3.) Leave a comment. Here, on iTunes, Michael’s website, LinkedIn. Anywhere. Everywhere. It all matters and it will help him grow the work he is doing.
A Growing Community
Speaking of podcasts, season two of the LeaderQuest Podcast is gearing up. This will include a similar format to season one, but I’m growing my guest list. If you’ve got an idea of someone you want to see on my podcast, please let me know!
I’m excited for what season two has to offer and know that it will bring a lot of value and benefit to your life. I’m also aware that it could be even better. Leave me your thoughts and feedback (and a 5-star review wouldn’t hurt either!).
The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book Shift: 7 Essential Mindset Strategies For Today’s Elite Performers. To keep aware of the release date and other excellent training material, please subscribe to my newsletter.
Shift: 7 Essential Mindset Strategies For Today’s Elite Performers.
Shift is about achieving ultimate performance.
In my work with my high achieving clients, I’ve discovered one thread in common with almost everyone: the biggest obstacle they face to success and transformation is the three pounds of grey matter lodged between their ears.
Our brains play host to all sorts of inherited narratives that influence our everyday lives. Take, for example, your thoughts about money. While I’m sure on some level you like it and know you need it, many of us carry around deep-seated issues towards money.
Is it a tool to be used for our own benefit or for the service of others?
A resource to be hoarded or given away generously?
A worry that consumes our thoughts or a blessing of enormous magnitude?
Chances are, whatever you think, you inherited those thoughts from your parents, your peer group, and other close relationships.
If you grew up in a house without a lot of money, it’s probably a constant stress or worry, even if you make enough of it now. It’s even worse if you don’t make enough. If you regularly experience more month than money, most of your stress (and spousal arguments) probably revolve around needing more of it.
If you think money is a sign of power and control, it will influence the way you approach all human interaction. Feeling stressed and need to seize control of a situation? Throw money at the problem. Feeling inferior, stressed, or irrelevant? A little retail therapy should help… Want someone to do what you want? Generosity with some strings attached could solve the problem.
Thoughts About Life
Whether you’ve consciously thought about your relationship to money or not, your life is dictated by it. As a business, you can’t survive without it. As a family, you can’t pay your bills without enough of it.
What is true of money is true of other inherited narratives as well.
What do you think about marriage? How do you explain your stance on family dynamics and relationships? How do you decide who’s house to go to for the holidays?
What is your view on loyalty in the workplace? Have you worked in the same place for more than five years? Ten? Twenty-five?
What about your own mindset? Why do you think the way you do? What story do you believe? Is it even true?
Mindset
The reality is that we all have preconceived notions of how the world should work, look, and feel. My son once asked me if I was the boss of mommy. How would you respond in that situation?
Shift is about creating a new mindset around the narrative that we tell ourselves. It is about rewriting the script on your own life from two primary perspectives.
First, is about the habits of success. There are fundamental practices that you need to engage in to create success. While I don’t believe that there is a “secret formula” for success, if there was, this would be it. I’m going to peel back the curtain on today’s top performers, elite accomplishers, and world-changing leaders to reveal what they do to be successful. This formula can be boiled down to one overriding principle: working smarter, not harder.
Make no mistake, it will take hard work. But, at the end of the day, hard work will never be enough. If you’re not working on the right projects, at the right time, with the right frame of mind, you’ll never get the right goals accomplished.
Because I’ve never met a leader who was looking for more things to do. In my five-plus years of experience coaching pastors, entrepreneurs, executives, business owners, and various levels of employees, I’ve never once heard it. Quite the opposite is true. We’re all overworked, overbooked, overstressed, and overcommitted.
Over It.
To be honest, I’m over it.
Instead, I decided to take back control of my life and help others along the way. Don’t just get more things done. Get the right things done.
This is a chance for you to examine your life.
Make changes.
Adapt.
Overcome.
Succeed.
Now it’s time to dive in so you can get the right things done.
Second, it’s an arbitrary date. While January 1 looks nice, it’s no more an effective date July 7 or September 10. In fact, based on the (usually) poor weather conditions and limited sunlight, it may actually be a worse time to start your goals.
Third, those committed to self-improvement do it as soon as they discover a weakness. In my work with high-performers, I can always tell the level of seriousness in a potential client by how they treat their self-improvement. Those who are ready usually take little to no prompting from me. We’ll talk about a subject, figure out an action plan, and they are off and running. In contrast, those that take a while to decide, need to spend some time “thinking about it” or “will get back to me” never actually make real change. They like the idea of change, they know they should change, but they rarely (if ever) do.
Think Different
In August of 1997, Steve Jobs urged us to “Think Different.”
It worked for Apple. It works for us too.
If you want to be someone that breaks the trend of failed new years resolutions, here are my top three tips to “Think Different” and experience success.
The spiritual and emotional health of leaders is a necessary component of holistic health.
We’re in the middle of a series on leadership health. Want to catch up? Part 1 is here.
