Leading with an Open Mind

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Note: This article is an excerpt from the “Stocking Your Leadership Super-Powers” book. Enter your info in the sidebar and I’ll send you the e-book free of charge.

Realizing the value in all things will allow you to live a more respectful life as a leader.

To realize the value in all things, you’ve got to keep an open mind. When you have an open mind, you free yourself from prejudices, stereotypes, and discounting of people, places and things.

Your curiosity might lead you to want to know more, but keeping an open mind allows you to get an even clearer sense of reality. If you’re curious without an open mind, you’re hosed.

Close minded people show little consideration for other people, places, and things. Close minded people look to confirm prejudices and stereotypes rather than find out the truth.

If you keep an open mind, honor the value of everything, and believe that everything is worth learning about without prejudgment, you will show people that you care and are willing to consider their side of the story.

The Damage of a Sealed Mind

When someone tells you something, at any level of authority or status in society, it’s important not to accept the claim as fact until you’ve investigated it thoroughly. A high level of curiosity means that you don’t accept claims outright until you’ve had the opportunity to investigate.

I remember in middle school that people always used to tell me how strict and uncaring one of the teachers was. She was a real witch according to all of my friends. “She gives out at least 20 detentions a day for stupid things like glancing up at the clock.”

Surely she wasn’t that bad. I had never encountered her before, so how could I know? I was always curious to meet her and figure out if the horror stories were true. I kept an open mind.

I finally got the chance to meet her at the end of my eighth grade year. The kids that didn’t go on a field trip had her as a substitute. Sure enough, she was just as mean and witchy as anyone could have ever predicted. Someone dropped their pencil on the floor and she gave them a warning that she’d give them a detention if it happened again.

When the bell rang, 5 people had detentions: one student didn’t raise her hand to speak, one accidentally dropped his pencil twice, one got out an eraser while the teacher was talking, one talked back when she warned him about putting his head down on his desk, and one to a student who told her that she sucked after she gave out 4 detentions.

On the other hand, they told me the same horror story about a teacher in high school. Using my past experience as a guide, I prejudged my high school teacher and thought she was going to be just as bad. In reality, she was nice, respectful, and was genuinely interested in teaching. The fact is you just don’t know until you know, so it’s important to keep an open mind.

Super Mind Opening Activity:

What kind of prejudices or stereotypes might you hold without realizing it?

What haven’t you been open to in the past that might be helpful if you were open minded about it today?

Answer the following questions about open mindedness:

Question #1: How can I be more open minded in my relationships?

Question #2: How can I be more open minded in my career?

Question #3: How can I be more open minded in my finances?

Question #4: How can I be more open minded in my health?

Question #5: How can I be more open minded in my education?

Question #6: How can I be more open minded in my spirituality?

Managing Your Leadership Energy

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Note: This article is an excerpt from the “Stocking Your Leadership Super-Powers” book. Enter your info in the sidebar and I’ll send you the e-book free of charge.

You can have all of the ambition in the world, but if you don’t learn how to harness it, you’re hosed.

Energy management allows you to set the pace at which you accomplish things. Energy management shows people that you expend appropriate amounts of energy on appropriate tasks. Energy management allows you to prove to yourself you can accomplish your goals.

Energy management is prioritizing the most important tasks, and focusing the most energy into those tasks. Subsequently, you reserve smaller amounts of energy for less important tasks.

Energy management is different from time management because you have to manage your energy based on priority as opposed to based on the time you have allotted for something.

For example, you might allot 5 hours of your time to looking over your personal budget. Chances are you’ll stretch your energy to fit that allotted amount of time. But if you say, “I’ve got to get this personal budget stuff done accurately in less than 2 hours so that I have time left over to eat, do the dishes, walk the dog, and get a shower,” then you’re concentrating the bulk of your energy into a smaller time frame to ensure that you have time to spend smaller amounts of energy to get other tasks done.

This also works the opposite way.

You don’t want to pack in and concentrate your energy on things that aren’t as important.

Say you need to get a project done for school and you’ve got 4 hours to do it. You don’t want to spend all of your energy worrying about where you’re going to eat for dinner, what you’re planning on wearing the next day. You’ve got to harness that energy and use as much of your willpower as possible to complete that project in less than 4 hours. It’s not budgeting out your time. It’s increasing the energy you use in that amount of time.

Leaders of energy management focus on their main priorities with high amounts of focused energy. Leaders are able to get the most out of the time they use.

In return, people begin to associate the leader with high energy, and they can trust the leader to be energized.

For instance, I used to know two girls who wrote their final papers in British Literature. One girl wrote her paper over 2 weeks in short, 1 to 2 hour bursts every other day. She wrote an “A” paper. She never felt stressed about the assignment, and the night before it was due she went out to a movie and a dinner with some friends. She prioritized her energy so she didn’t have to get “stressed” out.

