Top 3 Key Pieces of Leadership Advice From Former Mentors - and my top book recommendations!

In this blog post, I wanted to take a moment to highlight business and leadership advice that has significantly impacted my career and provide further reading for those interested in leadership development and emotional intelligence.

Two former mentors I’ve had in my career provided me with key pieces of advice that have stuck with me over the years. These are:

1. Context before emotion

2. Remain curious

3. Random activity leads to random results

Building on these key principles, let’s dive deeper into these topics.

Context Before Emotion

One of the most challenging lessons for me so far, is learning to put context before emotion. One of my former mentors used this phrase with me often, “Remember: context before emotion.” It took me probably a year to really understand what this phrase means. My mentor used this to help myself, and our team, make decisions based on objective information, not our emotions. It’s easy to take things personal and think things are all about us, when in reality, many times someone else’s actions have nothing to do with us. The more I’ve been able to see situations from an objective lens, the less time I’ve spent being upset about outcomes or factors that may not even exist. After utilizing this principle for the past two years, sometimes I still find myself becoming upset in certain situations, or analyzing a situation based on emotion. When these occurrences come up, I strive to take a step back, look at the objective information, and take 24-48 hours to make a determination on next steps.

Remain Curious

Another key lesson I learned from a mentor is to remain curious. Each moment is an opportunity to learn something. Whether the moment is seen as positive, negative, or maybe even just a daily interaction, the more we can remain curious, the more we provide ourselves with the opportunity to learn something new. For example, when we take a step back and assess daily conversations, we may notice that we personally, and our communication counterparts, are not listening to understand or engage, but to respond. When I first began to work on improving my communication, I realized that I was frequently using close-ended questions and jumping to respond instead of pausing to listen. Weekly calls with the mentor who taught me the importance of curiosity and communication helped improve not only my communication in the business-realm, but also changed my personal life.

Random Activity Leads to Random Results

If you’re like me, you may be multi-passionate and aim to always get things done quickly, no matter what task pops up in the day. With how busy everyone’s day to day is, it can be easy to get lost in never-ending to-do lists, only to find that you’ve made little advancement towards your overall long-term goal. Another lesson I’ve learned from past mentors is the vitality of specific, daily action. As my mom likes to say, “fail to plan, plan to fail.” When we don’t have a plan in place to take action towards our goals, the day can quickly fill up with other tasks that, while potentially beneficial in their own right, lend no gains towards end-goal achievement. For this reason, previous mentors recommended the completion of weekly prep. At a former organization we called it “Sunday Prep” – basically, each Sunday night we would each sit down and write up our goals for the week as well as daily activity to work towards goal achievement. Although I am no longer with that organization, I still utilize the Sunday Prep method to ensure that I am specific in my activity to achieve the results I am after.

In summarizing this post, I wanted to provide further opportunities to learn more about business, leadership, and emotional intelligence. The list below are books that I have found to be impactful for professional and personal development. You can find each of these on Amazon, and many are accessible through Spotify – if you have a premium membership, you can access 15 hours of audiobooks per month for free. You can check out some of my favorite books for personal and professional development below.

Thanks for reading!