Spiritual Health
Healthy leaders engage in ancient practices of development, often called spiritual disciplines. Times of quiet reflection, meditation, prayer, rest, and community discernment are a few examples.
An example of leadership spiritual growth is a hobby. Hobbies are those life-giving activities that serve as a reflection of our unique personality. Hunting, fishing, reading, flying drones, calligraphy.
In fact, I found that is often the case for high performing leaders. Engrossed in work and personal development (for the sake of further accomplishment), high performing leaders have a hard time unplugging and engaging in activities with no real goal or purpose other than enjoyment.
I’ve used comments like, “I have fun when I’m winning.” That’s enormously frustrating to people who are playing to have fun. (And vice versa).
Other similar phrases include:
I don’t know what to do with downtime.
I’m not bringing too much work with me, I’m on vacation.
My hobbies include winning and getting better.
(I may or may not have said all of these….) 😬
But spiritual health is rooted in calling and it is about the full development of a person’s humanity. Below, is a partial list of spiritual practices and disciplines to help you grow.
Practices for Spiritual Development:
Prayer
Journaling
Meditation
Scripture Reading
Gratitude and Thankfulness
Fasting
Sabbath Rest
Singing
Silence
Solitude
Have others? Leave a comment and let others know how to grow in spiritual health.
Emotional Health in leaders
Emotional health is the next step to fruitful and productive leadership. In my experience, this is the most neglected area of health. The emotional health of a person sits in the unique field of being almost completely internal in nature through past experiences, while also being almost completely externally visible through actions, perceptions, and relationships.
Peter Scazzeo notes the concerns of emotional health:
Emotional health is concerned with such things as: naming, recognizing, and managing our own feelings identifying and having active compassion for others initiating and maintaining close and meaningful relationships breaking free from self-destructive patterns being aware of how our past impacts our present developing the capacity to clearly express our thoughts and feelings respecting and loving others without having to change them clearly, directly, and respectfully asking for what we need, want, or prefer accurately assessing our own strengths, limits, and weaknesses, and freely sharing them with others developing the capacity to maturely resolve.
For the emotionally healthy leader, effective emotional health requires a previous recognition and engagement with the emotional traps, snares, and shortcomings at earlier stages of life. Family dynamics, addiction triggers, and shortcomings all need to be worked through and reflected upon.
But it is important to remember that emotional health may start internal, but presents external.
Snappy comebacks.
Biting remarks.
Constant criticism.
These are a few outward signs that something is wrong internally. Healthy leaders, by contrast, are generous. With their praise, with their affirmation, with their encouragement and desire to see others succeed and grow.
Because this is such an important topic, we are going to examine how to grow in emotional health and intelligence next week.
I learned the necessity of emotional intelligence like a child learning to walk. There was lots of hand-holding, many more tremendous crashes (often public), and more than a few bumps and bruises.
The Leader’s Guide to Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence is like playing the piano. The greater the range, the greater the player.
As a pianist, my musical accomplishment is limited to chopsticks. On a good day, I might be able to find middle C.
For my wife, after some tinkering, she can learn to play fairly complex songs. She can tune her guitar, sing along as she plays, and is good enough to teach our children.
A world-class pianist can play amazing complex songs. The piano seems to come alive in their hands. Every technique is mastered. Each hammering of the keys is intentional. Everything ringing with a divine sound.
Emotional Intelligence works the same way. Emotionally immature people have a very limited range of keys to play from. Usually, they are the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. A situation arises, and their keystrokes are limited. Everything triggers them to respond in simplistic ways.
I knew a man like this once. Though physically mature, the emotional range was limited. Within a split-second, he could go from happiness to anger. Worse than that (as someone who claimed to be a leader), there was little desire to change.
“I’m just this way. I’ve always been this way, I’ll always be this way. “
This limiting belief and limited emotional capacity will limit his leadership capacity.
Expanding The Emotional Range
Expanding emotional range happens with practice. Like each new key on the keyboard that a pianist can play, emotional range equips the leader for more situations.
Think of a strong emotion like anger. Those with limited emotional capacity experience lots of anger. The lack of self-awareness leads to them repeatedly pounding the same key over and over again.
They get cut off in traffic and are angry.
The restaurant takes too long to cook their food and they are angry.
Their child leaves their shoes in the middle of the floor and they are angry.
They are passed over for a promotion and are angry.
Their favorite team loses in the championship game and they are angry.
Bothered by the amount of trash in the local park, they are angry.
Like a new piano player, they keep hitting the same note. Always angry, always looking for a reason to explode, always at the ready to let everyone know how they feel.
In contrast to this, there are ranges of anger: annoyance, frustration, furious, exasperated, and bitter are a few examples. Each is a different key to more adequately express the current emotion.
Do your child’s shoes in the middle of the floor really make you angry or are you annoyed because you tripped over them?
Does the missed promotion make you exasperated because you worked hard and thought you earned it?
The more keys that are available to us as leaders, the better we can navigate the situations around us.
Continual Growth
The thing about leadership is that it is never a finished journey. New experiences and new insights lead to new emotional experiences.
