Be The Best Leader You Can Be - Part 3
Today I want to continue our journey to Be The Best Leader You Can Be.
If you have been following along, you will now know more about what brings out your best and what doesn’t bring out your best.
Now we want to take that knowledge and consider how we impact those around us. Because this isn’t just about you!
Remember: you can only be the best leader you can be if you know yourself well and you know how you influence those around you.
To help you know how we impact those around us, I want to share with you the following:
First of all, each and every person around you has their own list of what brings out their best and what doesn’t bring out their best. Let that sink in for a moment.
Secondly, while you might not know what is on another person’s list, you can start with the following assumption from Peter Kaufman’s The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking (1):
“All you have to do is take that list that’s in [your] head, and every single other person in this room, every single other person in the whole world, has this list in their head – trustworthy, principled, courageous, competent, loyal, kind, understanding, forgiving, unselfish, and in every single one of your interactions with others, be the list!”
Thirdly, there is a concept called “mirroring”: “...the subconscious replication of another person's nonverbal signals” (2). I mention this because when we are at our best, those around us are more likely to mirror your best with their best. At the same time, when we are not at our best, we are more likely to experience others not at their best.
So the challenge for you today is this: pay attention to how you are feeling -- are you at your best? Or does something feel off? Then pay close attention to how the people you are interacting with react to you.
We can start with paying attention to physical behaviours or nonverbal communication, like facial expressions, body movement and posture, gestures, eye contact, touch, space between you and the other person, and voice or how they speak.
When we become more aware of those around us, we will begin to realise just how much we influence a situation.
As leaders, it is important for us to know how we influence our teams and for us to take responsibility for that influence. Responsibility is much easier to handle when we know more about what brings out our best and what doesn’t bring out our best.
So you see how this all fits together?
That to me is leadership in black and white.
Resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirroring#cite_note-Chartrand_&_Bargh-1
Photo: Canva Creation using Peter Kaufman’s list
