Fifty-some years ago, American writer and critic Mary McCarthy penned the words: “we are the hero of our own story.”

I chanced upon her quote when I purchased a bracelet, created by a Seattle artist, with a story bead incorporated into the design. Pasted on the bead were Mary’s words.

Several years later, when I returned to school, that bracelet became a metaphor for my research and the circular learning process I would label Storied Leadership.

So, what story are you telling yourself? Allow me to tell you one of mine…

It was 1969

I was seventeen

“What a miserable way of life!” I exclaimed to my mother as three young women walked away. It was 1969, I was seventeen years old, and we were seated at an outdoor café in Athens, Greece. Mom and I traveled to Greece together each month because that was where the orthodontist’s practice was located. Dad frequently commented that those monthly trips were far more expensive than paying for braces stateside.

We were an Air Force family living overseas in the late sixties. I attended a boarding school in Ankara, Turkey, because the Department of Defense schools in Adana, where dad was stationed, did not offer high school classes. American teenagers living in countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia all converged in the capital city of Turkey during the school year and tried to recreate a typical high school experience. Far from typical it was, though, as few of the friends we left in the U.S. when our military families moved overseas heard the Islamic call to prayer five times a day, ate three meals a day in an institutional cafeteria, or slept in sparsely furnished dormitories with 100 of their closest friends. And presumably none of those stateside friends were subjected to a series of rabies shots when that cute puppy that sneaked into the girls’ dorm suddenly seized and died.

The Turkish culture was intriguing to a teenage girl in the late sixties. Hashish water pipes, worry beads, and inexpensive gemstones were readily attainable. Turkish kilim rugs and antique copperware were the souvenirs of choice for those able to think beyond high school proms and custom-made evening gowns. Exotic belly dancers entertained and steamy Turkish baths soothed the less inhibited. Most importantly, the taboo against reacting to the Turkish male habit of pinching female butts as they walked down the streets reinforced my well-honed ability to mask what I was feeling.

But today I wasn’t hiding my reaction. “Who would want to live like that?” I commented to my mother, looking aghast. My fate was sealed the moment those two uncensored sentences escaped my mouth. The three young women I had just met were Navy wives “following the ship.” Years later I too would follow a ship from port to port in an effort to see my husband, even if for just short periods of time, during those long and lonely nine-month deployments. The daughter of an Air Force pilot seemed destined to marry a Navy pilot and join the ranks (pun intended) of “the good military wife.”

Thirty-eight years later my doctoral dissertation research focus would be leadership, and the population I would choose to study would be military spouses – heroes of their own story and, often unrecognized, leaders in the military culture. The methodology would be narrative. And so, the story began.

One of the early questions I faced in my research was what tool I could use to talk about the stories shared with me. I created the conceptual model of Storied Leadership to analyze my research, and today it offers a tool to help understand your personal leadership style.

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