Do you have a vision for your life? A vision for your career? A vision for who you are as a daughter? A son? A father? A mother? A brother? A sister? A person?
My calling is that people are liberated.
Everything I do, everything I say yes to, the people I hang out with, how I spend my time, is in service of liberating myself first. Because if I'm not liberated, I certainly can't provide that to my family, friends, and community.
So what's your calling for your life? What gets you out of bed in the morning? How do you want to make the world around you better?
Once you have your calling, you need to think about how you are going to fulfill that calling. What actions do you need to take? What changes need to be made? Do you need to eliminate some current habits and create new ones?
You also need a vision for your leadership. How are you going to influence and inspire others to fulfill your calling? You need a vision that holds true even when everything around you is going wrong. If you don’t have a set vision for yourself as a leader, answer the following questions to determine what your vision is.
Who are you as a leader?
What's important to you as a leader?
How do you best want to serve others in your leadership?
How do you show up when you're at your best?
How do you know it was a good day?
When do you feel the most rewarded and fulfilled in your career?
Answering each of these questions allows you to piece together exactly how you want to lead to fulfill your calling and enable others to do the same.
Living In Alignment
Ultimately, to be at the peak of your leadership powers and encourage optimal results from yourself and others, you have to live your life in alignment.
There’s a full article on living in alignment here, but we’ll go into it briefly.
As a leader, living in alignment requires three things. First, it requires you to tune in to what's important to you and how you want your life. If you are the author of your own life, what is the purpose driven life you want to lead?
Secondly, it takes you really looking at your ways of being that are congruent with your vision and allow you to move towards it. For example, for myself they are generosity, contribution and integrity. I know when I don't honor one of those three things, life doesn't go as well for me. Because I know that all three of those things are important to me, I am able to turn on those elements when I have fallen off track.
The third piece to living in alignment is daily discipline. For myself, I have a morning ritual. Every morning I get up and I have my hot lemon water. I perform my breathing exercise that I learned from my yoga teacher training and then I do 20 minutes of meditation.
Every. Single. Morning.
And that enables me to begin each day in alignment.
What habits or rituals could you insert into your day to enable you to get and stay grounded and in alignment? It could be as simple as going for a run to start your day, taking time to read a book, or having a short afternoon nap.
People always ask me “How do I live true? How do I stay in my flow zone personally and professionally when I'm working with all these people who don't even care how they show up to work?”
My answer is always about vision. Call it what you will; a purpose, a calling, a vision. We have to have a big WHY. It could be a WHY for your own life, a WHY for the company you are working for, or a why of a project that you're on. But it needs to be big and compelling and it needs to motivate you to act and inspire those around you to do the same.
Then you need structures and systems to tap into your highest power and enable your teams to do the same. We need structure, whether it's in the form of a daily ritual, team meetings, one on ones, kickoff calls, or feedback loops. We need structure because without structure, there's no freedom.
We also need to declare what kind of environment we want to have in our personal and our work lives. How do we want it to feel when we walk into our house? For example, I am remodeling my home office room at the moment. I have carefully crafted every single component in the room because it's where I will spend 8 to 10 hours a day working and I want to feel good where I work. I used to work upstairs on my kitchen bench, but after a couple years it got old and I felt like I was compromising my personal space for work.
So what do you want in your environment? How do you want it to feel? How do you want the experience to be for you and others? What kind of environment makes you most productive?
It all starts with you. You cannot have a positive influence on others if you don’t have a positive influence on yourself.
P.S. Want to learn more about how to live in alignment and as your highest and best self? Check out our Evolve the Leader Within Seminar Series. This series shows you how to achieve a deeper level of fulfillment and a heightened ability to lead yourself and others to effectiveness. You won’t want to miss it.