Ten Terrifying Questions with Holly Ransom + an extract from The Leading Edge!

Holly Ransom is an expert in disruption and future leadership and the author of the new book, The Leading Edge. As the founder and CEO of Emergent, she helps individuals and teams formulate the questions to find their strategy for making effective change. Named one of Australia’s 100 Most Influential Women by the Australian Financial Review, Holly is also widely recognised as one of the world’s top female keynote speakers. She has delivered a Peace Charter to the Dalai Lama, interviewed Barack Obama on stage, was Sir Richard Branson’s nominee for Wired Magazine’s ‘Smart List’ of Future Game Changers to watch in 2017 and was awarded the US Embassy’s Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Leadership Excellence in 2019.

Today, Holly Ransom is on the blog to take on our Ten Terrifying Questions! Read on to see her answers, plus a snippet from The Leading Edge …

Holly Ransom

1. To begin with, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?

I was born, raised and schooled in Perth, Western Australia. I feel like from the outside my upbringing represents that of many Australian kids … I got in trouble, fell out of trees, played lots of sport, and interrogated my parents, teachers and any adult who would listen, about why the world was the way it was. When sufficient answers weren’t forthcoming, I tried to find ways to solve problems early, saving pocket money to give to the homeless man on the street. But as I grew up a bit, I realised that the problem was way beyond this one homeless guy and no amount of pocket money was going to fix the entrenched social inequality that I was starting to see everywhere. I got so frustrated with the adult world that I had no choice but to start trying to scale change and to start young.

2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and twenty-five? And why?

When I was a kid I was absolutely determined to win a Brownlow. The footy field was a level playing field for me until the age of 10. Up until that point that muddy oval was fertile soil, somewhere I could lose myself in the game, find myself in my gawky body and calm my forensically curious mind. But at age 1 that all changed. I was told I couldn’t play anymore because I was a girl. I was devastated. I felt betrayed by my body, then by the game, then by society. So by 18, I was well on the path to being a social change warrior. I wanted to run my own Not For Profit and I had a million ideas ready to go … I just wasn’t entirely sure how to start, and I hadn’t yet collided with the incredible mentors who would soon change my trajectory forever. I had all the willpower but none of the power. Fast forward the next seven year cycle, and I felt like I was getting somewhere. I had worked my way through some big roles, and tackled some of the world’s most wicked problems alongside other incredible change-makers. Then BAM!! I developed depression and was knocked for six when I was 23. So in my mid-twenties, my ambition was to get out of bed with energy, to fire up again and find the energy and to learn to live and lead ‘smarter’ not ‘harder’. I knew that there was still so much work to do to impact a more sustainable world, but first I needed to master the art of sustainable leadership.

3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you don’t have now?

At some point in my twenties, I realised that no one was going to turn around and give me the magical keys to leadership. No one was going to usher me in and say, great job Holly, you’ve now earned the right to lead. I let go of the belief that one day, pure hard work and a list of achievements would result in a leadership medal, a validation, a ‘right’. Instead I realised that I just had do it. Having read every leadership book I could get my hands on, I felt full of aspiration, but stuck on one side of an actualisation divide. What replaced my “magic key” belief was my “unlocked door” philosophy. We are so in awe of the door!! We walk up to the door that stands between us and the next goal, the position of influence, the golden opportunity and think, “well that is such a fancy looking door, it must be locked”. Or we tell ourselves that the people on the other side will be way too influential and important to ever let us in. But it’s simply not true, we just need the courage to swing open the door and enter the room with the curiosity and confidence that we all have important work to do. The trick, I’ve since realised, is making sure that you’re intentional about the room you want to be in … sometimes you’ll find a much more interesting conversation happening out in the garden.

4. What are three business and leadership books that have influenced your development as a leader and public speaker?

I have just finished Untamed by Glennon Doyle. Every day now I find myself silently repeating “we can do hard things”. I will forever love the kind and generous wisdom embedded in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as it helped me leap across the implementation chasm. And while I could go on forever about books I love, Stacey Abrams’ book Lead from the Outside totally aligns to the message I am passionately trying to promote in The Leading Edge.

5. What inspired you to write your book?

During the last two years I have had the absolute privilege of a dream coming true; I studied a Masters in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School as a Fulbright Scholar. But it was ‘privilege’ that infuriated me while putting together my literature reviews on leadership. We desperately need leaders who are able to imagine and influence a world beyond our current unequal power structures, our short term consumerism and our unsustainable measurement of growth through the GDP paradigm. People who are currently sitting at the top of these power structures are not incentivised to topple them. People ensconced in power are not able to relate to the vulnerability of the disempowered, or even the general population. And leadership today is too far invested in upholding a system where value and values are often entirely misaligned. Change cannot come from the top, at least not the kind of systemic change we need right now, and at the pace we need it. There is simply too much to do. I wrote The Leading Edge because I believe we need to unlearn leadership. We need to redefine leadership as those acts of bravery that happen in the small moments, as well as the big movements. We need to empower all people to dream big, spark change and become the leaders the world needs us to be.

6. Please tell us about your book!

The Leading Edge is a book in two halves. The first half explores ‘leading self’. The second half delves into ‘leading others’. Because it’s only when we harness the fullness of ourselves that we can be useful to others. The architecture of The Leading Edge is built around the three principles of mindset, method and mastery. But the thing I’m most proud of? The Leading Edge narrative is home to over 70 diverse case studies from leaders across the globe. Many of these change-makers you will never have heard of and I hope that many of them you will never forget. When we stop seeing leadership as something that happens when you run a million dollar company, or score the maximum number of goals on the field, or stand on stage with a microphone in hand … then we see points of light beaming everywhere. The Leading Edge is a call to arms for people the world over to stop waiting for the golden ticket of leadership and start crossing the golden line of courage – to find their leadership edge.

