1st Lead U - Leadership Development
This podcast, now in Season 3, is dedicated to self-development, self-awareness, and learning to lead oneself so listeners can lead others well. If someone cannot lead themselves well, it will be difficult for them to be an effective leader of others. This podcast will help listeners understand what it means to 1st Lead U and build confidence in themselves and their leadership ability. Personal Growth Coach John Ballinger has spent 35 years developing the knowledge and material he shares with individuals, business owners, and leaders from a variety of areas.
1st Lead U - Leadership Development
Unlocking Leadership Potential Through Journaling
If you can get to the point where, after an event takes place and you feel like you may have reacted versus respond, now go in your office and I mean literally take three minutes, four minutes and just journal that down while it's fresh.
Announcer:Welcome to First Lead you, a podcast dedicated to building leaders, expanding their capacity, improving their self-awareness through emotional intelligence and developing deeper understanding of selfless leadership.
John Ballinger:Hello America and welcome to First Lead U where we believe selfless leadership is essential. America is suffering a leadership crisis. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence is the key to developing selfless leaders.
Announcer:Now here is personal growth coach John Ballinger.
John Ballinger:Hello leaders and welcome to First Lead you. My name's John Ballinger and I'm here with my co-host, mr Douglas Ford. Good afternoon.
Douglas Ford:John Good to see you?
John Ballinger:Good to see you. You know we work around each other, but sometimes we just high five in the hallways, don't we?
John Ballinger:And sometimes we can't do that. Yeah, we can't even do that. Um, uh, like I said, welcome to first lead you. Uh, we're in season three and, uh, if you listen to uh, the first three podcasts of the season, we started out talking about chart, which we're going to be uh kind of rolling out through season three. We've had some special guests, uh, that have helped talk about unlocking the brain's potential. Uh, roadblocks or challenges could be DNA, things like that, and then how to work out the brain to make it stronger through the process, Uh. But today we're going to be talking about something that we've talked about for probably the entire two seasons. It comes up periodically, but it's one of the number one things that we talk about needs to happen for leadership development, but it's also one of the most difficult things to get leaders to do. Mr Ford, what is that? Journaling?
Douglas Ford:It is favorite word.
John Ballinger:We say that people cringe, like how can I, how can I learn to get better at leadership? And we say, well, we'll get a journal. What else can I do? No, we've got to learn how to journal. What else can I do? No, we've got to learn how to journal. And it's important to learn how to journal as a leader because it helps you reflect and look back on things, decisions you've made, challenges that have come up during the day.
John Ballinger:How you reacted to a, responded to it Um and it. And it helps you create what we called in one of the previous episodes Um and it. And it helps you create what we called in one of the previous episodes cookies. It helps you, uh kind of your brain, uh develop cookies which are in the world of computers. Uh, the the computer actually takes search engine uh information and holds it.
John Ballinger:So the next time you go to that website, it kind of pops up cause it knows what you're looking for. Next time you go to that website, it kind of pops up because it knows what you're looking for. And in the scenario where you start seeing patterns of things that you need to learn in leadership, it's good that you have built your own cookies through journaling. Oh, I've seen that before, and here's how I had to deal with it, and here's how the response was to the team member. The team member, and, and so one of the things I wanted to start with is have you ever written an email, sent it, later read it and wished you hadn't sent it?
Douglas Ford:Yeah, I think we probably all have done that, at least once.
John Ballinger:Yeah, this is kind of like journaling. If you think through that is you, you're. You're basically sending yourself an email. You're writing yourself a note and saying this is what happened in this circumstance or this issue or this matter. This is how reacted, this is how should have responded instead of reacted, and I want to learn how to better respond next time instead of react.
John Ballinger:And it's it's really what, what I've learned, especially in court being an expert witness or um, reading emails that I've sent you know they tell you write an email as if you're going to read it to a jury and that's a. That's a tough thing to think through. When you're writing an email, especially if you're emotional because you can hear somebody hit keys when they're, when they're emailing, you're like, oh, that's not going to be a good email because they're they're hitting those keys hard. But the journaling process is is really a reflection. We'll tell leaders this is good for mental health. It's really good to just take all that out on a piece of paper and just reflect on it, and it will be good for your sanity to just get it out of your head.
