lived experience Archives

The Ultimate Leadership Style

8 Apr 2022 by Daniel G. Taylor

a compass guides you to your ultimate leadership style — Photo by Bakr Magrabi from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/compass-on-hand-3203659/

I love leadership. But when I began, I didn’t even know what a leadership style was.

Way back when I was 15, a friend from church loaned me a book, Hand Me Another Brick: How Effective Leaders Motivate Themselves and Others, by the Christian author, Charles R. Swindoll. That book is a practical guide to leadership based on one book in the Bible.

From the moment I started reading it, I was hooked on leadership.

In the time since—a short 37 years—I’ve read a lot more about leadership and I’ve applied what I’ve learned to different leadership opportunities. Tonight, I’m going to share with you three lessons I’ve learned about leadership that will help you develop the ultimate leadership style.

Leaders Learn How to Be Leaders

Before we get into that, here’s a new definition of leadership for 2022 I came up with earlier this year for a LinkedIn post:

Leadership is getting a result while ensuring everyone has a great time along the way.
Daniel G. Taylor

Perhaps the earliest thing I learned about leadership is this: leaders learn how to be leaders. No one is born a leader.

Sure, some people are naturally charismatic, a style that gets equated with leadership because people are naturally attracted and drawn to such people. But you don’t need to be charismatic to be a leader.

What does it take to be a leader? All it takes is to develop a single leadership style.
Daniel G. Taylor

The first leadership role I had was as a teen leader in my church’s youth ministry. The first leadership style I developed was an altruistic one, based on moral strength and listening skills. I was expected to model behaviour that the people I was leading would aspire to follow.

Think about it like this. You’ve already developed a way to influence someone or a group of people to get a desired result. And you went about doing that the same way you did everything else you’ve mastered: you learned something.

What I’m going to urge you to do in this article is to develop several dominant leadership styles. That’s your takeaway.

When I did the Toastmasters “Discover Your Leadership Style” assessment for a talk on this topic, I found that while I have one style that has a score of 24, I also have two styles with a score of 23, and two more styles with a score of 22. The difference between those scores is so minor as to be irrelevant. I don’t have one dominant leadership style, I have five dominant leadership styles—and developing that many styles has been a deliberate strategy on my part.

You can watch my talk, “The Ultimate Leadership Style” here:

And all of the above leads to my second point.

Leaders Learn New Leadership Styles to Meet the Needs of Their Team

Every leadership style has a time when it’s not the most effective style to use. You can find your leadership style by taking this free assessment from the University of Southern California.

Sometimes, the best approach is to get buy-in from everyone on your team. At other times, time doesn’t permit that style and you need to take use the authoritative style and dictate what needs to be done.

For example, let me tell you a story from my time as President of City Centre Toastmasters. That club has always been a multicultural club. Different cultures have different ways of approaching leadership. I found that in our club leadership meetings, our Chinese members weren’t speaking up.

They came from a culture where you withheld your own opinion so you didn’t make leaders look bad in public. The concept is called “saving face.”

So what I did was arrange one-on-one catch-ups, and I found that when I used a coaching style, those same Chinese members shared ideas—and brilliant ones.

You have two approaches for developing new leadership styles. The first is to develop a new style as the need arises. The second is to always learn new styles, so you have a toolkit ready to meet any need.

Leaders are Readers

And how do you constantly learn new styles? It comes down to something you’ve probably heard before and my third and final point: Leaders are readers.

Leaders know the value of ongoing learning, whether that’s practical leadership skills from how-to books or biographies of the greatest leaders from throughout history.

Let me tell you the story of just one of the prominent leaders from history known as a reader: Napoleon. Napoleon had a personal librarian. Every time he went out to a battle, Napoleon took a portable library with him. But even when he was starting out, because of the extent of his knowledge gained from reading, his superiors entrusted Napoleon with an unusual amount of responsibility for one so young.

This begs the question: Are you a reader? And by being a reader, I don’t mean audiobooks. That’s not reading, that’s listening. Completely different thing; a completely different mental skill set. What I mean when I say are you a reader is, do you make time to sit down and read a book each day?

If you’re looking for book recommendations, each month I publish an email newsletter, The Leader’s Bookshelf, with my reviews of what I’ve read in the previous month. To get this newsletter—and my weekly email newsletter—please fill out the form below.

So let’s come back to this idea of the ultimate leadership style.

Conclusion: Learn New Leadership Styles to Become an Outstanding Leader

What is the ultimate leadership style? The ultimate leadership style is one where you have a repertoire of different styles you can call on to meet the needs of your team at the moment.

In conclusion, leaders learn how to be leaders. No one is born a leader. A good leader develops one leadership style. But one style gives you all the upsides and counters none of the downsides of that particular style. An outstanding leader, therefore, constantly seeks to develop new leadership styles so they become strong in the weaknesses of their dominant style.

