Courageous leaders know how to stay "in the zone"

I have been working with several clients over the last few months and applying the work of Martin Seligman for them to better understand how they can come from a place of strength and work regularly in their "sweetspot". It has been wonderful to watch and hear people exploring what it feels like to hit their sweetspot and what holds them back from doing it more often.

As a society we have been educated to value skills and accordingly spend a lot of time emphasising the need to build them - and yet as a leader it is not skills that are going to unleash your courage to make the tough decisions, engage in the conversations you'd rather avoid or set aside critical time to think and reflect. I believe this is a major reason why we have so many leaders who operate on automatic pilot and do not inspire their people to truly unleash their potential. We have leaders who concentrate on skills and achieving bottom line by getting the tasks done.

To be a courageous leader you must invest the time in getting to know yourself and finding ways to "be at your best" - know the "right hand" of your personality preferences, identify your values/strengths and determine how to translate these into behaviours that let you be at your best. Only then are you ready to unleash the potential of people working in your team and in your business.

As I heard Dr Stephen Covey describe when he spoke in Sydney - globally our biggest workplace issue is all the untapped potential of people working in our businesses. They have untapped potential because they are not managed and lead by courageous leaders! Contact me if you would like to explore this issue in more depth as I love engaging in such conversations.