3 Practical Ways to Improve Your Leadership Inputs

Many leaders are on a junk-food diet for their minds and souls. The majority of what we watch, read, scroll through, and look at doesn’t help us grow in our leadership.

Unfortunately, what you consume determines what you produce. So if you’re on a junk food diet, you’ll produce junk food results. 

If you want to produce great results, you need to obsess about finding the right leadership inputs.

To improve your inputs, focus on two “whats” and a “who.”

1. What you consume.

The content you consume shapes how you think and who you become as a leader. What comes into your mind comes out in your leadership.

Question: As a leader, what are you consuming? What are you putting into your mind that’s coming out in your leadership?

Much like how your physical body doesn’t improve while consuming carbs and candy, your leadership capacity is never strengthened by empty entertainment, negativity, or distractions. As a leader, you need to treat your leadership development in the same way you would treat your physical development.

Question: What are you doing today that will strengthen your leadership tomorrow? 

Every day, you should be actively strengthening your leadership.

If you consume great leadership content, it’s going to help you lead yourself well.

2. What you attempt.

You don’t grow by simply doing what you have done. So how do you grow? You grow by either:

• Doing more of what you already did, or
• Doing something different than what you normally do.

In the same way that you don’t expect to grow by doing the same workout at the gym, you won’t grow as a leader by doing the same thing you’ve always done.

This might sound odd, but one of the best ways to grow as a leader is to grow in a new and unrelated area of life. This is important because we all have some leadership insecurity. Something that makes us think, “I’m not very good at this.”

Trying something new will do three things for your leadership:

• It increases your humility. Trying something new reminds you that you’re still learning.
• It gets you comfortable being uncomfortable. The only way you can get better is by pushing through discomfort.
• It builds your confidence that you’re always growing. It reminds you that you can still learn new things as a leader.

When you experience these three things, it shifts your thinking from “I’m not very good at this” to “I’m not very good at this yet.”

3. Who you surround yourself with.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of surrounding yourself with great leaders.

You are generally the average of your five closest friends. If you want to grow as a leader, surround yourself with people who are better, smarter, wiser, and more experienced than you.

When you’re around great leaders, don’t just study what they do, study how they think. Ask them about what content they consume, what habits they have, and what questions they love to ask.

There’s no excuse to not surround yourself with great leaders. Find an event to attend, a counselor to see, or a great leader to take to lunch, and learn from them.

Master the 8 Habits of Great Leaders

What sets great leaders apart?

Great leaders are fanatically consistent with a few strategic habits.

Get my easy-to-reference guide outlining eight of the habits great leaders have in common. (#2 is something you can implement today.)