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Your team looks to you for their model of leading and learning. Does it look like you have arrived, like you know it all, like you have all the answers or like you are just cruising?
The key to being a great coach is being a good student. It all starts with you!
Excellent leadership is not just about investing in others. It’s also about investing in ourselves. Today more than ever, there is a cafeteria of learning available to us… and it’s filled with the food of excellence. The great news is there is no annual membership fee to the Brain Gym! Traditionally known as the library or bookstore, the Brain Gym is now completely virtual. All we need to exercise our brains is at our fingertips, literally. But it’s not just about reading and training.
The Brain Gym is anywhere we want it to be. In other words, our lives are our own learning labs, where we can build our leadership competence. We can find best practices everywhere. Watch the people around us. We can find nuggets of excellence from a father-in-law, a clergyman, a speaker at a professional association meeting, a fellow leader, our child’s school principal, a Boy Scout’s troop leader or a particularly helpful salesperson at a local department store. Observe, read, ask, listen and learn.
There are also lessons to be learned in everything your team does. Look for opportunities in post-project reviews, customer meetings, conflicts with other departments, changes in priorities, miscommunications and mistakes. Seize all these experiences to exercise your brain.
Keeping our memberships at the Brain Gym continually hones our competence… and competence builds confidence. Confidence is critical – excellent leaders need it and their teams want to see it.
So, if you want to be a great coach, be a good student. Get started by reading 7 Moments… that Define Excellence Leaders.
