Series: New Year, Bold Moves - The 2025 Leadership Challenge Article 1: The First Step: Cultivating Habits for Sustained Leadership Growth

Hi Meaningful Leaders,

Welcome to the first edition of our "New Year, Bold Moves: The 2025 Leadership Challenge." When I sat down to plan the content I wanted to create for you this year, I thought about new year resolutions and how easily they can fizzled out without the proper structure in place. So, as we embark on a new year, it's the perfect time to transform our leadership through disciplined, intentional habits. This January, we're not just setting resolutions; we're committing to a month-long journey of meaningful change that sticks.

Are you game? I hope you are, because I'm writing this series for myself ????♀? as much as for you!

What to Expect:

Throughout this series, we will explore four key aspects of habit formation:

1. Week 1: Cultivating Habits for Sustained Leadership Growth – We are exploring the science of habit formation, focusing on how to create cues that trigger productive behaviors and routines that can be sustained over time. Learning how to build a supportive environment that makes good habits inevitable and bad habits difficult.
2. Week 2: Habit Mastery: Building Blocks for Leadership Excellence – Delve deeper into the mechanisms that reinforce habits, such as the role of rewards and the importance of seeing progress. We'll discuss strategies for making habits stick, even when your motivation wanes.
3. Week 3: Turning Trials into Triumph: A Leader’s Guide to Endurance – Tackling the challenges that come with changing old habits, including how to handle setbacks and how to maintain new behaviors under stress...because life will be in the way!
4. Week 4: Beyond the Basics: Advanced Strategies for Lasting Change – We'll look at ways to keep advancing and refining your habits. This week will focus on continuous improvement and how to scale small habits into big transformations.

Why Focus on Habits?

Resolutions often fail because they are mere statements of intent without a structured approach to achieve them, wishful thinking ?. Habits, on the other hand, are the engines of our daily lives. As James Clear beautifully articulates in his book, Atomic Habits, "Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement." Just as small investments grow over time, the effects of small but regular improvements in our habits accumulate to produce remarkable outcomes.

Building leadership habits doesn’t just mean adopting new behaviors; it's about transforming your environment, mindset, and daily routines to foster these habits naturally. According to Clear, every habit is initiated by a cue, performed through a routine, and rewarded by a benefit. By understanding and manipulating these components, we can replace unhelpful patterns with new, beneficial ones.

Exploring the Science of Habit Formation

Understanding the science behind habit formation can transform how we approach personal and professional growth. Habits are formed through a loop process that involves a cue, a routine, and a reward. To harness this power:

1. Cues: Begin by identifying clear cues that prompt your desired habits. These could be as simple as placing your running shoes next to your bed if you want to cultivate the habit of morning jogging, or setting a specific time for strategic planning each day.
2. Routines: Establish routines that are easy to follow once your cue is triggered. If your cue is setting your strategic planning documents on your desk each morning, your routine might involve reviewing key objectives and tasks for 30 minutes without interruptions.
3. Rewards: Finally, ensure that each routine is followed by a reward. This could be a sense of achievement, a small treat, or even a few minutes of relaxation, an outdoor walk or a nice cappuccino. Rewards solidify the habit loop, making your brain link the habit to a positive outcome. Yes, we are tricking our brain ??

Creating a Supportive Environment

A supportive environment is crucial for sustaining new habits. This involves:

• Removing Temptations: We must organize our environments to minimize temptations that lead us away from our desired habits.
• Designing for Success: Set up your physical and social environment to support your new habits. This might mean restructuring or decluttering your workspace, choosing the right team for collaborative projects, or even changing your digital environments to reduce distractions and promote focus.

This Week's Insight:

As you set out to build and strengthen your leadership habits**, think about the environments that have historically enabled your success. How can you replicate or enhance these settings to support your new goals?

**Note: When you thing of leadership habits, this includes taking care of the whole of you. Your physical, mental and spiritual parts. For me this year the emphasis is physical health (workout regularly and fuel my body) and spending quality time with the Lord every day.

Take Action:

Identify one key habit you want to develop this week and apply the cue, routine, reward cycle to it. Arrange your environment to foster this habit and think about the immediate reward that will help make this habit stick.

Thank you for joining this transformative journey. Stay tuned for next week's edition, where we will delve deeper into making these habits a lasting part of your leadership style. Together, let’s lay a strong foundation for a year of growth and excellence.

Let’s make this a year to remember—start small, think big, and act now!

Thanks for reading and God bless you,