From Performance to Leadership to Transformation

When your beliefs and mindsets are not productively aligned with whatever outcomes you have set for yourself, the external world occurs to you as a series of potentially disempowering hurdles and rejections. Uncertainty, resignation, and depression start taking over.

I developed “The Owning Tomorrow Performance Model” to illustrate the importance of maintaining productive mindsets when realizing the goals you set for yourself. That’s when amazing things start happening. External parties who might have once been indifferent to your efforts become allies who help you make better decisions and provide you with a source of energy and inspiration.

That’s also when six key leadership skills come into play: Planning, Productivity, Persuasion, Perseverance, Perceptivity and (Re-)Programming. There are two additional elements that don’t fit the model so snugly – your or your organization’s Purpose, and the most important element of all, People.

The videos above provide a more in-depth explanation of these two frameworks. As neat and tidy as these models might be, I found that developing a similar “guidebook” for personal transformation – which in my world transcends both performance and leadership – was far more difficult. It’s easy to explain the concepts but virtually impossible to impart what an individual’s journey will look like because everyone forges their unique path.

For me, real and lasting personal transformation is only possible if you are willing to commit to a never-ending journey towards wisdom. And the portal to wisdom is empathy, both with yourself and with others. Empathy is not the same as sympathy or pity. Rather, it is the ability to understand what people are feeling and thinking with as little judgment as possible.

Empathy is like X-ray vision – you can see through people and situations to the truth of what’s really going on. Truth is the basis of wisdom. And with wisdom comes the ability to navigate the most difficult situations, the freedom to discover and innovate, and the courage to get things done.