Great Leaders Lead Themselves Well
When we focus on our strengths and our blindspots and hone our key human skills (communication, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, negotiation, etc.), we become more impactful.
Read on to reflect alongside Melissa about how you can best set yourself up for success as a leader.
The World Is Changing
I wrote this article last year at this time, and the message seems to still fit pretty well so am sharing it again.
Over the past week (now a year), ChatGPT has been in many of my social media feeds and has been highlighted by a few people. I was impressed when I checked out its capabilities.
How Did I Get Here?
Have you ever been driving and realized you had not been paying attention to where you wanted to go and were driving on auto-pilot? This has happened to me more times than I'd like to admit.
Are You Prepared?
What kind of person are you usually - winging it or uber-prepared? Neither one is better or worse if they get you the desired outcome; they are just different ways of operating. However, if the way you operate causes you stress, that may not be your most successful mode.
When one door closes…
As the saying goes, when one door goes, another opens, and that has been my experience, though we don't always see it that way initially.
Do You Have a Personal Board of Advisors?
One of the topics we're covering on Monday in my FIRE Circle program session is the idea of having a personal board of advisors or directors to help guide you in managing your life, personally and professionally. Do you have a group of trusted advisors that you look to when you're analyzing what's next in your career or navigating a challenging set of circumstances? I do, and it's really helpful to be able to get perspectives from people that you trust but that are looking at the situation with a different lens.
Permission to Reset
When I reviewed my blog post from last year at this time, I had just finished my last long race of the year, and my physical therapist was coaching me that it was time to take a break from training. His point to me…you have to let your body rest. It needs time to recover from the stress you put on it. I admit…it was nice for someone to give me permission to not think about what kind of workout to do for a few days.
Do I Belong?
Do you ever walk into a meeting or an event and wonder if you belong there? There's a feeling you get when you walk in and don't know people but you feel a vibe that people are interested in getting to know you. There's also the vibe where you feel like you're interrupting when you try to introduce yourself.
Seven more weeks
Though the world doesn’t magically change when we end one year and move to the next, it’s good to make time to reflect on how far you’ve come and what you have left that you want to accomplish.
Let’s dive in with a set of questions to guide your reflection.
Do you know what you're looking for?
When I talk to people about what's not working for them - in their life, their career, their business, they often are clear about what they think the problem is. They want more, better, different, and they're clear on what that might look like. Assuming we end up working together, we usually find that there's also another underlying challenge they want and need to work through. It's part of the full exploration of how we best lead ourselves to where we want to go and who we want to be.
What Aren’t You Noticing?
One day the trees were green, and the next time I looked, the leaves were yellow, orange and red. One day, it was light out when I ran in the morning and then all of a sudden we needed lights to run safely. I know there were incremental changes that I wasn't paying attention to, but everything seemed to happen overnight.
This happens in life too. We're so busy doing life that we miss the small changes that are happening around us at home and work. We look up one day and…