How to Lead the Most Important Person in the Room!!
Off the back of my last on the 5 foundational pillars of leadership in sports, I want to further the connection of where leadership stems from. Leadership is a skillset. Like any skill set, it is strengthened through learning, exerted effort, and most importantly repetition. Being creatures of habit, our mind loves comfort and will always choose to resort to what it already knows at an unconscious level. Repetition builds habits to a level where you can perform a skill on autopilot. Leadership is a skill that is no different.
"First, be a leader of yourself. Only then can you grow to lead others." - David Taylor-Klaus
Leadership is the ability to influence and empower.? If you think of great leaders in the world - it is their character that stands out before their knowledge. I've been working with a client recently, who is looking to take the college route to pro basketball. He has had a few offers from Division 1 schools, Ju-co's, and NAIA's. Throughout his meetings with the college coaching staff, very little has been questioned about his basketball ability. Instead his upbringing, environment, values, and people skills. Obviously, you need to have an elite skillset to perform at the collegiate level but it is much easier to integrate a 'team-first' athlete than a 'me-first' athlete.
Realistically, we are all leaders of our own journey through life. We lead ourselves before we lead others. So, the question isn't "are we leaders?" but more so "how well are we leading?" The fact of the matter is we can't fill an empty cup so putting time into self is vital to empowering and influencing others. Self-leadership is the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling, and actions toward your objectives (Bryant and Kazan 2012).? Subsequently, this proves that leadership is a mindset rather than a title or position.
"First, you will have to understand yourself, because the hardest person you'll ever have to lead is yourself...
Second, to be an effective leader, you must take responsibility for your own development." - Bill Georges
When you put time, practice, and repetition into self-leadership not only does your energy and confidence attract your influence but you stand taller, think bigger, and care more.
Leading yourself means:
Understanding who you are as a person comes down to understanding your six core needs. Needs of your personality - certainty, variety, significance & connection. And needs of your soul - growth & contribution.
These are the core drivers of human behavior. They are what makes you tick, what motivates you, and the foundation of why you make the decisions you make in every aspect of life. I'll go into this deeper in another article.
2. Knowing your role and abilities.
Recognizing your strengths and weaknesses in sports gives you a better understanding of yourself as a whole and how you best operate.? Your strengths are what offer you the opportunity for a game-winning performance. Knowing what you do well increase positive emotions and feelings, gives you the greatest chance for success, and enhances self-confidence and inner belief.
Recognizing your weakness, helps you see your conscious blind spots, learn the lessons and develop skills to optimize potential. Knowing your role in sport allows you to narrow your focus with great attention to detail so you are clear on what you are good at and what you need to develop to maximize opportunity.
3. Getting clear on your goal.
The beauty of future thinking is that it allows us to utilize our creative minds to direct our focus on what we want to achieve.? Shoot for the moon, aim for the stars. Most athletes set unconscious limiting beliefs upon themselves because of either the people and environment they surround themself with or that they're not clear on the process or objectives to reaching that goal.?
The truth of the matter is, the process or objectives don't need to be perfect - they just need to create forward momentum. In fact, no matter how much time you spend trying to get that process right, it will change as you change.? You can't be the same person and expect a different result. That is a definition of insanity. Momentum creates growth. The rest you can figure out along the way.
4. Being Aware of your objectives.
You can go about this in a number of ways. Model the elite - follow the path of someone who has achieved or got close to achieving what you want. There is a reason they reached the levels they did.
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You can also reverse engineer your goals to create your objectives. What do I want to achieve? What is the step before that? and the step before that and so on until you are back in the present moment. Having objectives makes the dream seem more achievable in the mind. And that is what creates the motivation to take action.
Leading yourself is the biggest challenge you'll ever undertake because looking inwards can expose vulnerabilities, insecurities, and even self-doubt. There is a certain amount of discipline that comes with leading yourself and that is why it's so challenging. It's not a 9-5 job at the office or a couple of hours at training where you lead, it is a 24/7 job. And every decision comes with a consequence.
Self-awareness is the key to leading yourself. And this is the foundation for developing your leadership skillset.? When we are self-aware we can then begin to self-regulate. In other words, when we know who we are we can then begin to develop whom we need to be.
"Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power." - Lao Tzu
So, how can you begin to develop self-leadership?
a) Develop your "who"
b) Define your "where"
c) Determine your "what"
"Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about empowering others." - Jack Welch
Self-Leadership is a lifelong journey. It is a journey of trial and error. It is a journey of learning and re-learning. It is a journey of applying and re-applying. Leading yourself doesn't mean you don't make errors. In fact, it is those errors that help you learn and therefore improve and grow.
We lead in so many different aspects of our lives, not just in sports.? Whether you know it or not, you create your focus, expectations, timelines, and accountability. You have values and beliefs underpinned by principles and behaviors. You may not be consciously aware of them but they are there.
There is so much power in our unconscious mind. In fact, there has been proven research that the unconscious mind acts 7 seconds before we consciously make a decision.? To better know yourself you have to better know all of yourself. And we do that by asking ourselves powerful questions. Tony Robbins once said, "the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of questions that we ask ourselves."
The first step to leading others is to lead yourself.
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