Coleridge wants you to live a productive and mistake-free life. We never see the possibilities. And then, heaven forbid, we may have to change. Your old eyes adjust to a new world, and you become more creative and discerning. It is a philosophy says Asacker. Surveys show that while some 40 percent of us make them, only 8 percent of us keep them. We may feel exhilarated when we set a big goal, but that soon gives way to anxiety. There is a way to set goals and achieve them.
He did it by getting his pitchers to scale back their goals from lofty to bite-sized, from outcome to process. Instead, Rick refocused his pitchers on short-term, bite-sized process goals. He told them they were professional glove hitters with one simple goal: He has to concentrate on hitting that glove.
Hitting the glove on a high percentage of pitches is also the most probable path to achieving larger, outcome-oriented individual and team goals. How It Translates We can all learn to refocus on hitting that glove. Whatever numbers they produced last year, they no longer matter. Time to prove yourself all over again. Many sales organizations try to motivate their sales forces with talk of raising the bar and hitting even bigger numbers. But that lofty-goal approach can trigger fear and worry instead.
Just like pitchers, salespeople know there are parts of the sales game beyond our control. By focusing on having daily, high-quality interactions with customers, I would make great progress toward putting a dent in my quota. Thinking about how many high-quality interactions I should have each day, I set the initial target at two. Before you laugh and ask what I was going to do after lunch, consider the math.
Two high-quality interactions per day are 10 per week, and 40 per month. As soon as I started focusing on my new simple, short-term, bite-sized process goal — two high-quality interactions with customers each day — I began thinking about my day differently.
I began prioritizing those two high-quality interactions with customers above everything else. I wasted less time. Focusing on that one small change brought about big results. Gratitude encourages, clarifies, motivates, includes, and unifies. But gratitude is good for you too. Gratitude puts you in the right mindset to lead. Gratitude and humility are interconnected. They reinforce each other. We alone are not responsible for who we are and what we do and that is the essence of leadership.
We are never truly self-sufficient. In a practical way, gratitude provides guardrails in our life.
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Gratitude helps us to protect from ourselves. It is amazing how much gratitude plays into avoiding poor behavior and wrong thinking. Gratitude sets a boundary on our thoughts by making us mindful of others. It helps us to avoid going where we should not go because we are more self-aware. Gratitude requires that we slow down and reflect. Gratitude is the basis of emotional intelligence. It puts other people first. It says you know and you care.
While empathy has been found to be essential to leadership, empathy is not empathy if it is silent. It must be expressed. Gratefulness helps to curb unproductive emotions such as frustration, resentment, and revenge. Studies have shown that it is an antidote to depression. It has the power to heal and move us forward. It improves relationships and is a remedy to envy and greed. Instead of trying to strive with others we are thankful for what they do. Grateful people find more meaning in life and feel more connected to others.
In these changing and uncertain times, gratitude is a leaders ally. Life is a continuum. Gratitude allows a leader to appreciate where they are and the resources they have at their disposal to face what life throws at them. A habit of gratitude gives us perspective. More than a behavior it must come from the heart. It must be the mindset we lead from, manage from, and make decisions from. Gratefulness is grounded in reality because ultimately we must realize that everything good in our life is a gift. Leadership begins and ends with gratefulness. The ability to quickly master hard things.
The ability to produce at an elite level , in terms of both quality and speed. To produce tangible results that people value. The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. Learning is an act of deep work. An act of intense focus. We are what we focus on and that is increasingly, the superficial.
Shallow work adds to our sense of meaninglessness. Here are a few Newport suggests: There is the Monastic approach that eliminates or radically minimizes shallow obligations. The Bimodal approach that suggests binging on deep work for various lengths of time. The Rhythmic approach makes deep work a habit by scheduling a regular chain of deep work in your day. The last approach and the one Newport prefers, is called the Journalistic approach. Using this approach you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule.
This last approach however, requires a great deal of willpower and practice. The Rhythmic approach may work best to get you started. Take Breaks from Focus Make deep work a priority by taking breaks from focus, not from distraction. Be Intentional with Your Time Have a plan for your day. If you start your day with blocks of deep work scheduled in, you stand a much better chance of actually getting some deep work done.
