We can always find inspiring natural leaders close to us!

In this series of interviews, I’m talking to people who have touched my soul: small business owners, neighbors, friends & colleagues. Those who inspire me to spread the wisdom & insights of our common ability as a human being to lead, influence, and impact people around us.

In Insights From Natural Leaders: With Yasmine Khater, Yasmine brings us a beautiful metaphor for leadership and its constant changes.

For the past decade, Yasmine Khater has been helping senior leaders in over 75 MNCs and governments to stand out, inspire their team, and grow their business. She has taught thousands of entrepreneurs and social leaders on how to use stories to sell.

Armed with a degree in psychology and communications, Yasmine has worked with brands like DBS, Salesforce Essilor, Linkedin, Credit Suisse, ClubMed, Danone,  GoJek and more.

She comes from a mixed heritage, has lived in seven countries, and travelled to a quarter of the world.  Sharing powerful stories has helped her sell, crowdfund and speak to thousands.

Recently, as a side project, she crowdfunded in 1 day Bye Bye Virus, a card game to bring fun for the social distancing days. 

Yasmine is the lead researcher at the Sales Story Method. She also runs the Sales Fit Lab Online to support leaders.

You will find that she has a great energy and is really good with metaphors. Enjoy!

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the interview:

“The caterpillar dies every 21 days. So you might be thinking, like, ‘What the hell is this?’ and it’s because of the fact that when you’re leading, especially in today’s world, you need to be able to let go of the fact that one day you’ll be beautiful, and the next day you’ll be back to where you started. ” 

Yasmine’s advice for young leaders:

“The one thing I would always recommend is to get over perfection.”

Follow along with the transcript, below, if you like.

Check also Insights From Natural Leaders: With Paul Tolchinsky.

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Maike: Hi, everyone! This is Maike from Inbody Coaching and Training. Today, I’m back with a video on Natural Leaders, interviewing Yasmine Khater. How are you doing, Yasmine?

Yasmine: Good! Hope you’re doing well as well!

Maike: Yasmine and me, we met seven years ago in Barcelona. I saw Yasmine talking at one of the TEDx Women here in Barcelona. I’m very excited to hear more about what you feel about leadership today, what is needed, what you see out there and if you have any tips in advance for us. Let’s get started!

Yasmine: So I’ve been actually working with senior leaders and entrepreneurs for over eight years now, helping them get much more effective, in terms of how they communicate, so they can sell their ideas to customers or even to their teams. It’s been a lot of fun, but at the same time, I will always launch some side gigs, as well. So I recently just finished launching my first card game, called Bye Bye Virus, which we launched on Kickstarter, and then I’m going to be launching, in a few weeks’ time, something called the Sales Fit Lab

Maike: Wow, amazing. I actually checked out your game; it’s really fun, it’s amazing. So you’ve been running so many programmes, you’ve been doing loads of crowdfunding, so you must have been, like… you’ve worked with leaders, as you said, entrepreneurs, but I’m sure you’ve also worked as a leader in your field. So what do you think is leadership about for you?

Yasmine: For me, it’s two different levels. One part of it is the level in terms of how you manage yourself and the story you tell yourself, and the second one is how you manage speaking to your team, speaking to your customers, speaking to different stakeholders to get the point across. So I think often times it’s not a simple answer, because it’s really about how do you– like, if I had to encompass it, it’s like how do you manage yourself, and also what kind of stories do you tell yourself and what do you believe about yourself that either will help you thrive or hold you back. And when I coach leaders, it’s amazing how people always tell me, ‘Give me the strategies, give me the tips,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure. That’s the easy part.’ But if we don’t understand the inner narrative that’s happening inside, that’s actually where the magic happens.

Maike: So if you were to think about a metaphor or analogy when it comes to leadership, what comes to mind?

Yasmine: The one thing that comes up for me is caterpillars. Because if you think about a caterpillar, it has to go through a lot of discomfort to become something beautiful. But also about the caterpillar is the caterpillar dies every 21 days. So you might be thinking, like, ‘What the hell is this?’ and it’s because of the fact that when you’re leading, especially in today’s world, you need to be able to let go of the fact that one day you’ll be beautiful, and the next day you’ll be back to where you started. And you’ll become a cocoon again, opening up into another butterfly. And the more comfortable you are with the fact that the only thing constant is going to be change for you, and that’s also how you manage that whole process, the more you’re going to go out and show up and realize that, like, ‘Today I might be a cocoon, and the other day I might be a butterfly,’ and that’s okay, because that’s part of what needs to happen for you to lead more effectively.

Maike: The cocoon and the butterfly. I think that the whole idea of adapting to change has never been more important, at least from our generation, than now, with the whole Corona and the pandemic all over the world. So if we connect to this context right now and all the knowledge that you carry from the past, what would you say, what kind of advice would you give to young entrepreneurs or young leaders, maybe in one sentence, or in a nutshell?

Yasmine: The one thing I would always recommend is to get over perfection. People often think that, like, ‘I will only share this idea, I will only go out there once things are perfect.’ But it’s better to be in the progress state and think about always creating shitty versions, versus this final masterpiece, this Salvador Dali painting, that in the end of the day, like, that’s scary, but the first draft, the first drawing, the first colour, the first version of this, it’s shit. But then by round three, four, five, it becomes something beautiful. And with my card game that I developed, if you saw the first version, it was literally a piece of paper where we scribbled instructions, and now it’s a beautifully designed pack that we’ve sold to over 1200 people, and that would not have been possible if we didn’t start and realize that actually it doesn’t need to be perfect; we just have to start. And if you’re doing that and always thinking that it’s progress versus perfection, then you’re going to be able to create things, make magical things, lead awesome teams, and let go of the fact that it needs to be awesome from the very beginning.

Maike: Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your insights, and I will try to stay with my own imperfections.