How to Embrace Personal Growth, Break Old Habits, and Redefine Leadership for Success

Are you ready to break free from stagnation and embrace the habits that will lead to lasting success and meaningful leadership?

Most people, most of the time, fail to make the changes that would improve who we are. We tend to stick with our routines and habits. If you haven’t recently made a significant change, it suggests you are not growing or developing in a meaningful way. If you haven’t changed your mind about something important, it is evidence that you are stagnating.

Tracking Personal Growth for Long-Term Success

One way to track your growth and development over time is by creating a record of the changes you make. People only rarely change our beliefs because we are chained to consistent patterns in our lives, but changing a belief is proof that you are growing.

How Raising Standards Transforms Leadership

At one time in my life, I made a decision to remove the people who surrounded me. My friends were unhappy with a change I had made, accusing me of believing that I was better than they were. They tried to pull me back into my past behaviors. One day, I told them that I was better than they were, and it was true. I had raised my standards. They continued their routines without me, but over time, most of them changed. You may have had a similar experience in your life.

Recognizing the Pain That Drives Meaningful Change

Many who make significant changes do so because they can no longer continue on their current path—they can no longer live with the threshold of pain that it requires. They change their beliefs and their actions. Those who break free from their past beliefs and actions gain a new identity.

Those who tolerate the threshold that should cause them to change often find themselves in greater pain, or worse. This, too, is tangled in their identity, habits, and beliefs. If you want to make a significant change, you have to break free from your identity, habits, and current beliefs.

How Leaders Set Higher Standards for Success

It is important to set higher standards for yourself and, if you are a leader, to raise your team’s standards. If you have worked for a great leader who elevated standards, it likely led to a significant life change.

Right now, I am raising my writing standards by studying four books containing a large number of strategies that are no longer practiced.

Taking Small Steps Toward Transformative Growth

One way you can change and grow is to act. It isn’t enough to talk about it; change comes about only through action. Once you decide to change, do the first thing you need to do. For some of us, this means removing long-held habits and replacing them with the actions we need to take consistently.

Small changes provide you with big growth. Incremental changes stack up over time. Take a couple of minutes to consider what small change has the power to compound over time.

Overcoming Barriers to Leadership and Success

The first obstacle to making significant change is comfort. When you have beliefs or habits that are deeply ingrained, they can make change difficult. To overcome this, you have to move away from comfort and seek something that forces you to live with discomfort. You must prioritize the necessity of change over the comfort of your routines and habits.

Your identity can also make it difficult to change. Part of the challenge here is that others may notice you are different and criticize the new identity that defines the new you. But stagnating comes with hidden costs to your success: stagnant habits, stagnant beliefs, and a stagnant identity.

The Intersection of Personal Growth and Leadership Success

This is the path to personal growth: changing your beliefs, habits, and what success means to you. This is your personal leadership. For a long time, I have suggested that there is a person who comes after the person you are now. You have to let go of who you are now if you want to become that better version of yourself. One Zen Master suggested that I am perfect just as I am, and that I could use some improvement.

Maybe you are perfect just as you are, and you need a bit of improvement.