035: Becoming a Better Leader, Step One - Choose Transformation

Often prospective clients ask if I can guarantee improvement in their leadership and work experience. They want to become a better leader, and they recognize the need for change in their business culture or personal life and leadership skills. I’ll tell you what I tell them: If you want different results, you must overcome the resistance to change, invest energy to breaking unproductive patterns, and choose transformation. 

Step one to improving your leadership is to say yes to the invitation for growth.

The Invitation to Becoming a Better Leader

What I offer and recommend in the way of improving your life and business is simply an invitation. What you choose to do with what you are given will determine your growth and experience. That is the case with all of life. A better you, better team, better business, and better life is possible, but the choice is always yours.

Much of life seems to be contingent on our conformity to an established hierarchy or compliance with existing structures. While adjusting, conforming, or complying, never forget that you have a choice. There are costs and consequences to every choice you will ever make, but you still get to choose.

Positive change is determined by your intentionality. A better experience and a better life are the result of accepting the invitation to do something different in order to get a different result.

Information Is Not Transformation

We live in information overload. One of the more significant challenges in our culture is the temptation to substitute the acquisition of information for the work necessary to experience transformation. Information is not transformation. Transformation occurs when you apply appropriate information. It’s not what you’re given; it’s what you do with what you’re given!

Breaking Bad (Patterns)

There is a lot of energy required to break bad behavior patterns and unproductive work practices. It is so much easier to stay in an unproductive pattern. You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. You also don’t have to experience the recognition and reward attached to new and better opportunities. If you want different and better results, you are going to have to change the way you are doing things.

Change Is Not a Command but an Invitation

Change is not a command. It’s an opportunity. In my client work, I occasionally meet individuals who hold everyone and everything around them responsible for their success. The way that I recognize them is that they blame everyone and everything around them for their failure. At the end of the day, recognition and promotion are not inalienable rights. They are the fruit of offering yourself to the invitation to grow and become.

You May Need to Find Another Garden

If you can’t bloom where you are planted, you may need to find another garden. Every work experience and every relationship is not going to offer you the culture and the affirmation you need to become the best version of you. Don’t stay where it isn’t working. But if you find that you are moving from garden to garden, relationship to relationship, job to job, the problem may not be with the garden, the companion, or the employer. It might be you!

Reframing

What would happen if you began to look at the events of your life as an invitation? What if your difficult work experience is simply an invitation to become a better communicator? Change and growth are not requirements that you have to obey. They are opportunities. You can stay right where you are in life, work, and relationships. Or you can see opportunity as an invitation to become a better version of you.

Where Are We Going?

Over the next few episodes, we are going to talk about what it looks like to respond to life’s invitations, what it may cost you, and what you will face in terms of resistance to growth. Here’s a secret: Even resistance is an invitation. It all depends on how you respond.

Until next time, lead well!

Bill