Most Important Principle for Great Leadership | Jack Canfield

Hi, I'm Jack Canfield, and today I'd like to talk to you about a principle that almost every successful leader that I know embraces and keeps on their mind at all times. In fact, it might be the single most important principle for leadership success. You know, when people ask me for the single most important principle to leadership success, I share a simple formula. And for years I've been teaching top leaders and thinkers in our world that this formula that helps guide their decision making and pathway to success. I don't know any successful leader who doesn't keep this on their mind daily. And the formula is this E, R O, which stands for event plus response equals outcome. Now, the basic idea is that every outcome you experience in life, whether it's success or failure, wealth or poverty, wellness or illness, intimacy or estrangement, joy or frustration, is the result of how you've responded to an earlier event or events in your life. Great leaders don't just know this instinctively. They make it a habit to respond in ways that generate the outcomes they want, even during extremely tough experiences or events that are seemingly beyond their control. If you don't like the outcomes that you're currently experiencing, there are two basic choices you can make. Choice number one, you can blame the event, the E, for your lack of results, the outcome. In other words, you can blame the economy. You can blame your lack of money, your lack of education. You can blame racism, gender bias, your wife or your husband. You can blame your board's attitude, your employees and colleagues, the lack of support you have, the current administration in Washington, and so on. No doubt all of these factors do exist. But if they were the deciding factor, nobody would ever succeed. And we'd have leaders with no direction, no focus, or no solutions. But that's not the case. You see, for every reason you have that it's not possible, there are hundreds of people who have faced the same circumstances and they have succeeded. Now, here's choice number two. You can instead simply change your are your responses to the events until you get the outcomes you want. You can change your thinking, change your communication, change the pictures you hold in your mind, the images you have of the world. And you can change your behavior, the things you say and you do. In fact, that's all you really have any control over. Your thoughts, your images and your behavior, what you say. Unfortunately, most of us are so ingrained in our habits that we never change our behavior. We get stuck in our conditioned responses to our spouses and children, to our colleagues and to our employees at work and to our clients and our customers, to our students and to the world at large. You see, you have to gain control of your thoughts, your images, your dreams, your daydreams, and your behavior. Then you'll realize the results that you want. It's simple. If you don't like your outcomes, change your responses. One of the behaviors of successful leaders is they make it a habit to ask for feedback. It's one of the R's that they use in their life. Now, leaders cannot work in a vacuum. See, they may take on larger, seemingly more important roles in an organization, but this does not exclude them from asking for and responding to feedback. In fact, a leader arguably needs feedback more than anyone else. It's what helps a leader respond appropriately to events in pursuit of successful outcomes. If you want to have a wonderful, supportive relationship with your team at work, but instead you find that they're angry with you for neglecting their needs as loyal employees, what do you do? Do you get mad at them for being upset? You can either see it as an opportunity to improve yourself and correct your behavior, or you can see it as the world ganging up on you and insulting you. But remember, your team's anger is feedback that's telling you that you're off course. To get back on course, you need to listen to the feedback and take the appropriate actions. You need to open up those communication lines and act like a true leader. So how can you become successful in dealing with feedback? The answer is to ask for it and to create a safe space. I'll say that again. Create a safe space for people to tell you what they are seeing. Now don't be vague about what kind of information you want. Ask for it in very specific terms. You could ask them how they see you limiting yourself or the team. Ask them how you can improve and what it will take to get you back on course. Get the team back on course. Trust your gut feeling about things, but also listen to what others are saying and look at the results of your actions. Once you know the truth, you can set about taking action to improve. Everyone will be the better for it. Now here's your homework to complete after watching this video. Is there something that's holding you back from becoming a great leader? Is there something you're not taking responsibility for? Think about that. Enjoying the conversation in the comments below. Write that down. We'd love to hear what you think. So thank you for watching. And remember, nothing in your life or your work will change for the better until you do. Now, if you found this video helpful, make sure you like it, share it with a friend who may need it and subscribe to my channel. For more videos like this one, and for some additional resources on Train the Trainer and becoming a better leader, visit my website@jackcampfield.com thanks again for watching.