How to Reinvent Yourself as a Leader in a Challenging Economy

In this episode of Leadership Is Calling, Annie talks about why it’s important for leaders to reinvent themselves in today’s ever-changing world. She will share some strategies for staying calm and confident in the face of change, and show you how to use self-leadership to thrive in a challenging economy.

The world is changing, and leaders need to change with it. Learn how to reinvent yourself and stay ahead of the curve. Whether you’re a new leader or you’ve been in the game for a while, this video is for you. We’ll give you the tools you need to reinvent yourself as a leader and create a successful future for yourself and your team.

Here are some of the topics we’ll cover in this video:

• The importance of self-leadership for leaders
• How to stay calm and confident in the face of change
• How to use self-awareness to your advantage
• How to set and achieve goals How to build a strong team
• How to create a culture of innovation

If you’re ready to reinvent yourself as a leader, watch this video today!

Key Points

• Business is hard today and change is coming faster and faster. In order to succeed in this environment, we need to reinvent ourselves as leaders. This means learning how to be in a good place inside ourselves, even when things are tough.
• We need to be able to handle anxiety and stay in a place of self-leadership. This means reinforcing ourselves and how we approach leadership.
• We need to be outcome focused but not outcome reliant.
• We need to have true confidence in ourselves, no matter what happens.
• When we are in a good place inside ourselves, we are better thinkers, decision makers, and connectors with people. We are also able to attract and retain the best team members.
• Reinventing ourselves as leaders is the key to transforming our businesses.

Related Resources

More information: Self Leadership | Compassionate Leadership  
Articles: Leading Through Crazy Business Cycles | Learn How to Partner with Your Team
Amazon: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Auto-Generated Transcript – unedited version

How to Reinvent Yourself as a Leader in a Challenging Economy

So today I’m going to be talking about reinventing yourself as a leader. Why is it important? Meaning, like why you should really consider doing so and what it really means. Like, how do you reinvent yourself as a leader? What does that even look like?

Okay, so I’m going to start with the why. I have to give a little bit of context first in that business is hard today, whether you’re a CEO or a leader within the business, you know that the external environment is making your business harder. Everything from the economy not doing as well to all the big technology and the social platforms, changing their algorithms every 5 minutes to expenses, just, you know, being a lot higher everywhere. So business is harder and change is coming faster and faster.

That to me is one of the things that I notice the most. Is that right when you think you might have something going pretty well, it changes. So how do we actually succeed with our businesses and be competent, confident leaders when it keeps going? Not as good as we hoped. Right. Like and even when it goes well, just feels like it goes well for a little bit. And then it starts going worse again. And you’re always working to get back to where you were. Right.

Right now, gosh, so many clients are just trying to have as much revenue as they had last year. Right. And they’re ecstatic when they actually meet that end. The reality is that lots of clients are doing less than last year. But in this environment, it’s still quite good. Okay.

So when everything is changing and things feel bad, how are we going to not only survive but really thrive in this kind of an environment that is not easy, that does get more challenging. That does kind of throw curveballs at you. Unexpected ones often.

I was working with a leader today and it really hit me how much this is about what we talk about in business as kind of that business has two parts. It has the business part and then it has the people part, meaning the business part is all the things you do to operate a business. So it’s everything from your organizational structure, your business strategy, your goals, your projects, how you get things done, all your customer service, all your technology, etc., right? All those things that you need to run a business.

But all day, every day, there’s a second part going on in that we still operate business with human beings our businesses are still reliant on having humans perform really well together in business. And humans are, you know, we are amazing thinkers when we’re actually thinking when we’re not thinking, we are usually in what we call self-protection. Right.

And self-protection is when you are in an emotionally triggered place. And that doesn’t mean that you’re having this giant emotional meltdown or emotional reaction. What it means is that you are thinking and behaving in ways that are driven by emotion.

So let’s take anxiety, for example, right? Let’s say you just introduced a new product and it’s not meeting your sales expectations. That’s anxiety producing for sure. The thing is, it says that as humans, we have to learn how to handle that anxiety, because if we stay in that anxiety, we end up going into these self-protective thoughts and behaviors. We end up going to a place like, those sales are bad, those sales are not enough for us to be successful from here. I am you know, I’m starting to get scared that we won’t be able to recover from this or we won’t be able to do something good in the future. And when I’m in that kind of a place and in a kind of a not good enough or lacking place in my own head, right in where when I’m coming from, that place of reactivity and fear and anxiety, I actually cannot see what’s going to be important to actually have this product sell better in the future. Because when you go into a place of fear or anxiety, your perspective goes from nice and wide to a place of like, I’m okay in this so I can see the different perspectives, I can see opportunities, I can see things for how they are without making a judgment on them. But when I judge them as bad and wrong, then my perspective goes to teeny tiny and I get focused on a very small part of the picture that usually isn’t even the part that is going to fix it, right?

