

With Character, On Your Way To Leadership!
For instance, negative thoughts affect our daily lives more than we think and can send us down a spiral of despair, depression, insecurity, anxiety and self-sabotage.
Needless to say, most people want to improve themselves, to evolve, to get ahead in their work life but have a tendency to welcome negative thoughts or ignore how to shut them down.
Unfortunately, they end up hindering their accomplishments and career advancements.
That is why it is necessary to control the damage caused by our mind, to discipline our thoughts and emotions, to build up a robust positive attitude and to find peace of mind.
Thoughts automatically appear in our mind. They come from past experiences and from the fact that we believe what people have previously said about us. They can be brought up by a word, an image or a memory and employ torture words that decrease our self-esteem, worsens situations, such as “should”, “must” and “have to”.
Because they are spontaneous, we think that they are true. In the long run, thoughts sometimes become rigid beliefs, absolute truths.
Therefore, it becomes an imperative to gain control over them. Disciplining your mind, controlling your thoughts and generating emotions regardless of your environment, regardless the level of attack help you become more mature, make healthier decisions, become more creative, escape, heal bad memories.
Positive attitudes can become difficult to maintain in challenging situations in the workplace. But once acquired, it is a habit that can help you overcome bad situations.
Indeed, positivity ensures progress, diffuses situations, alleviates stress, reduces fear, increases endurance, increase self-esteem, attracts positive results and better opportunities. It requires inner work and is independent of external circumstances of the outcome.
There are many ways to bring positivity into the workplace and to your mindset.
Identify the source of your thoughts and check the memories that you store in your brain.
Be selective about the information that come into your mind.
Stay away from the news because they will negatively affect you.
Have a joke of the day and send it to people who matter to you. Watch shows, listen to podcasts, audio books that will uplift you, inspire you and motivate you.
Identify triggers, patterns in your thought process.
How do they start? What my thoughts say about me? What are the consequences of my thoughts? What do you say regularly to yourself?
At some point, you must be aware of the content of your thoughts.
Therefore, you will be able to interrupt them whenever they don’t help you, to delete the negative ones and replace them with forward-looking ones. Changing thought patterns is difficult because our brain generally resist change.
When you understand that you are not the prisoner of your thoughts, you will eventually become the one to change the atmosphere in the workplace, won’t allow the environment to drain you or define who you are and won’t let someone else control your behavior.
It helps to:
When faced with negativity, select and force your brain to redirect negative thoughts toward more pleasant alternatives.
For example, think about the opposite of the negative thought, attach constructive emotions to an outcome, visualize a positive outcome for the situation or visualize the perfect life every day before you got to bed and everyday when you wake up.
What’s going right for you?
Focus on what is going right instead of what is going wrong.
People give negative emotions more importance than the positive ones, which conditions our brain to bring up negative thoughts automatically and repetitively for a long period of time.
You have the power to choose and train your brain to give positive emotions more attention.
Improving your thoughts reside in accepting the present moment and understanding that it is inevitable.
How to focus and stay in the present? Understand that panicking and worrying is useless, that the past is unchangeable and the future uncontrollable, that every experiences have made you who you are today.
Give your thoughts a name and call them out whenever they send us down a negative spiral and challenge every single thought by speaking them out loud.
It is easy to complain and whine, so be grateful that you have a job and show appreciation in your contribution.
Learn to discern toxic coworkers.
Don’t tolerate or focus on negative people.
Get up early and work out before going to work to seize the day and release the endorphins throughout the day.
Create a positive work zone by insulating yourself with headphones for example.
Also, avoid gossip at all cost, put up motivational objects around your desk.
Take regular breaks from your cubicle to stop thinking, to meditate and go to the bathroom.
It becomes essential to create a better work life balance to protect your home life.
So, leave the drama at work, be strict with your hours, avoid staying late and taking work at home!
Meaning fake it until you make it…
Sooner or later, you will have to separate yourself from the negativity and surround yourself with open-minded people with a positive mindset.
One way would be to stick positive quotes on your wall of your cubicle or on your desk.
Take a class after work or find a hobby so you have something to look forward to at the end of the day.
Finally, if this environment isn’t working out the way you want to, you can always discreetly find a more comfortable and productive workplace.
