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Shepherds Advantage Inc Celebrates the 100th Podcast!!!

The potential to lead exists within you!

Melissa Poe Hood, a 15 year old that started a local group to plant trees and cleanup neighborhoods as a group grade school children that went global with 500,000 members stated in her final speech as she graduated from High School; “Everything you need to be a successful leader you already have; your intelligence to see an issue and a way to fix it, your heart to stay motivated and your courage not to give up….you can’t look for the man behind the curtain to solve your concerns.”

Learning Is The Master Skill

We have all heard stories of ordinary people who have led others to get extraordinary things done. Every person has a story they can tell. It is not the absence of leadership ability or potential that inhibits the development of more leaders; it’s the persistence of the myth that leadership can’t be learned! Leadership can be learned in a variety of ways according to Leadership Journal & Organizational Development pp274-280 by Kouze & Posner

• Experimentation
• Observation
• Classroom
• Reading Leadership Books
• Simple reflection on personal experiences

Adopt A Growth Mindset

Our world is changing at a pace that our fore-fathers could not have imagined. Simply learning is insufficient. You must learn how to learn. You must be willing to learn new ways to do old things and new ways to do new ways. Thomas Friedman author suggests that what you know today will be outdated sooner than you realize. He goes on to say that what you know and how you learned it will set you apart from the crowd. Psychologist Carol Dweck uses the mantra, “The Growth Mind-set” is based upon the belief that your basic qualities are things that you can cultivate through your efforts. In other words people who have a growth mind-set believe people can learn to be better leaders – they are made not born!

Mindsets carry over into performance. A growth mindset believes that making mistakes trumps a “talent only mindset” whose concern is more about looking smart versus making mistakes.

Deliberate Practice Is Required

General Colin Powell speaking to the midshipmen at the Naval Academy in 1992 stated; “You can’t learn to be a good leader without putting in the time and the practice!” Florida State University Professor K. Anders Ericsson says the same thing a different way: “Until most individuals recognize that sustained training and effort is a prerequisite for reaching expert levels of performance, they will continue to misattribute lesser achievements to the lack of natural gifts and will thus fail to reach their own potential.”

It should be noted that high IQ’s do not equate to outstanding performance. Many times people with high IQ’s are just average performers when it comes to leadership skill. Professor Ericsson suggests a rough matrix to achieve the highest level of “Expert” is roughly 10,000 hours of practice over a period of 10 years. That comes out to 2.7 hours of practice every day for 10 years.

Those who study what it takes to become an expert in any field suggest that practice usually has five elements to it:

1.It is designed to specifically designed to improve performance

2.It is to be repeated a lot – sustained effort is being suggested

3.Continuous feedback on the results must be available

4.It is highly demanding mentally

5.It is not all that much FUN

Leadership ignorance is perpetuated by the idea that leaders are born and not made. This is why I am so passionate about Executive Coaching. Thinking you have the answers and contain the skill set needed is fool-hearty. LEADERS ARE LEARNERS. Make a commitment in the coming year to change your mind set and habit to grow yourself. In closing, you do not get what you want, you get who your are!

LINKS

Shepherds Advantage Leadership Podcast is now on iTunes – SUBSCRIBE

Shepherds Advantage Leadership Podcast is now on Stitcher – SUBSCRIBE

FREE GIFT – “The Art of Balancing Candor With Care” – Click on the icon at the bottom of the page

Executive Coaching Service– Private message me for details on this customizable service

Music: “Gratitude Mood” by David Arivett. You can learn more about his music by clicking on his name. THANKS DAVID!

A Journey Toward Significance – Take The SEVEN DAY CHALLENGE