What are the talents and skills that you need to get to the life you desire?
What do you need to learn in order to approach your life in the way that allows you to be the best? Or the highest functioning?
Pause there.
Don’t read on.
Think about your answer carefully. Better yet, write it down. Likely you know what you need, or what is best for you without reading more. It’s a powerful question when you take time with it.
Here is my assessment based on my executive coaching and retreat facilitation work. My observations from being in the presence of and coaching so many amazing individuals is that leaders all have, and continually work on, the below four core skills. I believe that, if mastered, they allow you to play at the highest level of life.
1. Awareness
The skill of self awareness means genuine intrigue and curiosity about what makes you tick combined with the willingness to constantly develop and flex your insight of your strengths and weaknesses. This is the most important skill to up-level your life.
Being “aware” means you’re paying attention to your own life. This includes evaluating circumstances that are out of your control and continually assessing your actions, behaviors, judgements, responsibilities, and results that are in your control. When you take time to be ‘aware’ of your life, you are in a position to interpret, process, and pivot efficiently and effectively. An example of what this looks like is when you can recognize patterns in yourself and try a new course of action in order to strategically get a different result.
There are several ways to develop your Self Awareness. I am certified in several respected tests such as the Ennigram, Strength Finders, DISC, and more which are wonderful for creating a baseline of your personality traits based on asking you a series of questions. You can also work with an Executive Coach, preferable me, who will also ask you a series of questions to coach you through the process of becoming aware of blind spots you may have.
2. Intention
Intention is the skill of choosing your thoughts, words, and actions with the foresight of your desired outcome. Multiple studies have shown that we have about 60,000 thoughts per day. Most of them are not deliberate thoughts; they have been programmed into our life and are running on an automatic script. Many of us spend little time consciously choosing our thoughts, beliefs, or even actions. “Intention” sets you up for success. It focuses your mind on a goal or result for any/ every interaction you have.
This is an elaborate skill that doesn’t just come from reading a blog. Practice is the only thing that can hone this skill. Leaders I work often have some practice with this skill, it can also be referred to as ‘objective’. Leaders set ‘objectives’ which has the same ‘intent’ of establishing direction for your time and energy. When you combine awareness of what you’re thinking and how you are being perceived with intention, you have two of the most important ingredients to leadership.
3. Empathy
Empathy, in this context, is both the ability to relate to and process others feelings as well as your own. Empathetic people build stronger relationships, stronger relationships means more trust, and more trust leads to tackling bigger challenges. In order to be empathetic, you must be able to stay with a feeling and not give into the urge to avoid it. The best way to hone this skill is to process your own feelings of inadequacy or discomfort. Acknowledge this is the skill of awareness transcended into an emotional feeling.
The intention here is not to eliminate negative emotion from our life, but to embrace and process feelings so you become unafraid of any negative emotion that you or others may have. If we don’t leverage this skill, we become afraid of living the lives we are meant to live, setting big goals. and of failing. That is why this skill helps us evolve and master any challenge in our life.
4. Strategic Action
Leaders take strategic action. They have an intention for the result that they want, the self awareness of what they need to do to get there, and the empathy for themselves and others to work towards their goal despite pitfalls that might arise. Most people take action one time and fail and give up. This pattern sets leaders apart from the masses. If we don’t know how to have empathy for ourselves and process the negative emotions that can come from taking risks, we avoid it. We live a life that isn’t anywhere near the standard of what we want to live because we’re too afraid of putting ourselves in harm’s way.
Taking action is the willingness to keep moving forward, no matter how many times we fail or fall down. It’s picking ourselves and others up with compassion, curiosity, and fascination about the growth we need to get the result we want. This last skill brings the others together to creating meaningful results. It’s the skill of knowing what you want and being able to create it, to have an idea in your mind, and knowing how to make it real, knowing how to produce it.
It is these core pillars that I guide individuals, executives, and organizations through via my Professional Development, Business Consulting, and Retreat services.