How to Check Your "Exampling"

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It’s Easy to Tell Others What They Should Do and How They Should Live Their Life.

But doing it ourselves? This is an entirely different ballgame.

When I’m teaching leadership, especially “academy or university” style where I spend many hours and sessions with a group, the first thing I focus on is how to lead yourself. Because I know the truth of how difficult this is and how important it is if you want to have any credibility at all in helping others to do better.

The reality is that your life, and the product of how you have been living, speak much louder than anything you could ever say.

Everyone is leading someone whether we like it or not or admit it or not. We lead our children, peers, friends, people in our community, those we are peers-teammates-workmates with, those in organizations we are part of, even those who might be in a position of leadership over us. And of course, if we are in a specific leadership position, those we are serving through our leadership.

Ask Yourself This: If Those You Lead Were Doing The Things You Are Doing, How Would They Be Doing?

Your life and career are going to generally reflect two things: Your habits over the past several years, and the choices you have made. Yes, there are also the affects of serendipitous and unfortunate occurrences that have played a role too, but in GENERAL, those will have simply bumped you up or temporarily derailed you, in the big picture. When I say habits and choices…I’m not referring to the big ones…I am referring to ALL of them. We are all the sum total of all we do.

“Leading by example” is well a worn cliché. And that is because it’s true.

True leadership starts when someone WANTS to follow you, and that means you have to be perceived as someone worth following. And that is not likely to be based on what you say.

In the workplace, it’s true that circumstances, positions, life stages, career stages, and job roles, among other things, are going to dictate that the person you may be leading should likely be doing specific things that are different than you. That’s not what matters.

The key things are general and categorical, and have a massive impact on whether or not you are an inspiring example that someone else would deem worthy of emulating.

The “3 Circles Living” aspects will be very obvious to you and those you are attempting to influence (the essence of leadership), but there are several other things that matter as well.

In the below video, I give you eight areas to look at that provide you a mirror to assess how “followable” you are. The purpose here is to help you assess how you are doing in the things that others will look at as you live under the microscope of leadership. If this resonates with you, please share with others.