Discovering Your Leadership Blueprint: Our Principles

All of us have moments in our lives as children, teenagers, in our early careers or more recently, situations or experiences that were big and may have stopped us in our tracks. Or indeed the smaller things that happen time and again, having a compound effect.

Sometimes these things aren’t obvious to us, we just work around them and develop our own unique ways of managing and coping with certain reactions and trigger we have. It’s only when we stop, and really start to work with our own unique patterns, that make us who we are, to open up a whole new world of self-leadership with impact. 
By breaking down these patterns we are intrigued to take a closer look.

Our Principles:

• They drive and inspire us
• They help us to operate at our best
• We will be drawn to them in others
• We will aim to demonstrate them in how we operate
• Some of them are obvious, others maybe not be until we explore them closer

Some of mine include imagination, inspiration and movement; affability, benevolence and those who take charge. All elements which hopefully shine through in how I operate, challenge and develop leaders, as well as the reasons I do what I do!

Can you identify what some of your principles might be?

Discovering Your Leadership Blueprint: Key Moments That Have Shaped Us.

Reflecting on key moments that shape us

In my last blog, I asked you to think about good and bad leaders you've had in your life.
You will be highlighting the qualities you'd like to emulate and noting how not to be.
Does that give you ‘your’ blueprint?

Let me take you back even further, to the many and varied experiences you’ve had earlier in life. From family life and things that happened, to the stories that were told about you or to you. As kids we are like sponges, we don’t miss a trick, and then there’s school and our early careers.

For example, my careers teacher, when I said I wanted to work with people, literally laughed at me, saying: “Come back when you have something serious to talk about.” 
She said this to me because it wasn’t the conventional answer about a university!  But...despite this, I'm now running my own business and getting enjoyment every day from doing what I’m great at and very proud of...developing leaders.

Can you identify key moments or stories that might have shaped you in some way?

• Experiences that spurred you on or have driven you
• Situations which may have had a more profound effect on you than you realised
• Do you remember when any of them happened, how you felt or reacted?

Discovering Your Leadership Blueprint: Are You Investing In Your Leadership?

How much time have you invested in your own leadership versus professional qualification training?

• Do you have a professional qualification for your career or industry?
• How many years of study and development have you invested in such accreditation overall?
• Honestly now, have you invested anywhere near as much development in yourself as a leader?

'No' - is the resounding answer for most of us to that last question, even if we are actually navigating leadership pretty successfully.

No matter what training programmes or courses we’ve completed on leadership, we learn far more from the experience we have of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ leaders.

Who do you have in mind?
What did you learn from them?