Side effects of Being agile

Everything has side effects. Some are very welcomed some are not.
 By increasing your agile mindest, a lot of welcomed side effects can be expected. People who develop and work consistency on their agile mindset are on a journey to become a better self-leader day by day.
What does this means? What are the qualities of a self-leader?

And why is it so interesting to become a (better) Self-leader?

Well, let us start with one part of the word: LEADER. A leader is a person who other people wants to follow by nature. They want to follow a person who already has something the others are seeking for. This starts in our childhood and it goes on continuously.
Age and experience are not the only not always the best criteria for being a leader. Nowadays we have so many possibilities to work smarter than harder due to digitalisation that very often older people loves to learn form the younger generation. So this might be a first paradigm that has to be overcome.

Let us assume this is done.

What is a „SELF“ -LEADER“.

This is a person who is able to mange her/his activities very effectively towards their goal. First of all these people do have goals!!! 
Do not lough I meet often people who does not know why and what kind of goal they should choose.

As we all can not manage time. We all have the same 24 hours day by day. But what we can mange are our activities 🙂 So we can manage how effective, how easy, smooth and how smart we are working towards the things we are seeking for.

Therefore certain knowledge and discipline is required. You have to learn what are your effective activities and you have to implement them in to your daily life. So one side effect is that you are getting really organised.
But let us Start one step before that.

The most important thing you need is CLARITY.

You need to have clarity about what you want, how you want to live and with whom you want to work etc … 
The WHY gives a lot of clarity. So spend time in looking at WHY.
Here is s great Video from Simon Sinke about this.

This is quite an interesting journey you will go through but it worth every second you invest into it.

Let us assume you have clarity. Then you are well advised to create your goal achieving activities.
Coming back to agile, some of these activities could be to have the habit of reflecting every learning experience and really doing the retros. I heard about „agile“ teams that are saying we don’t do them as we don’t need them.

An important task in the agile environment is to turn every failure into a learning experience. Fine. This sounds great, theoretical. But we all are coming out of an education system where mistakes have been punished. They have been marked red and as a result we got bad reports.
So this is how our subconscious mind is programmed. What do you think your inner program says when it hears : Now failure and mistakes are very welcome because we learn from it? Probably it will not listen at all. So when you really want to shift this important attitude towards failure, then you have to change your inner program. You have to change the paradigm.

This is what I show people how to do. To change a paradigm there are two different ways, one is an emotional impact and the other way is via repetition, repetition, repetition.

This is a longer process and cannot be done by a two day workshop. You can create the awareness and the interest by a workshop but you cannot change the paradigm in two days. I learned this from Bob Proctor who is studying this phenomenon for more than 58 years. He is the master when it come to change a paradigm.

Coming back to this topic to turn every failure into a learning experience I recommend you to do the following: When you have situation that you might judge as a failure, write it down. Think about it. Think why it was good that this happens. Let us take an example. You were driving too fast and the police gave you a ticket to pay. So it rather obvious that you did not behave as the rules are you wished to do. So sit down, take a piece of paper and write down ten points, why it is good that the police caught you? This can be points like:
It is dangerous to drive too fast, so I am lucky that nobody got hurt.
or
I did not recognised that I was driving too fast, so I better stay more alert when driving or use the speed control.
etc.
I think you got what I mean.

By doing this, you really will learn of your failures. So when you get into the habit of doing this every time you experience this you will learn and learn and learn ….

Then you come to the point where you turn every failure into a learning experience.

It works by creating and implementing habits that let you achieve the wished outcome. This is what makes the mindset work so valuable. By the way the side effect here is, that these changes are sustain. Because you do not any more your will power to achieve this, it is a habit.

So to get positive side effects you are well advised to establish positiv habits into your life. You will fall in love with the process once you understood it rightly. Habits are based on our belief system and relay to our attitude. So make a decision to improve your life by improving your habits. Be agile and train your mind 🙂