I would like you to take a moment and consider how much time you spend leading others. Consider how much time you spend trying to influence, direct or plan the activities of others. How much time do you spend trying to influence your spouse in the direction that you feel is appropriate? How much time do you spend directing and facilitating the lives of your children? How influential are you trying to be with your aging parents?

Most of us spend significant amounts of time directing, leading, planning, and influencing the lives of others. We are involved in our aging parents’ lives when trying to facilitate and influence their next life decisions. Then we are also leading and guiding our children in a direction that we feel is appropriate and aligns with what we think is right. Finally, we go off to work where we lead, direct, plan, and influence the work and decision-making of our employees. I know that many of you are saying, “But this is the role I play, this is what I’m supposed to do:’ One of the primary goals of Spiritually Aligned Leadership is to challenge this mindset and to assist leaders in examining their traditional thinking around the role they play in leading others.

If you add up all the time and energy spent leading other people in your life compared to the amount of time spent leading yourself, you will be shocked to discover that you are the lowest priority. Most of us spend a fraction of our time leading ourselves compared to the amount of time we spend trying to direct other people in our community, families and our businesses. The real question is why? Why do we spend so much time focused on others instead of focused on ourselves?

Another important and yet very difficult question is why do we believe that we have the right to try and significantly lead and influence other people. It seems we believe we have the right answers for other people. Specifically, when we consider our children and our employees, we fundamentally believe we know more or better than they do. My goal is to challenge this thinking and to re-align your focus to becoming the best leader of yourself and only you. By doing so, you create the best possible life for yourself while increasing, in a very natural way, your organic influence on others.

When you focus on leading yourself, the rest of the puzzle comes together in a natural and organic way with little or no effort whatsoever. We lose authenticity and integrity when we focus on the outside puzzle pieces while neglecting the most important part of leadership-the leading of one’s self. Our employees can see right through this and so can many of the other people in our lives. We often become a walking contradiction, believing we have the right to lead others when in fact we’re not intentionally and deliberately leading ourselves.

Sometimes we focus on leading others so intensely because we fundamentally believe they don’t have the skills or capacity to lead themselves. This plays out daily with regard to our children. Yet this couldn’t be further from the truth. Our children, employees and even most of our elderly parents are more than capable of leading themselves. When we turn inward and focus on leading ourselves we can begin to see the significant strength and capacity within others.