How to learn and nurture leadership skills?
It starts within us! Join Women Leaders’ Circles!
Hi my Substack friends!
Hope you have had a great week so far ❤️
In today’s post, I would love to share with you one of the best things that have happened to me in Saigon this year, amidst the challenges and chaos of 2024! I feel like my Substack has been full of challenges and self-doubt this year as a leader, a founder, and a human 🤣 😅 Time to bring some wholesomeness and joy to this little Internet corner 😁
Over the past few months, I had the opportunity to join the first Women Leaders Circles cohort in Sai Gon started by 3 wonderful women Tara Hill, Mina Chung, and Huong Tran.
I came across Circles quite randomly following chi Huong Tran’s LinkedIn posts. Surprisingly, Circles came at an oddly perfect time, helping me navigate a big transition period - ending my 4-year entrepreneurship journey.
During this period, I found myself battling negative thoughts, comparing my path to others, and second-guessing my decisions. These feelings often left me questioning my priorities, values, and goals. What is truly important to me? What paths have I left behind? How can I live in alignment with my true self?
There were moments when I felt utterly lost—detached from my purpose and unsure of my next steps. But Circles helped me find clarity, slowly but surely. Through the stories, life experiences, and support I received from other members, I was reminded that I wasn’t alone. The tools and frameworks we explored, combined with the support and open-mindedness of the group, gave me the courage to navigate this transition.
More than just teaching leadership skills, the Circle experience helped me reconnect with myself. As Tara often reminded us in our sessions:
Leadership starts from within. To become better leaders for others, we need to first become better leaders within ourselves.
I have read books and articles about leadership before. However, I’ve realized the majority of things I tend to focus on consuming are more related to contextual/short-term management skills without understanding what leadership is.
In this post, I am excited to share with you what the WLC program is about and some of my takeaways on leadership from the program.
About the Women Leaders Circles Program (WLC)
The Women Leaders Circles (WLC) program was originally launched out of Stanford Business School and has now been adapted for Vietnam. Its core mission is to empower and support women leaders by bringing together small, tight-knit peer groups of around 6-8 participants.
Under the guidance of lead facilitator Tara Hoang Ngoc Hill, an executive coach and Stanford MBA graduate, these peer groups create a safe space for authentic sharing, in-depth support, and high-quality connections. Tara’s approach focuses on fostering self-awareness and resilience while helping participants build the confidence to lead in their own unique way.
What I like about Circles’ program is its holistic approach. It is designed as follows:
Self Awareness + Self Trust + Supportive Community + Tactical Skills
= Enhanced Leadership + Improved Resilience
Here is the outline of the program that I’ve gone through at Circle:
Lifeline & Values
Wheel of Life
Strengths & Energy Finder
Career Goals & Leadership Style
Inner Critic
Resilience
The program can be grouped into three key phases:
Reflecting on our life experiences: In the first sessions, we explored the events, places, and people that shaped us into who we are today. We reflected on our proudest moments and biggest challenges, distilling the values we hold dear. This exercise revealed profound insights for me:
I realized how much I value personal growth and learning, especially in my career.
I noticed that while I care deeply about family and relationships, I often deprioritize them, leading to guilt and a constant desire to “make up for” lost time.
I recognized that I’m still unclear about my core values and that I am often influenced by others' opinions, which unsettles me.
Understanding our strengths, weaknesses, and energy: The next phase focused on identifying our strengths and energy zones - what gives us energy and what drains it. This distinction was powerful. It helped me realize that leadership is not just about improving our strengths but also about finding environments that energize us. Strengths guide what we do well; energy tells us where we thrive. For me, this has been key in understanding how to navigate my next steps. I’ve realized that:
My greatest strengths lie in planning, execution, and leading by example.
My potential blind spots are relationships as I often prioritize getting things done over building relationships with people I work with.
My zone of genius is around setting up systems and processes for other people to implement. I also feel in flow when I analyze what the problem is and how we can solve it.
