‘We all have the choice of thought. Think about what you think about.’
The mindset you adopt, foster and nourish will either assist you to flourish or expire as a leader. You choose your thoughts. Your creed, gender, age, intellect or experience doesn’t matter; we all have one thing in common—the choice of thought.
Your mind is your own. Yes, it can be tainted or lifted by others, but you have to own it and accept you have total freedom of what you think is true, false, hindering or empowering, especially when leading others with your purpose, direction and energy.
Energy is shown through your actions. Ultimately, it comes from your mindset. If you run a meeting and have little or no belief or commitment in the message you are communicating: how do you think you will be perceived? You can’t fake energy. You can try, but it will become exhausting, and people will see through it. When you do things incongruent to whom you are and what you believe in, you play the game of conflict. It’s an ugly game to play.
Your actions reflect your mindset
Every action has a thought and feeling attached to it. By simply reading that last sentence, you will have produced an action or thought. Maybe you frowned, maybe you had an answer, and maybe you went blank. These thoughts and feelings trigger the actions or behaviours you demonstrate to your team and yourself.
Agility is a mindset, not a process. To adapt and upgrade to agile thinking, you need to be able to ‘renew your mind‘. To get to a point where you doubt things and where you openly say, ‘I don’t know’, can assist you in developing yourself and the team you are leading.
Having a clear mindset, one that is open to change and new ways of thinking and doing, will serve the greater good.
A few things you can focus on:
• Responsibility: This is the ability to respond and be fully accountable for all outcomes. This means you need to be ‘at cause’ and decide—no matter the circumstances— that you will be accountable and take responsibility for the outcomes. Making the choice to self-lead and take responsibility can be a real game-changer.
• Focus: The old adage, what you choose to focus on, you will find, rings true here. Think about an unusual baby’s name; until you heard it, it wasn’t in your focus or sphere of thought on a subconscious level—now it pops up everywhere. What do you want from your team and for your team? If you look for issues, you will find them; if you look for competency and have a strengths-focus, you will also find this.
• Perspective: Use perspective when faced with limited options that may be preventing you from moving forward. A limitless leader likes exploring unknown territory, like standing at a cliff face; they aren’t led towards certainty. They prefer clarity over certainty and have a clear sense of what is next to achieve their overall mission and purpose.
• Mindset: This is about being able to discipline your imagination. When you get to a place of, I don’t know; you are perfectly placed to install upgraded software in your mindset—a new way of thinking. This takes you to a place of curiosity. Ask yourself, What if I did know? This simple reframe can open up your thinking to a world of possibility and new ways.
In a nutshell, the actions and behaviours we currently display come from what we are thinking. Take a moment to reflect on the current results you and your team are experiencing. What you are experiencing right now comes from actions resulting from your mindset and the mindset of your team.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Lead to be limitless…
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Renée is a mentor, coach, expert facilitator and keynote speaker. She is the author of ‘Limitless Leadership’ and co-author of ‘Leaders of Influence’.
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