5 ways to show up as a leader in your life

You are the leader of your life, or you can be. You may not feel like a leader in this moment, but the one person who is in charge of your life and how you live it is you. It’s an important point to remember because so often a person can feel powerless due to circumstances that are out of their control, yet the one thing you have control over is how you respond to those circumstances. The response may not always be ideal, but it is within your power.

In my work in my own life and with other men, one of the skills I focus on is cultivating the skill of leadership. Leadership is an essential skill that helps you transform your life. All of us are capable of becoming leaders. We may not end up being a leader at the job we work at, or in the organization you’re involved in, but leadership isn’t always about being a leader in every activity you’re involved in. Being a leader is about taking charge of the direction of your life and the choices you make around how you live your life, solve your problems, and create the adventure you’ve always wanted to live. 

So how do you show up as a leader in your life?

Discover your mission - Your mission is unique to you. It is the sense of purpose and direction that you bring to your life. When you don’t know what your mission is, it can cause you to feel like you are lost. If you want to become a leader in your life, you have to discover your mission. It needs to be a mission that goes beyond the relationship you are in, or the job you work at. Your mission is what you offer to the world.

How do you discover your mission? What matters most to you? What brings you to life? In my case, it’s my spiritual work and the work I do with men. Those two activities bring me a sense of joy and purpose and comprise my mission. You may not immediately figure that out, so ask yourself this: How do I want to show up in the world? And then live the answer.

Choose your habits - Your habits define your life. If you are indulging in bad habits, those habits will create experiences that while pleasurable in the moment, will ultimately drain you of your life. If you choose good habits, you enhance your life but it also requires that you are willing to stick with those habits. For example stretching and exercising in the morning will help you stay flexible and healthy and instill a good habit.

The habits we choose are chosen because of what they provide us in the short term, but we also have to look at the long term impact of those choices. Healthy habits lead to better quality of life and happiness while unhealthy habits are usually coping mechanisms that are put in place to avoid dealing with the deeper unhappiness that you may likely be feeling. If you want to be a better leader, you need to lead yourself and one of the ways you do that is through the choices you make each day.

Honor and love yourself - We are taught to love other people, but the most important person you can give your love to is yourself. It’s equally as important to honor and respect yourself. Many people don’t honor and love themselves. Instead they loathe themselves and place all their hope for love and respect in the hands of other people.

Learning to love yourself involves not just saying a mantra that you love yourself, but adopting actual practices of self love and care. Some of those practices can be found in taking on good habits, but some of them can be found through deliberately choosing yourself. When you choose to honor your inner truths, your needs and wants as well as your mission and purpose you are choosing to love and honor yourself.

Participate in your community - So many men isolate themselves, focusing on their work and their relationship with their partner. Men need to have relationships outside of work that are intimate but don’t involve romance or creating a life with someone. Men need to participate in their communities, in meaningful ways that reflect the mission and purpose they follow.

Participation in your community means doing something to contribute to your community. For example, I staff at men’s weekend retreats as a way of participating and contributing to my community. You could teach a class in your community or do some other activity that allows you to help the community you are part of. When you lead yourself, you make the choice to show up for your community.

Take charge of the direction of your life - You can live a life where other people are in charge or you can live a life where you take charge of yourself and your actions. The former type of life typically sees a man answering to his boss, partner and everyone else, always trying to please them, always playing the nice guy, always making choices that go against his inner truths and desires. The later type of life is an adventure of your making. You honor your inner truths by speaking up for them and taking meaningful action on them. You recognize that you need to validate yourself by learning to love and respect what really matters to you.

If you need help with taking charge of your life, I invite you to sign up for a 20 minute sacred masculinity coaching session with me. In that time we’ll discuss a challenge you’re facing in your life and I’ll help you come up with a solution that honors your sacred masculine strength and shows you how you can move forward in a meaningful way. Click the link to sign up.

How to recognize when you are burning out

January is a month where I have to slow down what I do in my life because of the demands of my day job. I provide technical support for financial software for businesses, which translates into mandatory overtime and dealing with stressed out people. By the end of my working day I’m usually emotionally and mentally tapped. What I have learned to do is slow down during January and accept that what I usually do in terms of writing and other content creation simply isn’t going to happen to the same degree as it happens the rest of the year.

