All aboard the Leadership Express!
Station Five: Obstacle Curve
Welcome Aboard: The Rise As A Leader Journey!
Every great leader embarks on a journey, and today, we continue ours. Each stop along the way reveals new insights, challenges, and discoveries about yourself as a leader.
Our final destination? Your personalized Leadership Development Plan, a roadmap to becoming the leader you aspire to be.
Today, we arrived at: Obstacle Curve – What obstacles hold you back?
Every journey has roadblocks. Today, you’ll identify the obstacles (internal or external) that are slowing your progress. Awareness is the first tool to begin moving forward.
Reflect. Write. Grow. Identifying obstacles gives you power to overcome them.
Let’s dive in!
What Are Your Leadership Obstacles?
Reflective Questions
Here are some questions to help you reflect deeper.
Where do you feel stuck? This is valuable data!
Once you identify your obstacles, you can start working on them
purposively.
Both can hinder your progress—but the key difference lies in how you feel about them.
A challenge is something that excites or energizes you. It may be difficult, but it pushes you to grow, and you feel motivated to tackle it.
An obstacle, on the other hand, makes you feel stuck or blocked. It drains your energy and feels like something you can’t move past—at least not yet.
Scenario:
You’re leading a new team and want to create a culture of trust and collaboration.
Challenge: You realize your team has different communication styles. It’s not easy, but you feel curious and motivated to understand them better. You see it as an opportunity to grow your emotional intelligence and bring the team together.
You’re energized to solve it. That’s a challenge.
Obstacle:
One of your team members keeps resisting your leadership, no matter what you try. You feel frustrated, helpless, and stuck. You’ve tried different strategies, but nothing seems to shift.
You feel blocked and discouraged. That’s an obstacle.
Obstacle: it is something that impedes or hinders progress. It's a barrier that stands in the way of achieving a goal. It can seem to come out of nowhere—entirely unpredictable. We can become alarmed, shocked, or surprised when we first encounter them. The feelings associated are high or low energy with low pleasantness such as “hopeless, disappointment, angry”. Keep in mind that obstacles often come from within.
This reflection helps you identify which situations ignite your drive (challenges) and which ones drain you (obstacles). It’s a powerful way to start understanding what skills or tools you may need to shift obstacles into manageable challenges.
Understanding what blocks you reveals exactly what you need to learn, practice, or shift. Awareness is your first tool for change.
Challenges are not roadblocks; they are learning opportunities.
Think about areas like delivering hard messages to your team, conflict, delegation, boundaries, self-doubt, or giving hard feedback.
Next stop: [Fuel Depot] – Let’s relight your motivation and uncover what keeps you going. You've identified what slows you down, now it's time to find what drives you forward.
Your leadership vision is in motion, let’s keep riding toward bringing it to life!