This was originally a LinkedIn Live recorded on October 6th, 2021 In our first Leveraging Thought Leadership Live session, we invited two amazing guests to speak with us about challenges and the grit it takes to overcome them.    Jan Rutherford is a former Green Beret, and the founder of Self-Reliant Leadership. He's also the author of The Littlest Green Beret: On Self-Reliant Leadership.   Shanon Huffman-Polson is one of the first female Apache helicopter pilots, and also the founder of The Grit Institute and author of The Grit Factor: Courage, Resilience, and Leadership in the Most Male Dominated Organization in the World. Together, these two brilliant leaders, vets, and authors, discuss with us the importance of laying down a strategic plan early in your thought leadership journey. We discuss how they found ways to convey their leadership experience in methods that help others learn from it, and developing avatars to help reach the audience who needs you the most. The conversation covers the need to iterate in order to stay on top of your game, and how to listen to the market in order to keep your business growing with today's needs. Jan and Shannon share why they chose to become authors, and their reasons for wanting to write a book about their personal experience. Both created books that focused on making their personal stories a delivery mechanism for inspiration, insight, and ideas that others can use to improve their lives. If you missed this episode when it was live, this is the perfect opportunity to get caught up.   Three Key Takeaways: * Understand your thought leadership's deeper purpose, identify the people you want it to serve, and reach out to them early in your career. * The market will tell you what it values — which might be different than what you want! Be open and willing to listen, and change course toward success. * It can be easy to create thought leadership based on our experiences, but it shouldn’t be about you. Make sure you are giving your audience something they can use.