Downloads
Workbook exercises that work for you
— Created by Kiran Scarr
Your Brand Promise
Who we are as leaders – our leadership brand – matters. Our leadership brands are not what we achieve; they are how we make others feel when we interact with them. Change does not take place by coercing ourselves into being someone else. We must fully step into who we are, from the inside out. Working on who we are from the inside out means tackling three core components of ourselves: our capabilities, mindset and behaviour.
This exercise is designed to help you identify the unique aspects of who you are and create a brand promise that you can live up to every day.
Click here for Your Brand Promise
You may find it useful also to download the following:
Know Your Values
Your values - the key fundamentals of who you are - guide your decisions in life and work. They represent a general expression of what is most important to you. They can be viewed as your own personal moral compass.
Your values show up in every choice, decision and action you make. It helps, therefore, to better understand what your core values typically look like in action.
This exercise is designed to help you uncover your core values and what they look like in action.
Know Your Strengths
The key to effectively communicating your impact is a deep understanding of your leadership strengths and how they help others in a way that matters.
This exercise is designed to help you uncover your core strengths and help you articulate them as your unique selling points.
Closing the Perception Gap
If you want to improve the impact you have on the people around you, it helps to understand your natural behavioural style, the impact this has and, therefore, the gap between how you think others perceive your and how they actual perceive you; the Perception Gap.
This exercise is designed to help you work through the following:
• Identify your dominant behavioural style or styles.
• Understand the impact of your behavioural style on other people.
• Uncover what this means regarding how others perceive you and what you can do to create more harmonious and productive relationships with the people around you.
Finding Mindfulness
Mindfulness practice can take many forms. When you choose mindfulness – the state of consciously being in the moment of now – you:
are present in the now and only that.
know how you feel without wishing it were different.
notice what is, without blame, criticism or judgement.
bring mind, feelings and soul into one.
create space.
silence the inner critic.
discover stillness.
find contentment from within.
This exercise is designed to help you answer the question: “How do I find mindfulness in my day to day life?”.
Letting Go of Perfection
The pursuit of perfection can hold us back in life and work. The essential route to letting go of perfection is to observe how your perfectionism traits show up day to day and experiment with what happens when you make a different choice.
This exercise is designed to help you work through the following:
• How your perfectionist tendencies show up.
• What triggers your perfectionist ways.
• How to experiment with changing your behaviour to allow perfection to no longer hold you back.
Creating a Vision for You
If you are struggling to decide on what path you take next, it helps if you develop a sense of where you want to be in 3 to 5 years in order to show you what direction to take. The vision does not need to be clear or perfect. It just needs to be felt by you, wholeheartedly.
This exercise is designed to help you work through the following:
• Identify how you would like your life to be in 3 to 5 years.
• What may be holding you back from living this picture.
• What steps you can take now to move you closer to this future vision for you.
Your Wheel of Life
When life is busy, energy is focused on competing demands and you increasingly feel you have no time to think, you may be feeling off balance. The Wheel of Life helps you consider each area of your life in turn and assess what areas may need more attention. It is powerful because it gives you a clear visual representation of your life as it stands, compared with the way you would ideally like your life to be.
This exercise is designed to help you identify how to refocus areas of your life to achieve greater balance and fulfilment.
Discovering Your Ikigai
What is your ikigai? It’s your reason for living. Your purpose. The reason you get out of bed each day. And the reason it’s important to go on a journey of discovering your ikigai is that it supports a long and meaningful life.
This exercise is designed to help you work through the following:
- what you love doing
- what you can contribute
- what you can be paid for; and
- what matters to you,
to help you discover your ikigai.
Finding Flow
The essential route to achieving greater fulfilment in work and life is to shift focus from ‘having it all’ to dedicating your energies to activities that make your highest contribution to things that really matter.
This exercise is designed to help you work through the following:
• Identify the activities that put you in a state of flow.
• Understand the common themes of how they make you feel.
• Draw on these details to uncover what activities you should focus on doing in order to achieve greater fulfilment in your work and life.
Your Sphere of Influence
Building your network of relationships requires a shift of attention to those people who have potential to contribute most to your success. This means focusing on the groups of people who play a specific role in contributing to your opportunities now and in the future.
This exercise is designed to help you work through the following:
• Identify the groups of people who play a specific role in contributing to your success.
• Understand which stakeholders to prioritise, in what way and for what purpose.
• Uncover an action plan on what to do to nurture your network and build deeper and stronger relationships that contribute to your greater impact.
Setting Meaningful Goals
As leaders we must take deliberate steps to show people how to implement organisational purpose on a day-to-day basis. We achieve this by shifting team KPIs from a static ‘to-do list’ of stated annual objectives to a dynamic dashboard that sets out meaningful goals connected to strategy and purpose, tracks progress, and provides recognition and feedback on achievement of agreed, dynamic milestones.
This exercise is designed to help you create the transparent tools necessary to agree and implement meaningful goals that connect your team members to the strategic objectives of your organisation.
Finding the Optimum Environment for You
If you are thinking about changing to a new team or place of work, put to one side the subject of what they are offering you. There needs to be a fundamental shift in focus from ‘having more’ to surrounding yourself with the right people and support that makes you contribute at your highest level. This means finding the platform that gives you the autonomy, flexibility and resources to maximise your potential and unleash unlimited potential in those around you.
This exercise is designed to help you work through the following:
• Identify the optimum environmental conditions that contribute to your success.
• Understand the elements of support you need to fulfil your highest potential.
• Draw on these details to uncover who and what you need to surround yourself with in your next phase of work or life.