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| Newsletter January 18, 2012 Your Personal Leadership Style for 2012 |
Happy New Year to all my readers. In this new year I have something new to offer you also. You can now choose to listen to my newsletter or read it. Listen to My Newsletter or Download it to your iPod here.
So let me help you build some momentum. Let me help you get some foundations in place that will help you make 2012 very successful, meaningful and productive for you. While my readers are a diverse group of people, most seem to be professionals. They have done a course of study at a university or tertiary institute and qualified with expertise in a particular profession or industry area. No matter whether we are an accountant, doctor, lawyer, psychologist, real estate agent, financial planner or whatever, we are all trained in a very similar way. We are given a body of knowledge in our professional/industry area and a set of technical skills. We are told that the more competent we become at bringing the knowledge and skills together the more excellent and successful practitioner we will become. It doesn’t take us long out in the field to discover that is not the case. We need more than that. Sometimes it takes a while to find out what that “more” is. It was Richard Barrett who made the comment: Who you are and what you stand for is becoming as important as the product or service you sell. That’s the “more” – who we are and what we stand for. Becoming aware of this and really knowing it and bringing that to our practice is what makes all the difference. Who I am (my self-awareness) + What I believe (my values) + What I do (my profession) + How I do it (my technical skills, personal leadership and soft skills) + Why I do it (my motivation) = Excellent and successful practitioner. The What, How and Why need to be consistent with our values and who we are at our essence. All of this is building our Personal Brand and Our Reputation. It is about our Way of Being. Getting it right will give us all the professional edge. All of what constitutes the “more” is what we didn’t get at university. They are, for example, personal leadership skills like integrity, character, self-management, self-mastery, mindset and reflective practice. It is also about acquiring resilience, pro-activity and emotional intelligence as well. It’s about things like
This is all stuff that sits below the surface of every professional’s public face. There is no way today we can avoid a confrontation with it. When we do, it will be those who have become aware of the importance of this “more” and who have embraced on-going learning to acquire those skills and abilities who will become the people of influence in their organisation, their profession and their world. I am committed to helping professionals develop the soft skills for personal leadership – skills they need to lead themselves first so they can then lead their people.  Maree Harris Ph.D.  |
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Creating Our Way of Being – Our Personal Leadership Style.
How do we want to be? How do we want to feel about ourselves – not just when we are out there amongst our colleagues and clients, but when we are alone with ourselves, laying in bed at night thinking about our day? How do we want our employees, colleagues, clients, family and friends to see us? All the answers to these questions are about our way of being with people, our way of being in the world – not just about what we do, our way of doing. It’s not enough to get some tips and strategies on soft skills. The real change in this area is below the surface. It’s about transforming ourselves to become who we want to be. Four Processes to Start Creating a Personal Leadership Style for 2012.
1. Start with Why. I “steal” this phrase from Simon Sinek, author of the book “Start With Why”. He says that most organisations and people know WHAT they do. Some know HOW they do it. Very few, he says, know WHY they do it. “WHY” is about”what’s your purpose, your cause, your belief.” It’s the reason you get out of bed in the morning. He says this is very important for us to get clear because “people don’t buy WHAT you do. They buy WHY you do it.” Discovering our WHY and then living it with passion and commitment turns us into a leader who attracts others to us who share our beliefs who want to work with us. Recommendation. Watch Simon Sinek’s TED 18 minute video on this – How Great Leaders Inspire Action. Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4 2. Positive Explanatory Style. When things don’t go right for you, when “bad” or negative things happen for you, how do you explain it to yourself? This is your explanatory style. Do you have an optimistic or a pessimistic explanatory style? Which kinds of people would you prefer to work with? Which kinds of managers would you prefer to have leading your team? Learning to develop and sustain an optimistic, proactive and resilient explanatory style will see you become a high achiever and a leader everyone will want to be around and follow. More importantly, you will feel much more at peace with yourself and your life. Recommendation. Chapter 2 of Martin Seligman’s book “Learned Optimism” has a questionnaire in it where you can test your own explanatory style. 3. Self-discipline. It was Kop Kopmeyer, a highly regarded writer and researcher on success and achievement, who said: “There are 999 other success principles that I have found in my reading and experience, but without self-discipline, none of them work.” What is self-discipline? One of the early twentieth century writers, Elbert Hubbard, put it very succinctly: “Self-discipline is the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.” So at this time of the year when we are setting the goals that we believe will bring us the success we want, learning to be self-disciplined becomes incredibly important. It goes hand in hand with self-management and self-mastery. Recommendation. Read Brian Tracy’s 2010 book “No Excuses – The Power of Self-Discipline. “ 4. Being Mindful. Have you ever had the experience of driving somewhere and upon arrival, not knowing how you got there? You drove on automatic pilot. It’s concerning but a very common experience for people. Police say that many minor car accidents are caused by lack of concentration. Not being mindful of what we are doing while driving our car can be a life/death issue. Not being mindful of what we are doing in our work and in our relationships, however, can see us not achieving what we want from our efforts and endeavours. NOW, this moment, is all we have. Being fully present in this moment is what allows us to extract everything of value from it. The speed and busyness of life today gets in the way of being mindful. It breeds distraction and fragmentation. It encourages multi-tasking even while we are engaged in important activities, like driving our car. Being mindful is about being focussed and tuned in to what we are doing. It’s about attentiveness. It grounds us, centres us and sees us achieving more in every moment. Recommendation. Learn and practice some activity that supports being mindful, for example, yoga, meditation, tai chi. 5. Get Yourself a Performance or Accountability Partner in 2012. Stay With It. It is a Journey not a Destination. None of this is easy. None of it happens quickly. It is a life-time commitment to become the person you want to be. When we work with something very practical – balancing our books, renewing the paint on our house, creating a new garden, reorganising the office – we see results quickly and we get a lot of satisfaction from what we have achieved. It is obvious to us and everyone else. We can see the beginning and we can see the end result. Balancing, renewing, creating and reorganising ourselves, however, does not happen quickly. Nor are the results obvious immediately. Often we too and fro and seemingly go backwards. It’s not always easy to see how we are progressing. That’s why this journey is one that is more enriching and energising when we take it with someone else. Recommendation. Share your aspirations for 2012 with some important other – friend, colleague, manager, mentor or coach – and meet regularly to explore your journey, both the challenges and the achievements.
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