“We can choose to be affected by the world or we can choose to affect the world.” Heidi Wills
Do you wake up in the morning and bound out of bed with excitement about what the day will bring? Or do you want to pull the doona up over your head when the alarm goes off dreading what’s waiting for you? Over my lifetime I’ve certainly done both of these things. The doona issue is a constant temptation because I do love my sleep! However, the distinction in how these situations feel is enormous.
The environment we are now operating in is complex, challenging, competitive and frantic. This isn’t going to change. What it does magnify is the importance of capitalising on the time we invest into our business and careers to ensure we aren’t simply just ‘showing up’ and going through the motions. It’s important that our thoughts, the actions and tasks we are executing and our efforts are contributing to something worthwhile.
Are you building and developing something worth leading?
Definition of leading ‘most important’. Definition of lead ‘ to go before or to show the way’.
We pour our heart and souls (well most of us) into what we do. We make sacrifice and we sacrifice things that are important to us to try and further advance our goals. Think health, relationships, exercise and rest. So it makes sense to ensure we are slogging it out to create something that is worth leading rather than creating something that is simply a job and just continually arduous.
There are 4 key areas that I believe we need to be focusing on to ensure we are building something worth leading:
- Business
- Career
- Leadership
- Reputation
Build a business and career worth leading, have a leadership style that’s relevant, worth following and that has influence across the generations and have a reputation that is valuable and that you’re proud of.
These 4 things are so closely intertwined but also quite exclusive. In today’s ‘busy economy’ as I like to refer to it, we must ensure that our business, career, leadership and reputation are something worth leading rather than just something we have. We need to ensure we are standing out for the right reasons, being seen for the value we can offer and influencing outcomes to make a difference.
Given over 3 billion of us are so incredibly hyper-connected in this digital world we live in, it’s now increasingly hard to stand out for what we are good at and too easy to get lost in all of the white noise. The last thing you want to do is get lost and the very last thing you want to be is beige.
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll expand on the 4 critical elements of building something worth leading.