Jack H. Llewellyn, PhD is a sports psychology consultant who has helped a major league baseball pitcher become a Cy Young Award winner, A NASCAR driver go from number six overall to number one and with the Winston Cup Series Championship, and countless leaders at Fortune 500 companies. Now, he’s written the book, Commonsense Leadership: No-Nonsense Rules for Improving Your Mental Game and Increasing Your Team’s Performance.
This is an excellent book for leaders at any stage in their leadership career. It’s a results-driven guidebook that teaches you how to recover quickly from adversity, thrive on stress, preform on the emotional edge, and create a motivating environment (instead of trying to motivate people).
My favorite chapter is the one titled, Winning Versus Surviving. In it, Llewellyn outlines the life factors that can fuel your everyday success. Some of those factors include:
No. 1 – Winners expect to win every day. Your plan as a leader should be based on what you expect to gain instead of what you expect to avoid. “The attitude of expecting to achieve something every day puts the probability of success on your side for whatever you may be trying to accomplish,” explains Llewellyn.
No. 2 – Winners have a positive mental attitude. “In practice, this means you may have to back up on occasion and accomplish smaller, separate tasks to regain a positive attitude. Don’t get bogged down by not being able to perform something that is very complex” says Llewellyn.
No. 3 – Leaders play every day at as high an emotional level as they can control.
No. 4 – Leaders strive on stress. Stress can be a wonderful thing if you control the stressors according to Llewellyn. “We make stress negative through our reactions to it,” adds Llewellyn. “The key is to focus your energy, which has traditionally been spent on battling stress, on using stress as an incentive to become better.”
No. 5 – Leaders have specific goals. Winners always know exactly what they want to achieve within a specific time frame.
No. 6 – Leaders realize the importance of teamwork. It’s important that every player know his or her role on the team and be able to execute it.
No. 7 – Leaders communicate with team members, not to team members. Your verbal and nonverbal means of communicating must be used in a very positive and constructive way so that every contact is truly a conversation.
No. 8 – In winning environments, leadership is tolerant of mistakes made while trying to succeed.
No. 9 – Leaders must provide players with a winning environment.
No. 10 – Leaders hold their focus and can change it quickly. No environment—no plan—is perfect, so there must be a plan B.
No. 11 – When focus is lost, winners can recover quickly, and leaders are able to help their team do the same.
No. 12 – Leaders have balance. Consistent leaders recognize the importance of fulfillment, both personally and professionally, and they evaluate balance in terms of quality, not quantity, or time spent.
No. 13 – Leaders are totally committed to winning; in other words. They have a burning desire to do so.
Thank you to the book's publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.
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