Douglas Ford:Absolutely. And you know, before we get too deep, we recognize there's different types of journaling, right? So there can be just I'm just writing up my day and just sharing, you know, sharing those thoughts mostly with my myself in terms of putting them on paper. But when you start talking about journaling from a leadership standpoint, it takes on a little bit different um frame of reference, and one of the things that I did as part of our research and preparing for this episode is I looked up are there are there true scientific benefits to journaling and and this would encompass a lot of different types of journaling and I found, of course, there's a list of things that popped up like these are the scientific benefits from journaling, but there was also an article on web md.
John Ballinger:We all know that's very reliable for the most part don't doctors have that in the office.
Douglas Ford:That's what my doctor uses, I think. But um, but you know, it was just just another kind of validation, verification that there are some true benefits and so mental health benefits from doing that, and so I want to just share a couple of the benefits and then maybe a little bit later we'll get into the WebMD article. And there's Forbes articles, there's Inc magazine articles. We even have a former guest who is a behavioral scientist that penned an article in LinkedIn, manny Rodriguez. He's been on our podcast before and we'll share all the information as we go through.
Douglas Ford:But one of the benefits of journaling is it reduces stress, anxiety, gains self-confidence. It can even improve your immune system, and I'll share some interesting things about that from the WebMD article. Of course it does help good mental health, improves your memory, it helps you with your concentration, enhances critical thinking, it can improve your mood, help you achieve your goals, boost self-awareness we talk a lot about that and it can even help you sleep better. So those are just a few of the things that are listed. If you look up, what are the benefits of journal Can?
John Ballinger:I add two more to that, absolutely Two more, and these are two that really help me. And, yes, I journal. I happen to journal on my phone because I've got a notes app on my phone and I do a lot of journaling and if you looked at my phone you'd see different topics that I label them and when I when that topic comes up in a scenario, I will go to that particular note folder and add to that journal and as I'm adding to it, I'll reflect back reading through the journal notes, cause you can talk into your phone. You know you can do that, mr Ford. You can talk into the notes part of your phone and it'll dictate for you. So, and the reason I say that is because when people say, well, it takes too much time, it does not.
Douglas Ford:Talking into your phone and it recording doesn't take a lot of time right, and it helps if you go back and you spell check it and read through. That's.
John Ballinger:That's important too, because siri doesn't always get right she doesn't, especially with us southern boys down here, but there's, there's a piece of this that I can tell you works and it's improving emotional regulation and that's when you write down, when you journal the experience. It can help you process what your emotions were like during that process or that event, that occurrence, and it helps you develop better coping mechanisms because of that reflection and you're thinking through, and then it helps facilitate problem solving. Writing down the thoughts concerns better coping mechanisms because of that reflection and you're thinking through and then it helps facilitate problem solving. Writing down the thoughts concerns helps you individually organize your thoughts and identify potential solutions to problems. So those are two critical pieces when you're dealing with as a leader, when you're dealing with the different scenarios coming at you all day long, helps you regulate emotion and helps you facilitate a problem solving as well.
Douglas Ford:Yeah, and again, I think there's a good point to be made here about the intentionality of journaling and several articles I read in preparation talked about. On the one hand, it can be super beneficial for you just to write, sit down and just write thoughts and get things out of your mind, but when you're thinking about doing it from a leadership standpoint, it really needs to have a point of view in what you're journaling about and there needs to be some, probably framework around it. It talks about what was the situation, who was in the room, how did they react, how did I react? And it could be good.
Douglas Ford:Let's not assume that this is all from a negative standpoint. Like you need to journal those good moments as much as you need to journal the moments where you weren't as successful, and so it reinforces those processes and or, as you said, it helps you to think through those moments where you missed the mark so that when you come up against that the next time, like I said, you've created this little cookie that's there, and when you see that start to play out, you're like, oh, I remember this and I remember how I responded last time. Here was my solution in my journaling. Let me draw on that, as opposed to just my raw emotion or other other circumstances that are surrounding me.
John Ballinger:Yeah, and those cookies, if you imagine I don't know if the audience has ever eaten a Chips Ahoy it's difficult to take a bite of Chips Ahoy and crumbs not fall. And the important piece of the cookies are those crumbs. Those crumbs that you actually journal. Let you go back, kind of like you're looking for something and so they tell you to leave things behind so you can come back and find your way. It is that critical to leadership development. And I met with a young man yesterday I've been meeting with for years and his one of his comments was if I would ever start journaling, like you've told me to the past few years, I would, and I'm like, yep, you sure would. Told me to the past few years, I would. And I'm like, yep, you sure would. But the discipline it takes to journal is is more than most want to try to do because they think it's difficult. But, like I said, technology has made journaling much more easy than sitting down with a pencil and piece of paper or a book.