Maybe I would get focused on advertising that didn’t work to promote this new product. Okay, maybe advertising was a little bit of it, but this is a tough environment. Maybe some of its advertising, maybe some of it is just people having less money because of inflation and these giant mortgages that have gone up. You know, we don’t totally know.

And so in an environment like this, we have to be willing to sort of, you know, keep looking at the big picture and then at the details and the big picture. And to do that, we have to be in a good place inside ourselves. We have to be in what we call self leadership, not self-protection. And some of that self protection is pretty stealthy because in business, you know, not meeting your revenue targets. Yeah, sucks. It’s true, it sucks. But we’re going to have to keep it in a place of factuality. It’s not what we desired, but it’s not wrong or bad.

The only way to do that is to reinforce yourself and how you approach leadership and how you actually are as a leader. So that you aren’t only saying it’s like we want you to be outcome focused but not outcome reliant, because if you base your wellbeing, your ability to show up in self leadership on achieving the outcome, we won’t get you there. You’ll immediately fall into self-protection and then we lose all the good thinking and all the, you know, the amazing, the amazing intuition, the amazing perspective, the amazing way you can connect with other people when you’re in a good place to actually find the opportunities and the solutions that are there.

When I say reinventing yourself as a leader, what I mean is that you are doing an inside job. You are reinventing how you perceive the world, that you are reinventing, how you relate to what’s happening around you, that you relate to it without judgment, you relate to it from a place of this is just what’s happening. It’s not good or bad. It’s not right or wrong. We don’t even really know what it is. But what we do know, and this is a giant part of the reinvention, is that we’re enough. We’re enough.

So even if the sales of our new product didn’t go like we hoped, that does not mean anything about our own capabilities, about our own intentions, about our own ability to show up and be here. Be here for whatever the world is serving us. We’ve got to be able to show up from a place of true confidence. And that true confidence is not the confidence that I’m definitely going to be successful in reaching the goals. True confidence is no matter what happens. I know I’m fine, I know that I’m already successful. I’m already a successful human being. And so whatever I do from here is outside.

So in that way, when you get to change how you perceive your whole world around you, then you naturally have a whole different approach to leadership. And it’s one where you are connecting with other people in a way that is calm, that is centered, that is able to actually listen to what they’re saying without having, you know, the voice in your head tell you what they’re saying isn’t good enough.

Let me interrupt. I think that you’re able to interact with people in a way that brings out their best thinking, that allows them to get into self leadership because they don’t have to worry about you when you’re in a good place. People can drop with a part of them that’s like, Oh no, it’s this. If it’s me now, I’m not in a good place. You know, my team will go to a place of, Oh no, and he’s not good. We better figure out how to do something good while they’re doing that. They’re not working on the business.

So when I can show up all ready, good. Already knowing that I am competent, even if I just made a big mistake, and even if this current thing isn’t going that well, I know that I’m okay in this. I’m going to show up. Well, it’s going to go as it goes and chances are it’s going to turn out great. And when you consistently do that, it always does.

There’s this movie that I love that’s called The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. And in this movie, there’s a quote in there that the hotel owner, the hotel general manager, keeps saying, and it’s that everything will be alright in the end if it’s not alright it’s not the end.

I think that’s a great quote for leadership and life, but especially for leadership because we need to keep holding ourselves in a place where it’s going to be alright. It is all right. And in the end, it is all going to work out. We can’t see how it’s going to work out. We can’t see exactly what the path should be. That’s going to be a little bit of trial and error. And the better thinking we have, the better our trials are going to be and the fewer errors.

And that really means that we have to be in a place inside ourselves that is all about I’m good, I’m good, I’m all right. Even if this launch doesn’t go well, even if someone on my team moves away, I’m okay. Even if I got some bad comments on my Facebook page. I went to give a big presentation and I flubbed it like, we’re okay.

And that part is just the big, big, big reinvention. It’s not a small thing. It is. It’s central. It’s not easy, but it is worth it. It is the part that when you reinvent yourself so that you’re okay from the inside out, it changes everything. And it definitely makes you a better thinker, a better decision maker, a better connector with people, somebody who the best team members want to work with. Right. It makes you attract and retain talent that you can’t right now when you’re not in a good place.

And so we want this for you. This is how you transform your business. Man, do we know that businesses need a lot of help and support right now? Reinventing is the name of the game. It’s you know, in some ways it’s like, you know, this is probably the first of many reinventions. But the most important part is to reinvent your own leadership so that you know you are enough. You are an outstanding leader in yourself every day, no matter what’s happening and no matter what the results are that day.