Leadership-Life Fit — Live Your Best Life

Let these four lessons guide your summer plans to uplevel the quality of your leadership-life fit.

In this article from Inc., Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and Mark Cuban offer their perspective on living your best life. The questions that follow each provide an opportunity to process in your mentoring partnership.

Buffett: Surround yourself with the right people.

• Who are the people in your circle—both personally and professionally?
• Are you associating with the kind of people who represent what you want to be?
• Which relationships fuel your energy? Which leave you drained and exhausted?

Jobs: You can always make more money; you can never make more time. Do everything as quickly and effectively as you can, and then use your “free time” to get other things done just as quickly and effectively. “Exceptional people impose their will on time.” 

Jobs' point is that we instinctively stretch tasks or projects to fit into the time we have available before a deadline when they should only take as long as they need to take.

• Where might you impose your will on time (rather than be driven by it)?
• Discuss a project or task to which you devoted way more time than needed. What did you notice? Was the increased amount of time spent evident in the quality of the project/experience you created? Or, was the difference negligible?  What did it teach you about managing time?
• How do perfectionistic tendencies influence your ability to determine how much time any project may take?

Winfrey: Listen with the intention of validating that person, of seeing them and communicating that they matter.

• Think of a time when you were listening to someone, and you recognized they felt heard and seen. How did you know? What did you observe? What did you do to elicit that response?
• Covey in The Speed of Trust advises Listen First—listen for as well as listen to. Listen for what matters most when you’re listening to people. He goes on to add that as long as a person is communicating with high emotion, they don’t feel understood yet. When was the last time you listened for and to someone? What did you notice? How did that impact the relationship?
• The next time you’re in a conversation, ask yourself if you’ve really listened to this person. Do you really understand how they feel? Set aside your agenda and focus on their point of view before advocating for your own.

Cuban: “One of the most underrated skills in business right now is being nice. Nice sells.” Cuban notes being nice doesn’t mean being lenient or soft. It’s about caring about others and believing in them.

• How do you define nice?
• How do you demonstrate “nice”?
• If you asked staff to describe you in 10 words, would “nice” (in some form) be on the list? How do you know?
• How have you held people accountable to high standards and maintained “nice”? What does this look like going forward for you?

📝 Dana’s Note: Three of the four of these connect to relational energy, which is an important factor in a quality leadership-life fit. When you reflect on the previous sets of questions, consider your next littlest thing in terms of your circle/s of personal/professional support, your listening, and your niceness. Small shifts in each of these can fuel your relational energy, which is vital to a quality leadership-life fit!

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