Superqualities are the aspects of your personality that really make you, you. Sure, your organization may employ several accountants, project managers or sales reps that all have a role quite similar to yours.

But the way you do your job – the unique qualities you bring to it – will be distinct from everyone else.

Knowing your superqualities is a vital way to distinguish yourself in the workplace and in the world. It allows you to consciously put these natural traits to use. Just as importantly, it allows you to stop trying to be something you’re not.

People sometimes assume that the extroverted, charismatic personalities in the are always the most valued. In my experience as a corporate executive, I can tell you it isn’t true. In reality, it takes an assortment of people each with distinct qualities to make a kick-ass team. If everyone is the life of the party, nothing gets done.

Credit: www.caresearch.com.au 

So, instead of trying to bring out qualities in yourself that you perceive to be leadership-worthy; notice, value and leverage the qualities that people already value in you.

Be super-cautious not to mistake common positive attributes with your superqualities. For example, all of the project managers at your company may be highly organized. That’s a great attribute, but it’s one that is expected of a project manager. Just as anyone would expect an accountant to be ‘thorough’ or an HR manager to be ‘relatable’.

Below you’ll find three exercises to help you brainstorm your superqualities. After you do this brainstorming, try to narrow your list down to three superqualities that most define you.

1. Write a list of 5 to 6 words that best describe your personality. Use words that really get to the heart of who you are. Here are just a few possibilities to get you thinking: creative, straight-shooting, decisive, intuitive, compassionate, clear-headed, rational.

2. What have other people said are your best qualities? Think back…consider what family members, friends and colleagues have said.

3. What 5 to 6 characteristics do you value most in yourself? Maybe you’re someone who is always punctual or who has superb listening skills. Maybe you value your honesty or your sense of compassion.

I would love to hear your feedback on Facebook and Twitter. If you discover your superqualities, please let me know!

Leadership, very simply, is about results. Can you get the results you say you’re going to get? Can you get the results people expect from you?

If not, then nothing else really matters.

Now, I’m not saying get results at any cost. I’m not Machiavelli. Without question, you want to be a leader of integrity and values. I’m just saying if there are no results, then it’s all for naught.

When I coach people on improving their leadership skills, I always talk about ‘knowing your results’. I see so many talented people exhausting themselves with too many ill-defined projects and commitments. The end of a quarter comes along and although they’ve worked their butts off, they’re hard pressed to explain what they’ve accomplished.

 Credit: www.thebmc.co.uk

To be a leader that really shines, you need to get uber-smart about what you’re taking on and then go above and beyond what’s expected. Soon you will be known for what you’ve achieved every quarter, every year. That’s how you build a leadership brand.

Here are 4 questions to help you start to zero in on your results:

1. Who do you serve in your organization (which is to say, who are your internal clients and external customers?)

2. What major results have you delivered in the past 12 months?

3. What results would allow you to generate the maximum value for the people you serve? (aka – what do they really, really want from you?)

4. What major results can you deliver in the next 12 months?

Leadership is an ongoing theme on my Facebook page and Twitter feed too.  I do hope you’ll follow me there and weigh in with your thoughts.

And a ‘shout out’ to moms everywhere.  I hope you had a splendid Mother’s Day celebration this past weekend.

So, the question is: who are you as a leader?

I’m a huge believer in defining your own leadership brand. I get how odd and disconcerting it may feel to see yourself as a ‘brand’, but go with me because applied correctly the concept is really powerful.

Your leadership brand is based on who you really, truly are as a person (as opposed to some ideal of ‘a great leader’). It’s comprised of three things: your superpowers (the things you do with uncanny ease and ability), your superqualities (the aspects of your personality that shine the most) and the results people (and you) have come to expect from you.

Simple, right?

Deceptively so. If I ask most people to name what they are most brilliant at (their superpowers), they are likely to hesitate or tell me about the skills they think are most exciting or marketable.

If I were to ask you what personality traits really make you…you, you might find it hard to narrow it down to just two or three that really set you apart.

I find that many people think of ‘their brand’ as the role they plan in an organization – as in, I’m the VP of Marketing or the Director of Sales.

But a leadership brand is not a title. It’s a promise. It’s a promise of how you will use your unique abilities and traits to deliver results that people can count on.

Knowing who you are as a leader is, in my view, the first essential step to becoming an extraordinary leader. It helps you zero in on exactly how to invest your energy to make the biggest impact rather than taking a scattershot approach.

It also becomes abundantly clear how to differentiate yourself within your organization. There may be many people who play a similar role, but none of them will have the exact same leadership brand.