There is a need for Positive Leadership.
Positive leaders have a moral compass, are purpose driven, communicate effectively, exhibit integrity and provide emotional safety.
Because they inject good energy into the team, they instill an atmosphere of trust and openness they rip enthusiasm, motivation, transparency from their team.
Positive leaders are able to impact their company culture, improve results, increase performance and enhance job satisfaction.
Hope that I’ve helped you get it together on your way to leadership!
Don’t forget to like, share and leave a comment below.
Some people usually don’t follow through because they self-sabotage, misuse their time and energy by procrastinating, setting impossible goals, managing their time poorly, yielding to temptations and distractions.
Other people have internal roadblocks that impede them from taking action because they are either lazy, lack discipline and willpower, fear judgement, rejection or failure, try to be perfect, are too insecure, lack self-awareness, are unconsciously protecting themselves.
Indeed, people who have interval roadblocks and who fail to follow through:
Following through requires four elements: focus, self-discipline, action and persistence.
With focus, you are able to keep “your head in the game and your eyes on the prize”. You concentrate all your effort and energy onto achieving your goals.
With self-discipline, you are bale to regulate your thoughts, control your focus and to work regardless of your emotions and your circumstances.
With action, you are able to get closer to the finish line, execute the plan and translate your intentions.
With persistence, you will develop resilience and be able to push through until you have achieved success.
To start following through, you have to take a good look at yourself, build a better relationship with yourself, develop the right mindset and equip yourself with the best tools to succeed.
To develop the mindset, you must believe that:
Sometimes, you will have to make the decision to follow through or to give up.
To make the best decisions, you have to create a set of rules that will serve as a guideline, a code of conduct, a task roadmap and a mission statement.
To stay motivated enough to follow through, you must identify the things that motivate you.
Some people want to avoid negative consequences at all cost and will do everything in their power to succeed.
Others are pushed forward by the need and desire to improve their lives.
To stop procrastinating and to follow through:
There are many reasons why people stay stagnant in life. In Finish What You Start: The Art of Following Through, Taking Action, Executing, & Self-Discipline, Peter Hollins breaks down the psychology and the art of following through on your goals.
Finish What You Start: The Art of Following Through, Taking Action, Executing, & Self-Discipline is recommended for people who struggle to get things done and is full of powerful tools to help you take action and achieve your goals.
Peter Hollins jumpstarts you towards your dreams, shares several tactics to execute whatever you set your mind to and makes some very good points when it comes to the mistakes people make when pursuing their goals.
Following through boils down to extracting lessons from past failures and knowing yourself well enough to create the best environments, rules and roadmaps for you to succeed.
Focus guides your thoughts in figuring out how to follow through and directs your actions toward achieving your vision.
Leisure is an important part of life, but if it’s excessive and takes the place of reasonable productivity, then it becomes a vice.
Follow-through is 100% mental. It takes a cognitive effort to follow through on something, especially when you hit discouraging obstacles.
Stop judging yourself and others for being different. We are all different.
Our productivity is very fragile and requires particular care to flourish. Treat yourself to what helps you thrive if you want to follow through.
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The leader has to select the team to ultimately create the best results for the organization, in light of the company’s culture and of the personality, motivation, commitment, values, performance, integrity level of his or her potential team members, with respect to his or her leadership style.
When the team is built, the leader has to look out for red flags that can destroy the synergy of his or her team and easily create a lasting toxic climate.
Wondering how to detect these red flags, avoid toxicity on your team, how to extract the best results from your team members and to become the best team member you can?
A few years ago, I worked on a year-long project, under a boss who used demotions and other measures to punish some of his employees when mistakes occurred. For example, he would quickly and sadistically withdraw work responsibilities from someone he did not favor to give to someone else.
As a result, the team was a unsalvable shipwreck: every man for himself, searching for a flotation device, fighting to get on land. My former boss manipulative behavior created a toxic climate where people were continually in flight or fight mode, were mistrustful towards one another, would turn on each other, retain information and sabotage every other person efforts to succeed, were obliged to seek his “affections” and to continually prove their loyalty to him in order to feel safe in their position, were more focused on office politics than on their work, were always on the lookout of a scapegoat, were afraid of speaking up and being transparent.