7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your book?

Leadership needs to be recognised in people who are doing the right thing, the inconvenient thing, the brave thing, for the benefit of other people they will likely never meet. I hope readers of The Leading Edge will help amplify these stories and draw courage to see themselves as leaders. To grab hold of the ideas in the book that feel right for them and put them to work immediately. To start right now, with what they have and find their way to the edge of their own potential.

8. Who would you most like to interview and why?

I would love to interview Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Greta Thunberg and Grace Tame all in the same room. Not because of the feminist narrative. But because I reckon between them, they understand systems change almost better than any other combination. Their lives have been dedicated not so much to doing as undoing … undoing the damage of the broken leadership of our past and trying to convince the world we need to relearn leadership for the future.

9. What are your goals?

My next immediate goal is to ignite a movement of changemakers to design a new world. I’m starting small, in the vein of working with what I have in front of me right now, and I’m building a 28 day challenge to reflect the 28 chapters of The Leading Edge. I don’t want this book to be something that burns in people’s minds for an instant before being put on the shelf. What I care about is impact. The open source 28 day challenge will give readers an opportunity to take the concepts in the book and apply them immediately to action. These bite-sized micro-challenges will allow leaders to rapidly upskill on a day by day basis to unlock the doors that may be standing between them and their leading edge.

10. Do you have any advice for aspiring leaders?

Leading at the edge is not harder, it’s braver. Leading at the edge is not more dangerous, it’s more daring. Leading at the edge is not impulsive, or rash, or unprepared. it is a disciplined choice to channel all our learning into the courage to chose to do the next brave thing, over and over.

Thanks Holly!

An extract from The Leading Edge

Chapter 3: Own Your Narrative

‘There’s a power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning
your unique story, in using your authentic voice.’

Michelle Obama

When I was twenty, I participated in a week- long global peace- building conference in Osaka, Japan, an incredible opportunity that culminated in presenting a Peace Charter to none other than the Dalai Lama. I was awestruck by the magnitude of the adventure as a kid from Perth, the world’s most isolated capital city, who until the age of eighteen hadn’t managed to travel beyond Bali (yes, I was a Western Australian cliché!). When I arrived and found myself surrounded by people from dozens of other cultures and nations, there was one thought looming large in my mind: what on earth could I bring to the table to contribute to the meaning of peace? I felt like a deadset imposter.

After a week’s worth of learning and activities, eight of the hundred of us were fortunate enough to be selected to draft the charter. I was incredulous. And more than a little daunted by the task at hand. We had a full day to do it, which quickly morphed into night . . . and then back into morning as we consumed copious amounts of average-quality hotel coffee and debated synonyms and phrases until 5.30 am. It was my ultimate inner-social-warrior-nerd’s all-nighter and showed me the extraordinary power of diversity, the incredible challenge of diplomatic work and the heightened sense of accomplishment we get when building something with a truly global group of people. I had never been engaged in such passionate debate where the intricacies of language mattered almost as much as the subject itself. But we managed to find our common values and weave them into the text, and that alone made it feel like we had earned something of a right to chart a pathway to peace.

Later that morning the Dalai Lama entered the hall where we were all assembled and from the moment he did, you could feel his energy. He just seemed to unleash a positive vibration, as though he were radiating joy. Among his many words of wise optimism, he made a comment that I completely failed to understand at the time, but that struck me as being important enough to scribble down in my spiral- bound notebook: ‘Until we’re at peace with ourselves, we will never be at peace with others.’

His Holiness talked with animation about self- acceptance being step one on the journey to building a brighter, more peaceful future. He explained that we would never be able to constructively deal with conflict and work for peace if we hadn’t first been able to undertake that process for ourselves. That if we could come from a place of love and self- acceptance, we didn’t ‘need’ anything from our encounters with others: we didn’t need to win, one- up or prove anything. He spoke about constructive disengagement – things like violence and hatred – so often stemming from unresolved personal turmoil. In contrast, inner peace removes the need to continually apologise or to doubt ourselves, which often robs the world of our fullest and most creative expression.

I was twenty, so much of this went way over my head. But I understood enough to come back to Australia with a different focus. I’d spent so many years doing so much outwardly that I’d neglected the internal work required to sit comfortably in my own skin, story, dreams and aspirations. I needed to make peace with my own narrative.

Jim Loehr, author of The Power of Story, says that the stories we tell ourselves are the only reality we will ever know in this life. ‘And since it’s our destiny to follow our stories,’ he explains, ‘it’s imperative that we do everything in our power to get our stories right.’ Given we are dynamic beings, this work is never done; we are continually evolving our story as we engage in new experiences and create new meaning. But, as Loehr argues, the most important story we tell is the one we tell ourselves: ‘If you aren’t the author of your own story, you’re the victim of it.’ And at the heart of our story is a purpose, the ‘why’ we talked about in Chapter 1, closely followed by the plot line and suspense of our choices, as we discussed in Chapter 2. There’s no story without a lead protagonist. That’s you. Please prepare to take centre stage.

—Extract from The Leading Edge by Holly Ransom, published by Viking on 20 July 2021, RRP $34.99.

The Leading Edge

Limited Signed Copies Available!

by Holly Ransom

Leadership is within everyone’s reach, everyone’s ability and everyone’s power. It's time to step up, and Holly Ransom will show you how.

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