The Leading Life Podcast.

Leadership isn't proving you can read the room. It's being secure enough in who you are that the room doesn't change you. Adapt your approach. Adjust your communication. Read your audience. But don't camouflage your character.

Most leaders think leadership is about being the strongest person in the room. Having the answer. Owning the strategy. Making the call. Controlling the outcome. But some of the greatest leaders in the world do something very different. They build bridges.

Sometimes the difference between somebody giving up and somebody becoming extraordinary is a person who refuses to underestimate themselves.  So this is what I want you to reflect on today...that dream inside your head that goal that you've been putting off that body that you want to have. that song you want the world to hear that painting you want the world to see that vice president position you...

Hi, it's Andy, and welcome to another Mid-Week Mastery! Let me ask you something: How long are you going to wait for somebody to recognize your potential before you finally do something about it?

We are going to think about your career trajectory and what's really important for you! What do you want your work to make possible? Who is better off because you did the work? Who is better off because I did this work? Let's answer these questions today!

I’m sure almost all of you have seen the movie Forrest Gump, but if you haven’t the main character recites an expression his Mother taught him, “My mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”  So I wanted to dig into that question and ask if we should believe that's really true. Is life something more that you control and get what you want or is it a...

Alain de Botton has written about the idea that a meaningful life cannot simply be prescribed to us by somebody else. We have to discover it ourselves. And sometimes that takes a long time. You may spend years pursuing something because you were taught that achieving it would make your life matter.

I understand how life can make progress genuinely difficult. People have responsibilities and obstacles I can’t see. I’m talking about the moments when we do have a choice and we quietly choose what’s familiar. So here’s the question I want to put to you today: Where are you saying you want to be excellent, while continuing to practice being average?

Today, I want to pull 6 lessons from The Power of Us and use them to ask a bigger question: Are we still capable of working together? I believe we are. But it may require remembering something we've forgotten. And I think the problem isn’t that we disagree too much. The problem is that we’ve forgotten how to belong to something bigger than our disagreement. Let's learn how to expand "...

Who or what from your past are you still allowing to have too much authority over your future? Acknowledge what happened. Tell the truth about it. Learn from it. But don’t give it the steering wheel. (Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/music/tracks/christopher-galovan/essentia License code: DCSI3VQV5F7VYPTN)

Think about one person on your team you're frustrated with right now. Before you make a permanent judgment about them, ask yourself three questions: Have I coached them clearly? Have I given them enough repetitions? Have I given them a real opportunity to improve?” If the answer to any of those is no, you may not know their potential yet. Let's talk about how to uncover the greatness in your team!

How do the facets created by pain become something useful instead of something that keeps cutting you? That's what we are going to jump onto and how to turn around pain into something useful.

"Not yet” has a nasty habit of quietly becoming “never.” And one day, you may be the older version of yourself looking backward, wishing the person you are today had simply gone for it. So here's your Mid-Week Mastery: Don't ask yourself: “Am I ready?” Ask: “What's one move I can make today?” (music with kind permission by Terra Symphonia "A Beautiful Mind")

Today I want to save you from organizational whiplash! This isn't a theory I pulled out of a leadership book. This was my actual playbook of 7 steps that kept my team's grounded and focused when the people around us moved the goal post. Your daily playbook should be simple enough that you can actually remember it when the day gets messy. Leadership has become unnecessarily complicated. Let...

This is about finally ending the war you’ve been fighting with yourself. Self-improvement driven by self-contempt is fundamentally broken. Because if you don’t learn to accept yourself now…success won’t save you later. Let's fix this with 5 easy actionable steps!

Here’s one of the biggest mistakes leaders make with feedback: They wait. Something happens Monday. They notice it again Wednesday. By Friday, they’re frustrated. And three weeks later, they schedule a meeting to discuss a problem that probably could have been corrected in sixty seconds.

If we have been entrusted with leadership, then it is our responsibility to protect both our employees and the business. And sometimes protecting the business means having the courage to question the way the business has always operated. So if you glean anything from this episode, I want us as leaders to stop and examine our own ownership. Because you’re never going to rewrite the rules, change wh...

Fewer people seem willing to do the one thing that makes human connection possible: Listen. And maybe underneath all of it is something even more uncomfortable. Maybe self-interest and self-importance have started taking up so much room that there isn’t enough room left for another person. Let's learn how to stop this!

Live up to your standard , regardless of what the scoreboard says. Do so much good you don’t even remember doing it. Help somebody and forget about it. Pick up the check and forget about it. Make the introduction. Do the right thing when nobody knows you did it.

Communication isn't measured by how impressive you sounded. It's measured by what happened after you stopped talking. On today's episode of The Leading Life Podcast, I want to show you how great leaders turn communication into action. How they get communication out of the conference room, out of the PowerPoint deck, out of the corporate jargon and turn it into movement. Because leaders...

Everything can matter without everything needing your attention at the same time. Constantly carrying something in your head is not the same thing as actually doing something about it. And maybe responsibility isn't walking around mentally carrying your entire life. Maybe responsibility is knowing: What deserves me right now? Let's talk about that today.

Today I want to talk about a concept from Derek Sivers... You don't have to choose your entire life today. You only have to choose what gets your focus right now.

The hardest part of leadership usually really isn’t the work. It’s carrying competing human and organizational pressures at the same time. Today I want to get real about five real leadership struggles that are happening around us all and how to fix them. I know what your going through. So here's how the best leaders learn to handle it. And I want you to be the leader your people deserve.

Today I want to talk about becoming lighter. Not physically lighter. Emotionally lighter. Less reactive. Less defensive. Less controlled by the past. Less consumed with things we cannot change. And to help us explore that, I want to introduce you to the work of an author named Yung Pueblo.

We often ask other people to give us something we’re unwilling to give them first. We want people to tell us what they’re really thinking. But meanwhile, we’re carefully managing what they get to see from us. Let's learn from Neil Strauss....