For example, you may be an outrageously talented project manager whose superpowers are tracking minute details and foreseeing obstacles. But maybe you are also naturally comedic with the gift of the gab – and these qualities mean that your team adores you and they’re motivated to go the extra mile.

The other project managers down the hall might have mad organizational skills, but they don’t bring the same personal qualities you do, making their value proposition different from yours.

As always, thank you for reading. I hope you’ll follow me on Facebook and Twitter for my ongoing tips on leadership and thriving.

Whenever I see someone struggling to find meaning and passion, I know they are seeking to uncover their core values (even though they often don’t realize it). You can’t feel purposeful, directed and fully you without knowing them. Some people are lucky enough to just spontaneously know them early in life. Others need a bit of guidance to get there, and that’s where I come in.

Steve Jobs’ strengths and flaws have been analyzed ad naseum, so I won’t get into that here. But what I’m continually fascinated by is his ability – for better or worse – to live and lead according to his values. He had an unrelenting talent for this that I personally strive for.

There’s a grainy, undated YouTube video of Jobs discussing the core value: “…People with passion can change the world for the better.” Even though he describes it as Apple’s core value, it’s clear it’s more than that. It’s his personal core value. Apple is simply how he manifested his core value in his business life.

Here’s what I believe: If Jobs had not aligned his work to his personal core value, Apple as we know it would not exist today.

If, like many well-meaning CEOs do, he had chosen common core values like ‘innovation’ or ‘exceptional customer service’ or ‘integrity’, I wouldn’t be writing this story on my MacBook Pro or proof-reading it later on my iPad.

Jobs dug deep. He didn’t let mistakes and failures water down his view. Even when he was booted from his own company and his career seemingly veered off course, he came back with an even clearer focus on his mission…on his value.

This is why – for individuals and for companies – deciding your core values is not a exercise to be taken lightly. If you’ve been guilty of creating your core values and then shoving them into a binder somewhere never to be seen again, think of Steve Jobs. And go dig your values out of that drawer! Or better yet, go through the exercise of creating them again with this new perspective in mind.

Here’s the video of Jobs discussing Apple’s core value and how he’s bringing it to life through branding.

As for me, I love helping people discover and live their values. And thanks for reading.

People – It’s my birthday on April 25 and I want to celebrate! So, here’s my little gift to you…and only you my amazing community.  A thank you for all your support!

If you’ve been wanting to get more out of out of your life and secretly hoping to do The THRIVE GUIDE program when your budget allows…now’s your chance.

For a very limited time (the next 3 days!) you can sign up for my 52-week online coaching program, The Thrive Guide for just $99 (the regular price is $149).

This program is for you if you don’t want to just live your life, but instead you want to THRIVE. It’s for anyone who wants to feel like their life has a deep, abiding significance.

The program teaches you how to make huge life changes in a kinder, gentler way using my method of ‘tweaking’.

Go ahead! Sign up. You deserve to thrive!

Birthdays always cause me to pause and think about what I’m grateful for.  My appreciation and gratitude to you all.

I never tire of seeing people become reinvigorated by their lives when I help them tune into and articulate their core values. It’s like an inner light bulb turns on, illuminating their true essence.

But knowing your values and living your values are two different things. Living them requires breaking old habits and being comfortable with making decisions that might unsettle other people. If you’re an established accountant who’s just realized, for example, that creativity is one of your core values, you might alarm people if you start pursuing your secret passion for fashion design.  To onlookers that kind of realignment might seem rash. But it’s not really.  Your values form the foundation for your purpose. You gotta be you.

Having said this, living your values doesn’t often require dramatic upheaval in your life. It’s mostly about the more subtle aspects of how you live and breath.

Let me help you get a quick gut check on how well you’re currently living your values.

First, think of one of your core values (if you’re not sure what your core values are, please check out my new online program The Thrive Guide). Now ask yourself the following questions…and please, be brutally honest:

1. Do I exude this core value in the way I speak?

2. Do I exude this core value in the way I present myself to the world?

3. Do I exude this core value in my career choices?

4. Do I exude this core value in the way I spend my free time?

5. Is this core value evident in my leadership style?

Repeat this process for your other core values (by the way, I recommend a maximum of four).

If you discover that your core values are hidden away in the recesses of your mind instead of out there in the world, fear not. It’s a process. This cause is pretty simple: you’re probably not using your core values to filter your personal and business decisions.

