GETTING STARTED
Read Time: 9 minutes
Covenant Leadership is about developing the good, high-trust relationships in life that bring both happiness and success.
The more people trust your wisdom, that you love them, and that you get the job done, the stronger your relationships. That applies to your relationships at work, with family and friends, in your community—and especially the relationship you have with yourself.
To build that trust, simply practice the Covenant Virtues:
- Seek Wisdom
- Practice Love
- Get Results
Practice these virtues in your relationships with:
- Yourself
- Family and friends
- Work and Community
You don’t need to memorize 100 leadership tips to be successful at work. Covenant Leadership recognizes that human nature and human relationships are fundamentally the same whether they are with yourself, at home, or at work. The Covenant Virtues work across all of them.
When you practice a virtue in any of your relationships, you strengthen that virtue in all your relationships. Practicing love in the community or with friends strengthens your ability to practice love and build trust at work and with your family.
It’s All About Habits
Covenant Leadership is not just a way to do leadership. It is also a continuous leadership development process.
You become what you do. The key is to practice these virtues over and over until they become habits, embedded in your character, part of your very being. Covenant Leadership is about developing habits that make you wise and loving, and build strong, high-trust relationships. The more good habits you collect, the better leader you will become.
We are our habits. When we are under stress, we naturally fall back on our habits. That is why we say that people reveal themselves—their character comes out—in stressful situations.
Remember that mental habits are just as important as physical habits.
A Winning Approach
Many of us wake up each morning and slog through the day, one dismal day blurring into the next. We spend a lot of our energy, time and lives chasing things we’ve been told will make us happy, but don’t. We get anxious, overwhelmed, and burned out. We attack each other on social media.
Each year there is a Random Acts of Kindness Day and Week. At a time when kindness and love are scarce, it is a great idea. At the end of the week there is a call to continue doing one small act of kindness each day throughout the year. Wouldn’t that be nice—if more people did one kind thing for another each day?
Let’s step back and think about that. As humans, we are biologically wired for relationship, yet it is a stretch to ask people to do one random act of kindness for another each day.
What does that say about the overall health of our relationships as a society?
What does it tell us about the opportunity to transform leadership and culture to increase engagement, productivity, performance, recruiting and retention by practicing love?
What does it tell us about the opportunity to change our nation and world for the better by practicing love?
What if we changed our attitude from trying to remember to do one nice thing a day to seeing each day as full of opportunities to grow our leadership and happiness by practicing love?
Or broader, what if we went into each day actively looking for dozens opportunities to seek wisdom, practice love, and get results?
What if we saw every encounter with another person as an opportunity to practice love and gain wisdom? What if you felt a win every time you reinforced a habit? Instead of a slog, each day would become a chance to practice as many habits—to collect as many wins–as possible.
The reality is that if you just focus on seeking wisdom, practicing love, and getting results, and make them habits, part of your being, everything else in life will take care of itself. You will get the relationships that bring you happiness and success in life.
If you approached life that way, how fast would you develop your wisdom, love, and results? How would that transform your relationships with yourself, your family, and friends? How much more successful would you be as a leader at work? How much better of a parent would you be for your children?
Start Simple and Easy
Build Wins and Momentum
There are dozens of ways to seek wisdom, practice love, and get results.
To maximize success, start simple and easy. Choose one or two relatively easy actions that seek wisdom, practice love, or get results, and focus on making those habits. Collect wins to build your confidence, momentum, and self-leadership. When those become solid habits, choose one or two more actions, and do the same thing. As you gain self-leadership, confidence and momentum locking in easier habits, move to more challenging habits.
As you collect good habits, you become a good, wise, and loving leader who naturally builds high trust, high performance relationships.
One option is to commit yourself to committing as many acts of kindness each day as you can. That can include greeting people. An honest compliment. Opening a door. Thanking a service worker. Helping a co-worker move something. Practicing a positive attitude. Making room so another driver can enter your lane. Giving up a parking spot. Grabbing a grocery cart in the parking lot and bringing it to the door. Doing the dishes in the work sink. Getting into the habit of looking for as many ways as possible to be helpful.
If you are worried that doing the dishes in the work sink will lead to other people taking advantage of you, you might be right. But then again, is your primary aim dishwashing justice or taking advantage of an opportunity to practice love, get a win, build a habit and become a better leader?
Another option is to find a few things that you are already doing and convert them into habits.
Maybe you already do professional reading to keep up at work. If it isn’t a habit already, convert it into one.
You probably spend time with your spouse and kids. Can you turn that into a habit by intentionally setting aside 1:1 time with each of them? Your spouse and kids probably each have something they are passionate about. Can you learn about it and share it with them?
Habits are about consistency. Find something that you do right most of the time and strive to do it right all the time.
