Leaders My Leaders! Welcome back.
Leadership begins with you. If you’re chaotic or dysfunctional, then you’re going to do damage. It really is that simple. You have to lead yourself to make good choices first before you can expect that from your team. Every day you are sowing seeds that you will harvest later. What is your harvest going to be like? Will it be robust, with just a few unavoidable weeds mixed in? Or will it be mostly weeds, with a few inadvertent good things thrown in? The bottom line is, if you are making healthy choices, then you and your team are going to have a bountiful harvest. But if you are making bad choices, then you are eventually going to face those consequences. The longer you delay changing your ways, the more intense and longer lasting your pain will be. That pain will spill over onto your team, robbing them of their well-being and perhaps altering their futures right along with yours. You don’t want to generate that kind of seriously bad karma. When you choose wisely today, you can have confidence in your tomorrow.
Leading yourself first brings you peace, your team hope, and your organization good results. You become an upstanding member of the community. You respect yourself. You honor the gift of leadership you have been granted. There are three key aspects of self-leadership: maturity, integrated wholeness, and sustainable life practices. All three are essential to building a foundation of bedrock rather than quicksand. Leaders who wisely choose to build on bedrock will stand the test of time and all kinds of weather. Leaders who choose to foolishly build on quicksand will find that eventually the storms sweep away what was never strong to begin with. They will be trapped by their own poor choices, with no way out.
Next week we’ll talk about the one trait the most amazing leaders all seem to share. Until then, take good care of yourself and your team!