Start now. Without a doubt, something will arise later today. It might be a very small decision (where to take your client to lunch or what to do this evening), or it might be something more significant. Whatever it is, filter your decision through your values. If creativity is a value, what can you do this evening that’s creative? If adventure is a value, maybe you can take your client somewhere off the beaten track.

And so it goes. Decision by decision, day by day, you start living your values. It won’t take long for you to notice that you’re feeling more purposeful and clear-headed. Then…empowered and full of life.

Thanks for reading! I do hope you’ll connect with me on Facebook and Twitter. I’d love to hear your insights and feedback.

The Financial Times defines values-based leadership as connecting organizational goals to employees’ personal values. But personally, I love how Forbes described it simply as ‘doing the right thing’, in an article by Kellogg professor, Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr. Here’s a quote:

“As I tell my students, becoming the best kind of leader isn’t about emulating a role model or a historic figure. Rather, your leadership must be rooted in who you are and what matters most to you. When you truly know yourself and what you stand for, it is much easier to know what to do in any situation. It always comes down to doing the right thing and doing the best you can.”

In this context, leadership is something far beyond thinking strategically and motivating people. It means diving deeply into your psyche and knowing yourself on a profound level.

Source:  www.allsquareinc.com

 Are you feeling disconcerted by this and yearning for the comfort of a familiar distraction? It’s ok. Don’t panic. Here’s a quick framework for what it takes to head towards values-based leadership:

1. Most fundamentally, you need to know your core values. Don’t confuse these with the values of your company. I’m talking about you. I’m talking about the qualities and traits you value most above everything else. Not just in a work context, but in your life. Get your head out of business matters, sit in park (on the grass) with your IPad or some paper, and let your mind roam free. Play with words like passion, discovery, adventure, contribution, creativity and freedom (to name just a few). DO NOT ANALYZE. Analyzing will send you down the wrong path. Let this exercise be quick and painless. Just notice which words make your heart sing. Choose 4 that make it sing the loudest. Done!
2. Make your 4 core values central to your life. Start with simple things like posting them on your fridge or making them the background image on your computer. You need to see them constantly. As the stuff of life arises, requiring personal and business decisions, use your values as a filter. Ask yourself what decision will be most aligned with them. Trust yourself and your values. They will steer you in a direction of integrity and truth.
3. Be authentic. For example, if you chose ‘adventure’ as a core value, but you’ve been living a very conventional life and making only prudent, conservative business decisions…you aren’t being a values-based leader. I’m not saying you need to be crazy and reckless. I’m saying you need to lead from a place that’s authentic to who you are. You’ll be able to make decisions and create plans that you are more excited by. You’ll lead others in a way that’s more genuine. Your peers and your team will respond to you differently. It’s far more empowering to lead from a place of clarity and strength rather than some standard ideal of what a leader should be.

If you’d like to learn more about being a values-based leader, I’m addressing this topic in my new online program The Thrive Guide.

Are you following me on Facebook and Twitter? Please do!

1. Do you sometimes feel discomfort with your life and you can’t trace the cause?
2. Do you sometimes question what you’re here on this planet to do?
3. Do you feel like you’re quietly waiting for something to happen to make the pieces of your life fit together and make sense?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any or all of these questions, the fix may be closer than you think. Sure, these can be symptoms of an existential crisis, but they can also be symptoms of something more earthly…a life out of synch with your core values.

Let’s begin here. We’re living in a society that would have us believe everyone is made deliriously happy by achieving exactly the same things: money, white picket fence, luxury car, good job, 2.5 kids, 2 week vacations in Maui and eternal beauty. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things. But if you’re focusing your life (consciously or not) on having them, it’s worth pausing to ask yourself – are these things bringing you the wholeness you expected to feel?

If not, let’s continue. That feeling of wholeness I’m referring to is what you feel when your life is aligned to the qualities or traits you personally value above all else. Notice an important distinction here. I’m talking about aligning your life to qualities and traits rather than material goals. Stay with me.

Your top core values may be something like: Passion, Freedom, Discovery and Creativity. Or maybe something like: Leadership, Connection, Contribution and Spirituality.

There are endless possibilities, but having helped countless people over the past decade and a half zero in on their core values, I can tell you, it’s usually a very quick process if you have just a bit of guidance. This is because deep down, we all know our most deeply held values. Usually we just haven’t surfaced them so we can live by them.

Source: www.literalmom.com

When you live by your values and allow them to guide every personal and career decision you make, let me tell you, magic happens. This is a game-changer. You feel strong and purposeful. You’re connected to your life’s unique meaning. You no longer struggle with who you are and what you’re meant to do.