Leading Blog: A Leadership Blog: Personal Development Archives
A deep life is a good life. But a growing feeling of disappointment overwhelmed him. Finding Your Second Anchoring Technique. Our environment triggers behaviors or responses in us. When to Cooperate and When to Compete. What Are Your Hidden Strengths? Your strengths will get you in the door, but to make progress you are going to have to become more of who you are and draw on your hidden strengths. Hidden strengths are not weaknesses. They are capacities you have that have yet to be recognized, developed and utilized.
They become your Learned Strengths. Your strengths and weaknesses need to be managed. Strengths need to be managed so that they are not overused or overbearing. Often they can be delegated. But the area between the two—your hidden strengths—not only provide a deep pool of strengths to draw on but they will help you to smooth out your rough edges and bring into balance your natural strengths. Is it Time to Disrupt You? Disruption can be a powerful and positive force. If we are to work with and take advantage of the disruptions in the world around us, we must be willing to disrupt ourselves.
Return on Character We live in an age where wisdom is only wisdom if it is supported by numbers. There are two obvious problems with this. First, we miss a lot because we are looking for immediate return. And so it puts our focus on the wrong things. And secondly, as a result, we tend to assign value to things in terms of numbers. It is assumed that if it gives us the best numbers, it must be the best choice or behavior.
Nevertheless, it is satisfying when the numbers do add up. The 5 Choices to Extraordinary Productivity. The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership. Do you have Moxie? Where it Comes From Why do some leaders make an impact, while others flounder after initial success? How to Find Leadership Blindspots.
The 12 Rules of Respect. How to Discover Your What. What Keeps Leaders Up at Night? Self-leadership is fundamental to good leadership, but it is not the end-game. Self-awareness for self-awareness sake has a limited value. Through introspection and reflection we can get to know a great deal about ourselves—as far as we know.
The problem is that we don't know what we don't know. Only when we are able to test our assumptions about ourselves, can we know if we are getting it right. It is when we see ourselves in relation to others and in relation to a higher purpose that we really begin to clarify and many times even identify our core values, beliefs and intentions. We can all know who we think we are, but it isn't until we get out and interact with others that we can begin to see where we are right and where we have been fooling ourselves.
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Who we are takes on meaning when it is in the context of our relationship with others. Superman's stance on "truth, justice and the American Way" is pointless if he remains isolated in his Fortress of Solitude. His values only have meaning in relationship to other people. All the self-knowledge in the world counts for very little if it is not put to work in the service of others. Self-awareness that points to your unique contribution in the world is leadership. Who you are is leveraged when it is placed in the service of other people. Surely we must lead with integrity—in a manner consistent with who we are.
However, the only way to know if we are really doing that is by looking at how we impact the lives of others—how our leadership is experienced by others. Self-awareness provides the opportunity for us to close the gap between who we think we are or want to be and who we actually are at a particular point in time.
But that can only be achieved with feedback of some kind. It's a book about trust in leadership and the trust that is generated by knowing who you are and leading as that person. At thirty-five, I was already an executive vice president with Turner Broadcasting, overseeing two divisions and reporting directly to the second most senior executive who soon would be named the company's CEO. I believed that I was very much at the top of my game, already delivering a lot of high-level presentations, and getting consistent positive feedback.
I was more than a little offended by the suggestion that I needed any help at all with my communication skills. In Atlanta, I participated in Speakeasy's exclusive, invitation-only workshop for C-suite executives.
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Called "The Leader's Edge," this intense three-day workshop focused on communication style and delivery with respect to leadership. In spite of my initial resistance, I did my best to participate without revealing my conviction that I felt superior to this target audience that needed help with communication and presentation skills. I wasn't the least bit nervous when it came time to watch the video recordings of our individual presentations.
I was sure I'd done just fine. With the others in our group, I watched as the executive persona of Scott Weiss delivered his speech from the screen. The guy up there looked pretty good. Very sure of himself. I expected to be told, as I always had been before, that I was a very effective presenter. But after a moment, Sandy Linver, the faculty leader who had directed our session turned to ask me a question. If you could separate yourself from this person and experience him objectively, would you want to hang out with a person like that on the weekend? But I looked at that person frozen on the TV monitor and thought about it.
