Introducing The Summer Series at Coffee on Leadership
It is summer and summer is officially one of my favorite seasons because there's a lot of flexibility in schedules, people have fun plans, they're taking vacations and getting rejuvenated and refreshed, ready to come back to work – and you may have noticed, we paused for a little bit on the Coffee on Leadership podcast.
Haley, my amazing podcast manager emailed last week, she had just come back from vacation and was like, “Where are we at on batching some new episodes?”
I'm gonna be honest, I was super behind, because it has been a very full season for me. But it's also summer and that makes it difficult to really want to sit down and leverage learning content. It's also difficult as a learner and as a leader to find time in your schedule for development. Right?
That's where Coffee on Leadership was originally designed so that there could be short and sweet episodes that you can digest over a cup of coffee, because leadership development can be the trickiest thing to fit into your schedule as a leader.
When things get busy, when the to-do list gets long, development is sometimes the first thing to go – we stop reading those developmental books, we stop checking out our favorite blogs where we learn, we stop listening to podcasts because there's other more pressing urgent matters on our to-do list – but, those are also the seasons when we need it most.
I was at a dinner party with girlfriends this weekend and Kim, one of my friends there said, “Hey, who has short and sweet podcasts I can listen to? I need something that I can listen to when I get ready in the morning,” and somebody threw out that Chaili’s podcast was built for that – and it is but even those 15 minute episodes can be tricky to get to.
So here's what I'm doing: a summer series is coming your way that will have those short and sweet episodes meant to be quickly listened to and integrated into your day. The beautiful part of this is it really ties back to Leader Cards, which if any of you are familiar with our Leader Cards project from a few years ago, these are leadership intentions that are set to a daily rhythm throughout the month so that you can be embracing development in a really integrated way with your schedule. You select an intention as a leader that you are setting and it has a card that goes with it. So there's an actual artifact that can sit on your desk and remind you what you're striving for on that day as a leader. There's some reflection questions, and we've talked about some of those on the podcast before and I had at one point even promised that we would be doing some more of those on the podcast like going through those daily intentions together but I think it fell by the wayside.
So we're bringing it back for our summer series – going to hit some Leader Cards and really have some ways to narrow in on some intentional developmental insight, some intentional reflection as leaders in this busy season.
Because the reality is we have full schedules no matter what time of year it is, and we have to learn to create rhythms of development for ourselves and for our networks and for our teams.
So this is my challenge to you for the summer – find ways to integrate any sort of developmental nuggets into your day, and the reflection side of that is getting to the end of your day and looking back and deciding how did I do? Do a daily audit, because it's one thing to set quarterly goals, annual goals, but it's another thing to realize that we can set daily goals to be better leaders. When we look at the day, the interactions that we had, the people that we got to talk to, the projects that we were able to work on, how did we do? What can we do better tomorrow? That’s what really impacts who we are as leaders.
I also have some other little audit conversations that we can have. I am a leadership mindset mentor within a group of business leaders and we had some good conversations last month and this month about the PERMA Framework, which some of you may have heard me mention in outside workshops, but it's a well being theory for leaders and people in general and I'm gonna bring that one up too.
That's what you can expect in the next few segments. Super excited about it so that we can roll those out to you in the coming weeks of your summer. Cheers!