Douglas Ford:Absolutely, and one of the things that are key to journaling is, as we mentioned earlier, was some structure. If you don't know what to journal about, ai is a great help with that, like they can create prompts for you. I need 25 writing prompts related to leadership development to use in my journaling and leadership development process. It'll pull them up for you and then you can just follow those prompts and answer the questions that it provides. Again, the framework that we talked briefly about outline the situation. Who's in the room? How did you respond? How did they respond? What did you want the end result to be? What can you do better next time? Those can be the prompts that you use. You can walk through your day with that, so it doesn't have to be something that is so restrictive and you have to do exactly the same thing every time. But consistency is definitely the key to success. Everything I read, everything that we've talked about, everything that we know just personally, consistency is a key to success.
John Ballinger:Can't you tell the difference in the leaders that we work with that journal versus do not?
Douglas Ford:Oh yeah, absolutely. I tell the difference in myself when I'm, when I'm consistently doing it and when, uh, oh, it's been three or four weeks or it's been this or it's been that. You know, it's like you just have to kind of keep getting back on the horse, so to speak, and keep staying after it, because eventually you develop that habit that if you don't do it you kind of miss it.
John Ballinger:Yeah. So when we come back, we're going to talk about what do I journal. I think that's critical. It's kind of like going to the restaurant and and, uh, saying what, what does the cook eat? You know he or she is going to eat their own food. It's probably good enough for you to eat. So we're going to talk about what do I journal. How did I begin journaling, how did I get disciplined and consistent at it and how it's helped me with my leadership.
Douglas Ford:So we'll be back. Welcome back to First Lead you. Today we've been talking about journaling and the process of journaling and the benefits of journaling how it can improve your mental health, your emotional health, help you sleep better at night, but it can also contribute significantly to your own personal development journey and your leadership development journey, and I mentioned previously that even WebMD talks about the benefits of journaling, talks about the benefits of journaling, but one of the guests that was on our program previously, manny Rodriguez, is a behavioral scientist and he has a blog on LinkedIn called the Behavior Bulletin and one of his recent articles talks about the power of the pen and paper, how journaling propels leadership growth, and so he studies this everyday leader, uh, behavioral science and behavioral development, and so some of the things that he listed and there's multiple things that you can go to, like I said, there's forbes articles and ink articles that you can go and look at, but he he listed these things as some of the benefits of journaling and it's one you learn from the experience. Two, you can set goals and hold yourself accountable using journaling. It's a great way for stress management and your own personal well-being and it also helps you increase your communication and team building, because, as you see what you've done, how you've reacted, there might be times where you can go back and you can correct some behaviors that may have happened and or recognize team members who did well and you need to make sure that you show appreciation for them, that so it's not just living in that moment when you go back and you reflect on it.
Douglas Ford:So, john, I want to kind of take some time in this second half here to talk to you about your journaling practices, because you're you're the big proponent for journaling. You talk about it all the time. You encourage people, do it all the time. It's certainly part of what we encourage people to do when we meet with them and or leading them. So share with us a little bit about the things that you journal about related to leadership development, your own personal leadership, uh, when you uh sit down to to journal.
John Ballinger:Well, I I think the most, one of the most important, if not the most important parts of journaling for leadership is learning responding versus reaction, and I want to tell the audience why this is so important.
John Ballinger:Responding, which is really a spinoff word of responsibility, is considerate and deliberate. Reacting means to meet one action with another. If you think through that as a leader and you think, all right, I have a responsibility to myself and my team to talk through. Whatever the crisis of the moment is and it may not be a crisis, it could just be day-to-day activity. It could be a meeting with your team and learning to be thoughtful and deliberate in how you speak to them, versus being abrupt, you know, short and make people think what in the world's going on, that, whether you want to believe it or not, and this happened, this has happened this week and some of the companies I've been dealing with no-transcript. The leader I don't think the leader realizes how much of an impact how they respond to react to a team and impact that team that day, cause you can literally react the wrong way and cut production and productivity down 50% in a day because you've literally thrown a grenade into your team and they are just shell shot.