Make it a habit to regularly study Covenant Leadership, human nature, and relationships. Make a habit of setting aside some time each day for self-reflection.
There are many ways to practice love at work. Know the stories of each of your people and what is important to them. Sit down with them and help them develop and advance a career plan. Actively listen to them. Mentor their leadership development. Choose one or two of these, make them habits, then tackle a couple of more.
You can practice getting results by developing habits to overcome procrastination and drive projects to closure.
Our mental and emotional habits are as important as our physical habits. If your thoughts drift to negative places out of habit, recognize that and make it a habit to shift your thinking to something positive.
Tackle a few habits at a time. Tackle easy habits before more challenging ones. When you get one habit locked down, start developing the next one. And then the next.
Build Habits by Collecting Wins
Every time you do or think the right thing, that is a win. Celebrate that win mentally. Pat yourself on the back. As you string the wins together, they will become a habit and part of your character.
As you are practicing habits, don’t think too far down the road. Don’t worry about whether you will be to sustain a habit for another week or month. You will be more successful if you focus on getting another win this hour, this morning, this afternoon. In his book, Unbeatable Mind, retired Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine shares that his boat team was the first to make it through SEAL training without losing anyone. The key to their success? They didn’t try to make it to the end of the week—that was too far away. They stayed focused in the present, on taking the next step, doing one more pushup, swimming one more stroke.
Practice this focused thinking until it becomes a mental habit itself.
You will fall short many times in the process. That is normal. Learn from the miss, get back up quickly, and move on. Don’t let a miss distract you from your next win. Always positive, focused on wins. Always moving forward. The key is to decrease the percentage of misses and increase the percentage of wins over time.
When you learned to walk, you took about 14,000 steps a day and fell up to 30 times an hour. You got right back up and kept trying. It took about 2.6 million steps—small wins—for you to become a proficient walker.
Working hard to overcome failure and develop habits? You’ve been there and done that. You already have a track record of success.
Research shows that establishing a habit can take anywhere from 18 days to more than 10 weeks—so be patient.
Self-Leadership is Critical
Self-leadership is your self-discipline, your willpower. It is your ability to focus on what needs to be done, and fight through obstacles like temptation, laziness, anxiety, and fear to get it done. The more self-leadership you have, the faster you will collect wins, habits, Covenant Leadership, and happiness and success.
Every time you achieve a win towards developing a habit, you also strengthen your habit of self-leadership. That makes every Covenant Leadership win a double win.
That is why Covenant Leadership starts simple and easy, and with your strengths. As you gain wins, you gain momentum, and winning itself becomes a habit. The more you practice self-leadership by fighting through obstacles for wins, the stronger your self-leadership becomes. That prepares you for taking on the tougher habits and obstacles as you gain strength.
Fight Through This
When I encounter an obstacle—a temptation to skip a workout or eat something I shouldn’t or get angry with a stupid driver or drift toward unhealthy thinking—I have found that I am much more successful doing the right thing if I catch myself and think “Fight through this!”.
Fight through the temptation, the obstacle, the feeling. Fight through and take one more step. Fight through and keep going one more second. Fight through and let go of the anger, anxiety, or negative thought. Reset and focus everything on getting the immediate win.
Fight through this is becoming a habit with real benefits. It prevents me from accidentally reinforcing a bad mental or physical habit. It motivates me to get results—the win of doing the right thing right now one more time.
If you are conscious that every win is a double-win—the habit you are reinforcing and the habit of self-leadership—you are more likely to fight through obstacles and get those wins.
The more self-leadership you develop, the more you will develop the habits you need to be a respected, high trust, high performance leader.
Life is a Pilgrimage:
Write Your Stories Together
As human beings, we are made for relationship. That is why we find fulfillment, happiness, in good relationships. Covenant Leadership works precisely because it recognizes and engages that fundamental reality about our human nature and relationships.
Life is a journey—a pilgrimage to fulfillment and happiness—that we walk together. Our lives are the stories of how we walk that pilgrimage together.
We develop the deepest, most fulfilling relationships when we go through challenging times with others. That is why people develop deep, often life-long bonds while facing challenging times together whether its sports, disasters, illness, or war.
It should be no surprise that when life is about relationships, the more you surround yourself with people practicing Covenant Leadership (relationships), the more successful you will be.
Find other people pursuing Covenant Leadership and journey together. Share ideas. Support each other. Challenge each other. Pick each other up when you fall. Suffer with each other when times are challenging. Celebrate with each other when times are good.
Your best option is to develop a small group of people who can seek wisdom, practice love, and get results together with you. Write the stories of your lives together.
At www.covenantleadership.net we are working to build that community of people seeking happiness and success together. We need your help. Stay up to date with Covenant Leadership through our blog, podcasts, videos, and community. Ask questions. Share your wisdom, experiences, and wins.