3 Personal Mastery Secrets in 2024!!!

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to Global leaders and high Performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back. It's the very first episode for 2024. So excited to reconnect with you and to share some things with you that I really feel will equip you with the tools to step into an incredible year. So first things first. Last year I interviewed so many incredible leaders. The most incredible leaders ranging from prime ministers to former world leaders to people who are running multi billion dollar organizations to philanthropic leaders, the lot top athletes. The list goes on in terms of incredible people doing incredible things and they shared so many insights with me and I wanted to distill that for you. So in the show notes in the description you'll see a link to a free resource. Please make the most of it. My team and I sat down and looked at our most popular and downloaded sessions from last year. So in 2023 we looked at all the most downloaded episodes and interviews and we've distilled 11 personal leadership so personal mastery and self development insights for you to take forward into 2024. And I'm going to share three of those with you right now. But there's all 11 if you go in there. It's a free resource for you. As I say it's in the description. So please make the most of it. But I am going to share that with you. I'm going to share also a few books that I've been reading over this break. I believe it's great to sit down, carve out time to regularly fill our minds with new thoughts. With thoughts that challenge our existing beliefs and ideas. And I've got three books that definitely have done that for me and maybe one of those will be really valuable for you and your journey as you step into a really powerful year ahead. Look, I'm very excited for the year coming up. This first half of the year, I'm almost fully booked for my keynotes, so I'm really fortunate to travel around Australia, Australia, New Zealand, North America as well, delivering keynotes on personal mastery, on leadership, on high performance. I really love it. And if you or anyone you know has a company who needs someone to speak for them at an event, let me know. Get in touch with the team and we'll see if there's a availability on the calendar and I'd love to serve you. But for now, let's jump into it. I'm going to share with you three insights. I'm going to grab my journal here. For those that know me or that have been listening to Lean on purpose for a while, you'll know that I journal every day, twice a day now. Yeah, there's going to be some days where it might only be once or the odd day where I don't journal at all. But for the most part it's morning and night. It's a practice. It's one of the most valuable tools in my life. I've been doing it for several years and honestly, the difference it's made, I've been able to see my flaws, been able to see where I need to level up, be able to see what my strengths are. I've been able to really identify what my North Star is and identify my Everest. And it's just such a valuable tool. So if you don't do it, definitely encourage you as you step into 2024. Grab a journal. So first things first, the first takeaway is this. And this is from the amazing Mo Gaudat. Now this episode, across all of the channels that we've shared it on and platforms we're coming up to half a million views, downloads and people listening to that episode. He's the former Chief Business Officer of Google X, one of the founding fathers of AI. It was an amazing episode. We had so much feedback, thousands of comments on our YouTube channel from that episode alone. But the one takeaway, and you'll see this in the free resource in the description, but the one takeaway was this. Schedule, think time. How simple is that? Schedule, think time. If we don't have time to think, then our actions are going to be diluted. If we don't have time to think, we don't learn from our mistakes. If we don't pause and slow down, then we're constantly in the rat race. Mo talked about his silence, retreats and silent meditations that he embraces regularly and how after those silent moments, he's full of inspiration, creativity and real clarity about where he's headed. So schedule Think Time now, any of the clients I work with a very small number of clients each year, one to one. The one thing I ask all of them to do is get out their phones, get their calendar up and schedule Think Time every day. Whether it's 30 minutes, I prefer an hour or 90 minutes would be just absolutely spot on. But 30 minutes minimum every day where they think. There's no phone, there's no podcast, there's no other people. It's time for themselves to reflect with a journal or walking and thinking, letting their mind wander, trying to solve challenges in their mind, setting their North Star or identifying their Everest. But if somebody wants to work with me, that's one thing I ask. Can you commit to that? If you can't, we can't work together. High performers make time carve out time to think, and Mo Gaudat really, really underlined that. The second was from our current Prime Minister. So I interviewed Christopher Luxon last year, who's the Prime Minister here in New Zealand, for those of you who are not from New Zealand, and he shared so many fascinating insights around leadership. And of course he had a career before stepping into politics. He was the CEO of Air New Zealand and learned a lot of valuable insights there that he's bringing in to leading the country. So the one thing that he shared that I really want to inspire you to think about is clarify, clarify. Get radically clear on what your vision is. Get radically clear on what your responsibilities and your roles are are. Get radically clear on what you stand for and what you won't stand for. I was just so inspired by him when he was talking about this is what it takes to lead yourself is getting clear on your mission and purpose. And always shoot for something that seems too big. Always shoot for something that really forces you to step up, but also inspires other people to come along for the journey. At the end of the day, if your vision isn't compelling, you're not going to be motivated to follow through. Neither is anyone else around you on your team or your friends or your family. So the big takeaway there is again, journaling and Think Time will help you to do this. But clarify your thoughts, clarify your vision, clarify your motivations, clarify your core values Another thing I love to do with my clients is help them get clear on, on what their values are. Because your values drive your behavior. Your values are your personal standards.