John Ballinger:So one of the things that I do when I'm journaling and I do this, this is not just note-taking at the end of the day because you've met with these customers or clients and you're trying to make notes on those clients it's setting aside and thinking about the leadership that I had to do today and the decisions I had to make with the occurrences and events that happened with me. Journal through that process but use how did I respond or how did I react as a as just at kind of a jumping off point to journaling yeah, and I was just thinking through, as you were.
Douglas Ford:We're talking about that respond versus reacting. It's like you know, in sports we have an advantage sometimes because a lot of sports are recorded on video or you know whatever, and you can go back and you can slow that down, you can do slow-mo and you can say, oh right, here, here, see, this is where I made the critical error right, or here's where I made the right move to make this happen. And you know, with the Telestrator now on broadcast sports, you can point that out. That's something that doesn't happen in everyday life. We're not following around with a video camera and we're not then replaying that every day. But the journaling process can certainly help that and so thinking through that idea of responding versus reacting can make a lot of difference in those moments of journal.
John Ballinger:I'm going to ask you, based on being a dad, at one point an employee and now a business owner, can you reflect back and see the amount of leaders that you worked under that were very reactionary versus response driven oh?
Douglas Ford:absolutely. I mean, you know, as you kind of look back across all that, I can look back at a time when I was much more reactionary as a father, uh, and I'm trying to be more response driven, uh, now, and I've been working on that and uh, you know, still don't always get it right, but the more I think through that process, the more I write down about that part of my life as well, the more I can respond appropriately to situations and hopefully add to it from a beneficiary beneficial standpoint, versus reacting to it and causing more destruction or blowing up something that could be a good thing to start with.
John Ballinger:I want to.
John Ballinger:I want to say the two words when it comes to responding considerate and deliberate. I mean, write those words down audience. Considerate and deliberate when you can learn, as a leader, to respond with consideration to the person that's in front of you that has the issue that's going on, because I really think team members want to do the right thing. You're always going to have people inside the company that don't want to do the right thing and a lot of times we'll gravitate to those people that don't do the right thing.
John Ballinger:But you've got 80, 90% of your people that want to do the right thing and they're coming to you as the leader, wanting the correct response in order to move forward with whatever events going on. If you react, you're you're basically taking a situation that's already probably bad and pouring gas on top of it, and that person's going to leave and not do the job they need to do. So remember those two words considerate and deliberate when you're journaling and make sure that you ask yourself that I was. I consider it and deliberate when the what was the way I responded? Or did I react? And it was haste, hastily, and it kind of, like I said, threw a grenade in the situation.
Douglas Ford:That's good Good words. So how often do you journal daily? Okay, so I'm starting my journaling journey. I'm probably not going to do it every day.
John Ballinger:You're not, you're not going to do that, but I'm telling you, it's kind of like if you, if you started working out, you know it's. What do they call it? New year's resolution.
John Ballinger:I'm going to start working out and you work out and you find yourself mid to late January and something came up and you missed her three days and you go back. It's like good gracious, how did I lose it? That quick Journaling is like that. You can start and you'll feel good and all of a sudden life comes up and you'll stop for two or three days, you'll come back to it and you'll read your notes that you've journaled. Man, I've lost my touch, you know. So I do.
John Ballinger:I journal daily and it may not be a lot, you know, because once you start developing more and more as a leader and you learn to respond more, you're not journaling as much reactionary thing. Sometimes I will verbally journal to you when I come in and say, well, I botched that one, and I will say I reacted versus responded. But what I would ask the reader to do is start out with just once a week. Just once a week is start out with just once a week, just once a week. And what we encourage leaders to do is try to at least spend one hour a day, whether it's reading, reflecting, journaling, quiet time. And you may not be able to start that one hour a day, and if you could start one hour a week and just get started. You're going to see that it is really beneficial for getting stuff out of your head on the paper and helping you out right.
Douglas Ford:One thing I like to point out, too, is it doesn't have to be a solid hour. It could be I'm going to do reading for 20 minutes in the morning as part of my morning routine, and it's going to be, you know, 20 minutes the middle of the day where I'm doing the reflecting. Or I'm going to spend 20 minutes at the end of the day doing the journaling, and so now you've got an hour that you spent on your personal and self-development throughout the day, and it's a lot more manageable than like, oh, I'm going to block out from, you know, from seven to eight. I'm going to do that. Well, as sure as you say you're going to do that, something's going to blow it up. So it gives you the opportunity, multiple times throughout the day, have touch points where you're working on yourself, thinking about yourself, doing that development process. So don't feel like you've got to get all done in a single 60 minute sit down session. Spread it out across the day and use it to help you.
