Leadership Secrets That Will Transform Your Business

I've always been obsessed with personal and professional development. When I first started my career, I took all the Dale Carnegie courses, and then I had their organization come in and train my entire company. And then I tried to become a facilitator with Dale Carnegie before then I hired my own coach and started going down the path of having a builder in my life come in weekly and kick my butt and try to make me better. I've gone through Dan Sullivan's Strategic Coach Entrepreneur program. I've done EOs to help me on the operating side of running my business. And every time I added more to my portfolio of development, I saw just explosions in my company and growth of those people around me because I shared all those tools. I remember when I came back to my office after becoming a Colby certified trainer, and I was giving assessments to everybody in the office, and not everybody liked it and not everybody benefited from it, but plenty of them did and learned so much about themselves, and I learned so much about me and the way I work with everyone in my company. So that mindset of just always getting better is really important. And no one does that better than the guy who comes in and beats me up on a weekly basis. My coach from a company called Built to Lead, and he has these things called by way of Reminders. And I love these by way of reminders because I share them all the time. I hate taking credit because I have to always give credit where I learned it. But I'm just calling it a by way of reminder because I'm reminding myself and one of my favorite ones that I have a bunch of favorite ones, but one of my favorite that I can share right now is that there's a problem in our society where people care so much too much about what other people think. So much so that they change their way of being and they show up either personally or professionally or, you know, in this group or that group, this venue, as a different person. And it's. It's hard to not. It's hard to change who you are all the time wearing different hats. And he always says, you should care. You should care what people think, but not that much. I love that because I've always said I don't care what people think, but I do care what people think, and you should. But I've gotten to a point where I don't care that much. And I think that's a great reminder that you want to live a whole life and you want to know who you are and you want to show up no matter where you Go. And no matter who you're with as yourself, you got to first learn who you are. It takes hard work to do that. But then you have to not care so much. And here's the good news. Nobody's thinking about you. Everyone's thinking about themselves. So when you're so busy catastrophizing in your head what other people are thinking or what they are thinking when they see your post on social media or the way you look when you walk out of the house, trust me, they're not thinking about you. People think about themselves. They care about themselves. Most people are selfish, and it's a comforting feeling because you don't have to worry so much. They're not thinking about you. And I think that's an important lesson for everybody, is that you shouldn't care so much and don't change who you are for other people. Another one he always says that I love is you got to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And I think that's a really powerful reminder. Because if you want to get good at anything and if you want to grow and if you want to expand, whether it's your impact or your performance, your relationships, there's always going to be this kind of circle of comfort zone that you're in. And in order to kind of break out of that, you've got to teeter on the edge of that circle. You don't want to go off the deep end, but when you start to feel that uncomfortableness, you got to sort of love it. You got to be able to step back in the moment and say it's uncomfortable for a reason. I'm going through change, and it's much better to be proactive and put yourself in these uncomfortable positions and finding comfort in being it versus waiting for something to show up in your life to make you uncomfortable. Both are going to happen. More likely the one, the latter one, which is going to. Something shows up in your life, and then you gotta react to that, and you gotta learn to love it. You gotta learn to find the awareness that I'm in an uncomfortable position because change is coming and it's gonna lead to whatever's coming next. And I'll look back one day and probably think it's a good thing. I can't see it right now, and that's okay. But just build that discipline to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And I think as a leader, I think another good reminder is going to be that you get the team that you deserve. And if you want a better team, then you have to become a better leader. And that was a powerful lesson early on for me because I hold myself to a high bar and I hold people around me to a high bar. And sometimes the expectations that I have of those around me aren't necessarily realistic or fair because it's my standard. And I had to learn early on that if I want that standard to be increased and I want to raise the bar, then I have to raise the bar. No matter how good I'm doing at something and no matter what my results are, if I want better people around me, I got to keep climbing. And you do. Mass attracts mass, and your choices have consequences. So you gotta make a choice. You gotta make a decision, and you gotta go. And people get paralyzed, and they're weighing between two decisions and they can't make a decision. They're being indecisive. They tend to delay the inevitable and fail. And if they learn from it, it's okay. But why choose that? Why not move forward, be a doer, surround yourself with high performers, Raise the bar yourself so you can attract better people around you. And that thought of you're going to end up having a lot of similarities to the five closest people in your life. There's truth to that. So take a hard look and see who you're hanging out with and who's in your network before you're complaining about results in your life not being where you want them to be. And remember, you're by way of reminders. So thanks.