Struggling to keep the energy up for your people? Keeping a positive leadership mindset is more important than ever. Here are some essential tips, and some funny relief.
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A leadership framework for personal and organisational resilience
Resilience is a hot topic because we’ve all needed it. It’s not something you just pick up; it can be cultivated. It’s an essential leadership framework.
Read MoreLeadership principles for surviving complexity
Our brains are complex things, but not great at handling complexity. We need a few key leadership principles to help us make sense of the fast paced hot mess that is our current leadership context.
Read MoreA leadership principle I keep re-learning
Do you keep being given leadership lessons to learn? Do the same ones keep coming back? That’s definitely the case for me. This is obviously a leadership principle I need to keep learning.
Read MoreLeadership qualities for the long haul
What leadership qualities do you need to sustain performance over a long career? Leadership is a tough gig; we need to ensure we’ve got all the tools we need to go the distance.
Read MoreLeadership development for underperformers
While we love to focus on high performers, there are those who also need leadership development: the underperformers. What looks like bad behaviour could be a talent waiting to be developed.
Read MoreLeadership skills to regain trust
Cultivating trust is a key leadership skill. But what happens when we lose trust? Specifically, when we make a mistake, a big one, and people lose trust in us? Here are three skills to deploy.
Read MoreLeadership frameworks that cause evolution
Designing for development is a critical leadership skill. If we design our social and physical environments properly, we can evolve as humans and societies, keeping important leadership frameworks in mind. Here’s a fun way to do that.
Read More3 leadership books on power
Power is a tricky topic. Fortunately there are some great leadership books to help us navigate the pitfalls. Here are three contemporary authors who deliver.
Read MoreBoundless Leadership: Focus gives freedom
I flipped to a page in my journal from some time ago where I’d listed my worries of the day. I remember them feeling huge and overwhelming. Getting them out on paper is always my go to strategy for stress management. I recall they still felt onerous, even down on paper.
Months later, nothing had turned out as badly as I thought it might. The consequences happened. But there were no long-lasting ill effects. I moved through the crisis.
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Read MoreBoundless Leadership: Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn
It’s confession time. I would much rather have positive feedback than constructive. I’ve been working on this preference for years now. I *know* that constructive feedback helps me improve, shows me what I cannot see myself, and offers the pathway to elevated performance.
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Read MoreBoundless Leadership: 3 strategies for best self
I was thinking about how to become the best version of self for this year. And it really comes down to three different tactics. It's input, output, an idle.
It’s kind of like running a car.
You need to put petrol in. That's the input. You need to press the gas pedal. That's the output. Then you need to put it into idle and rest the vehicle once in a while.
So you take those three strategies and you apply it to the three aspects of self. Those are head, or wisdom, heart, which is compassion and 'hara' which is gut or vitality.
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Read MoreBoundless Leadership: The strength you need
In exploring beyond boundaries, boundless, there have been many experiences of letting go. To explore a life in Australia, I left my culture, community and family behind in Canada. I let go of the known to seek out the new.
Boundless Leadership has at its core the premise of expansion and growth. It has the energy of seeking, of evolution.
Within that concept there lies another one: expansion is not uni-directional. It has movement backwards and forwards. Boundless Leadership is an oscillation between limitless possibilities, and returning to the core of who you are, and the fabric of your being.
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Read MoreUse history to help, not hinder, your leadership
“Yup that’s me. I get it from my parents.” My client sighed in resignation, defeated.
She told me about her tendency to be self-critical, and how it stemmed from the lack of support and encouragement from her parents. Nothing was ever good enough. Any success was dismissed with ‘you could have done better’.
My client felt she had worked hard her whole life to outrun the shadow of not being good enough. And now, exhausted and at the end of her tether, she wanted something to change.
How do we escape our history?
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Read MoreIs your leadership perspective expanding or contracting?
Standing looking out to sea over a beautiful expanse of land, I could not help but feel at once small and vast. This is the power of environment.
Environment causes evolution. It's a concept I learnt 15 years ago from the founder of Coach U and Coachville, Thomas Leonard. He had deep insight into how crafting environments deliberately can cause evolution.
Leonard highlighted how all animals and plants adapt to their environment and conditions. The polar bear has developed a thick white fleece for camouflage in Arctic snow. The Chameleon is renowned for changing its colours to blend in to the landscape. Look at any animal and any plant you will see how it has evolved to suit the situation.
Leonard’s theory about deliberate evolution started the question: “what if we deliberately changed our environment to cause adaptation?”
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Read MoreLooking beyond your leadership horizon
It is a well-known fact that an able and intelligent human in possession of singular ambition must be in want of progress.
Hear! Hear! And yet, when it comes to the mechanics of seeking progress, said able and intelligent human tends to retreat to the distracting halls of day to day minutiae and the comfortable gathering spaces of known social circles.
In short, the familiar eats the unknown for breakfast.
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Read MoreTake a leadership pause for appreciation
In my Leader’s Edge Mastermind group, and in my weekly team meeting, I always ask, ‘What are you celebrating this week?’ As Boundless Leaders, we are constantly stretching towards new horizons, and it’s important to acknowledge how far we’ve come. It’s the key to building a strong centre that allows the ongoing exploration into the unknown.
Invariably it is a bit of a struggle to find something ‘noteworthy’ to list on the celebrations ledger. We are so locked in to the idea that celebration needs a significant achievement to warrant notice. And so we drag ourselves from week to week, without stopping to take a breath. It’s only when we reach a target that we might experience a passing moment of euphoria, then it’s back to the grindstone.
I think we can do celebration better.
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Read MoreBoundless Leadership: Keep Pushing
“Oh crap!” These were the words that spun through my head as I flipped over my skis, landing upside down, smacking my head. It hurt.
We had 1.5 meters (5 feet) of snow in a week. This is highly unusual, and in 20 years of skiing in the Australian Alps, I have not seen the like!
I also had more falls this week than I have had in the last five years. It was a combination of heavy snowfall, poor visibility, and funky, sticky snow.
I hadn’t skied this kind of snow before and I felt like a learner all over again.
New conditions need new ability.
Read MoreHow to challenge leadership perspectives
I gaped as my friend Sandra told me of her near-death experience paddling on a river. She fell in, got hypothermia, had no effective communications, and had to crawl out of a canyon to find help. It could have ended very, very badly. I shuddered at what may have happened.
I’m all for adventure. It is one of my core values and I have lived all my life following its call. Solo adventure can be done safely, with plenty of planning. In my experience though, adventure together is better. It’s safer, easier, and way more fun.
Likewise, strategy together is better. None of us is as smart as more of us. We can challenge assumptions, test ideas, and explore creatively together.
Here are some key principles to make it work well for you.
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Read MoreSigns your leadership maturity is about to shift
Human development is no picnic. We come face to face with who we are and realise there is likely a better way of being in the world. We discover that we might be better, and by correlation, who we are now might not be as awesome as we once thought.
Self awareness is like seeing a video of yourself and realising the picture in your head does not match what is being shown back to you. It’s the painful precursor to growth, if you decide to embrace something different.
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