cause I started my assignment at Charleston about the same time that I started the program to now, and it was a two-year program.

Sara:

I'm happy to answer any questions If anyone has any questions about coaching program, but what I see about myself and how I make decisions and how I decide I want to show up in each moment is now so much more important to me than the perception I give and as somebody who I mean. When you're in ROTC and in corporate, there's a world that you're trying to just fit into and this might be me, but I feel like there's other people who have felt this way before but you try to fit into this world and try to fit the vibe of whatever leadership is at this organization. And the more I went through this program and understood what coaching was and how it can enhance who you are as a leader and as a person, I realized how much more I wanted to be authentically me and how much more I wanted to authentically lead the people around me, because I noticed that when I led in my most authentic self, I gained more trust, respect and buy-in from the people that I led, because they could see that I was passionate about what it was that I was truly into, whatever the situation was or the project that we needed to get done. I could see how challenging it was for them, but I was like, let's I. It's challenging for me to come on, let's go, we can do this. And one of the coolest things that I think I've encouraged myself to do is to just be authentically me, but in the quirkiest way possible, because that's who I am or that's part of who I am.

Sara:

I don't want to say that's all of who I am, but I tend to add a lot of quirks in the workplace and the day-to-day. I will tell you, everyone will tell you that, in who has surrounded my life, but when it became part of, when you're part of the military, you try to create this persona a lot of ways, especially as you move up in rank, because you feel like you're supposed to fit this mold. You're, you're fitting into a puzzle piece and I do believe that you should stay professional I'm not saying to not be professional and over the course of this time of me just inserting little parts of myself, when it became like quirky or just my full authenticity, then I felt more in my power, in the weirdest way but in the coolest way, and the people that kind of joined me for that journey could see that. So all of this to say all of this to say authenticity, I'm learning how important it is in leadership and how much we need it. Right now we're moving away from influencers, not saying that influencers are bad, but like the portrayed self of perfection. Nobody expects anyone to be perfect. That's kind of what we had been seeing on social media for the past several years. But now we're going into this who are we? What is authentically me, and how does that come into the workplace, especially with folks returning back to the office? So, as you come along for this podcast, which I'll go over kind of how it's going to work in the future, I want you to see what feels right to you, what is your leadership style, what feels like you. Every leader, every person is going to be different. You don't have to lead in the way that the person before you led. That's not how leadership works. Leadership is how you lead, how you create power in yourself and for those around you, and I'm excited to see how the conversations kind of evolve and as we go through the next several episodes, please take what you want from each episode.

Sara:

I've always said that I will release episodes even if I'm not completely happy with them, because I think that there's a piece of information or some value that someone in the audience, someone out there, will gain and will gather from that particular section of whatever podcast. So I don't expect you to agree with every single aspect of every single podcast that is going to be released. I don't think anyone ever will, and that's totally fine. Take what feels right for you. Take what feels right for you. That is the main thing. I hope for this. Okay, what can you look forward to when it comes to this podcast? Okay, let me tell you about the journey, about what this podcast started as and what I tried and what didn't work.

Sara:

When I first started this podcast, I had every intention of releasing episodes weekly. Every intention, intention of releasing episodes weekly, every intention. And I was hardcore going for it for the first like two to three months, and it was so much fun. It was so much fun. I just couldn't keep up with the pace of it. I couldn't. It was just a lot of work because between the interviews and then editing and then the promotions, it was just a lot. And as a one person show, it was one of those things where I recognized what is my capacity and what's my capability. And so then I went every other week. I was like, okay, this sounds great, like I can keep up with this pace. I wanted to keep everyone engaged. So I added in a coffee chat every other week that didn't have a full episode and it was just a five minute segment of a previous episode. I loved those didn't have a full episode and it was just a five minute segment of a previous episode. I loved those. I think those are great and maybe those will come back.

Sara:

But then, you know, life happened and when I worked and lived in Dallas, I was able to figure out a good balance for this. And then, when I lived in Raleigh, I was able to figure out a good balance for this when I moved to Charleston and was leading a team. It was a lot, because when you're leading a team and you're trying to make them the high performers that you know that they can be, it takes a lot out of you, and so during that time my effort towards the podcast faded off and it eventually just faded. It was one of those things that I think there's an episode about if you want to listen to it. There's an analogy where you're holding glass balls versus plastic balls, and in my life at that point I felt like I was juggling a lot of plastic balls I need to put down so I could focus on the glass balls that I kept juggling. So that was a choice that I made and for the entire time since then. So the last episode I released was in November 2022.

Sara:

Since then, this podcast has been completely on my mind and a goal of mine to get back into, and so I took some time to really figure it out, because this is not something that I want to pick up and put back down pick up and put back down and leave people hanging Because, again, I think that we all deserve good leadership and it should be something that we can continue to grow upon, no matter where we're at in life. So I have decided to make seasons of the podcast, so what you can look forward to is a 10 episode season, in the spring and in the fall, and this is episode one of the 10 episode season. And I have some awesome, so great guests lined up for you, and the guest lineup continues to get better, and some of them are similar backgrounds, some of them are completely different, but they all provide really, really, really good information about their journey, advice from all aspects of life, and I'm so excited for you to join me in listening in on our conversations, because I love doing these things. I love these podcast episodes so much, and really it's interesting that you see a lot. You're seeing a lot of podcasts now, which is it's interesting to see how they've evolved over the past couple of years since I've been on hiatus, and what I want to continue to bring that I think the original lead into it episodes had is the authenticity, the conversations that just flowed, but really good information that I think people deserve to know and to reflect upon and to grow in themselves. It feels so good to be back. I think now's a perfect time to be doing these episodes and to be releasing them. I'm really looking forward to you listening to all the conversations that we've had. I'm excited to continue recording conversations for future episodes and I have now engaged with that mindset. So, guests, I will continue to ask for some really cool guests to come on the show.

Sara:

As you continue to listen to the show, please subscribe. That really helps me and the show gets some love. Also, rate it and review it. It's been a while since somebody has reviewed it. I'd greatly appreciate it and I will thank you on a future episode.

Sara:

Additionally, reach out. If you have any questions that you want me to answer or maybe our guests to answer. I can always reach back out and ask them. Tell me about some leadership challenges that you're facing or topics that you'd like to hear about. I am all ears. Leadership is so much more than just managing a team. It is so much more than making a project happen. It is almost everything that we touch and everything that we do, and so I'd love to hear what your challenges are, what you're hoping to grow and expand upon. Go ahead and send it to sarah at leadintoitco. That's S-A-R-A at leadintuitco, and we'll take that for future episodes and try to coordinate it.

Sara:

I want to hear from you. This is for you, and I would be so thrilled to have a back and forth conversation with everyone to kind of build what this foundation has already created. Also, continue to follow me on social media, and I'll post on Instagram and LinkedIn. I also, in October, I started a sub stack, uh, which I send out every Sunday, and it has either leadership knowledge or something that I've been thinking about, or it'll relate to something in this podcast, um, so I'd love for you to subscribe. You'll find the link in the show notes. Again, I am so excited for this season. I think it's going to be a lot of fun to share these episodes and these conversations. I'm excited for everyone to continue to grow and to build upon the knowledge that they have and to see what they're, what's possible, just to see the good things that are out there and see what power that they actually have in their day-to-day life. So thank you so much and I look forward to seeing you over the next couple of weeks and please enjoy these future episodes.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Sara Greco

Host