The lack of trust, commitment, performance was noticeable on a daily basis. By trust, I mean the ability of the team members to admit their mistakes, acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses, stay open, transparent with one another without any repercussion on themselves or their career.
In Speaking Truth to Power, James O’Toole states that “In essence, trust is hard to earn, easy to lose, and, once lost, nearly impossible to regain”.
Teams must be able to understand each other, to interpret their respective behavior and to be candid with one another.
To enable transparency, leaders have to:
In teams, conflicts do exist, are raw and real, are to be expected, and shouldn’t be avoided. In addition, they occur because we were born into different generations, backgrounds, with different personalities, values and morals.
Furthermore, conflict is always seen in a negative light or as a destructive process.
However, conflicts can be healthy and productive too. And even though conflicts are uncomfortable and make you feel under attack, they are necessary for personal and organizational progress, are used to generate the best decisions for the organization and to make team meetings mire engaging. In order to establish a conflict culture, it is imperative that leaders:
Commitment is the willingness to achieve common goals as a team, the ability of team members to align themselves with the organization purpose, values and strategies even in disagreement with the decision taken.
To enhance team commitment, leaders must:
Team members must keep each other accountable for their behavior, their mistakes and lack of performance. If no one is held accountable, team members gradually lose respect for each other and moral decreases. Leaders must:
Develop your communication skills.
Make sure that you are understood and are open to clarifying misunderstandings.
Monitor your non verbal communication. Keep your body language positive and opened.
Look at the person you’re exchanging with.
If a problem occurs between you and someone else, fix it before the problem festers by talking to that person as soon as possible. This shows that you are willing to work through issues, that you are a problem solver instead of being inappropriate and ineffective.
Give sincere and appropriate positive feedback to your team members.
Develop your listening skills.
To demonstrate your interest in learning new skills, to better understand the other person, you have to:
Failing to follow through on your team assignments is synonym to letting your team down. To stay accountable for your part:
In the team, you have to cooperate with your coworkers and work well with your supervisor. To do so:
Hope that I’ve helped you get it together on your way to leadership!
Don’t forget to like, share and leave a comment below.
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We all have a dream of outperforming ourselves at work and staying consistent and moving up in our career.
However, we have difficulties bringing our wishes and expectations to life.
Furthermore, in the fast and highly competitive corporate world, some of our attitudes, assumptions, values, flaws often render us completely ineffective, come in the way of us being the best version of ourselves, from learning new skills, from developing our talents.
The reality is that, despite our best intentions, we are often our worst enemies, are unable to improve our career, to achieve our definition of success, to satisfy our higher purpose.
We thereby harbor dissatisfaction, self-defeating thoughts and resort to self-sabotaging actions.
Most of the time, self-sabotage takes roots from collaborators sometimes abusing substance, striving too hard for materialistic success.
Self-sabotage also stems from an inability to control extreme negative thoughts and emotions such as anger, guilt or resentment, and an inability to control other people. Indeed, in the workplace, low performing employees and leaders tend to either:
Becoming a better performer and contributor in the workplace doesn’t end at solely executing your duties and providing acceptable results, it also means working on your character and core values. To enable effective performance in the workplace, it is necessary to:
If you happen to abuse substance or are in emotional distress in the workplace, don’t be ashamed, you are not alone. Please talk about it to your closest family and friends, or find the nearest Workplace Help Center.
Hope that I’ve helped you get it together on your way to leadership!
Don’t forget to like, share and leave a comment below.
Subscribe to Journey To Leadership
Thoughts, positive or negative, influence our character, our behavior, our vision, how we deal with setbacks, how we build and maintain relationships, has direct impact on our body and health, emotions.
For instance, negative thoughts affect our daily lives more than we think and can send us down a spiral of despair, depression, insecurity, anxiety and self-sabotage.
Needless to say, most people want to improve themselves, to evolve, to get ahead in their work life but have a tendency to welcome negative thoughts or ignore how to shut them down.
Unfortunately, they end up hindering their accomplishments and career advancements.
That is why it is necessary to control the damage caused by our mind, to discipline our thoughts and emotions, to build up a robust positive attitude and to find peace of mind.
Wondering how to process and control negative thoughts, emotions and how to use a positive mindset to get ahead at work?
