LTL 125: Four Areas Of Focus To Increase Excellence

If you missed last week’s episode, we talked about what excellence looks like in leadership. And in an effort to increase our clarity, I’m going to spend some time in this episode looking at four areas where you can focus your effort to increase the presence of excellence in your life and work.

As a quick recap, here are some of the major points from last week’s episode:

• Excellence will cause you to stand out
• Excellence will force you to narrow your focus
• The risk with developing excellence is you slip into perfection
• Excellence is a lifestyle, a commitment to a way of living
• Doors open when you commit to excellence

Lory Hough wrote an article called Does It Have To Be So Complicated back in 2015 for the Harvard Graduate School of Education. One of the points she made in that article was that if you ask your own questions, you take greater ownership of your learning and deepen your comprehension. It leads to discoveries on your own rather than being dependent just on the supposed “experts.” And in the absence of obvious solutions to complicated challenges, the answer to complexity is sometimes to simplify.

A Student Just Like You

I am not an expert on excellence. I’m a student just like you. My job is to present thought-provoking information and content. Your job is to consider what I present, fact-check it for yourself, and then draw conclusions that help you to grow in your leadership competencies.

So as I focus on these four areas today, I’m including some great questions that you can ask yourself to measure your performance and pave a pathway to improvement. They aren’t substitutes for your own questions. I want you to come to your own conclusions, your own discoveries because you thought about it for a minute. Because you challenged yourself with a question which made you think. The questions I’m providing are simply meant to start the conversation. Are you ready?

Attitude isn’t everything

The first area is attitude. Attitude isn’t everything because if it was, our world would be in much worse shape than it is. Think of how many bad attitudes you encounter every day! Thankfully, our world doesn’t hinge on our ability to choose a good attitude each morning when we get out of bed! Now, attitude may not be everything, but I do believe it’s quite possibly the most important thing and I’ll venture that without a good attitude, excellence will forever elude you.

What do people say about your attitude? Do you have a reputation for being cross or grumpy? Are you egotistical and hard to get along with? Do others find you unapproachable? What would your customers say? Do they enjoy doing business with you? Do you always have to be right? Can you have a conversation without making others feel small?

Is your tendency to see things positively or negatively? Are you overly optimistic or weighed down with pessimism? You might think that you are bound to struggle for instance if you aren’t optimistic. Or maybe you believe that because you are more solemn, you can’t produce excellent customer service. Neither is true. You will have to understand your behavior and then adjust accordingly to produce the result you desire.

Excellence Start With A Focus On Discipline

The second area is discipline. Excellence starts with a focus on discipline. Remember the quote from John Maxwell last week?

Consistency is the prerequisite to excellence.

John C