Be who you want to be – Lolly Daskal (Interview)

I follow Lolly Daskal in the social media and her work for a while. I see Lolly as the encyclopedia of Leadership. She has a lot of experience in the field, working with the big organizations, and influential CEO’s. I share her website in my top 5 sources of information.

I had the pleasure to meet Lolly Daskal in an event, WOBI in NYC end of last year. We were sitting next to each other all the event! Me and Lolly really connected, and I dared to ask her if I could interview her! I prepared the questions…I put the phone on the AVR PRO on, and record the interview!! It was a beautiful and inspiring conversation!

It took a little bit of time to make the transcript, I mean too long… as I was feeling I was not in the level to have it! But you know…, Lolly told me…”Give yourself permission to move forward with your dreams! So this interview is for you!”.

Thank you Lolly!

For the purpose of length and purpose of message I am going to split the interview in 3 posts. Today is about: “Be who you want to be”.

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Question 1: Who is Lolly Daskal?

I am an individual who is a student of life and a work in progress.

I never think I know everything, I am a kind of person that always says I don’t know enough, that’s why I read a book a day, that’s why I tried when I know someone new, I try to be really present, as I truly believe I can learn from every single person that I meet.

Question 2: How did you come with the essence of Lead From Within and building this as your legacy?

I had a very traumatic childhood. But without talking about the childhood there were a lot of struggles that I had, and I always looked for help outside. Who is going to save me? The kind of victim’s mentality. Who would make my life better?

And I will never forget, when I was around 18 years old, and I kept finding myself very disappointed that nobody was coming to save me from the dilemma I was in. Somebody gave me the book called “Man’s Search for Meaning”, from Viktor Frankl. I read the book and changed my life. I read now the book every year on my birthday. It’s is the fundamentals of who I am today.

And it is the WHO I became.

You could be the worst situation, I was living the Holocaust, talk about people that who were hungry, who were dying, but if you find meaning in something you can move beyond the difficult situation, and that was the moment after reading that book, I stopped looking for who is going to help me and I knew if anything was gonna get better it would had come from within.

And I never forget I was walking somewhere, and I was telling myself, I have to Lead From Within! It has to become from you! It had become a mantra of mine.

Now, in order to find yourself to lead from within, you need to know yourself.

That’s why in that early stage I became the reader, the inquisitor, the questioner, the curious one.

In my kind of upbringing asking questions was frowned upon, because the way I grew up in a society, in a community where you told do it, you will do it. You don’t ask why!

And so, I am the person, who said WHY? I want to understand if resonates with me, and I did not have mentors or anybody in my life that I could look up and could become the person I wanted to be, so it had to become from books. So Viktor Frankl became my first mentor, Joseph Campbell became my second one, and Carl Gustav Jung become my third mentor.

These three individuals have made who I am today. They have taught me that is not the How, the What, the When, the Where, it’s the WHO you are, that is where everything begins.

Please don’t make the excuses that you don’t have the right environment, I fought against that, just because I grew up in a certain environment doesn’t mean I have to be a product of that environment, I can change by doing the things can feed me and nourishing me. So reading books has made me who I am today.

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