Mature leaders demonstrate both gravitas and agility. Ask any leader you admire about their most formative learning, and they will likely tell you about experiences...and not necessarily the good ones. Ask them what enabled them to learn from those experiences, and you hear things like, “I changed my perspective,” “I got to walk in their shoes,” “I know what it is like to be in the trenches,” “I hit bottom and bounced back,” “I realized it was not about me,” “I was humbled over and over again till I was ready to ask for help.” 

Part of Jan Rybeck's Vertical Development series:
Vertical Development is about expanding and deepening our capacity to see, understand, empathize, and respond in a diversity of situations. As we grow and evolve in this way, our experience of self, others, and the world shifts, leading to new ways of doing and being, that in turn lead to other changes that we cannot always foresee.