Reluctantly, I had to tell the truth. I had just admitted that the person I was projecting was not someone to whom I could relate. He wasn't even someone I really liked! And apparently, I wasn't the only one to be put off by Scott Weiss's executive persona. In our remaining time together, other members of the audience began to offer more specific impressions of how they had experienced me as a communicator, and as a person. Those were just some of the terms they used. I had never heard myself described this way before.
I felt like the emperor with no clothes. I had not gone to Speakeasy for a consciousness-raising experience. But I sure had one. In the weeks following that close and uncomfortable encounter with my own executive persona, I did a lot of thinking. I examined what I had learned about how others actually did experience me, and thought about how I wanted people to experience me. There was a gaping abyss between those two extremes, and I realized that I had a lot of work to do to bring them closer together—to become more congruent as an individual and as a leader.
I needed to find my authentic self and learn how to bring more of my real personality to my vocation. I appreciate Scott Weiss sharing this story, for it's not just a process all growth oriented leaders must go through, but a process we must seek out continuously. Feedback is a process that, if we allow it, will keep us honest with ourselves. We see things as we are; and we see ourselves through our intentions.
Feedback gives us a reality check that we are free to accept or reject, but without it we have no way to combat our own self-deception. We must be able to experience ourselves in relation to other people if we are to have a genuine understanding of who we are and why we do what we do. So the place to begin if we truly want to know ourselves is to reflect on the impact that we have on others. Only then can we lead authentically knowing that our inner being is congruent with our outer behavior. Self-awareness is vital to the development of a leader. But it's not navel-gazing. It is not an inward focus.
It is an outward focus. Its ultimate goal is to improve our connection and effectiveness with others. The self absorbed leader struggles with self-awareness and emotional intelligence because self-awareness is about how we are perceived by others. It's about understanding how our behaviors are affecting other people. And we just can't do that by focusing on ourselves. It is easy for us to focus on ourselves—to think people just don't understand us. And when we do, we tend to rationalize rather than grow.
Explain rather than listen. Disconnect rather than lead. Self important leaders can't see how they are sabotaging themselves because they focus on their needs and feelings and not those of their followers. Consequently, they don't encourage feedback because it never seems relevant to them. An inward focus dooms us to operate from a place of weakness—never able to see what is holding us back. It is in the character of great leaders to have a great appetite for feedback. It's a gift and still the best way to gain an awareness of ourselves.
You might think of it as a personal scorecard. To see where we need to grow, we need to see how we affect other people. Only then can we begin the introspection that will lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and learn to move past unproductive thinking and develop new behaviors. Self-Awareness Like us on Facebook for additional leadership and personal development ideas. How to Make Better Decisions "Why do we have such a hard time making good choices? We often just go with our gut. And that hasn't always served us well. Are You a Giver or a Taker?
Learning the Wrong Lesson. Fred exemplified an attitude of exceptional service delivered consistently with creativity and passion in a way that values other people. Leadership and the Art of Struggle: The problem is we view struggle as a negative. But struggle is how we grow. How to Make Work— Work for You. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. We begin with values that drive our behavior based on intrinsic rewards. But over time, something can happen if we are not careful.
Competitive pressures weigh on us. The chance for extrinsic rewards like money and power loom larger. So if we want to have lasting change, the beginning point has to be our thinking. When we look at our behavior we have to understand that there is a thought going on in our heads that is tripping us up.
And we have to change that first. How to Avoid the Artificial Maturity Trap. Feedback Can Be Fun. You According to Them. They have limited our responses. And it profoundly affects our ability to adapt. Behaviors and Mindsets that Ruin Careers. The Titleless Leader Leading without a title is about taking personal responsibility.
We—the world—is in desperate need of people who will choose to lead whenever and wherever they can. People are frustrated, angry, disillusioned, tired, and afraid. Not to mention skeptical, cynical, and distrustful. And those plaques touting people as the most important asset should be taken down. Not everywhere, of course, but in far too many organizations. But we have a choice. No one needs to appoint you, promote you, or nominate you.
What Russell is talking about here is a different kind of leadership that starts with what all good leadership begins with: It is taking responsibility for the outcomes in your area. Negativity Loops Destroy Intention When the stakes are high, negative thinking is a no-brainer; it comes naturally to any of us. Living intentionally is the path to success, but what happens when our intentions are derailed? Kristi Hedges is an expert in executive presence.
