JcLove's Blogs

Courage, Humility, and Disciplineā€Š. The three must haves of a great leader!

JcLove Blog Last Activity 4 years ago 177 views 1 comments

Courage


No one is complete and competent in all respects, everyone has chinks in their Armour. The one who realizes this, is the one who will dare to do something about it. To realize, one needs courage to get feedback and to honestly look at themselves in the mirror. To face your inner most fears, to face the change, discover blind spots, ask for and seek feedback and to act on the same, even if it may not be to oneā€™s liking, needs immense courage. Courage is about confronting your weakness(es) and devising strategies do work on the identified weaknesses. Courage is about getting out of your comfort zone and doing things that feel uncomfortable (e.g. asking for feed-forward suggestions from others, or raising difficult conversations). Great leaders have immense courage.


Humility


If you are wanting to get better, then you have to start by accepting that you are not perfect. Humility is acknowledging the work that needs to be done to change and grow, not to let ego come in the way of this process of change, and therefore growth and to accept oneā€™s areas of improvements. Humility involves letting go of your ego and focusing on how to change your own behavior to make your team and workplace more effective. Besides, it needs a lot of humility to take a Coach and more importantly to believe that someone who may not necessarily be better than you at what you do but can still help in achieving the desired outcome of the coaching engagement. The job of Coach is to observe and make you realize all that needs to change and then hand-hold you in the process of change, not necessarily being better than you at what you do. Any learning journey is a humbling experience as the realization dawns that there is no much that you didn't know or didn't realize or how you could have done things differently to be even more effective. It is also a highly rejuvenating experience once the positive behaviors start building, but one needs the humility to make the start.


Discipline


Discipline is the third pillar for adopting any change or learning anything new. It is the ability to commit your time and energy to the outcome being pursued, in a quantum commensurate with what you are expecting to achieve. To be able to devote yourself to a learning journey, which when it comes to behaviors is mostly preceded by a phase on unlearning, needs a lot of commitment and discipline. You need to get out of your comfort zone again and again to re-learn behaviors, before you get from a stage of unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence. Discipline relates to consistently implementing effective behaviors until they get ingrained in your neural paths and become a habit. To be a great leader, you have to have the discipline to follow up and do the hard work to keep getting better.


Self-reflect and see if you have the courage, humility and discipline to be a great leader! If you see a scope for improvement then before working on any other behavior or outcome, commit to work on these three traits which is really the foundation of great leadership.

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