Blog Posts by Courtney McBath

Hope your year is progressing and you are feeling positive. I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to sing America’s national anthem, I was hoping to start a vision talk with you. Vision includes the ability of the leader to articulate the direction and persuade people to follow that direction. The other side of vision is found in my ability to see my own progress, success, failure, and struggles. The truth is that as the leader grows and develops, so does the organization. This week I started my degree at the University of Oxford and I spent very little time recognizing the faults of my team. I could not get passed the daily revelations of my own deficits. Whatever growth or change you want to see in others, begins with you.

As we navigate the often complicated path of emotional intelligence, I want you to begin developing a deeper self-awareness. One of the primary attributes of a leader with high emotional intelligence is self-awareness.

Regular...

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to identify, understand, and manage one's own emotions, as well as those of others. It is a crucial aspect of leadership and plays a vital role in determining the success of a leader. Today, we'll explore why emotional intelligence is so important for leaders and how it can help them to be more effective in their roles.

First and foremost, leaders with high emotional intelligence are better equipped to handle the challenges and pressures of their role. They are able to stay calm and level-headed in the face of adversity and make thoughtful decisions rather than reacting impulsively. This allows them to be more resilient and adaptive to changing circumstances, which is essential for success in today's fast-paced business environment.

In addition, leaders with high emotional intelligence are able to build strong relationships with their team members and foster a positive and supportive work environment. They are able to...

Last week, we talked about keeping track of our productivity and tracking the actions that support our goals. We reminded you to review your progress at the end of every week, and check how much time you have studied, either through your notes or how much you have completed. You are not failing if you CONSISTENTLY manage a few hours of schoolwork. That action will help us to improve our consistency and make the needed adjustments quickly.

Don't fear identifying deficits or making changes to correct them. Concerning our goals, we know what to be consistent with and/or what to improve on. When you refer to your goals and check them against your progress, you may need to step back and reevaluate your goals. That's a huge victory and not a defeat. That just puts you one step closer to success.

This year I want you to approach your goals slightly differently and make room for change and necessary adjustments. My experiences have taught me that things will not always go...

Welcome back to an amazing new year and to some simple thoughts designed to jump-start your progress for this year. Hopefully, you have already experienced growth from seeing goals like rocks to be chipped away little by little.

Here is a simple thought that may help you get “unstuck” and moving forward. Learn to arrange your goals as action items with a completion date, responsible party, and any potential challenges to completion. One of the advantages of creating a checklist is being able to mark a task complete. It is a feeling of accomplishment that we can not fully express with words, but it’s one of the many reasons we set goals and break them into achievable tasks and reach our goals one task at a time.

If we don’t, our goals will often suffer. Additionally, it’s easy to lose track of progress and feel you haven’t accomplished anything when we don’t track the daily actions on our list. Then we have to address the...

I hope you enjoyed last week’s reminder about revisiting priorities and putting people first! I would love to hear your stories about priority decisions you’ve made already.

Every new year comes with a renewed desire to improve and grow. We want to be better than we were in the past year. We want to achieve more and see the realization of our dreams. But do you ever feel like you know what to do to see things expand but struggle with maintaining consistency in execution? Well, I sure do! I can be the poster child at times for procrastination and inconsistency! But I have found a way to minimize those bad traits and maximize my success.

The way to win is by focusing on each day and the tasks that come with it. Too often, we are duped into obsessing about how huge and impossible our goals are. Instead, nurturing a winning habit begins with focusing on each day. I know it sounds a little counterintuitive but thinking too far ahead can stop you from working...

If you’re anything like me, you want to see improvement this year. You want to be better, you want those you love to experience greater joy and peace, and you want the people you work with to be successful at a new level. I knew it! You are a LEADER! Leaders always long for growth, improvement, and increase.

The only sure way to experience that is to do things differently than last year, and I would like to suggest a good place to start. What if, right here in January, in the first few days of this new year, we made a decision that could change our lives, not just this year? Ready?

1) REEVALUATE YOUR PRIORITIES

I know, not profound at all, but this action can change everything. Too often, we have forgotten to put the first things first, and we may start in the right direction and veer off the path. Someone once told me, “Only a good thing can go bad!” The key is to evaluate what’s important, plan actions to improve and become accountable to the plan.

I...

Happy New Year to you! I am excited about all the great work we will do together and individually in 2023. It will be a wonderful year as we work together to build our organization’s vision. We start by building and nurturing the right relationships.

The brilliant Stephen Covey once said when trust is low, change is slow and costly; when trust is high, change is faster and less expensive. This means as we plan toward all the positive things we want to achieve in the new year, we may want to consider taking time to build trust with our team members. People are more inclined to contribute to the vision if they trust you.

Let us start with making an assessment. Make a list of people you need to reach and measure how much they trust you based on your personal history. Then, where necessary, you can build on the existing trust or nurture trust with others. Anything that can be measured can be improved. This is the quickest way to nurture your vision and goals, which...

In our last post, we spoke about letting go of the past as we transition from 2022 to 2023. We can not let the mistakes of the outgoing year hinder how we approach our vision for the coming year. A part of our responsibility as leaders is effectively communicating hope to our team members, especially when there is fear about going into the new year. Visions are founded on the belief that they can and will happen. So while we begin with hope, we must not end there. We have to restrategize the vision for the coming year:

1. Talk to your team: A good way to prepare and energize your team for the coming year is to ask for their input on the current year and their suggestions for the new year. This builds hope and excitement.
2. Outline how they align with your organization’s overall vision: Your organization has a vision, and every plan should point to that vision. Highlighting the ways the 2023 vision builds the organization’s goals is a certain way to clearly communicate the...

We are in the final month of the year, and it is a joy for me to share with you as we collectively reflect on the victories and losses of the year. While there is room to be solemn as we think about the outgoing year, we should also nurture our hearts toward thanksgiving. There is much to be thankful for as we prepare for the year 2023.

As leaders, the transition from one year to the other looks different for us. We are tasked with outlining our organization’s vision, and while it is easy to write certain goals down, there is always an element of walking into the unknown. What will the new year bring? Will we achieve half the things on my plan? What about the things we did not achieve this year?

These are all valid questions to ask yourself as you prepare for 2023, but the first step of drafting a new vision is to learn from the past but not dwell there. Yes, there were a lot of setbacks. Yes, there were big rocks that had to be carried over, but the new year is...

Leadership will often require us to be courageous. It will occasionally challenge our biases and views about several circumstances. But, on the other hand, sometimes, leadership requires that you do the challenging.

Making changes to the process looks very different depending on the context of your role or what you have to rethink. Several times, challenging the process begins with you. It starts with searching for the ways you have gotten comfortable. Choosing to push yourself toward innovation and growth by honestly assessing your performance is the most radical form of challenging the process. Because your team never really does what you say they should do; instead, they do what they have seen you do.

Next, we must seek challenging tasks that test our skills and abilities. Growth comes not from doing what you are best at but from doing the hard things. What do you struggle with that is essential to you and your team’s growth? What classes are you taking to...