Introducing my personal model for practicing Positive Leadership

Welcome to the first edition of my new newsletter: Positive Leadership & You.

For over a year, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss Positive Leadership with many incredible leaders from the worlds of business, academia, social entrepreneurship, sports and more on my podcast.

The advice, insights and experiences that they’ve shared have helped me to learn and grow, as an individual, a leader, and ultimately as a global citizen. 

It’s this ripple effect that makes Positive Leadership both so powerful and so simple to apply to daily life.

That’s why each month, I’ll be rounding up my top tips to share with all of you in this newsletter, using this three-part model: Me, Me & Others and Me & the World. The tips will be taken from my podcast conversations, but also from things that I’ve read, watched or done throughout the month.

Let’s get started! 

Me: Focusing on our personal growth, wellbeing and being positive with ourselves.  

Think about your inner voice. Is it supportive, empathetic and helping to boost you up? 

It’s so important to be positive with ourselves and to practice self-compassion, because as chartered psychologist Dr. Audrey Tang identifies, we can only be kind to others when we are kind ourselves. 

But we all have moments when our self-talk is more negative than positive. When this happens, here are three tips from executive coach Michael Bungay Stanier to help those unwanted thoughts at bay. 

1. Treat your inner voice with a certain amount of suspicion – what you’re thinking at that moment isn’t always the whole truth. Simply recognizing negative talk for what it is can be a powerful act of liberation. 
2. Practice affirmations. When things are difficult, that’s when it’s most important to remind ourselves of our own greatness, ability and strength. 
3. Write down what you’re feeling negative, anxious or worried about. Often, acknowledging it and making it concrete makes it shrink.

Listen to the full episode for more tips on becoming a better version of yourself from Audrey, Michael and additional guests like Arianna Huffington, Kevin Johnson and Kim Cameron. 

Me & Others: Connecting with and empowering others to achieve more. 

A great leader is more than just a great person. They also unlock greatness in all those around them, and inspire others to dream more, do more and become more.

This is certainly not easy! So to motivate and guide you, I’ve rounded up my favorite quotes from three brilliant leaders: my own manager and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Seattle Seahawks Head Coach Pete Carroll and organizational behavior Professor Herminia Ibarra.

1.  Satya Nadella: “Leaders have the innate capability to come into difficult ambiguous, uncertain circumstances and bring clarity, right? You never meet someone and say, oh, that person is a leader if they come into a situation where it's confusing and create more confusion. Leaders don't do that. Leaders create clarity.” 
2. Pete Carroll: “You have to care about how you affect the people that you deal with. And so it all begins with respect… And do you care enough about the people you're dealing with to organize your life and prioritize your actions so that you're available for the people you're supposed to be around?” 
3. Herminia Ibarra: “You cannot change a mindset directly. Your mindset is the product of your experience. What has worked, what hasn't worked. So the only way you change it is you give people new experiences or you push them to do new things that eventually change their minds.” 

For more great words of wisdom on how you can generate positive energy to improve the wellbeing and performance of your team, listen to the full episode below.

Me & the World: Having a positive impact on the world.

We must all play our part in transforming our world for good. And guess what? It will make you feel great! 

The guests featured in my latest episode are living proof of this. Not only are they committed to their purpose of changing the world, but they also help others to do the same. Here are their top tips for being a positive, purpose-led leader.

1. Start with your why and connect with your own passion. What is that problem you cannot turn away from? What is that thing you will bleed for? The hill you will die on? 
2. Understand the ‘collective consciousness’ of your company – the strengths, challenges and limitations, what you’ve become, the possibilities of what you can be. Turn this into a shared vision.
3. First, unlock purpose in your company by taking responsibility for your total impact. Then, try to enlarge that impact into your value chain at an industry level in order to become part of the bigger societal transformation.

Need more inspiration? Listen to the full episode, featuring some of the world’s top responsible leaders and social entrepreneurs, like Paul Polman, Vincent Stanley, Cheryl Dorsey, Jos de Blok and Dr. Iffat Zafar. 

I hope that you’ve enjoyed these tips and find them useful.

Subscribe now to get all the latest Positive Leadership insights each month and please share with me your thoughts in the comments below. I’m always happy to hear from you. 

- jp