Achieving Your Personal Best Leadership Results
What if you could achieve your personal best leadership results today? Have you ever asked yourself this question: how can I be the best manager I can be? Or how can I use my leadership ability to be the best at what I do? Read on.
Personal Best Leadership Exercise
Here is the way to start to answer that question. Think of a time in your career when you did your best work ever. Therefore, choose a situation that exemplifies your highest performance. Olympic athletes today use technology to analyze personal best performance and then compare it to the best in world. Then they use superb training and coaching to bridge the gap to reach their highest potential.
You can initiate this as well through this mental exercise. Get a clear picture of the event in your mind of what you accomplished. Relive it with as many specifics as you can. Replay it in your mind as if it were a movie. Think of the details – people, problems, sounds, feelings, and surroundings. Review in your mind what happened, how you behaved, what you felt and what you achieved. This type of mental rehearsal is called the master skill to high achievement. It helps some people to write you answer to these areas:
- Describe the situation.
- Outline the challenge or problem.
- Identify your best positive actions as a leader.
- Summarize the result: customer behavior, teamwork, bottom-line metrics.
- List 3-5 lessons learned.
How to Replicate Your Personal Best
Too often as managers we replay or review our shortcomings or failures not our successes. We focus on the obstacles not the breakthroughs. This can diminish your effectiveness as your attention focuses on the negative.
Next, ask yourself, how apply this experience to my current role? What new actions will I take? What do I need to learn to do these consistently? Who will help me? How can I leverage my relationships better?
Furthermore, to be the best leader you can be, make a commitment to personal development and excellence. Attend leadership course, read new books, and listen to CDs or watch DVDs. Get a coach to mentor your activities. If you want to be exceptional, do exceptional things. The difference between winners and losers is that the winners do what losers will not do at all or will not do enough of. Author John Maxwell said, “Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential.”
Pulling It All Together
Boil down all the research and literature that describes successful leaders and here is what you get: they are passionate about their vocation, they are goal-oriented, they coach exceptionally well, they involve themselves in ongoing education and training, they have mentors to guide them, and they become superb communicators.
In sum, you can achieve your personal best behavior if you do what is described above. Also, adapt the characteristics of other excellent leaders and you will become, overtime, the best that leader you can be. In conclusion, remember this, if you want your people to be better you must be a better leader.
Do you want more on increasing your personal best? See this: 10 Success Secrets of Great Managers.
Also, are you committed to your team’s success? If so, see this complimentary Coaching for Results eBook.
In addition, go here for our RealTime Learning & Training leadership and personal development website. Over 130 micro-learning and career development resources at your fingertips!
Finally, do you want to accelerate your leadership success? Go here for Rick’s Superstar Leadership eBook.
