What are your leadership goals? Do you want to make greater decisions? Communicate better? Listen more? Become a good mentor? Motivate your team to outperform? Be more adaptable? Build better connections?
Leadership goals are important because they help you identify your priorities. Leaders lead people and teams. While it’s great to make goals for your future, it is even greater to make goals that include your team. Goals set with your team in mind makes you a more efficient and effective leader. If you can have all your dreams come true and help your people to also achieve some of their dreams along the way then you are on the right track to greatness.
Setting the goals may be easy but making them come true can be challenging! Often we set goals but we don’t put in the hard yards to make them come true. Or, we start off very motivated but end up losing momentum and self-belief and dropping out of the race.
What if I share with you a secret way you can manifest your leadership goals? Read on and discover the power of manifestation.
The power of manifestation
Manifesting literally means visualising your desire and harnessing the power of your imagination to make it a reality. Manifestation is not wishful thinking nor is it daydreaming. It’s about acting on your dreams (or in this case, your leadership aspirations). For example, one of your leadership goals is to communicate better. Perhaps you are reserved and feel self-conscious about addressing a crowd. You may decide to take some public speaking courses to build confidence. When you do this and can start visualising yourself captivating your team at the department meeting or winning the audience in a business presentation, eventually you develop the confidence to speak publicly. You’ve realised your dreams through manifestation.
When it comes to successfully manifesting your goals, the secret sauce is you! Manifestation is not an exclusive club reserved only for successful people. Everyone has the ability to manifest, including you! Let me show you how it can be done.
1. Be the great leader you want to be!
Leaders don’t just dream about their success. They act on their dreams by putting energy and time into making them come true. By doing this, they are able to attract what they want.
I find the best way to become a great leader is to lead from within. Use your moral compass and values to guide you to become the type of leader you want to be. You will become an even greater leader if you learn to lead yourself first. Leading from within means you are constantly challenging yourself to be better. Leading within yourself requires discipline, self-awareness and resilience. It also requires you to have a genuine interest in helping the people whose future and livelihood depends on the decisions you make. Great leaders find ways to align organisational goals with individual goals. If the company succeeds, the people who work for the company will also benefit. People who work in a company that espouses this value feel more connected to their employer. They work harder to achieve goals because they know they will be rewarded for their hard work.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that there is nothing more you can learn as a leader because you’ve been in that role for so long. That’s not true. Learning is a continuous process without an end if we don’t give it one. Your leadership goals don’t stay stagnant. As you progress up the corporate ladder, you set new goals for yourself. To achieve these goals you may have to learn new skills, acquire new knowledge and even unlearn some bad habits. The more open you are to learning, the easier it is for you to achieve your leadership goals.
Even though I have been in a leadership role for over 15 years, I am still learning and discovering new things every day. Great leaders are great learners. So if you want to be that great leader, embrace knowledge and start learning. Also, the best way to learn is not through instructional videos or textbooks, it’s through real-life experiences.
By constantly challenging and improving on your leadership skills, you learn to manifest the type of leader you want to be and eventually, you become that leader!
2. Be a great leader who shows appreciation and gratitude.
How often have you said to yourself: “I don’t want to get angry!” But you did. Or “I don’t want to be negative but I can’t help it!”
If you want to think negatively of yourself (or others) then you invite negativity into your life. Eventually, it spirals into an abyss of despair and anger whether it’s directed at yourself, your loved ones or the people you manage.
On the other hand, if you manifest positivity, then you invite sunshine and happiness into your life. You have the power to be Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America or anyone you want to be. If you shift your focus and concentrate on abundance, joy, love, and life’s boundless possibilities, you attract the good things into your life.
That’s the thing about Appreciation and Gratitude. Several years ago, I discovered meditation. It helped me clear my mind, and align my body, mind and soul. Through meditation, I started to appreciate the things I have in life (both good and bad) and show gratitude towards the people whose paths I have crossed in my professional and personal life.
One of the biggest lessons I learned is not to focus too much on things that I do not have. If I spend all my time lamenting about all the goals I did not achieve, I will not have time to focus on the times when dreams did come true for me. I prefer to remind myself of all the good things that have happened to me like the time I survived a serious car accident or the time when my business partner and I turned our business around by doing things differently. When you look at both the good and the bad times, you become more appreciative of the things you have in life. You expand this gratitude to the people around you. A leader – who is genuinely happy about his or her people’s success is more likely to earn their admiration, friendship and trust. Once this special bond is fostered, staff are happy, motivated and productive.
Successes are celebrated. Failures are not mistakes but challenges that can be overcome. If we start focusing on appreciation and gratitude, we start seeing opportunities everywhere. The truth is, opportunities have always been around. We were just too preoccupied to notice it.
3. Be the self-aware leader
Great leaders have self-awareness. Self-awareness is understanding why you feel what you feel and why you behave in a particular way. When you have this understanding, you have control and you are one step closer to achieving your leadership goals. That’s because self-awareness helps you recognise your strengths and weaknesses. Not the ones that you write on a piece of paper during a training session. The ‘real’ ones that are buried deep inside your soul that you may be in denial from.
Self-awareness is power. If you know exactly what you are good at and what you may want to improve, you can take positive steps to get what you want in life. It can be using your strengths or improving on your weaknesses. Either path will lead you to success.
The reason we fail is ourselves. We are our worst enemy. Our mind is always trying to trick us by planting self-doubts in our heads. So, we lose the courage to be daring; to go out and grab what we want in life.
Here are some things you can do to develop self-awareness:
Practise daily self-reflection.
Stop and take some time each day to reflect on what you’ve achieved. During this time you can take stock of your successes and misses. If you spent just 10-15 minutes a day on this, you’d have accumulated 365 wins and misses in a year. Imagine if you’ve acted on every single one of these?
Seek feedback
The best way to improve is to learn what others think of your efforts. Consider feedback as market research on yourself. The more data you have, the more informed you are about the best course of action.
Practise mindfulness
It’s important to allocate some time to declutter your mind. Mindfulness and meditation are relaxing and restful. When you are rested, you think clearer and make better decisions.
Unfortunately, I cannot share all the wonderful life lessons I have learned in this blog. If you are keen to learn how to manifest your own success, read my bestselling book on the topic titled ‘Great Leadership Starts with You’. Click this link and grab your copy now: https://youwantgroup.com/great-leadership-book/
Iris Du is a leadership strategist and human behaviour expert who thrives on helping individuals, leaders and businesses achieve the success they deserve. Drawing on leadership, attraction and manifestation strategies, Iris works with organisations to help them leverage their natural talent to create highly engaged and high-performing leaders and teams.