Negativity dramatically affects your ability to lead. Negativity pulls us down and inward. Positivity pulls us up and outward. Negative thoughts have two characteristics: When they have setbacks, they see the issue as temporary and specific, not permanent and pervasive.
Most of our pessimistic thoughts are just catastrophizing with little or no root in reality. They destroy our game. Learn to challenge your thoughts before, during, and after a stressful situation. Find a pregame ritual—a repeatable process to get yourself in the zone of your intention—to get yourself into a positive frame of mind from the outset. When you have a physical reaction in a stressful situation, accept that it is a normal response and use helpful strategies to work around it, including taking deep breaths, pausing, and simply acknowledging them.
The Power of Habit Habits will always be with us. But how do you replace bad habits with good habits? More importantly, how often do we ask ourselves if what we are doing is really just a habit? We are less intentional than we think we are. Develop a Relentless Solution Focus. Where Negative Emotions Come From. Finding Gratitude in the Common Things We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. Do You Have Moral Overconfidence?
Most will behave well or poorly, depending on the context…. Business leaders need to remember that most of us have too much confidence in our strength of character. Nohria is exactly correct. Good leadership is humble leadership. Humility is living in truth. The truth about our limitations and an understanding of our proper relationship with others.
Humility gives us a better understanding of how we are to treat each other. Without it we operate from only one perspective—our own. As leaders, we are to work with people, not over them. It is far too tempting to think hierarchically and not relationally. A humble leader will close the gap between themselves and others. Humility manifests itself in understanding the need to learn. Authority disciplined by humility is teachable. It is merely an opportunity to learn from another perspective. If you stop learning, you stop leading. Leadership has a way of revealing our weaknesses.
Practical Genius is a Choice Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses you. Are You Up, Down, or Sideways? There are no guarantees in life. We can be proactive, but there are some things that are completely outside of our control. We must learn how to interact with the forces in our life that are bigger than we are to create the outcomes we desire.
No matter where we are—up, down, or sideways—there are things we can do to mitigate the downs, take advantage of the ups and maximize the sideways times in our life. What to Ask the Person in the Mirror While we might like to think otherwise, here is a fact about successful leaders: Successful leaders go through significant periods of time in which they feel confused, discouraged, and unsure of themselves and their decisions.
They feel as if they should be somewhere else, doing something else. And un successful leaders go through the same thing. The trick lies not in avoiding these difficult periods; it lies in knowing how to step back, diagnose, regroup, and move forward. Have a Nice Conflict! Reading Have a Nice Conflict was like listening to my Dad again. Behaviors are the tools we choose and use to support our self-worth. You can look at personal strengths like behaviors.
They represent the different ways a person can interact with others to achieve self-worth. When a person tries one of these strengths and has success with it, they use it more often. Other strengths might have rendered poor results, and so they might tend to use those less and less. They become our modus operandi. What are they overdoing? What are they really trying to accomplish? Most likely, their intent is not to annoy you.
Conflict can happen when other people misinterpret your strengths. We want to recreate the success they have enjoyed in our own lives. So we try to imitate them. It seems like the shortest distance between two points. Of course, we are trying to copy a result.
What we often fail to see is the work it took to get them to the place where they could do what they do. A big part of the problem is the lack of confidence we have in ourselves. Sometimes in watching the success of others, we lose faith in ourselves. Jazz saxophonist Stan Getz took a teaching position at Stanford in In an interview with a reporter about his role there, he put it this way: I always tell them that they have to be themselves.
And I will tell them: If you want to try and do the same thing, it will only be an imitation, however perfectly you will do it. I keep on trying to convince them that they have to play what they feel themselves. Your hero is the only one that can play it that way. Success easily erodes humility.
It is the humility that comes with a habit of respect for others. Humility is all about perspective. Their strongly worded advice to aspiring leaders inside IBM should be read as words of wisdom for leaders at every level of all kinds of organizations: They focus on the work, not themselves. They seek success—they are ambitious—but they are humbled when it arrives. They know that much of that success was luck, timing, and a thousand factors out of their personal control. They feel lucky, not all-powerful.
Oddly, the ones operating under a delusion that they are all-powerful are the ones who have yet to reach their potential. But do not belittle others in your pursuit of your ambitions. Raise them up instead. The biggest leader is the one washing the feet of the others. The result, when it comes together—the execution of a great idea—should be humbling to any leader. It is humility coupled with ambition that correlates with results. Does Your Wellbeing Need a Boost? Gallup scientists have determined that there are five universal and interdependent elements of wellbeing that differentiate a thriving life from one spent suffering: Every day, use your strengths.
