Balance Your Scale
Which ways are your scales tipping?
I recently recorded a podcast during which the host admittedly threw away the show notes and went off-script for almost the entire interview. Instead of getting nervous or frustrated, I trusted him to lead the conversation to a place in which I felt comfortable. And so we spoke at length about me & my time spent in service to our country; luckily, these were two topics about which I knew quite a bit.
Then the conversation shifted to leadership and he simply left it up to me to discuss some of the lessons I had learned about leadership during my time in the Army. While I have no formal education in leadership theory or applied leadership, I do have over 20 twenty years of practical experience, so I went to the well and talked about two of the most important attributes every leader must possess and constantly work to balance.
Humility & Confidence. I like to view these two attributes on a scale. If humility outweighs confidence, we are likely to be a weak, meager, and ineffective leader. If the scales go the other way, we’re arrogant. Nobody wants to be either of those and nobody wants to work with or work for either of those.
So how do we keep that scale balanced? If you’ve read my blog posts, you should know what I’m about to say. You guessed it! Mental fitness is the answer. Mental fitness is our ability to manage our day to day challenges, stress, and anxiety with a positive mindset.
You may also know that the best way to build mental fitness is through having a high level of Positive Intelligence® (PQ). But how does having PQ enable all of this? It does it many ways but I want to focus on three aspects. Resilience, Trust, and Authenticity.
PQ increases our resilience which allows us to lean into our vulnerability with confidence. PQ allows us, as leaders, to be confident enough to believe we’re the best person for the job but humble enough to understand we’re probably not the expert and we probably can’t do it all alone. And if we screw up or our team screws up, the resilience built through PQ allows us and our team to bounce back quicker, find the opportunities in our mistakes, and learn from it all rather than playing the blame game.
Every leader needs to manage their emotions and communicate effectively or they risk losing the trust of their team. Once again, an arrogant leader has no interest in building trust (or managing their emotions) and a weak leader probably can’t communicate effectively. PQ does all of this for us. It allows trust to go both ways in our relationships with those above, below, and beside us. And when trust is present in our relationships as a leader, there is nothing our teams can’t do.
Nobody wants to work for or with someone they perceive as fake, disingenuous, or weak. These types of leaders typically lead out of fear usually due to a lack of confidence. These are the folks who put on a mask and just have a hard time being themselves. PQ allows us to replace our fear-driven habits (like yelling or insisting we do things our way) with a positive mindset allowing us to be authentic and show genuine care for our team.
One last note about PQ - the sooner we start in life, the better. As we age, our negative mental patterns (Saboteurs) become dug in and harder to uproot. They become harder to identify and even harder to call out. As a leader, PQ is THE way to ensure we show up every day for our team with a positive mindset whether our team is five people or twenty five people.
Interested enough to learn more about PQ? Check out my website here and while you’re there, take the next step & book a PQ Information Session. You can also sign up for the upcoming cohort or grab the free download on my homepage.
As always, comments are welcome! Thanks for reading.