Thoughts automatically appear in our mind. They come from past experiences and from the fact that we believe what people have previously said about us. They can be brought up by a word, an image or a memory and employ torture words that decrease our self-esteem, worsens situations, such as “should”, “must” and “have to”.
Because they are spontaneous, we think that they are true. In the long run, thoughts sometimes become rigid beliefs, absolute truths.
Therefore, it becomes an imperative to gain control over them. Disciplining your mind, controlling your thoughts and generating emotions regardless of your environment, regardless the level of attack help you become more mature, make healthier decisions, become more creative, escape, heal bad memories.
Positive attitudes can become difficult to maintain in challenging situations in the workplace. But once acquired, it is a habit that can help you overcome bad situations.
Indeed, positivity ensures progress, diffuses situations, alleviates stress, reduces fear, increases endurance, increase self-esteem, attracts positive results and better opportunities. It requires inner work and is independent of external circumstances of the outcome.
There are many ways to bring positivity into the workplace and into your mind:
There is a need for Positive Leadership.
Positive leaders have a moral compass, are purpose driven, communicate effectively, exhibit integrity and provide emotional safety. Because they inject good energy into the team, they instill an atmosphere of trust and openness they rip enthusiasm, motivation, transparency from their team.
Positive leaders are able to impact their company culture, improve results, increase performance and enhance job satisfaction.
Hope that I’ve helped you get it together on your way to leadership!
Don’t forget to like, share and leave a comment below.
Subscribe to Journey To Leadership
Sometimes, our job can become slow and cumbersome.
Other times, we can either:
Boredom in the workplace happens to millennials starting out on their career as much as accomplished men or women at the top of their career.
Great leaders have found their career of choice and are most likely thriving in their field.
However, when leaders are bored, they lose energy, become discouraged and frustrated with everyone and everything.
There are positives aspects of being bored at work. Boredom:
There is always room for self improvement. To get your motivation back:
Analyze your results, objectives, processes and team performance.
Then, think of new success strategy, find out what can be optimized and how you can take more risks.
For example, remove the flow of unnecessary meetings from your schedule.
Boredom can just be a phase.
To get over that phase, simply go on a vacation.
When you will get back to work, your energy and your focus will automatically be renewed
Leaders are, more often than not, excited for a new idea, by the idea of novelty and for the opportunity to learn. When bored, it is imperative for you to:
Passion is waking up energized and motivated to do the things you love. It means being able to persist through adversity.
If there are no more logical reasons for keeping your leadership position, ask yourself the 25 questions to find your passion back, to remind yourself what this job meant to you and want it did for you when you started.
Being present is a state of mind where you are neither focus on the future or the past, where your emotions don’t dictate your actions.
When you are grateful, you realize that each day you are closer to your goals.
That doesn’t mean that you are complacent or satisfied with the way things are.
Learning to be grateful means that you value what you have and are willing to go beyond your comfort zone.
When you are bored and have too much time on your hands, it is best to get organized, clean up your desk, clear up the junk in your emails, and freshen up your environment.
There is nothing more gratifying than helping someone else.
Go around your team members and study whether or not they feel the same way, need a challenged, need help, attention or encouragement.
A boring job is much better than a toxic or dramatic workplace.
So, keep your day job, take time out to define your passions, talents and skills.
Then, employ them in another environment after work until you can turn your hobby into your new day job.
To get rid of being bored, create more work for yourself.
You can use your initiative as leverage during pay raise negotiations.
Sometimes, when you lose motivation, you have to look for new ways to wake up in the morning and to go to work.
Fun is not only for kids.
But, instead of lashing out and taking out your frustrations on your team, celebrate your success, turn your day and activities into fun.
Boredom has a direct impact on your creativity.
If you are bored, let your imagination flow, look for different ways to express yourself and to implement your ideas.
Leaders and followers get bored from time to time.
Because we are all human and have all experienced boredom, you will have a better understanding on why some team members are underperforming.
That doesn’t mean that you have to cut your team some slack or breathe down their necks.
It means that you know how to re-energize them, to motivate them and optimize their performance.
Hope that I’ve helped you get it together on your way to leadership!
Don’t forget to like, share and leave a comment below.
Subscribe to Journey To Leadership
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