That icky, uncomfortable sense that something is wrong with your life but you don’t know what it is, just goes away. Aligning your life with your values doesn’t mean you have to give up your material possessions or fabulous lifestyle. It just means that you’re guided by something bigger.

Intrigued? Identifying your values is a key topic in my new online coaching program, The Thrive Guide. I hope you’ll check it out. And, please follow me on Facebook and Twitter for ongoing advice and tips on thriving.

And lastly, for those of you who celebrate, I hope you had a wonderful Good Friday and Happy Easter Weekend.

Perfectionism will tell you need to do more, more and more. It will tell you that you’re not good enough, but maybe you will be if you just push yourself a little bit harder.

The reality is, ‘doing more’ doesn’t always lead to ‘achieving more’ or ‘having more’. Anyone who’s ever been burnt out will tell you this. You can be incredibly busy, running in a million directions all at the same time, and at the end of the day look back and say, ‘I expended a whole bunch of energy but I don’t really know what happened.’

Sometimes you gotta slow down before you can speed up.

And sometimes you simply need to take on less stuff.  I’m continually meeting high-achieving people who seem to believe they have limitless capacity. I ‘get it’ I used to believe it, too. They keep adding more and more stuff into their work life and home life and they can’t figure out why they are exhausted and unsatisfied.

I’ll tell you why: they are exceeding their capacity. Talented and powerful as they are, they are still human. They need downtime. They need room to breath. And yes, sometimes they need fewer things to do in a day. There’s no shame in that.

Where did anyone ever get the idea that as you move through adulthood, you can just keep piling on more and more responsibilities and somehow you’ll continually expand your capacity to handle it all?

It’s a falsehood.

I’m not saying ‘you can’t have it all’. I’m saying you can’t have it all at the same time. Life is a highway, people. Let it unfold gradually rather than trying to pile everything on simultaneously.

Perhaps the most classic example of this is the high-achiever who becomes a parent for the first time. Now operating on little to no sleep with the joy, stress and chaos that comes with having a newborn, our achiever now wants to land a promotion at work and berates herself/himself for not working out as frequently.

When major life change happens, be compassionate with yourself. As you take on more in one aspect of your life, let up on yourself in another aspect for a while. This doesn’t mean you disregard your career and your personal health if you have a child. It just means you may need to adjust your expectations of yourself.

The myth of perfectionism is that you’re giving all of yourself to everything you do. The reality of it is, you’re spinning your wheels doing too many things and no aspect of your life is experienced fully.

The thing I want you to consider is: sometimes less really is more.

Want to drop perfectionism and prevent burnout?  I’m talking about it in my new online coaching program. I do hope you’ll sign up.

If so, there’s no shame in that. I see talented, driven people all the time who aren’t living up to their capacity.

This doesn’t mean you’re lazy or unambitious. It doesn’t mean you’re not successful at what you do. So, let’s take those notions right off the table.

Being under capacity means that you’d like to be doing more with your life – personally and/or professionally – but something is getting in your way. Most likely, you are getting in your way and you don’t even know it.

Often when people feel a sense of aimlessness about their lives, or a sense of exasperation at not knowing what their true purpose is, these are clues that they have untapped capacity.

In my experience, this issue tends to go undiagnosed. I’ve seen people live in this state for decades before understanding the problem. It can be debilitating.

I want you to know that discovering you are functioning under capacity is (if you allow it to be) a fabulous thing. It means that your life is about to open up. It means that, if you’re brave enough to go on a journey of self-discovery and embrace change, anything is possible.

I truly mean this and I see it happen all the time in the work that I do with others.

Now, fully assessing where you are in life is of course a bigger process. But to get you started, here are 7 statements to consider. How many of these feel true for you?

1. I see opportunities all around me but I don’t often act on them.
2. I spend time with whoever wants to spend time with me.
3. I would like to feel a deeper sense of community.
4. I feel stuck.
5. I’d like to develop new attitudes and behaviors.
6. I’d like to be different in the future.
7. A lot of my time is unfocused.

If 4 or more of these statements feel true for you, you may be operating under capacity and it’s time to start a journey to find out what will make you fully thrive.

If 3 or fewer of these statements feel true, your next step is to explore if you are at ‘optimal capacity’ (AKA maximizing your potential) or ‘exceeding your capacity’ (compromising your potential).

Let me support you. My new online coaching program is designed to help you thrive at your optimal capacity. Please connect with me on Facebook and Twitter for ongoing tips and advice on thriving. I’d love to hear from you.