It’s important to recognize when you could be headed toward burnout. When you recognize that you are starting to burnout you can take preventative measures but the most important you can take is to actually yourself to have the space to reset and recharge. So often we are told to be productive, to always be doing some activity, but sometimes what we really need to do is slow down and pace ourselves.

I call this slowing down wintering and it is the deliberate cultivation of a state of slowing down and taking care of yourself instead of trying to do all the things. What I’ve learned to do is integrate wintering into they rhythm of my life so that I know when to slow down instead of continually trying to be productive. By learning how to pace myself, I maintain a state of well being that helps me avoid burnout because I proactively slow down.

You can take the same approach in your own life. Review the cycles of your life. If there are points in the cycle of a given year where you find yourself busier in one area of your life, it can be really helpful to slow down in other areas of your life. You can also do the same activity with your day. For example, I meditate during my lunch. This helps me to slow down during my busy days and gives me time to reset and recover.

There can be a lot of pressure to be on all the time, but you don’t have to be on all time and its not actually helpful to be on all the time. When you are burning out, its because you’re having to be on all the time. Turn off and allow yourself the necessity of rest and of doing activities that nourish you. If you do this proactively you won’t burnout because you’ll be taking care of yourself in a way where you preserve your creativity, well-being and overall focus.

One of the best ways you can take care of yourself the other people in your life is making the choice to deliberately create habits of rest and rejuvenation. When you take a nap or go for a walk or do some other activity that isn’t “productive” keep in mind that it actually feeds your productivity, because it gives you the break you need to have in order to recharge yourself.

Be better: The mantra we can all live by

One of the themes I’ve been exploring in my life is the theme of being better. By being better, I don’t mean being better than someone else, or comparing myself to other people. I’ve done all that before and its not helpful behavior because I find that it actually holds a person back from their greatness.

When I talk about being better, what I really mean is making the choice to improve yourself each day. This choice to improve yourself doesn’t mean you have to make grandiose changes. Rather it means that you pick an area of your life and you make gradual changes that help you get better. Here’s a few examples that may inspire you in your own efforts to be better.

Example 1: I started exercising each morning for 10-15 minutes. I do this each each day, focusing first on stretching and then doing a series of core exercises to help improve my core strength. I have been slowly increasing the time I exercise, and I’ve also used this morning activity to inspire exercise in the evening.

You can take a similar approach with your own physical health. Carve out a specific time of day and start doing stretches and exercises during that time. Initially you might start with 5 minutes and then work on getting to 6 minutes, gradually increasing your time spent exercising.

Example 2: I started working on my posture. My Sifu has been helping me work on my posture. I’ve been using the stretches as well as his instruction and several books to help me do specific exercises each day to straighten my posture out. Each day I spend a few minutes working on these stretches and I am noticing that I am standing taller and feeling more confident as a result.

If you want to work on your posture, have someone look at it with you and then start introducing changes to how you carry yourself. My initial focus was just on standing up straighter, but now its moved over to sitting differently, walking differently, etc. You can do the same by focusing in one specific aspect you want to change and then carry it over to another area you want to improve on.

Example 3: Reading each night. Each night I spend a half hour reading. I make the choice to slow down my evening after I finish writing by taking some time to read. It feeds my mind, gives me something to contemplate and helps me continue the work I am doing. Initially I was only reading for ten minutes and I gradually moved the time up so I was making more time to read.

Each of these examples involves making a commitment to do a specific behavior but it also involves making a time commitment. The time commitment doesn’t have to be lengthy. If you spend 5 minutes doing something that helps you be better than that’s an improvement right there. What you’ll find is that the more you do something, the more easy it becomes to commit to doing it for longer periods of time, and also applying it to other areas of your life.

Being better is really about making incremental changes. The little changes we make create the opportunities for growth and improvement that we want but they make them sustainable! Sustainable change is what enables us to create momentum in our lives around the improvement we want to create for ourselves.

The role of systems in Creating Habits

If you want to create habits you need systems. Your systems supports your habits. I share why and discuss how you can make positive changes to your life as a results of the systems you put into place.

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