Actually, Karen Marie Moning says it even better:
It’s what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are.
I used to live in autopilot. My life was just moving on, structured as it was meant to be. It was great, honestly. But I was missing something. In the back of my head, I was looking for a greater purpose.
In 2018, I started to explore behavioral cognitive therapy and coaching and realized that we have the power to change our thinking and our beliefs – and this is how I found my mission, and started to be laser focused on my goals. And to achieve much more.
What I found is that we can become very deliberate how we want to live our life. We can chose to deconstruct what our education, our culture taught us. We can chose to reframe our past and build our future, in a more focused and purposeful way.
And these new beliefs shape the new you. So you get to define who you want to become, and look at the beliefs that are still holding you back, to reframe them in a way that is more aligned with your future you.
Who do you want to become as a leader?
The first thing I did was to think about which kind of leader I wanted to be. And you can do this for yourself:
- As a leader, how do you want to show up for your team?
- How do you want to behave, while working towards your goals?
- How do you want to show up in from of obstacles?
- What are the strengths I have I want to keep
- What do I want to improve?
- What will make me a great leader?
You can answer these questions by yourself and you can also think about people who are inspiring you. Use them as role models: what do you like from them, that you’d like to develop yourself?
Look at the beliefs holding you from this targetted leader picture
We all have beliefs. The thing is some are useful, some are not.
Beliefs are great drivers but deciding about which ones you want to keep or not, for your own good, will free you up.
If you want to be a servant leader, for example, beliefs like “If I don’t check what my team did, there will be mistakes” will not help you empower your team and let go of control.
Or “I need to work 50 hours a week in order to become a top-manager” can seem very true, but it will be at the expense of your own health, and will not give a good example to the person you work with if you promote work life balance.
By keeping thinking about them without taking care, they will create a limit for your own progress.
If you want to lead your team towards a goal and think “we have so many constraints, this is demoralizing”, you will probably not get the enthousiasm and quality that you – paradoxically – are expecting from them. Because you will lead from a place of frustration.
So, whenever you have this kind of thoughts, you can now spot them and ask yourself: is this belief helping me in achieving my goals?
I can be wrong, but I am pretty sure the answer will be “no”. From here, what would you like to believe instead to make that goal happen?
