The First Step to Real Leadership: Life-long Learning

The journey through the Leadership Enrichment LIFE-cycle (LEL-c) begins with a single, crucial stage:

LIFELONG LEARNING. This is the starting point for building and refining your Leadership Platform. It’s a recursive process that conditions us to think rightly and effectively so we can act rightly and effectively as real leaders... not just managers.

As leadership expert W. Edwards Deming noted, to manage one must lead and that transformation begins with the individual. To transform your leadership, you must commit to an openness to learning, which consists of three key components:

1. Acute Alertness: Paying attention to life and your surroundings.

2. A Keen Awareness: Knowing what to look for—in yourself, in others, and in your organization.

3. An Insatiable Curiosity: A desire to discover more and continually question accepted knowledge.

The Emotional Connector: AWARENESS

Awareness is the engine of this stage. It's about more than just seeing; it's about

perceiving—mentally understanding the situation with the powers of reason. Without awareness, we miss opportunities for growth because we remain in a state of "unconscious incompetence," where we don't even know what we don't know. One powerful way to elevate awareness is through guided self-examination, asking tough questions about your values, goals, and deepest motivations.

The Performance Waypoint: LEARN

The new information gained through awareness is useless unless we act on it. Learning requires moving past excuses like "the instructor was boring" or "I disagreed with the content". True learning demands an "openness-to-learning," where you shift out of defensiveness and into genuine curiosity, even if the feedback is unflattering at first.

This stage is dedicated to blueprinting and designing your platform. It’s where you use diagnostic tools, coaching, and self-reflection to understand your current thinking styles (i.e., the leader you currently are) and define the leader you intend to be.

In our next post, we'll explore how to take what you've learned and turn it into meaningful action in Stage 2: Internal Locus of Control.