What does it look like to lead your team through external forces and distractions in a powerful way?

This is another one of those universal things that everyone is feeling right now. In this episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask share some personal examples from their own lives and work. 

Richard just got back from one of his first business trips in a long time. He gathered with 150  leaders/founders/executives for the War Room Mastermind, and all of them are feeling the strain of external forces wreaking havoc in their own lives and their employees’. Jeff says it’s a recurring theme with his coaching clients as well. Just as quickly as leaders feel like they’ve gotten a handle on it, a new distraction rears its head.

Listen in as they offer some grounding practices and habits that will enable you to be the leader of your life and the owner of your circumstances. 

How Can You Lead Well In Spite of What’s Going On?

There are a billion external forces, scenarios, you could be dealing with at any given time. Then each person who reports to you could be dealing with one of a billion of their own. 

In the past 10 days, Richard had every refrigerator in his home go out, multiple A/C units broke, his back fence fell down, one of his kids had multiple Covid tests, his car broke down, his wife’s car broke down, and he had to cancel a trip. And that was just at home. He still had to show up at work every day, lead at work, lead at home, and lead and serve at War Room.

How does he show up and maintain his energy with all these external forces at play? He has to be very careful not to bring his money problems from home to work and inappropriately generate revenue for himself as quickly as humanly possible in ways that might not be in line with the company. Or push his people because he’s worried about money going out the door. Or complain about money going out the door to people who make less of it than he does. 

So, what’s Richard’s solution? A change in mindset. Instead of “here’s what’s happening to me,” he challenges himself to flip those things into opportunities to succeed. “One of the ways I am my best self,” he says, “is when I’m up against a worthy adversary, a worthy competitor. So I have to be challenged.”

He acknowledges that he needs to be careful not to compete with anyone who works for him though, anyone he’s charged with growing or leading. He’s failed there in the past, and it was costly.

For him, he looks at external forces and challenges as his competition. He can use hard stuff to help him get to his optimal performance level by leveraging what he knows about himself and competition. 

Know Yourself Inside and Out

You have to know yourself really well. You have to know what it takes to be your best self and how you show up as your worst self (and what triggers it). 

What do you need personally and professionally to be able to show up as your best self? And when that starts to go away, what happens? The more self-aware we can be, the better we can lead. The first thing you have to control is you, because you’ll never be able to control the external forces. 

Recognize where you’re off, replace those thoughts, recite the words out loud. Own your own emotion, your thinking, your process. Remember, as Jack Sparrow says so eloquently, “The problem isn’t the problem. It’s our mindset around the problem.” The one problem that’s unsolvable is the...