Leadership Starts with You
Earlier this year, I honestly considered writing a book. Maybe there is a book in me for the future, but today my mission is to make inspirational leadership development accessible to anyone. Every day I meet leaders, exceptional leaders, good leaders and mediocre leaders who are all challenged. Leadership is a path for those that want to become magnetic leaders worth following. It’s a path that leads to an unfolding journey of self-discovery as a foundation for taking others through their own self-discovery. To support leaders on such a journey, in a way that fit with their time, finances and other constraints in life, I created an e-course ensuring they could not only take in the wisdom of a book, but also have structure and support in applying it.
Leadership starts with you. Leadership begins with finding and bringing forth your highest potential so you can do the same for others. This is leadership’s highest calling – unlocking the potential of others, but it starts with you. Understanding who you are is the foundation for knowing your purpose, or why you do what you do. Knowing who you are and your purpose gives you the foundations for others to take up your cause and you’ll still need to figure out what you need to do and how you’ll do it to ensure your followers can take your strategic vision and run with it to create results.
All of the leaders I meet experience areas of challenge and opportunity. Whether it’s feeling lonely at the top, like they don’t really make an impact, that they’re putting out fires day to day but not thinking strategically enough, that the days just fly by and they’re left to do the real work after hours or that they’re not developing their team or creating deep accountability with their followers. These are just a few of the essential areas of development for all leaders and often I find that leaders have attempted to develop in their challenge or opportunity areas without success. What’s common is that their development has been focused on the skill before creating a solid foundation of authentic leadership first. After all, leadership starts with the leader not with the skills of leadership.
Today I’m inviting all leaders who want to be worth following to take a deep look at themselves. To know and understand who you are, the purpose and impact you care about bringing to the world, your values as a leader as a foundation to bring great leadership forward. Once you, as a leader, have taken that first step of the journey I invite you to look at how you trust others, express gratitude and how you build depth of relationships while also having strong and honest boundaries for yourself and your team. Finally, look at how you develop others through coaching and having honest feedback conversations with yourself and your team to ensure you continue to evolve as individuals and together.
Leadership is not a skill, it’s an art that begins with you. Like any great artist, you need support and structure to develop and refine your craft whether it’s through a coach, an e-course or something else – a book doesn’t create an artist.
Make time to master yourself and you’ll become worth following.