Sept 11, 2011

Welcome to my new Leadership Journal.

Lately my thoughts have been about confidence, motivation, passion, focus, and commitment. The last few months have provided me with very clear insight into the catalyst which successfully creates each of these situations.

The secret
It is all in your head. Each and every single one of these states comes from how you think and feel about yourself and the situations you find yourself in.

What does this mean and how can this information be helpful
You have great power and ability to create personal confidence, motivation, passion, focus, and commitment. You just need to figure out how to get inside that head of yours and figure out the next step in your leadership progression.

A personal SWOT analysis will help you achieve personal confidence, motivation, passion, focus, and commitment by identifying the aspects you need to work on the most.
I find a personal SWOT analysis very helpful for the next step. No matter what level of leadership you find yourself in, a SWOT analysis can be very helpful in determining your next step in developing your leadership capabilities.

Take the time to ask yourself these questions:
What are your 1) Strengths 2) Weaknesses  3) Opportunities and 4) Threats.

First, let's look at your Strengths and Weaknesses
Are you reliable? Are you timely? Do you have the passion to succeed? Can you be depended on to get things done? Do you have the skills and resources?

The next step is to figure out and list your Opportunities and Threats.
For instance, if you are timely and dependable, but the others in your field (your organization or the market in general) are not timely and dependable, these are the skills that will give you the market Opportunity.

If you aren't good at something (for instance public speaking) but your competitors are, this will be one of your Threats in the market.  You may be really great at doing something, but if you cannot communicate your Strengths to your market (clients and consumers), your business may go unnoticed. If you cannot communicate and fulfill your Opportunities, your leadership will not be apparent.

You can hire someone to make up for your weaknesses. But this is about YOUR capabilities and leadership. Therefore, you would want to develop your Weaknesses and Threats into Strengths and Opportunities.

Rank your Opportunities and Threats
This will really help you pinpoint where you need to spend your efforts each day. You may need to spend several months or even a year working on one of your Weaknesses and Threats.

Pick the largest Threat or Weakness to work on at this time in your life, and turn it into your Opportunity or Strength
For instance, if you are not a talented public speaker and you have some time on your hands, you may want to join a local Toastmaster Club.

How does this relate to focus, confidence, passion, motivation and commitment?
If you know these states are a result of how you think and feel about yourself, you are able to develop yourselves to improve your leadership abilities, capabilities, and talents. Remember, how you feel about yourself is all in your head, and that is where it needs to be to make you successful. (External motivators are not as helpful). Once you know this, you can tackle almost anything, and learn to be confident, talented, passionate, focused, and motivated.

Spend time on tasks that make a difference in your life
In general, folks tend to spend their day fulfilling many of the tasks they complete on a daily basis, rather than the one important task which will help them get ahead in their career and life. If you can focus on this one task, you can develop the skills, passion, and motivation to get this task done and jump to your next big step in leadership and life.