Understanding our inner critic and building resilience: In the final sessions, we examined how we handle stress and the voice of our inner critic. I learned to pay attention to my thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and body signals. During my transition period, I was stressed out about what was next. Negative thoughts about my self-worth and self-confidence came up very often. Listening to other people’s sharing helped me feel calmer and heard as I know I am not alone in this journey. Being aware of all these self-critical thoughts helped me become more patient with myself and trust that I will eventually find my path.
WLC Takeaways
One of the biggest lessons I took away from WLC is that leadership isn’t defined by a title or position. It's about leading ourselves - being aware of our strengths, weaknesses, and inner critics, and using this knowledge to build confidence and resilience.
For me, leadership starts with the smallest actions I take every day: in my work, with my teammates, my housemates, and my family. When I first joined MO, I wasn’t a formal leader, but I took every opportunity to lead projects, take initiatives, and propose ideas. Over time, as my confidence grew, my cofounder recognized my ability to lead and promoted me. Even today, though I still experience imposter syndrome, I try to lean into my strengths and use my insights to address the areas where I need to grow.
After participating in WLC, I think there are three 3 critical elements to learn and develop leadership skills, which are:
Self-awareness: Understanding who we are and what drives us is the foundation.
A supportive network or mentor: Surrounding ourselves with people who offer guidance and perspectives is invaluable.
Tactical skills: Communication, management, and decision-making are critical, but they must be built on a foundation of self-awareness and support.
Leadership is a lifelong journey. While tactical skills help us lead others in different contexts, it’s our core values and self-awareness that give us the resilience to face new challenges and grow as leaders.
Thus, I think it’s important to invest as much time in building self-awareness and a supportive network as in developing tactical skills.
WLC Resources
Below are some of the resources I’ve learned from Circles that I found super helpful!
1. On building self-awareness
These are a few powerful exercises from Circles that I found very helpful:
Lifeline Exercise: Reflecting on significant life events to understand how they shaped your values.
Strengths & Energy Finder: A great tool for identifying what gives you energy and what drains you, helping you align your work with your natural strengths.
Inner Critics: Learning to identify and manage the negative thoughts that hold us back.
Stress Zones: Learning to identify the types of stress that we experience and how we can manage stress to experience growth instead of leading to burnout.
*For these exercises, it’s best to have a facilitator or coach to guide you through this process. Bonus if you have a close friend or teammate to do these reflections with.
These are a few extra readings from Circles that I found very helpful:
5 questions to help identify your values by Susan David
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown
Leadership Styles & The skill of adaptivity by Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
6 Leadership Styles by Daniel Goleman
A Simple Way to Map Out Your Career Ambitions by Marc Effron
2. On building a supportive network
Join Circles!!! I’ve had the chance to meet incredible women leaders from Circles, some of whom have become my wonderful mentors and friends. If you are in Saigon and are looking to find your safe, support network of women leaders, please consider joining!
Besides Circles, I will share some of my tips and experiences in finding mentors and building a supportive network/community in future posts!
3. On building tactical skills
I am going to read Playing Big by Tara Mohr as I love her excerpt about feedback here. As someone afraid of both giving and receiving feedback, this is definitely an area I want to focus on more!
If you are playing bigger, if you are sharing your voice, you are going to get more feedback that feels high stakes because it is feedback on the real, emerging, tender you.
This is hard.
We are tender. The toughest among us are even more tender, underneath our thick skin. We are afraid of finding out we aren’t good enough. We are afraid of finding out we are more than good enough, so good that there is no reason to keep stalling, perfecting, preparing – that it is actually time to just step onto the big stage now. What if that is true? Ack!
So I want to offer you a mega-concept shift, a whole new way of thinking about feedback that has allowed feedback to serve me (instead of scare me). It allows me to even seek out feedback.
On a personal note, I really like Wes Kao’s newsletter on how to be a better leader, operator, and manager.
As I continue to practice the toolsets and resources I’ve learned from Circles in different professional settings, I hope to share more deep-dive insights into each of the three takeaways above in future posts.
Finally, if you are based in Saigon and are interested in joining WLC, the next cohort starts on October 17th! Please message me on Facebook if you are interested to learn more about the program:)
Below are images from the WLC flyers if you want to read some more information:)
Thank you for reading!
Have a wonderful weekend <3