How Can I Become a Better Leader? | Ankush Jain

I’ve wanted to be a leader for a long time. Even at the start of my corporate career in my early 20s, when I would be put onto internal courses and asked by the facilitators “Do you see yourself as a leader or a follower?” I’d always put myself into the leader group. I felt like that was the correct answer if I wanted to have a good career. 

However, I didn’t feel like a leader inside because I struggled to lead myself.

I was out of integrity all over the place. If I agreed to a deadline with my boss there was only a 50% chance I would meet it and then I would look for excuses to justify why I hadn’t met the deadline. At home, if I had agreed to help my dad out with some mundane task I’d try to find a way out of it. With myself – which was the biggest place I was out of integrity – if I told myself that I was going to start working out at the gym or eating healthily or try and make some kind of change, I would more often than not ignore that.

I thought no one else would know except me. This was a surefire way of undermining my self-esteem. My word to myself mattered less than my word to others. 

My world was filled with good intentions, rather than real commitments.

It was only when I started training to be a coach and getting coached that I had my eyes opened up to where I was not showing up as a leader in my own life and in my world.

As my eyes opened, I was able to change my behaviours and start further developing my leadership skills. I’ve really enjoyed helping my clients do the same.

Leadership isn’t a role or a job or a title, leadership is who we are being every single day.

I talked more about this topic, especially around our excuses to keep our commitments, in a talk I had with Daniel Magnusson for his podcast Human Change. If you’d like to step up as a leader I recommend you check it out below.