Spend six hours a day socializing—face-to-face, phone, e-mail. Spend on others instead of solely on material possessions. Get at least 20 minutes of activity each day and 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night. Identify how you can contribute in your community based on your own values.
If we are struggling in any one of these areas, as most of us are, it damages our wellbeing and wears on our daily life. Ways to measure and improve in each of these areas is provided in Wellbeing by Tom Rath and Jim Harter. The Wellbeing Finder can be taken online by using the code provided in the book. Small changes can have a huge impact. To get started they recommend setting positive defaults. One of the best ways to create more good days is by setting positive defaults. Any time you help your-short-term self work with your long-term self, you have an opportunity.
You can intentionally choose to spend more time with the people you enjoy most and engage your strengths as much as possible.
Conclusion
You can structure your finances to minimize the worry caused by debt. You can make exercise a standard part of your routine. Through these daily choices, you create stronger friendships, families, workplaces, and communities. There will always be drama. From Values to Action. This Might Not Work! Creating and producing is mostly a matter of getting out of the rut, allowing the process to guide you, letting go of perfection, and showing up. Chuck Close, renown American photorealist painter and photographer, says that in his work, so much is embedded in the process of following the path wherever it leads.
The important thing is to get going. But if you simply get going something will occur to you. I added few trinkets, like a peacock feather and bookmark, that I picked up at retreats where I felt incredible energy and motivation around what I was learning. When I'm in my home office, I want to feel the same way I felt at those retreats. A few inspirational notecards from my best friends and women I admire are on my board as well; I personally believe that their handwritten notes on the back infuse it with even more good vibes. I even have a few items from past events that I want to keep occurring each year, like a photo of my husband from a surf vacation and an invitation to an annual gala dinner for the top 25 sales people in my company.
I want to continue to enjoy surf vacations with my husband, and want to continue to be invited to this exclusive gala. I've been invited back to that gala each of the last three years, and not coincidentally, have had the previous year's invitation on my vision board for the last two see, it works! A few quotes and reminders round out my board and I truly feel giddy every time I look at it.
There is only one major rule to creating a vision board that works, and it's that there aren't any rules. You aren't going to mess it up, you can create your vision board on your own terms. Here are the answers to the most common questions people ask:. Anything that inspires and motivates you.
The purpose of your vision board is to bring everything on it to life. First, think about what your goals are in the following areas: You don't have to cover each area exactly the same, just take a mental inventory of what you want each of those areas to look like and write them down. Always handwrite your goals instead of typing them, there's something energetic about actually handwriting your goals.
From your goals and aspirations, think about what you want on your vision board. Like I said before, what you focus on expands. You'll be amazed at how things just start popping up all over the place once you set the intention for what you want and how you want to feel. Should I have one main vision board, or a bunch of small ones for different areas of my life?
It's totally up to you. What makes the most sense in your life? I personally like to have one central vision board that I look at every day in my home office, and I have a few small ones that I've made at retreats that I keep around too.
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I turned to Google. I varied my search terms, but my results left me less than satisfied. I use Evernote to record my entries and use two tags: Every morning, I copy and paste the above template into a new note, date it and answer the following three questions:. Here, I write my five most important tasks for the day. If you want to achieve extraordinary results, you need to narrow your focus and allow what matters most to drive your day. This is an opportunity to review my day and improve what is already working.
I have an alarm on my phone to trigger my journaling habit, and every evening, at This is what really matters. The more thorough you are, here, the more you can return to it again and again and learn from it. Last week, for example, I accidently deleted an audio recording I had made. But when I meditated on it, when I really thought about it, I realised my problem was great because I could make an improvement on the original. This helps me be at the cause, rather than the effect of my concern.
This helps me track my weekly goal of reading a book a week. You can watch it on YouTube here. You can read my key takeaways here. The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. You can read my Kindle notes and highlights here. Did you enjoy this article? Join my monthly newsletter and get the best research-based strategies to level up your life and business today. Comments I have been searching the internet for a two part journal template and this is just what I was looking for, I will start using your template tomorrow.