Debra McQueen

Early in my career, I attended a workshop with a Tibetan Buddhist nun who asked us to think about our overall meaning and purpose in life without writing anything down. I was struggling in my second or third year of teaching - I didn't feel self-confident, I felt like I was failing the children who needed me. One day I woke up and my eyes popped open and I went, 'To be a benefit to others.' My overall meaning and purpose in life is to be a benefit to others. Once I had that focus, everything changed. I wanted everything I do to be about being a benefit to others, really focused on the children at first, but then it grew and grew. I wanted to be a benefit to my colleagues, to new teachers who needed mentoring. When I eventually had this leadership opportunity, which was nothing I ever thought I wanted or was looking for - I just wanted to be a teacher and stay in the background - I saw it as an opportunity to be a benefit to others and to be a good leader. My leadership style is, let me help you do your job. Every meeting I have with an employee starts with 'how can I help? What do you need?' Because I want people to be successful. Between the Buddhist nun and Simon Sinek and his book 'Start with Why,' those are my big influences. I also think that when I stopped worrying about what other people think and stopped trying to be everybody's friend, and started thinking more about what's going to improve the lives of these children, that's when things really shifted.

Don't take anything personally. I took everything personally when I was younger, and it's taken me most of my adult life to realize that nothing is personal. People aren't looking at you, thinking about what your hair looks like, or what your voice sounds like, or whether or not you're smart - you're thinking about that all the time. Don't worry about what other people think. Be true to yourself. Trust your instincts - you've got good ones. I was so self-conscious as a young woman and so worried about what other people thought of me that I wasn't really free. I didn't trust myself. When you're so self-conscious, it impacts so much. I read a lot of personal growth books and follow authors and speakers who talk about these kinds of things, and that issue comes up again and again - we take things too personally, and most of the time people are not meaning or even really thinking about what you think they are. We women are so hard on ourselves, so self-critical. It's been really nice to see in society over the last couple of decades this shift where women are becoming more empowered and more self-confident, claiming their place in the world and their right to be there. I get a lot of inspiration from women much younger than me who aren't torturing themselves the way that I did when I was younger.