Lessons in leadership are most evident in the mirror of our own successes and failures. Underlying them are patterns of recurring beliefs and assumptions worth a hard look from time to time. Such reflection opens them up to the revisions necessary to guide you to the next step in your development. Those who don’t spend time being schooled by yesterday’s thinking tend to repeat the same behavior and get the same outcomes. Understanding and upgrading the thought patterns driving your professional highs and lows is a simple and powerful way to continuously improve your game as a leader.
Self-coaching:
- What do you consider to be your single greatest professional accomplishment? Looking back on it, what did you learn from it, or take away from it, that makes you a better leader?
- Now take a hard look at what you would consider your greatest failure or disappointment with your own leadership. What did you learn or take away from it?
- Finally, what do you see in common, and what’s different about your thinking underlying the two experiences? What are the lessons there?
David Peck
Executive Coach and President
Leadership Unleashed
Twitter: recoveringleadr
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Based on client experiences / lessons learned, our weekly LeaderTips have been offering self-coaching themes and topics of interest to leaders since 2004. They are often published in BusinessWeek Online, sent weekly to our clients, and hundreds of other corporate leaders worldwide. I invite you to forward them to others, who are also welcome to subscribe using the link below. Note that over 100 of these tips appear in my book, Beyond Effective: Practices in Self-aware Leadership. Click here to subscribe to LeaderTips via email.
