“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” — Eckhart Tolle
Leadership is the most important quality for ANY business, group, or Team. Leaders make critical decisions, inspire teamwork, and they completely are responsible for the trajectory of all. Leaders come in many forms and styles, and have a realm of different techniques and approaches. However, the one thing all of the BEST leaders have in common is the love, respect, and appreciation of their very own team!
I personally believe that gratitude is THE foundational element of leadership. In fact, if your leadership actions aren’t flowing from a core of gratitude, you’re most likely an ineffective leader. In fact, I can almost guarantee that. Leadership is all or nothing – you’re either doing it or you’re not. To lead well, you must relentlessly take care and appreciate your people. To take care of your people, you have to know them; and to know them, you have to spend time with them. In order to do that with the right levels of authenticity and intentionality – and inspire incredible amounts of trust with your team – you must genuinely care for the growth of your people. And you can’t really genuinely care if you’re personally not grateful for your blessings. As leaders, we must carefully cultivate our own personal spirit of gratitude, which then spills over to our Team. How we treat people will cause a cascading effect for us and our people to give credit to the team when things go well / take personal responsibility when things go poorly, and so on and so on. So bottom line, a spirit of gratitude is often at the root of great leadership, and should, therefore, be cultivated and tended to with the utmost care!
Some people claim they are just “not wired” to show gratitude. I want to call out this myth if you think this is you. While we are born with predispositions – warmer or colder, more sensitive to positive or negative circumstances, these are not “life sentences”. Gratitude, like other character traits, is a matter of choice. We SHOULD have developed it from an example in our youth, but as we know, that doesn’t always happen. But it is learned. Through practice, we can wire our brains to express gratitude. It becomes a matter of choosing to move beyond our comfortable predisposition towards an approach to life that better serves us as leaders.
When we begin to practice gratitude, the goal here is to live gratefully—to make it part of who we are. Gratitude then extends to everyone in our lives. It is not just something we do at work to increase our productivity, but we take it home and express it to those people that mean the most to us. If we practice gratitude with all the people in our lives, we’ll find that they respond just as well as our Team does. When we express genuine gratitude to our family, friends, and all those we encounter throughout our day, we also give ourselves more moments of joy. One of the great ironies of personal relationships is that we so often take those who mean the most to us for granted.
As we conclude on the subject of gratitude for the week – I am personally grateful for the wisdom that God has instilled in me. My daily prayer is that I will continue to personally grow every single day and use my God given talents so that I can be of value to everyone around me to help them grow into the best version of themselves. I am also grateful to have seen how much growth has come not just from my direct leadership Team, but also for the hundreds of leaders that have grown in their own leadership and been inspired over the past few years as a result of my teachings. I appreciate all of your feedback (the good, bad, and ugly), and look forward to what the future holds for additional growth. I also cannot close this out without mentioning my incredible wife, and biggest fan, Brandi. She reads my teachings every morning, sees me in action every day, and is always supportive when I need it and gives me great feedback that helps me personally grow as a dad and leader.
Benjamin Franklin said this – “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
To all who are reading this, remember that we are all just getting started!
Blessings and sincerest Gratitude,
Sam Gembel