Another girl didn’t start writing her paper until the day before in one 4 hour burst. She ended up rushing through it and got a “C” on it. She wanted to go out with friends, but couldn’t. She didn’t prioritize her energy and ended up getting stuck and stressed.

Super Energy Management Building Activity:

As a leader, you want to avoid negative urgency at all cost. When you’re afraid of a deadline, you lock up and freeze. When you get pushed to do something at the last minute, the leadership principles get thrown out the window and you throw something at the wall and hope it sticks.

Many times it doesn’t, even though you might feel you’ve accomplished something great.

As a leader, you want to use positive energy management. You want the sense of urgency to get something done because it’s important, as opposed to it’s threatening you.

A great way to plan out the use of your energy is to first determine those things that are most important to you. Look back at your purpose, vision, ambition, and determine what the most important things are in your life, relationships, career, finances, education, health, and spirituality.

Some people ask “How do I know what my greatest priority is?” and the answer to that question is tricky because it depends on the individual’s purpose, vision, and ambitions.

Ask yourself the following questions of all your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly actions to figure out what your priorities are:

  1. How clear is my vision of the future? How critical is the task to my vision?
  2. What will the impact of completing the task be? How will the task help me achieve my vision? What’s the return on investment?
  3. What will happen if I procrastinate and not complete the task?

Some things may seem urgent to you, when in fact they aren’t and your time would be best spent elsewhere. And vice-versa.

Use your powers of foresight to keep a journal that has plans for your day, week, month, and year. Set aside blocks of time to accomplish your most important tasks for the day, week, month, and year.

Leadership Vision Podcast

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So, before we move on into talking about “Leadership Purpose,” I thought I’d create a quick podcast for you to demonstrate how to use leadership vision for your success.

In this podcast I run down for you how my friend Geoff and I used hindsight, insight, and foresight to create a student government on our college campus.

To download, right click the link below and click “Save Target As” to save it to your desktop.

Leadership Vision Podcast

Talk soon,

Jered

A Leader’s Vision

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Now we’re getting into some pretty serious stuff.

This video reveals how you can leverage the power of leadership vision to increase your capacity for leadership influence.

Oh, and there’s a “surprise” announcement at the end of the video that you won’t want to miss.

I made this video as a “thank you” to all of the loyal members of the Mass Influence community. Our little “club” has grown over the past month or so, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to see so many people getting so much out of the blog.

Enjoy the video, e-mail me and let me know what you think of the video, and please sign up for the e-mail newsletter and receive your free “The Secret to Mass Influence” report if you haven’t already. :)

Talk soon,

Jered

Focusing on Vision and Details

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“Jered… What’s more important… Focusing on the big picture or worrying about the little details?”

One debate that constantly circles the leadership world is whether leaders should spend their time focusing on the big picture or worrying about the little details.

On one side of the debate, there are leadership experts that say you should almost always focus on thinking about the big picture, and all the little details will fall into place.

Other leadership experts say that you must concentrate on all of the little details, and the more attention to detail you make at the lowest level, the better the quality of the big picture will be.

After reading into some of this “expert” talk, I’ve come to realize that both sides are on to something.

In my analysis, an effective leader first determines what they want the big picture to look like, and then focuses on influencing the little details to create the ideal big picture.

For example, I recently read an article discussing the secrets to Leonardo da Vinci’s success as a painter.

Researchers used a special x-ray machine that allowed them to examine various paintings by da Vinci.

The researchers discovered that:

  • Leonardo da Vinci used brush strokes that were thinner than human hair to create the shadowy dream-like effect of the famous Mona Lisa.
  • There may be up to 30 layers of paint to create the desired effect in many of da Vinci’s paintings.
  • Leonardo da Vinci used different types of metals and metal compounds in his paint mixes to create different effects.

Beyond the fact that da Vinci was a highly disciplined and skilled painter, one of the secrets to his success was that he was able to create an artistic vision in his head, and then carefully place all of the details to create the best work of art that he could.

First, da Vinci created the big picture in his mind. Then, he focused on making the little details the best they could be to create the big picture he envisioned.

Ultimately, the quality of the big picture relies on the supporting details, and the effectiveness of the supporting details relies on their usefulness to the big picture.

Big Picture and Supporting Details Diagram

In other words, a leader should envision the ideal big picture and the little details that will make the big picture, and then the leader should focus on completing the little details to create the ideal big picture.

So perhaps the debate isn’t so much about wither the big picture is more important than the little details, or vice versa.

Perhaps the answer is that to be an effective leader, one has to learn how to hold a solid vision of the ideal future and concentrate on implementing the details to make that vision a reality.

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