John Ballinger:Yeah, and if you can get to the point where, after an event takes place and you feel like you may have reacted versus respond, you know, go into your office and I mean literally take three minutes, four minutes, and just journal that down while it's fresh, that way, like, like Douglas said, you're you're throughout the day, you're doing your journaling.
Douglas Ford:So how has journaling helped you with your leadership process and development?
John Ballinger:Probably the key, because I, by nature, I had a bad temper. Um, I inherited that temper from my dad and my dad had an extremely bad temper, and I think tempers can be, um, handed down through DNA. Um, it's helped me tremendously with my temperament. Uh, people, people now expect me to be the the cold water to the fire, so they, they, they expect it. If I get the least bit excited now, it just tears everybody out of frame because they're like that's not John, something's going on with John right now because that is not him. You want your team to see you as that calm person and they need that In today's society where things are just chaotic. They need that calm presence in their life.
Douglas Ford:Now you brought up a good analogy there water to the fire, not gas to the fire. I used to say all the time with an organization I worked with quick, my hair's on fire, grab the gasoline. They never tried to solve the problem in advance. It was always very reactionary and most of the time the way they reacted made the situation even worse.
John Ballinger:And we're not going to go down the road of emotional intelligence, even though I'd love to Not for this episode, yeah, but that is so important. So the journaling will actually help with your emotional intelligence, which leaders have got to have today more than ever.
Douglas Ford:So one last question before we wrap up today. So you mentioned this just a little bit, but I'd like you to clarify for us. So I know that a lot of times at the end of the day, you know we'll be parting ways and you're sitting somewhere and you're writing some notes down and you will often say I'm going to take, I got to need to write my notes for the day. That's different than your journaling, correct?
John Ballinger:It is different than journaling. The notes that you're you're taking you know that I'm talking about. We're just reflecting on has to do with any of the different business things I'm dealing with that day, and you've been around me enough to know that during a day, how many things can I touch? I mean, it's sometimes it's dozens during the day and I make notes about all those so that when it comes back up I'm dealing with it. Well, that's different than the journal. Now I'm a journal after I get done, but note taking about the events with clients, customers, vendors, things like that is different than the journaling itself. The journaling is more self-development for you, where the note taking is kind of forward, facing the company.
Douglas Ford:Yeah, I wanted to make sure we touched on that, that you made a very good distinction there, and because I don't want people to think, oh well, if I just write about my day and all the different things that I did, that they're kind of quote unquote journaling in the way that we're talking about. Again we mentioned at the beginning of the episode there's lots of ways to journal right and and none of them are incorrect because it's for you, it's for your benefit. So you, you can do a gratitude journal, you can journal about your day, but when you're thinking about leadership development, it needs to have a very specific point of view and reason as to why you're doing it and kind of stay focused on that. Yeah, you may need to make notes about clients. You need to get back to situations that come up that need to be addressed later on, how you're going to advance the next step in your business development plan. But take time, be intentional about journaling journaling related to your own personal development and your leadership journey.
John Ballinger:Yeah, and I've got one more thing that, uh, as far as what does it help me to do and what can it help the leader to do? It actually helps with brain processing speed, which is so critical to a leader because there's so much coming at you. If your brain can't quicken the speed of thought, you're going to get mired down because you've got you've got one coming at you and asking you something your brain's trying to still process. How do I respond? Or did you react immediately, Turn around as somebody standing there, and they've got one. And so I talk about speed at speed of thought a lot when we're, when we're talking about leadership development, journaling actually helps you with that. So and I know I have a lot of leaders last week like, how do you deal with so much all the time and it just coming at you? Well, journaling has helped me do that. It helps me with my speed of thought.
Douglas Ford:Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you. That was, uh, I've enjoyed that, uh, discussion about journaling. It's something we talked about earlier. It's like, hey, we can actually do an episode on this, uh, so, uh, thank you for leading us through that and sharing some of your practices and thoughts on that.
John Ballinger:Yeah, and I look forward to starting the chart uh discussion. Uh, we're going to be able to uh, uh, hopefully, talk about that. We're going to go with the c's and when do you be? When is it? Are you a coach, cop, commander, counselor? Uh, so I look forward to that, mr ford, so remember, in order to lead your team. We'll see you next time.
