5 Questions to Ask Yourself Daily
Jan 21, 2024
While studying Great Depression businesses created by successful entrepreneurs, I discovered five core practices that were sets of daily habits for them. These five core practices are the heart and soul of the Work Positive framework from which I coach companies to develop a positive work culture.
These entrepreneurs drove their behavior by asking themselves five questions daily that charted their course to successful leadership of companies that thrive today almost 100 years later.
What questions do you ask yourself daily?
Do any of these questions transform you into a better leader?
Get up the courage and ask the people around you, “How are you better at work and life because I’m leading you?”
Become a more successful, positive work culture leader by asking yourself these five questions daily:
What Am I Thinking?
Your successful work culture leadership starts and stops in your head. Your thoughts guide your every action and relationship. Your leadership succeeds or sucks because of your thoughts.
The first question successful, positive work culture leaders ask themselves is, “What am I thinking?”
Successful leaders guard their thoughts religiously, only renting space to positive ones. They place security guards around their mind that maintain a singular perspective: focus on the positive and filter out the negative. They have little patience with negativity like 24/7 news channels and feed their minds positive nourishment.
Who Am I Attracting?
While successful culture leadership begins in your head, it bears fruit in relationships with others in whom you invest time. As Jim Rohn said so well, “You are the average of the five persons with whom you spend the most time.”
The second question successful, positive work culture leaders ask themselves is, “Who am I attracting?”
Successful leaders guard their relationships like their thoughts, only investing time in positive people. They have firm social boundaries that limit availability to negative persons—“Eeyore Vampires” as I call them—and focus on attracting positive people. They know it costs too much to do business with some people.
Why Am I Working?
Successful culture leadership at work begins in your head and reflects through relationships into your heart. The answer to this third question, “Why am I working?”, lies in understanding your purpose in leading work.
Successful culture leaders engage emotionally on a passionate level with their labor. Their work matters to them. This alignment between passion and purpose communicates to those whom they lead.
This positive engagement fuels their imagination and frees them to discover solutions to customers’ problems in innovative, added-value ways. This creative expression satisfies their “Why?” and furthers their successful leadership journey.
How Am I Doing?
Successful culture leaders understand that the what, who, and why questions beg for reflection, i.e., “How am I doing?” The key is to acknowledge areas for improvement while accelerating what’s moving forward now.
Their singular focus is, “How can I act strategically?”
So the fourth question they ask themselves daily is, “How am I doing?”
The Achievement Prescription drives the tactics of their strategy. Attention (to positive thoughts and people) + Intention (the answer to their “Why?”) + Action (strategic and tactical productivity) results in positive results. Such positive results are what drive the creation of a positive work culture.
Work is a whole lot more fun when producing successful results!
Where Am I Going?
These Great Depression gurus understood that once positive results emerge from their positive mental, social, and emotional achievements, successful leadership requires sustaining. You must keep leading.
Successful, positive culture leaders ask themselves daily, “Where am I going?”
Serving others sustains a positive work culture of successful leadership. Think of it as servant leadership. Act in the best interests of the team and community, to improve others’ lives. Gratitude for their achievements fueled their philanthropy.
It’s not that positive leaders think less of themselves; just less about themselves.
Ask yourself these five questions daily to become the successful, positive work culture leader you want to be.
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