FINAL EPISODE: A Message for You

Welcome back to the Lead with Levity podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Heather Walker, and I have the bittersweet announcement that, guess what? This is the last episode of Lead with Levity, or, you know, the podcast.

That is. Not the business, but the podcast. And I've been thinking about how to end this for weeks, and I've been way overcomplicating this, I gotta tell you. So let me just say what's true.

This show started because I was tired of watching people burn out trying to be something they weren't at work. Everywhere I looked, you know, leadership in particular meant sacrifice, stoicism, carrying everything alone and calling it strength. And I thought, wow, that sounds like a really terrible deal. What if the best leaders aren't the ones who white knuckle their way through?

What if they're the ones who figure out how to stay human while doing the hard things? That question became this podcast, right? Why levity? And you, you have been listening.

Those of you who have reached out, those of you who have said me too, you turned it into something way bigger than I ever planned. So here's what I didn't expect. I didn expect how many of you would tell me that you listened in your car before walking into a meeting that you were dreading Or on a run after a day that broke you just a little bit or a late night when you were questioning whether you were even cut out for the job I thought we were making a show about leadership.

I thought we were making a show about levity at work. But it turns out that we were actually making a show about not being alone in it. And every episode was someone saying out loud what most people only think about privately. the doubt, the mess, the moment that you laughed at work and remembered why you cared in the first place, the moment when you actually felt connected to what you were doing.

That's what levity actually is. Not the jokes, not lightness for its own sake or silliness for its own sake, although it is nice. It is nice to be silly sometimes. It's nice to feel joy deep down on the inside.

but it's actually the refusal to let the weight of the work crush what makes you you. So here's what I'm taking with me. I've learned more from hosting this show over the last six years than from most of the research that I've published. I've learned that people don't need you to have all the answers.

They need you to be honest about the questions. They need you to ask better questions. They need you to get curious about them, not just you. I learned that the leaders people remember aren't the ones who performed competently.

They the ones who made space for everyone else humanity And I learned that if you doing leadership right you should probably laugh more than you think is actually professional And if you've been part of this journey with me as a listener, as a guest, as someone who shared an episode with someone who needed it, I want to say thank you. Not in the thanks for your support kind of way, but in the I couldn't have done this without you kind of way, because that's real. Every week, every other week, when I'd sit down and I'd think about, you know, I don't know if this is something that I should continue, someone would pop out out of nowhere, the grocery store, the parking lot, the boardroom, the meeting room, and they'd say, hey, I listened to one of your episodes and I really appreciated what you had to say.

And that was what I needed to keep going. So thank you. From here, I just want to let you know I'm not stopping. I'm just changing the venue.

Everything that I've been doing here, the storytelling, the deep dives, the unfiltered takes on what's broken and how we fix it, I'm moving that to LinkedIn. It's really a better place for what I actually want to do next, which is less broadcasting and more building with you. I want to hear what you're struggling with. I want to test ideas in real time.

I want us to figure this out together instead of me talking at you from this recorded box and you hearing it like a week or two weeks later So find me there Find me on LinkedIn at linkedin slash in slash lead with confidence I Dr Heather Walker and I want to continue this journey with you. So if you've been listening to this podcast and you aren't connected with me on LinkedIn, I encourage you to go ahead and take a moment and do that right now. When I started this show, someone asked why I call it Lead with Levity instead of something more serious.

And I said, because if we can't find joy in the work, what's the point? And I still believe that. Leadership is hard. And it should be.

It should be hard. It's a complicated thing to lead people, to lead businesses, to lead communities. But it doesn't have to be joyless and it definitely doesn't have to be lonely. So wherever you're leading, whatever you're leading, whether it's a team, a project, or you're just leading yourself through a really tough time, do it with levity.

Not because it's easy, but because it's the only way that lasts. So I want to thank you for listening and I'm looking forward to building something really amazing with you and connecting with you on LinkedIn. Take care. Thanks for tuning in to the Lead with Levity podcast.

To get resources mentioned in this episode and find out what we're all about, check us out at leadwithlevity.com.