Pl-9 Improve your leadership

Progressive Learning Session 9 (Improve your leadership).

Most people want to feel great, have lots of energy, increase their fitness, remain free of illness and so on.

Most people also agree that eating better and exercising more would help them with their health and wellness goals.

However, most people also find it challenging to develop the consistent habits that they know would be necessary to achieve their health goals.

One of the main reasons people engage personal trainers is to help them become more accountable to their goals.

In the end, most people want someone to help them do what they know they should.

However, as has been often said, you can’t push spaghetti, but you can pull it.

Having a pull rather than a push approach is part of developing your leadership skills.

Most people also see the value of developing a team of team-building advocates and interacting with others also building a team of team building advocates.

However, as with fitness goals, many people find it difficult to form the right consistent habits.

It is vital to identify when people in your team are ready to step up. As we know, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink!”.

It’s also important to paint the vision for the willing and identify what barriers they may have.

Most people struggle with how they allocate their time. Help them think through their time allocation and become more organised and productive. For example, many people are continually held hostage to their urgent to-do list, leaving little or no time for important activities and projects. It is challenging to achieve your end goals if you leave no time to work on achieving those end goals.

It’s great to help others make a list of thanks that are important or urgent things or both and go through this list of to-dos with them.

One of the most fantastic favours you can do your team members is encouraging them to listen to the mini-habits video in our system. This video summarises the Mini-Habits book by Stephen Guise.

Helping your team members come to grip with these fundamentals is one way you can make a massive difference in their lives. But, more importantly, you can impact many others’ lives when your leaders make the same investment in their team members.

It’s also great to help people clarify what’s really important to them. In other words, to identify the essential things and work towards achieving them. You will find that most people rarely take the time to clarify their end goals when they can see no way of achieving them. In other words, they settle for mediocre rather than great. They choose to exist rather than live. Part of your job as a leader is to inspire team members to strive for more. Building a network makes so much more possible.

Let’s look at some leadership hints and tips:

• Always work on your personal development and develop your leadership skills.
  • One great way of doing this is to listen to the great podcasts that come as part of the CC.
  • Some of these are summaries of great books.
• Help your team members recognise the difference between pleasing methods and pleasing results.
  • Time flies when you are having a great time.
  • On the other hand, time typically drags when you do the boring stuff.
  • However, simple tasks that may be boring consistently repeated usually produce the most remarkable success.
• Show your team members that urgent tasks do not always have to be done before working on essential projects. 
  • Help them see that they can devote time to the important as well as the urgent. It’s not one or the other.
• Help your team members understand the difference between consistency and intensity.
• Show your team members how to avoid becoming prone to distraction.
  • In other words, how to avoid the shiny object syndrome. There will always be something new and exciting they can quickly become distracted by.
• Help those you are working with become more strategic and organised to avoid becoming overwhelmed.
• Many people allow themselves to become stressed and overwhelmed simply because they are not well organised. In other words, they are trying to carry too much in their brains rather than relying on systems and habits.
• Help those you are working with not fall victim to continually thinking, “I will when the current crisis is over”. There always seems to be a crisis with some people, doesn’t there?
• Help your team members avoid feeling like victims. In other words, it’s not what happens to us; it’s how we choose to react to what happens to us that most determine our strongly desired end result.
• In some cases, you may feel you are no longer having a significant impact with some people you are coaching. In such situations, you may be able to think of someone else in the CC that they can speak with who may have a more significant impact than you do. Also, in many cases, you can think of a book or a podcast episode that you can recommend to them. Such tools can be highly effective.
• Learn the skill of asking great questions that can lead people to their own penny-drop moments. For example, questions that reinforce the value of starting with mini-habits, so they don’t become overwhelmed or lose motivation.