So let me ask you: Do you want to be a good leader or an outstanding one?

A Message from Tony Robbins: Make Yourself CEO of Your Own Health

11 Mar 2022 by Daniel G. Taylor

tony robbins ceo of your own health — Photo by **Rui Dias** from **Pexels**

Way back in 2001, I was feeling pretty defeated with my mental health. In the previous five years, I’d had four manic episodes of bipolar disorder resulting in hospital admissions. Without even needing Tony Robbins to tell me, I learned a lesson at the heart of my message as a mental health speaker: be the CEO of your own health.

The first wealth is health.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up the new book by Tony Robbins, Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love (co-authored by one of my entrepreneurial heroes, Peter Diamandis, and Robert Hariri).

In this book, Tony takes the lesson I learned years ago in relation to mental health and he applies it to anybody with a body: in other words, everybody.

Nothing matters more than our health.
Tony Robbins

As I researched bipolar disorder—specifically the information that was available about how to prevent relapses of mania and depression—I discovered that few mental health workers in Australia knew what I was learning.

For example, I found out about the most effective treatment for bipolar disorder in the world: a psychosocial treatment called Interpersonal & Social Rhythm Therapy (IPSRT) that has an 80% success rate in preventing relapses over a two-year period.

The lesson was simple: Be the CEO of your own health.

As a result, I could launch an email newsletter and build a career as a copywriter before wanting to share my lived experience and research approach with people affected by mental health.

Without your health, you have nothing.
My great-aunt, Myrtle Thompson.

And why is this particularly relevant to everybody now in 2022? In Life Force, Tony shares the reason:

In 2017, Harvard Medical School reported that the half-life of medical knowledge was 18 to 24 months—and predicted it was headed for 73 days by the time you’re reading this!
Tony robbins, life force (2022), p.21

So what does it mean to be CEO of your own health? It means you educate yourself on health matters. Learn what’s working and then demand that treatment for yourself.

7 Lessons From Tough Times

10 Jun 2016 by Daniel G. Taylor

In 2016, I went through the toughest times I’d ever been through. Because of family conflict, my uncle evicted me from my grandmother’s house, which ultimately led to me being homeless, which I talk about in my talk that you can watch on my homepage.

These are seven lessons as I started going through that time:

1. Always learn from life.

No matter what challenge you’re facing, ask yourself: ‘What can I learn from this?’ What changes do I need to make in my life to prevent this from happening again? The best tool for doing this is the daily discipline of keeping a journal. Write in it each day, and read back over your entries often.

2. Done is better than perfect.

While you should always aim to deliver the best quality possible, having a high completion drive matters more than a bunch of great ideas that you never act upon. Execution is where the best ideas fail. I launched my crowdfunding campaign and did the best job I could. As I got feedback, I’ve made changes. The result: $615 raised in the first seven days. If I’d waited till I got it perfect, I still wouldn’t have launched it yet.

3. People WANT to support you.

The biggest thing I’ve been grateful for this past week has been the number of people who have stepped up, given money and shown their support. You don’t have to experience tough times alone. Share them with other people and they’ll amaze you with how decent they really are.

4. Distress is a choice.

You don’t have control over all of your life’s circumstances. Some things you attract through your focus. Other challenges God sends your way to help you grow into the man or woman he wants you to become. If it was a fact that your situation was distressing, then everyone who experienced the same circumstance would find it distressing. And nothing can stress you out unless you choose to let it do so.

5. Positivity pays off.

Contrary to what I said before, no one cares about you. Everyone cares first about themselves. Instead of letting your challenges dominate every conversation, listen to the people in your life. Let them talk about what’s important to them.

6. Integrity always makes the difference.

My friend and former copywriting client John Anderson said in an email today:

According to a 3-year study of 200 self-made millionaires, we need to be ‘Conscientious’.

This means being super-organised, self-disciplined and dependable.

You don’t let your life get out of control when a challenge hits you—but you face it with action.

You plan carefully and execute your plans.

Then you get rewarded with the self-esteem that comes from keeping promises and working at a high level.

Do your best to keep all your promises and agreements. As soon as you realise you may not deliver, contact the other person involved and renegotiate to their satisfaction.

7. Show yourself kindness when your standards slip.

In the past week and a half, I’ve broken all the daily habits streaks I normally maintain so carefully: my two Spanish lessons, reading 80 pages, walking 10,000 steps, writing 250 words, and my daily Quiet Time. An earlier version of myself would have beaten me up for “failing” at these. Now I show myself the same level of kindness I’d show any other person: When you’re doing the best you can, give yourself leeway.

What are some lessons you’ve learned from the challenges you’ve faced? Please comment below.