013: Leaders, Be Good to Yourself, Part 4

The Bill Perry Show

Is it possible that you are unintentionally sabotaging your own progress toward becoming a better leader? As we’ve written in this series, healthy teams require healthy leaders, so it’s vitally important you take care of yourself. In this podcast episode, we’ll talk about self-care in terms of self-talk, positive thinking and overcoming perfectionism. What you say to yourself is critical to the health of your leadership.

We all have foundational messages that tend to run through our minds on auto-play. Many of these thoughts are negatively oriented. For most of us, the process is so automatic that we often don’t realize how self-critical we are. We can blame our primitive ancestors for these negative leanings. When facing great hardships and threats over time, our thought processes evolved to diligently consider dangers to our existence. In other words, we are actually hard-wired to yield to worry.

The good news is that you can rewrite the negative story you have written about yourself. In this podcast episode, I share my own experience in reversing negative self-talk. The first step was to acknowledge the dysfunctional thought process. I had to intentionally break ranks with my perfectionist leaning to say, “Just because I don’t do something perfectly that doesn’t make me a failure.”

You have value and worth beyond your wildest imagination. Your previous failures and the messages of your past do not have to define who you will become.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• The research of Dr. Masaru Emoto, which explores how positive thinking impacts health and wellbeing.
• How I learned to approach daunting DIY projects with less dread and more positivity.
• Ways that you can offer hope and genuine kindness to those around you. (Hint: it starts by offering it to yourself.)
• The origins of our negative self-talk and how to change it at the core.

I’d love to hear your questions, thoughts and comments. If you have a minute drop me a line on social or email me ([email protected]) with your name and questions and I’ll take some time in an upcoming episode to address some of your organizational and leadership challenges!

As always, my hope is to encourage you in the pursuit of a better you, better team, better business, better life!