What do you let in. And whatever you let in those standards you accept, they will dictate the quality of your life, your health, your relationships, the lot. So last but not least, the third takeaway. And as I say, there's 11 of these takeaways from some of our top downloaded episodes last year. But the third here is from Richard Stengel, also known as Rick and Rick, was the former under secretary to Barack Obama. He was also the former editor at Time magazine. And he was the lucky gentleman who got to spend a number of years with former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. He helped him to author his book Long Walk to Freedom. And he shared one thing that I thought was just so profound. And for you, I think it's very achievable to embrace this simple. Think like Mandela. Think like Mandela. That's the one key insight that came from our conversation. Please do go and check it out. And if you do go and get that free resource, you'll see there are links to those episodes, those specific episodes. But think like Mandela. Have more compassion, have more introspection. Be willing to change your views when new ideas and evidence is presented. Don't be stubborn. Mandela was not an angel. Mandela had a very passionate, fiery temperament in his younger years. But he spent 27 years in imprisonment, 18 of those on Robben Island.

Think like Mandela. Those three insights, I'll share them with you again. Mo Gaudat schedule, Think Time, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon clarify. And Rick Stengel Think like Mandela. Now, I know that when I'm speaking on stages over this first half of the year, I will be sharing some of those insights in depth with teams that are high performing, with different corporates, with different philanthropic organizations. I'll be reinforcing how we actually take those and install those into our everyday lives. Too many people want to change their communities, they want to change the world. But I'm going to tell you something now. It starts at home. It starts with you. Starts with getting your own house in order, right? I'm constantly looking at what can I do better? How can I be a more patient dad? How can I be a more present partner? How can I be a healthier human? How can I spend more quality time with my dogs and cat? It's the simple things, right? How can I continue to learn and not burn out? How can I continue to give but know where to set boundaries? I'm so imperfect. I've got a lot of things I got to work on. But to me, that's what personal mastery is about. And that's why I put together that resource for you all to start the year. So please do yourself a favor, get yourself that free resource in the description, in the link, in the show notes. And that is the deep insights from the 11 top episodes over this last year and those books. I did promise you I would share some books with you that I've read over this last few weeks during the summer holidays here in New Zealand. Number one, Nelson Mandela. It's called Nelson Mandela by himself. And just holding it up for those that are watching on YouTube. Amazing book. It's all of his quotations, but it's authorized quotations. Nelson Mandela is one of the number one misquoted individuals on the planet. Many people will put his name down as quoted and they're incorrect. This is authorized, fully researched from the foundation itself. So an incredible book, very insightful one that I will definitely go back to again and again. Another one by a friend, Vishen Lakhiani is the code of the extraordinary mind. Vishen is the founder of mindvalley, an incredible learning platform for the mind. And this book really challenged my thinking about the culture scape. The idea that our beliefs, our behaviors, our habits and our actions are often shaped by the religions that have been imposed upon us as young children, by the family traditions and beliefs that have been imposed upon us, by the educational ideals that we're told we should be a doctor or a lawyer, or that we need to have a university degree or that we all have to get married to have a successful relationship. This book really challenged all of that for me. Fantastic read and some really cool practical tips in there. And then last but not least, the Art of the Impossible by the amazing Steven Kotler. This book is phenomenal, very research driven, data driven around peak performance and how we sustain that, maintain that. So three really, really great books. Definitely worth reading one of them if you can pick one of them up. And if you don't like to read, how about you listen to them? They're all available in audio format as well. So really excited to bring to you some amazing guests in 2024. We've got a lot lined up already. We're going to be going on tour as well and sitting down with some individuals overseas. We've got people in the professional sporting arenas, we've got people in politics, we've got people that are running fortune businesses lined up for you this year. So I'm really excited to go deep on personal mastery, self growth, self leadership. As you know, that's what I'm deeply passionate about. So until next time, please get out there and lead your life on purpose. Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love to if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks. And leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.