Leading yourself – Part 1

We have made it! You may not believe it, but I have been looking forward to this article since the end of 2022. The last several weeks have been building to this next chapter in the series that began with Directional Leadership. While the Directional Leadership framework provides clarity on how we should lead, we must never lose sight of where leadership starts. Leadership always starts with the person staring back at us in the mirror! Today, we will look at the first of four principles that we can use to lead ourselves well.

Before we get to the first principle, have you ever heard the expression “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result”?

I am not a betting man, but if I were, I would bet a quarter that you have. Popularly, this quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein. I am not sure if he actually said it or not, but it sure is true. I want to share with you another quote attributed to Albert Einstein that very much fits with what we will be looking at today. The quote goes like this: “You cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” There is great truth here. 

You and I have witnessed this multiple times throughout our careers already. I need only point you in the direction of treatment guidelines that have been revised or updated throughout your career. I’m so old, I remember calculated age depending blood pressure goals. For those of you who don’t remember or are blessed to be too young to have ever heard of this concept, the gist was that as a patient aged, we were to permit a progressively increasing blood pressure and still label it “controlled.” As we have learned more, we have been able to provide better care to our patients.

If learning more can improve the care we provide patients, would you be at all surprised if I told you that we can learn concepts and skills that would allow us to improve any other area of our lives? Absolutely not!

So, this is where we start as we begin leading ourselves. The first principle in leading ourselves is EXPANSION. Whenever we expand, we increase our capacity. When we expand our knowledge and skill around diabetes care, we increase our capacity of the care we provide to our patients living with diabetes. 

The grade school student who expands her mathematic skills by learning to multiply and divide will, at the same time, dramatically increase the capacity of different kinds of math problems she can solve.

As I learned to provide immunizations to my patients, I also increased the capacity of patients I could serve.

When I learned that leadership skills could be learned, I was so encouraged! As I took those first timid steps of improving my leadership skills, what I found is that my leadership went from a 1 to a 2. I doubled my leadership capacity very quickly. While I agree this is likely more of an indictment of how poor a leader I was at the time, there is an important lesson that you must not miss: You can see significant improvements in your leadership quite quickly once you start to lead yourself.

When I started leading myself, I found that I was able to discover all kinds of new ideas, or even fragments of new ideas that we could use to address the various challenges that we faced. Circling back to the Einstein quote above, I was elevating my thinking to a higher level from where it was when we experienced (or even created) the problems we faced. 

For those of you wondering where I started, it was with learning the core values of the company I was with at the time. As I learned the core values, I found I was able to assess problems in a consistent manner and I was also able to lead my team through this process so they could solve these issues on their own with a high degree of confidence. Where you start (or continue) your leadership journey is up to you. It may not be with core values, it may be with some other pressing issue, and that is fine. The important thing is that you start. Because once you begin to expand, you will find your capacity to lead will increase greatly.

Next time we will examine the second principle in leading yourself. You will not want to miss it. It is one of my absolute favourite principles to teach and one that has made a significant impact on my own life and one that has unlocked the potential of many of my students.

Between now and when we meet again, I encourage you to make the decision to expand. That is the first step. Perhaps you know a particular area where you would like to expand your leadership. If so, GREAT!  If not, don't worry. Your area of expansion will be revealed at the appropriate time.

Until next time

Jesse McCullough, PharmD

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