An Ideal Time to Sharpen Your Leadership Mindset

If you find yourself as a leader with any manner of found time, at least a reduced commute time, you're not alone. You're also in a prime position to sharpen your leadership mindset.

A leadership mindset is how we think about our work as leaders. This includes how we think about being optimally proactive, responsive, adaptive, honest, trustworthy, supportive, engaging, data-driven, detail focused, and big picture inspired. How we perform in any of these leadership dimensions emanates from how we think about them - our leadership mindset.

This is an ideal time to generate, update, and work on your leadership mindset learning questions. These are classically "How can I…?" and "What would it look like to…?" as well as other question forms. We work on what feels like our most important and actionable questions. Working on our questions means at least four kinds of action: visualizing, asking, searching, and trying (VAST.)

For some questions, we can visualize different approaches to common leadership situations we are experiencing or anticipate experiencing again. Some questions benefit from asking others for their insights. These could be peers, friends, mentors, and coaches we have direct or indirect access to. Searching is online exploration into the endless ocean of reading, watching, and listening options. Trying is doing micro-experiments in the areas of our questions. If you're homebound with family, some of these could be possible, given that good parenting and partnering have large overlaps with leadership mindsets.

We can turn whatever time we have into gold through our leadership mindset learning questions. And it's a good habit for whatever the future brings.