Having goals keeps you moving in the right direction. They motivate forward movement. They provide a plan for your bigger picture. Plus, meeting goals provides a great feeling of accomplishment.

Here are a few points about goals:

• Your goals are your responsibility
• A difficult goal is an opportunity to grow
• Striving to reach a goal is a good feeling
• Persistence in working toward a goal pays off

Your attitude is controlled by your self-talk. How you see situations, and how you describe them to yourself has control over your attitude. Choose to make your self-talk positive. Make your attitude positive and your day will be a great one!

1. What your competition is doing
2. What your competition will be doing in three years
3. What your clients want
4. What your clients will want in three years
5. What your clients think of your company (btw – THIS is your brand! Your logo, color scheme, advertising message, etc is not)
6. What each member of your team is working on
7. What each member of your team needs in order to be great at their job
8. What the trends of your industry are
9. What the trends in your industry SHOULD be
10. What you can learn about a peripheral aspect of your business

Curiosity may kill the cat. But, it makes the leader grow!

One day, another one of our caveman ancestors came up with the idea of launching a smaller spear using a stick and a string, a bow and arrow. Now, hunting could be done at a greater distance. Suddenly, the spear was old-fashioned; it was the old way of hunting. The spear was no longer a success. The idea of the bow and arrow spread; it became the norm for hunting.

Modern innovation is the same. We come up with new, great ways of accomplishing tasks. Then, those methods become the normal way of doing things, until they are replaced with the next idea.

It is important to continue to look for improvement, to continue to innovate. Get better, or become the norm.

Look forward to things that may cause your team to stumble. Things that may be in the way of forward movement. Things that could slow momentum. Find ways to use your leadership skills to remove these things.

Leadership is a choice. You must decide to be a leader. Leadership comes from experience and learning. Leadership involves a lot of following.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage. 

~ Maya Angelou

Leaders must be bold and courageous in moving forward. They must take smart risks.
Leaders must have the courage to risk failure.

Make sure the risks are smart

Risks should be calculated and smart. The person taking the risk should know up front what the risks are. A smart risk is one where the risk-taker has considered possible outcomes; he has thought about the risk from various perspectives. He knows what assumptions he is making, and how those assumptions may be wrong. Smart risks have been evaluated against data or experience.

Failure due to a risk that was not smart is due to an outcome that was not considered. Doing the wrong thing, or hiding information is a bad risk. Failing to gather the necessary information is not a smart risk. Taking action based on chance, rather than experience or data, is not a smart risk.

How to handle failure without discouraging future risk-taking

As a leader you must handle failure by your team carefully. You must think before you respond. You must make sure your response fits the failure. If the failure was due to smart risk-taking, leaders must be encouraging. Help the team, or team member find the lessons in the failure. Remember, smart risk-taking sometimes involves measuring the risk against experience. Failure brings that experience as much as, if not more so than, success. The failure may dramatically increase the value of the person or people who failed.

Encourage smart risks

Make sure your team understands what smart, and not smart, risks are. Let them know that failure is OK, if it is due to smart risk and not carelessness. Encourage risk. Encourage your team to innovate.

Zig Ziglar used the analogy of medicine. If the doctor says you are ‘reacting’ to his treatment, it is not a good thing. If, on the other hand, he says you are ‘responding’, it is a good thing. Why don’t we ‘respond’ to adversity? Instead of questioning how you caused the problem, what you did to cause the universe to attack you, ‘respond’ by seeking a solution. Accept the adversity as an occurrence, a temporary thing, even a challenge.

I’ll take this a step further: can you find something good in the adversity? If I look back at the adversity I have faced in my life, at the very least I see important lessons. It is difficult, but in the midst of adversity look for the lesson; look for something good. Think, “What impact will this event have on my life 5 years from now?”

Stress and adversity are mostly in how we see them. How we internalize adversities determines what affect they have on us. Choose the positive. Be intentional.