Effective Leadership. Pt. 2

If you can move one millimeter a day every day for your entire life Mhmm. Imagine where you are twenty years from now.

Welcome to Leadership Sovereignty, the podcast. I'm your host, Terry Baylor, along with Ralph Owens. And We continue the conversation with Larry Cheatham where he explains the eight f's that are associated with the excellence of life and the compound effect of getting 1% better each day.

In today's chaotic world, how would you, define effective leadership?

You know what? At the end of the day, leadership is about results. You know? Mhmm. I am one of these people today.

I I say we have to all be results driven driven. And so when you start talking about effective leadership, first thing is, is anyone following you?

If

no one's following you, then back to you're only taking a long walk.

Mhmm.

You're not leading. Mhmm. You know? So it's tough to be an effective leader leader if no one is following you.

Mhmm.

After you've determined, okay, someone's following me, back to effective leadership. Mhmm. Are you leading them, you know, in a way that, we lead them to desired results? Mhmm. I mean, let's face it.

Adolf Hitler hit Adolf Hitler was a leader. Mhmm. I don't think I would've wanted to follow Mhmm. Adolf Hitler. So back to Effective Leadership.

In my mind, effective leadership suggests that we're leading people in such a way that we're effective in getting results.

Got

it. So no, I appreciate that too. So Ralph, one of the things that we took, so I heard two things in here. One is, first of all, and Ralph, you're gonna love this because I think this is, I think you coined this. What you don't measure, you can't track.

That's right. 100%.

Right? So that's going to lead to the results aspect of this. And I had a few friends call me on a group call maybe about six months ago. And they were asking, what is leadership? Is leadership the ability to influence people?

Or is it kind of more of a, I don't want to call it command, right? And you just tell people what to do. And so my answer to them is, look, leadership is about you can be in charge, but unless you have the ability to influence people, then you're really not leading. You may be pulling them, you may be kicking them. But listen, I was in a meeting this week.

I was in a meeting this week, man, and I heard something and I'm like, Wow. And the statement was like, The beatings will continue until the morale increases. I thought to myself, yeah, there's definitely not a lot of leadership going on here.

No, no. It's funny you say that Terry, because you know, sometimes people think leadership is, you know, just because somebody's been put in a position of leadership and they have authority that that makes them a leader. And listen, that does not make you a leader because you have authority over someone. When someone does something because, they're in fear of losing their job because you can hold something over them, you're not inspiring people, you know, in in that respect. And in my in my mind, that's that's not effective leadership.

Yeah. No. I appreciate that. For sure. For sure.

For sure. Now that's great.

That's good. That's good. That's good. So let let's talk a little bit about personal growth through leadership. We're very familiar with the 8F's and you kind of talked about this in the pre show meeting.

So

I can't wait.

I can't

wait. I love it.

Explain what the 8F's are to the listeners and and the role of self development in becoming a strong leader.

So, again, this is something I learned, from, Orin Woodward, and a gentleman named Chris Brady and both of these guys being ranked by Inc Magazine as two of the top 50 leadership and management experts in the world. And they started talking about what does a life of excellence really look like? And they broke it down to about eight very specific categories, you know, and and ask yourself as as as I mentioned these eight categories, ask yourself which of these eight areas would you be willing to compromise? Would you be willing to say, yep. You know what?

I don't That doesn't matter to me in my life. In no particular order, but I'm gonna begin with faith. My faith walk. One of the eight F's that I wanna consistently work on being better in and improving, you know, my faith walk, my family life. What does that look like?

Your spouse, your children, if you're married, you know, your parents. And so faith, family, your finances, are you willing to have that out of order? Are you willing to struggle in the area of finances? You know, your health or fitness, the other eight, eight, the F eighth, the other F, you know, you know, so faith, family, finances, fitness, you're following. Remember leadership, no one's following you, you're only taking a long walk, you know, so following.

Friendships, what does it mean to actually have real friends, be a real friend, you know, in someone's life, you know? And so faith, family, finances, fitness, following, freedom, are you willing to sacrifice that one? And then fun.

You know, are there

ways of having fun that don't have to involve reckless behavior? You know, it doesn't have to come out of a bottle or at the end of a needle. So to me, those areas are the areas that I look to consistently improve in my life. And, you know, we had this talk once before that, you know, you're either getting you're either going forward or you're going backwards. You're there's no such thing as sitting in one space.

Right.

You're moving one direction or the other. So once I came to that understanding, then I thought, okay, you know, let's consistently see what I can do to be just even if it's just a millimeter Mhmm. Better today than what I was yesterday

Mhmm.

You know, that means I didn't move backwards. I moved forward. If you can move one millimeter a day, every day for your entire life, imagine where you are twenty years from now. Yeah. And I think that's what happens to so many of us.

We overestimate what we can do in the short term, you know, Oh, I'm going to be a multimillionaire, you know, by the end of the year, but we dramatically underestimate what we can do over the long term.

Right, that's good. Man, that's good. That's good. So what I hear out of that is being intentional, being intentional in personal growth is critical for, success. Let's talk a little bit about, what are some of the ways that people can be intentional?

I mean, I tell this story all the time. Larry is the one that got me into reading, personal development books and leadership books, but talk about some of the ways we can be intentional about you know, increasing our personal growth.

Yeah. You just hit on it. You know, when you talk about being intentional, if I know if I know what I what what you allow your eyes to see on a regular basis and your ears to listen to on a regular basis, if I know what you spend your time involved with and in, I'll have a pretty good idea of where you'll be five years from now. You know, in other words, how much time do you spend watching television? Not to say you should never watch television, you know, but it it for me, I took an approach.

I'm a huge football fan, right? I'm a big baseball baseball fan. But but one thing about that, I would never stop to watch someone else live their dream in without me taking steps toward my own. You know? I'm trying to think of how to best help you understand what I mean.

I guess before we get

to that, though That's great. That's look, everybody on that baseball field and I can I can relate to that because in my journey, I was supposed to be the next Ozzy Smith? Right? That was my ultimate dream and goal. And so whenever I watched that game, right, I would go to the games.

I would stand out after the game's over. I spoke with Jose Akendo. I was asking those guys, man, so what does it take? What did you do? You know, and everything it came back with the same answer every time.

It was hard work, hard work. But at the end of the day, those folks, Larry, were living their dream. And to your point, right, I'm there watching them live their dream, right, but what am I doing to pursue my own? Right.

So I want you to think about something for a moment, Terry. Imagine walking up to during his prime or even in pursuit of becoming the best what I believe is the best shortstop shortstop in history, Ozzy Smith. Imagine walking up to him while he's pursuing that dream and saying, hey, Ozzy, I want you to take off for the next week of practice and I want you to come watch me, you know, bowl. I want you to come watch me, you you know, pick the activity and watch him look at you as if you had two heads because Ozzy was in the pursuit of excellence. He was in the pursuit of his dream And he was willing here's what I I I would I would bet.

And I've never met Ozzy, but I would be I would be willing to bet that Ozzy was willing to invest time Mhmm. Money in learning from those people who had gone before him, who had demonstrated excellence.

Mhmm.

So I bet you he invests his time, his money, his energy, his thought process to becoming the best that he could

us keep the conversation going. Until next time, lead with purpose and God bless.