You’re in Good Hands
Are you a teacher or parent looking for practical strategies and inspiration for values-based leadership at home and work?
You’ve landed in the right spot! You’ll find strategies to use at work or with raising children, concepts to understand, and ideas easily implemented about creating space for self and others.
I’ve embraced a values-based leadership approach for more than two decades of my career in teaching, writing, and public speaking. Discovering repeatedly that using this leadership style in my classrooms, home, and relationships is rewarding and inspiring.
With proven experience and being a published author of conflict management, effective communication skills, and children’s books, you’ll find practical personal development, teaching, and parenting strategies. Most importantly, you’ll discover life lessons for living a fulfilled life.
Values-Based Leadership
Values-based leadership is an approach to leading that emphasizes the importance of personal values and principles. It involves understanding and utilizing the values individuals in an organization hold to provide direction and motivation.
This type of leadership believes people act with purpose, guided by deeply meaningful and important principles.
This blog post summarizes my teaching career and how I used values-based leadership in my classrooms:
Children Respond to Values-Based Leadership
Children learn to solve problems the same way they learn to read, write, and add. Like reading, writing, and adding, there are specific components to solving problems using our values. These are teachable skills children can learn at any age.
Values are the foundation of our identity and must be learned and practiced in the home first. Values-based leadership is rooted in the belief that our values should guide us as leaders. Our values shape how we engage, communicate, and problem-solve. Living our values promotes self-awareness, conscious decision-making, and motivation to live our truth.
Teaching children how to live their values as future leaders sets them up for success throughout life.
This post explores how to instill healthy values in your children.
Create a Positive Impact
A values-based form of leadership focuses on upholding certain core principles to create a positive impact. Setting an example that is followed professionally and personally.
Strong values-based leaders have a well-defined set of core beliefs that serve as the cornerstones of their actions. These help shape and inform decision-making, ensuring their actions are consistent with their beliefs.
With all this in mind, I developed a unique approach to values-based leadership for parents and teachers. Through stories, I share practical strategies using kid-friendly lessons to help children become their best selves.
This blog post includes ten engaging conflict resolution activities and practical strategies for teaching high school students conflict resolution techniques.
Additionally, including practical strategies with leadership principles in our daily lives through our work helps us become better versions of ourselves. You’ll also find essential life lessons about values, like how to set healthy boundaries, communicate effectively, and manage conflict. Ultimately leading to living a more fulfilling life.
Three Components of Values-Based Leadership
Values-based leadership has three core elements: skills, process, and attitude. Developing the necessary skills to succeed is just one part of the equation; it’s also essential to have an established process for using those skills. Finally, having a positive attitude is key to reaching goals and building strong interpersonal relationships.
- Skills: Values-based leadership is teachable. Many of us learn these skills in adulthood, yet kids who will lead the next generations, often don’t. They must learn these skills now.
- Processes: Living our values from a space of authenticity takes practice. A process helps us create context and gain perspective to transform into who we want to become. Kids can learn these processes as they would learn how to write a story or solve a math equation.
- Attitude: Make connections that matter in your life. Build and nurture strengths-based connections with self and others by approaching your relationships with the same ease and grace you would a painting, a dance, or a fire. Children are imaginative and creative. They learn to develop positive self-esteem and cultivate the best out of their experiences to become the best version of themselves at any age.
Cultivating Leadership Values
Fear of conflict is common, normal, and necessary. Children who fear conflict shut down, fight back, or even run away. What we learn at an early age about conflict and the messages we hear about conflict teach us to avoid conflict at all costs throughout our lives.
We develop values for harmony, peace, and living a life free of conflict. Then, we are faced with conflict, and our go-to strategies to resolve it are to make it go away, fight it head-on, or ignore it.
I spent a significant part of my career as an educator working to get at the core of what conflict is all about. Most importantly, I have been a practitioner. I have also been a consultant, mediator, parent, and coach and now share what I have learned through inspirewithsuzanne.com, Medium, and my books.
In this blog post, I share my stories and the valuable life lessons I have learned to help others achieve inner peace and live a fulfilled life.
What You Can Expect Here
I’ve been writing about values-based leadership, conflict management, and living an authentic life since the early 2000s, so you can trust that I know what works and what doesn’t.
You won’t find me promising immediate results in your life overnight. Instead, I will share practical strategies you can use immediately in your relationships at work and home.
I take the overwhelm out of how values guide our decision-making and ultimately lead to our quality of life. You’ll find practical strategies to make it easy to see how values are the foundation of our successes and our peace of mind.
Becoming Your Best Self
As an educator and a parent, I know what it takes to support kids’ development at home and in the classroom. This is not about telling you what to do or how to be a parent or teacher (it’s not my place!) but sharing my experiences to create a well-rounded, healthy foundation that will help your kids grow into their best selves faster than you could ever imagine.
Be inspired, entertained, and uplifted by the stories I tell.
Over the last two decades, I have worked with countless individuals and groups with various differences. I’ve served as a consultant, mediator, educator, and coach for individuals and organizations across North America. These experiences and my journey of self-discovery have shaped my view on living a fulfilled life.
I am an avid storyteller, a published author, and an international speaker. I possess a strong foundation in academia, a master’s degree in conflict analysis management, and a master’s in education. With this background, I’ve merged my passion for storytelling with my expertise.
My greatest inspiration to help others comes from my own incredible life story.
Sound good? Here’s How to Get Started
Check out my blog. This is my little corner of the Internet, where I share practical strategies to make the most of your relationships.
Articles highlight family dynamics, conflict management, social-emotional health, teaching strategies, and personal fulfillment.
Looking for More?
Values-based leadership is a way to approach problem-solving with the right attitude needed to accomplish goals and maintain relationships. This leadership style focuses on developing the necessary skills and creating a process while considering individual values and attitudes.
Values-based leadership provides a framework for effectively leading and making decisions in any area of life, such as the workplace or at home with children. This concept focuses on understanding the underlying values and creating an environment of respect and understanding for everyone involved.
Through values-based leadership, leaders learn to make integrity-based decisions and promote positive relationships.
Success is achieved through healthier and higher-functioning relationships.
Are you ready to empower yourself and take control of your life to become who you were meant to be?
Need resources for teaching and parenting consciously from your values?
