You Are a Leader

SUMMARY

Are you one of those people who thinks everybody else is a leader except you?

This is a common misconception and I want to help you to understand that you don't need to have a team to be a leader.

So, stick with me because this week we're going to shift some mindsets around that.

We’ve come out of that post-pandemic VUCA world. We used to be in an information world, and before that was the industrial age. But the thing is, it doesn't matter what area of leadership we are in; we still need to have these basic principles down pat, no matter which age we are working in.

We talked about the fact that there are three faces of leadership.

The first one is Personal Leadership which is all about YOU.

The second is Professional Leadership which is all about you getting results.

The third is about People Leadership which is about taking people on the journey with you.

What I want to do today is make sure that you understand what you need to work on in your Personal Leadership so that you can become who you need to be to do those things.

PERSONAL LEADERSHIP is the foundation of all other areas of leadership. If you are not secure in yourself and have the confidence to lead yourself, then how do you expect to get results and lead others as well?

The three areas of Personal Leadership are the following:

The first is your Identity, which is all about how you feel about yourself.

The next one is your Intelligence, which is about going beyond what you know and looking at things like your emotions and your social intelligence.

The third area is Intention, which is about having a plan for your life and not being stuck in just the day-to-day of getting up, doing the same thing, and then going to bed.

TRANSCRIPT

Are you one of those people who thinks everybody else is a leader except you?

This is a common misconception and I want to help you to understand that you don't need to have a team to be a leader.

So, stick with me because this week we're going to shift some mindsets around that.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, VUCA Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to continue this conversation around leadership by helping you to understand that YOU are a leader.

Last week, we started this conversation looking at how leadership is changing in the current landscape. We're now in the age of AI.

We’ve come out of that post-pandemic VUCA world. We used to be in an information world, and before that was the industrial age. But the thing is, it doesn't matter what area of leadership we are in; we still need to have these basic principles down pat, no matter which age we are working in.

We talked about the fact that there are three faces of leadership.

The first one is Personal Leadership which is all about YOU.

The second is Professional Leadership which is all about you getting results.

The third is about People Leadership which is about taking people on the journey with you.

Within each of these areas, I talked about the nine crucial shifts every leader needs to make to thrive and survive and be who they need to be as a leader in today's world.

So, what we're going to do this week is we're going to have a look at that first area of leadership, the one that's all about you, and that is PERSONAL LEADERSHIP.

I joked last week (in fact, it's probably not a joke because everybody says the same thing) that the most interesting person to lead on a daily basis is yourself.

The conversations you have and the strategies you need to employ to get you over the line are a little different to working with other people.

So, let's have a look at why that is.

PERSONAL LEADERSHIP is the foundation of all other areas of leadership. If you are not secure in yourself and have the confidence to lead yourself, then how do you expect to get results and lead others as well?

If you've done some conventional leadership training where it's all about others — getting people to do what you want them to do, delegation, communication and conflict, and all those things which are also extremely important — but you have not worked on the foundation of you, it's probably the reason why you're not getting the results even though you've done the training.

What I want to do today is make sure that you understand what you need to work on in your Personal Leadership so that you can become who you need to be to do those things.

Last week, I introduced you to the 3 areas of Personal leadership.

The first is your Identity, which is all about how you feel about yourself.

The next one is your Intelligence, which is about going beyond what you know and looking at things like your emotions and your social intelligence.

The third area is Intention, which is about having a plan for your life and not being stuck in just the day-to-day of getting up, doing the same thing, and then going to bed.

What I want to do today is unpack those three. In each of those areas (indeed in the whole 9), I take people on a journey from where they are now (which is not getting them the results they want) to where they need to be.

In each of those areas, there's a transformational shift that first starts in the mindset and then in the behaviour.

Let’s have a look at the first one, which is your IDENTITY.

Your Identity is who you believe you are and who you believe you're not. This is a key area that you need to work on to remove the limiting beliefs and the roadblocks currently getting in your way.

The transition we want to do here is to go from being conflicted (not being certain about who you are, lacking confidence, not really lining up with your thoughts and your true self, being easily led by other people’s thoughts and beliefs, and needing approval), and to shift to and go on a transformational journey to being congruent.

Being congruent means being able to line up with your values, who you truly are and what your beliefs are. It’s being more authentic, to be the real deal, to take off the mask and stop pretending to be who everybody wants you to be. It's about cutting yourself some slack, giving yourself the “okay” to make mistakes, to get things wrong. It's about moving away from those three universal fears of not belonging, not being enough, and not being loved. This is a key area that I've had to work on for many years, and it was not until I got to a great place in that area that I could go anywhere beyond the ceiling that I'd put on myself. This is the most exciting and rewarding area for me when I'm working with individuals to help them rewrite the conditioning that's gone on in their brain — to put new meanings around experiences and to have a healthy identity based on self-approval.

The second area is in your INTELLIGENCE.

This shift is about going beyond that singular Intelligence of IQ (your cognitive ability) to embracing your multiple intelligences as a human being— particularly your Emotional and Social Intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to be able to notice, name and navigate your emotions instead of suppressing, ignoring them, and all the crazy things that we've been taught to do. Instead of managing the emotion, you learn to manage the response to the emotion. It’s being able to realise that emotions are a good thing — they are cues and clues that are designed to help.

Social Intelligence is the ability to be able to want to understand the emotions that others might be going through — to have empathy and to be able to serve them. This is a key area that helps you in all areas of your leadership.

Then the third area is INTENTION. This is about going from being scattered (seat-of-the-pants mentality, day-to-day let’s just go from crisis to crisis and let's see what happens tomorrow) to having a clear plan on what you're doing all that for. It’s being able to realign yourself with your purpose and values and to (in a lot of cases) remember what it is that you started out doing and what you're doing them for.

It's way beyond a paycheck and the recognition and those things; It's about being able to set a new intention, a new pathway, a journey to get back to those things that you said you wanted to have. It's about “who do I need to become so that I can get there?”

Remember, we need to be able to be who we need to be to do the things we need to do to have the results that we want to have.

So, it's about having an intentional journey set up that includes removing those roadblocks and adding resources that are in your personal development so that you can go from where you are now (the current reality) to where you want to go (the results that you want).

So, PERSONAL LEADERSHIP is all about your IDENTITY, your INTELLIGENCE, and your INTENTION.

What we're going to do in the weeks to come, once we've unpacked the other two areas of leadership, I'm going to go right back to the start, and we're going to work on your Identity.

So, keep going on the journey with me.

And, if you're not one who wants to wait that long and you're like what I was, and you got to the point where you said:

“You know what, I'm not doing this anymore. I want to fix this. I want to make sure I identify what's going wrong here. Why have I got this ceiling of self-worth that says: ‘When I get to this area, I sabotage it because I don't believe that I'm good enough?’”

So, I want to help you with that, but if you do not want to wait for that then there are plenty of ways (down here, up here, or wherever you're watching this) to get in contact with me because I love to help people to be able to do those things.

We can jump on a call and work out how to work together on that.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue unpacking these three faces of leadership, and we look at your Professional Leadership.

I'll see you then.