Want To Know The REAL Secret To Success? Winning Big Starts With This.

 

Leadership. Let’s face it. This topic gets talked about and written about a lot. Many of us dismiss it. We think leadership only applies to military officers, corporate executives, and sports team coaches. Not true. All of us are leaders in some capacity. It could be at work. It could be in groups and organizations we’re part of. It could be with our families. But there’s an aspect of leadership we rarely hear about, and it may be the most critical part of leadership. What is it? Leading ourselves. If we don’t lead ourselves well, how can we successfully lead others? But what are the steps we should take to lead ourselves well? That’s a key theme in today’s episode of the Winning Mindset Mastery Podcast. The content of this episode applies to each of us.

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Want To Know The REAL Secret To Success? Winning Big Starts With This.

In this episode, I am going to talk about what I think is my second favorite topic. My first is mindset, but they go hand in hand. My second favorite topic is leadership. It’s not just leading others, leading a team, or leading your family. It’s leading yourself. That’s where it starts. I am a big fan of a young gentleman on LinkedIn by the name of Hampton Dortch. If you’re someone who likes to go and learn from people on LinkedIn, I call him my favorite follow of 2022.

He is Gen Z, and he’s going through his own leadership journey and sharing it in a funny and humble way. He’s always talking about leading himself. This is so powerful because I don’t care how experienced of a leader you are or, if you’re not a leader, we all benefit from leading ourselves. I don’t think we often think about it that way. When I think of leading myself, I think about some important areas. One is working on my mindset consistently. Maybe you don’t realize this.

Maybe I don’t share it enough, so I’ll share it here. I work on my mindset every single day, not because it’s not in a good place and not because you never get there. It’s because, like working out, the more I work on my mindset, the better I feel, the more excited I am about my life, and the more success that I have in everything I try and do. Don’t get me wrong. This does not mean I don’t have bad days because I do. I have scenarios where I’m not approaching it with the mindset that I know I should have, and I get even more angry at myself because I do know better. I’m still human. We all are.

If you have those days when you’re still struggling with your winning mindset, know you’re not alone. Know that over in Palm Beach, Florida, I may be doing the exact same thing you’re doing right at that moment, but also know that because you’ve made this commitment, it is going to get better for you and easier for you. Working on your mindset consistently is a huge way to make that happen.

It is also, as I said, a great step in leading yourself. If you’re like me and you’re super interested in leadership because you love to help and empower others, it doesn’t matter if you have a leadership title or you don’t. Some of the most influential and amazing leaders I’ve come across were leading from within a team or leading from the back. They might not have had that official title in the C-suite, management, or as a supervisor. They were leading people for their own good.

 

That started with leading themselves. The second part of leading yourself is to take the feedback you get from life and other people and use it to make yourself better. Here’s what I mean. How could feedback from life make you better? Let’s say you’re driving in your car. I love to use this example. I don’t know why, maybe because there’s so much road rage, but you’re driving in your car, and somebody does something rude, and it makes you so angry.

That is feedback from life. It is telling you something because when you’re in your best mindset, when you’re in a good place, some stranger doing something weird can’t rock you. If it does, if you’re getting feedback from life, it is rocking you, stressing you out, and making you angry, it is indicating something to you. That could be that you are trying to do too many things at once, that you’re too stressed, that you don’t have enough time to get where you’re going, that you’re hungry, that you’re tired, or any of these things.

 

When you go within, when you get feedback from the outside world, you can start to understand what you might need that you are ignoring, and you can give that to yourself. In addition, if you get feedback from other people you don’t like, that’s always telling you something too. It is the feedback you got from someone else. Let’s say any conversation, email, or anything someone did rubbed you the wrong way. I had this happen to me. It was what they were doing, and it wasn’t even happening to me. It was happening to someone else, but they violated values I hold dear.

I have three really big values, which are respect, empowerment, and team. I always want to treat people and be treated with respect. I am always looking for how we empower someone, make them better, and give them the tools and the ability to do what would make them the best version of themselves. Team, some people think I’m crazy because they say business is war, but I feel like we’re all more alike than we’re different. There’s enough for everyone.

We're all more alike than different. We're all on the same team. Let's figure out how we all work together. Share on X

We’re all on the same team. Let’s figure out how we all work together. The team is called Team Earth, and let’s figure this out. In this particular situation, someone had miscommunicated something and made a decision for someone else that I felt was unfair. It upset me because it violated one of those values. I knew that the best thing I could do was offer my help to the person who experienced it and the person who did it because maybe there was something I could do that could make this easier and turn around the way this communication was going in this business. It was interesting feedback because I knew it’s important to me that everything people do is aligned with those values.

That’s not always going to happen, but just knowing that made it easier to do what I could to make it better and then let it go. That was a great way to lead myself. It also dovetails very nicely into the third part of leading yourself, which is to model that. I don’t talk about modeling a lot on the show. I should probably talk about it even more because it is so powerful. Every time we do something right or wrong, someone’s watching, maybe not every time. I’m sure there have been times I’ve snuck snacks in a pantry, and no one has seen me. Everyone is watching what we do far more than they listen to what we say, especially from a leadership perspective.

 

This doesn’t have to be in business. This can be with your family. This can be at your church. This can be with your friends. This can be at the gym. People watch you more than they listen to you. As you lead yourself, you are modeling to other people how to lead themselves, especially if you’re transparent about it. I mentioned my friend Hampton a little earlier. He does this thing called Fail Fridays.

I don’t think he understands how genius this is, especially since this gentleman’s going to be a big-time leader like he’s going to be CEO of a company or run a city or something, and he’s still going to have this mentality when he does. What is so powerful is when someone models that humility, that, “This is what I did wrong, and this is how I’m aiming to fix it,” it is incredibly powerful for others because they tend to see us even better than we are more together, never having an issue.

It’s why I try very often to share when I have issues as well because I think that I had made the greatest improvements and the greatest strides when I realized that someone I admire had similar struggles to me. It was so powerful. When you lead yourself and you model that you’re doing it, but you also share what you don’t do well and what you’re struggling with, that is incredibly powerful for all the people around you.

There are so many ways that you can embody and live leadership, even if you’re just doing it for you and your family. It doesn’t have to be a big group of people. You don’t have to be a certain age to start doing this. The younger you start doing this, the more powerful it’s going to be for you. Try it out. I want to see how it works. I certainly want to hear about it. I cannot wait to know how this works for you. Here’s to your success.