The Distinguished Leader: Why You Should Accept Failure As A Gift — Day 14 of 365 Leadership Blogging
In today’s small business age, we have to bring something to the table in order to cultivate success but most of all leave a footprint as clues to help others find and be their best. So in today’s article, I decided that I wanted to explore what a distinguished leader may look like and how to learn from their patterns.
When searching for the word distinct in the dictionary, it read:
“recognisably different in nature from something else of a similar type”.
Does this definition resonate with you? I would really like to hear from in the comments if it does.
At the start of our business journey, we fell into a few disaster areas and so in writing today’s blog, we believe it’s only fitting to share some of those mistakes in the hope that it will impact your thinking on your journey.
We learnt loads whilst making our mistakes and those experiences ended up being valuable templates for ourselves and for others we work with.
Being willing to learn from your mistakes helps you walk away with the best form of information to plough back into round two. You normally have to buy this type of advice from an expert but if you can go through it, you will be halfway set for success. And save yourself some time and money too.
A distinguished set of solid research strategies helps to avoid throwing a boomerang out there and nothing coming back. That’s what we see in today’s form of business intelligence — quick and easy decision making, however, the intelligence isn’t always reliable. We, therefore, really enjoy combining a mixture of old and new research methods to ensure we are supporting our clients with the solid information they need to meet their goals.
Most people we come into contact with are either emerging into the world as a new leader or establishing a new business lifecycle as the last one came to an end. Again I say, we have been on both ends of the scale and our own experiences have led us to twist and turn whilst hanging onto to our sanity. Here are some of the areas you may want to consider from our lessons-learned-log.
Road to discovery
Our road to discovery was when we began to step out of our comfort zones. For you, it may be the same or you may be at that the end of a business lifecycle and are now looking for new opportunities. Either way, the pains and frustrations that we endured kept us together. It tried to break us, but by allowing our faith to kick in and listen for direction, it worked for us. We relied on this as our daily bread. Discussions were hard but more so respectful. Lessons we took away from the road to discovery was — knowing your end game helps to reverse engineer the path to successfully achieving your goals. If you are working with someone else this helps to keep you both on the same path and heading in the right direction.
Find your flow in leadership
As two thought leaders, we have had to be able to identify our differences. This strengthens our internal communications as we acknowledge our areas where we flow best.
An example of this is that as consultant/coaches we could easily fall into the trends around us, however, we have made the decision to offer a time-based model to our clients to maximise the use of technology without losing the personal touch we like to have with our clients. This way we know that as our business grows we won’t be too stretched to deliver. Our desire is to ensure that we are compatible in all areas of work and home.
The Crossover
The cross over dawned upon us as we realised that we were physically burnt out.
To fix this, we challenged ourselves to get others to help us look at our blind spots. We set up various trust/mastermind groups where we eagerly helped each other get to our quests. This has been a real eye-opener by giving people permission to show us blindspots, it saves us time on our personal stamina, marriage and family. We have begun to see the diamond in people which helped us focus on impacting their lives and making a true difference. We still have a long way to go but we are fully on board with the journey.
Becoming distinguished is a process, a journey into living life on your terms and living up to what you truly believe. Some of that journey has involved setting ourselves apart but that becomes part of the pruning the growing process — you have to shed a little to grow a lot.
Thanks for reading and do tell us in the comments:
Have you ever experienced failing at a height and getting up with the realisation that its part of the journey?
