If you had told me last year that I would be blogging enthusiastically about Kelly Osborne being a role model for leaders I would have looked at you very strangely.
Yep you heard me right, Kelly Osborne. You know, the youngest Daughter of Ozzie; the Prince of Darkness. Spoilt Millionairess, Drug taking talentless twit. Yes the very same.
I saw her interviewed on Saturday by Piers Morgan and I was struck immediately by her honesty and ability to listen to the questions and with candour answer them from the heart without putting any sort of spin on her responses.
She has come through the other side of LA school pretentiousness, drug taking, eating disorders, abusive relationships, her Mother nearly dying of Cancer and her Father nearly dying of a daft quad bike accident.
Not many people could cope with that, let alone at the age of 26 and in the near constant gaze of the ever so fickle global public eye.
She made some dreadful mistakes, some shocking errors of judgement and lapped up all that the celebrity lifestyle threw at her. She hit her Annus horribulus with both her parents lying in separate hospital beds on different continents waging their own personal struggle for survival as she blearily rallied between the two. What pulled her through? Dancing!
She agreed to compete in the US equivalent of Strictly Come dancing, Dancing with the stars, where she and partner Louis Van Amstel came third.
So how did dancing help her? And what traits make her a leadership role model Emma ?
Discipline: the training and complicated choreography is well known for being very difficult. Dancers are strong, courageous and committed. How many times in her charmed LA life had she witnessed or experienced these character traits.
Able to handle the attention: The attention was purely on her, her steps, her control. But the attention in a positive way rather than a negative. As the youngest daughter of a famous, some say iconic individual, it must be very difficult to fight for your own personality as you drown in another’s persona.
Able to rise to the challenge. The expectations of famous children is great. A models children are expected to beautiful, an actors children are expected to be brilliant actors and singers children are expected to have great voices. They are expected to emerge from the family, the finished product, not able to make their own mistakes or carve, through trial and error, their own path.
So Kelly in her short life made a bit of a mess, and made lots and lots of mistakes. I for one wrote her off as I’m sure many others.
But she turned it all round and is now much closer to her true authentic self. I’ll be following her progress very closely from now on and wonder what initiatives will come out of this new found personal strength
Good luck Kelly, this quote from Confucious sums it up for me.
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”.
If you want to see how your leadership skills measure up, contact me for a free tool which will give you great insight.
emma@emmaransonbellamy.co.uk
Emma Ranson Bellamy 