I love Pixar and DreamWorks movies. They are wildly creative, yet they tackle some of our greatest leadership challenges. Think about it for a moment.
What is Frozen really about? Look no further than its incredibly popular theme song: "Let It Go." Sure, there is more to the movie than letting go of thoughts that are no longer helpful to us, but at its core it is about an internal struggle. Like so many great stories, it takes us on a hero’s journey of overcoming doubt while discovering who we can become.
It is a theme that never gets old and is repeated throughout all kinds of cultural stories, from Encanto to Kung Fu Panda to one of my favorites, Inside Out. The latter follows the inner struggles of a teenage girl going through puberty. Except the main characters are not the girl herself, but the emotional voices inside her head. The character development highlights the fundamental human emotions and takes us on a journey inside her mind as she grapples with life.
The reason I like this movie so much is that it represents what I believe is our most important leadership challenge: leading ourselves.
The screenwriters of Inside Out are tackling our emotions and their impact on us. Before emotions become emotions, they begin as thoughts. How we lead our thoughts begins a cascading series of events that influences how we feel, the actions we take, and ultimately what we decide to believe.
This process is what I call the mindset loop, the interconnection of our three controllables: thoughts, focus, and beliefs. This article focuses on how to lead your inner narrative and the impact it has on your performance.
Three Leadership Ground Rules
Before we go any further, I want to establish three leadership ground rules.
Rule #1: We Are All Leaders
We lead ourselves every day from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep. We decide what we wear, listen to, read, eat, speak, move, and most importantly, think. These are all leadership decisions. How you lead yourself directly correlates to your success and your ability to help those around you. Before we ever lead a team, a family, or an organization, we are already leading ourselves.
Rule #2: We Won't Be Great the First Time
When we decide to try something new, we won't be great at it the first time. Or the second. And maybe not even the tenth. But with committed practice, we will improve over time.
Think about it for a moment. It makes perfect sense that when we try something new, we will struggle because we have never done it before. We may not completely fail on our first attempt, but we certainly will not perform at the same level as someone who has practiced dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times. I want you to embrace failure for what it really is.
Feedback. That is all it is. Feedback on improvement.
Rule #3: We Need Other People
We cannot do everything. There is no one person who can do it all. As a matter of fact, not even the superheroes we created, such as Superman or Wonder Woman, can do it all. More importantly, we need each other to grow and to help us accomplish those over-the-horizon goals we desire.
We need support in the things we will never master but that may be critical to our success. We also need teaching, coaching, and mentorship to activate the gifts we might become great at. In both cases, we need others to help us on our success journey.
Meet Your First Team
Now that you know the fundamental leadership rules, what is the single most important leadership decision we can make?
I already gave it away earlier. How we speak to ourselves.
Which brings me back to Inside Out and my suggestion for a new Pixar movie: Leading Me.
Instead of leading emotions, my movie would focus on leading our four fundamental internal teammates: body, mind, heart, and soul. In psychological terms, these teammates represent our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual selves. I call them our First Team. They are unique to each of us, and it is both our responsibility and privilege to lead them.
The way we lead our First Team is by talking to them. You might not speak to them out loud, but there is always an internal conversation taking place. Our body communicates when it needs food, water, rest, or exercise. Our heart sends signals about what feels heavy and what feels light. Our soul seeks purpose, fulfillment, and meaning. And our mind generates thousands of thoughts every day while analyzing information and helping us make decisions.
Each of these teammates has a voice, and I want you to start treating them like the teammates they are.
Related Reading - There has been a lot of psychological work done on mapping these areas of us, and if you’re interested in doing a deep dive in this body of work, I highly recommend starting with Dr. Richard Schwartz and his book “No Bad Parts”. He is the creator of the Internal Family Systems and I have found his insights wildly helpful in leading myself.
Lead Yourself With Kindness
The most critical first step to leading yourself is talking kindly to your teammates.
In Chapter 3 of Unstoppable Mindset, I call this first leadership decision "leading the conversation." I describe two primary voices: the Whiner and the Winner. These voices can come from any member of your First Team at any time.
The important thing to understand is that all of your teammates are trying to help you, just in different ways. Your body wants to conserve energy. Your mind wants to keep you safe. Your heart seeks balance and connection. Your soul seeks meaning and purpose. All of them depend on one critical leadership action: your kindness.
We must be careful in how we talk to ourselves. More often than not, we allow ourselves to speak to our teammates in ways we would never allow another person to speak to us. We beat ourselves up. We criticize ourselves. We convince ourselves we are not good enough. And all it does is discourage the very teammates we need most.
Do not fall into this trap.
Any voice that encourages you to belittle yourself is not your teammate. It is your foe. The way you fight back is with kindness. Be thankful to your body for all it allows you to do. Give grace to your heart when you fail to hear its signals. Keep faith in your soul and remind it that it is valued. And give your mind direction to listen to what your teammates need instead of simply replaying old fears and limitations.
My Daily First Team Practice
Over the years, I have developed a personal practice for leading my First Team. It is deeply personal, and it has evolved over time.
Each morning, shortly after waking up, I visualize sitting at a round table with my teammates: body, mind, heart, and soul. I imagine them holding hands as a golden light of energy connects us around the table. I ask for their support in helping others throughout the day. Whether I am giving a speech, coaching someone, or striving to be a better husband, father, or friend, I ask for their help and thank them for their support.
My final words are always the same.
I tell them I love them.
The entire process takes only a couple of minutes, but by the time my feet hit the floor, I feel energized and ready to embrace the day.
At night, before I fall asleep, I hold another meeting around that same table. Again, I visualize the golden light connecting us. This time, I focus on gratitude. I thank my body for the work it enabled me to do. I thank my mind for its ideas and focus. I thank my heart for its kindness and love. I thank my soul for the faith and strength it provided.
I finish the same way I started the day, by telling them how thankful I am to have them as teammates and how much I love them.
Why This Matters
I realize what I have just shared may feel personal and, for some people, perhaps a little unconventional. That is okay.
The bigger lesson is not about my round table. The bigger lesson is learning to love yourself. Loving yourself is the first leadership action on your journey to loving others. And the reason this is so important is that when you genuinely care for others, they respond in kind. The highest form of reciprocating that care is sharing the very best of themselves with you, their gifts, talents, and superpowers. That is exactly what you will need on your journey toward accomplishing something new.
If creating your own round table feels like a step too far, then start somewhere simpler.
Start by talking kindly to yourself. I promise you, it is far more helpful than beating yourself up.
The First Leadership Challenge
I am only scratching the surface of leading our First Team, but trust me on this: your first leadership action always starts with how you talk to yourself.
When you learn to love yourself just the way you are, you can move more quickly toward what you seek to accomplish. Most meaningful goals require transformation. They require us to become a better version of ourselves, and that transformation happens much faster when we are kind and loving to ourselves.
Something else happens too. You become better at leading others. You begin to recognize the First Team leadership challenges they are facing. The better you lead yourself, the better you can help others lead themselves. And when that happens, people go all-in. They bring their best effort, energy, and talents to the mission. When that happens, you become unstoppable together.
Be kind to yourself. The more you do, the more Unstoppable you will become.
Alden
