31 - Lead Thyself

Season #3 August 05, 2026

Lead Thyself

Great leadership begins long before you influence anyone else—it begins with mastering yourself.

In this episode of Become The Leader, Jody Holland, Mike Grigsby, and Meghan Slaughter explore why self-leadership is the foundation of effective leadership. They discuss the power of habits, identity, emotional regulation, discipline, personal growth, and intentional living.

Whether you lead a business, a team, or simply want to become a better version of yourself, this conversation offers practical strategies for developing the mindset and habits that create lasting leadership success.

Key Takeaways

Leadership begins with managing your own attitudes, habits, emotions, and behaviors.
Reading expands your perspective and equips you to think and lead more effectively.
The stories you tell yourself influence your emotions, decisions, and reactions.
Leaders set the emotional temperature, especially during stressful situations.
Discipline and intentional discomfort build resilience and leadership capacity.
Your habits reinforce your identity, and your identity shapes your behavior.
Small, consistent actions compound into meaningful personal transformation.
Self-awareness must be paired with self-discipline to produce lasting change.

What You’ll Learn

Leadership Begins With Self-Leadership

Before you can effectively lead others, you must learn to manage your own attitudes, habits, emotions, and behaviors. Leadership is more than a title—it is the ability to consistently direct yourself toward the person you want to become.

Read to Lead

One of the fastest ways to grow as a leader is through intentional learning. Reading expands your perspective, challenges your assumptions, and gives you better ways to think, solve problems, and make decisions.

Great leaders remain lifelong students.

Control the Story in Your Mind

Much of our emotional stress comes from the stories we create rather than the facts of a situation.

Questioning your assumptions before reacting can help you:

Reduce unnecessary conflict
Improve your emotional intelligence
Make better leadership decisions
Remain calm under pressure

Your interpretations shape your reactions.

Set the Emotional Temperature

People watch leaders carefully during stressful situations. They notice how you respond under pressure, whether you follow the standards you expect from others, how you treat people, and how you recover from setbacks.

Leadership by example speaks louder than leadership by instruction.

Build Leadership Capacity Through Discipline

Successful leaders intentionally do difficult things because discipline builds resilience.

Daily reading, early-morning routines, exercise, martial arts, journaling, meditation, and structured personal challenges can prepare you to handle difficult conversations and leadership challenges.

Let Identity Drive Your Behavior

Your habits are votes for the person you are becoming.

Drawing from the principles in James Clear’s Atomic Habits, lasting change begins when your identity changes. Instead of saying, “I want to become an author,” say, “I am an author,” and then act accordingly.

Identity shapes behavior, and behavior reinforces identity.

Raise Your Psychological Set Point

People tend to return to the identity they believe about themselves. This can affect weight, income, happiness, stress, achievement, and other areas of life.

Temporary motivation may move you forward, but old patterns often return unless your identity changes. You can raise your personal set point through consistent habits and mastery experiences.

Grow Beyond Your Comfort Zone

Growth happens through repeated stretching.

That could mean:

Reading five pages
Running one more mile
Having a difficult conversation
Learning a new skill
Completing a task you have been avoiding

Small disciplines, practiced consistently, can become a lifelong identity.

Build the Foundation Before Chasing Success

Leadership is not built overnight. Like constructing a building, you must establish the foundation before adding each new floor.

Strong habits create sustainable success. Fast success without character or discipline can disappear just as quickly as it arrives.

Pair Self-Awareness With Self-Discipline

Knowing your weaknesses is not enough.

Growth requires:

Awareness
Intentional action
Consistent discipline
Grace for yourself during the process

Self-discipline is the bridge between knowing and becoming.

Quotable Moments

“If you want to lead, begin to read.”

“Nobody can disturb your peace—you have to give it up.”

“The more I can manage me, the easier it is to manage and lead others.”

“What you do today determines who you get to be next.”

“Every habit is a vote for the person you want to become.”

“Good leadership is an outcome of really good habits.”

“You can’t unlock new potential if you’re not growing and expanding.”

“Celebrate the successes and learn from the failures.”

“The problem with patience and discipline is that developing each of them requires both of them.” — Thomas Sterner

“The greatest promotion you’ll ever receive is becoming the person your future deserves.”

This Week’s Leadership Challenge

Read at least 10 pages from a leadership or personal-development book each day.
Identify one limiting story you have been telling yourself and intentionally rewrite it.
Choose one difficult task you have been avoiding and complete it this week.
Write a one-year letter from your future self describing who you have become and what you have accomplished.
Develop one daily habit that reinforces the identity of the leader you want to become.
Evaluate your routines by asking, “Are my habits creating the future I want?”

Subscribe and Share

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Share this episode with a friend, colleague, or emerging leader who is committed to personal growth.

Leadership does not begin when someone follows you—it begins when you choose to lead yourself.

Episode Transcript

Jody Holland (00:10.571)
Hey guys, Jody Holland here with Mike Grigsby, the technology consultant, and Megan Slaughter, the communications specialist. I am the lowly leadership strategist, but we are gonna have some fun on the show today. We're gonna be talking about the idea of you must lead thyself before leading others. And Mike came up with the very proper terminology for that with the King James version of lead thyself.

So Mike, I'm gonna let you kick it off since it was your idea. What is your concept of what it means to lead yourself?

Mike Grigsby (00:42.264)
Well I don't know that I have a definition of the concept of it, but I know that it's sequentially required before you do anything else.

Jody Holland (00:50.635)
All right, so maybe you don't have a concept, just make some stuff up here. Like, what does it mean for you to be in charge of you?

Mike Grigsby (00:53.954)
Well I think it's important too, because we we talk about leadership on on this podcast. We talk about it a lot. And we're constantly sharing with people like, here are tips and techniques for you know leading others and and and things along those lines. But I think it's good. Maybe we do it quarterly, maybe we do it biannually, whatever it is. I think it's good to kind of check ourselves, right? If you don't spend time

Learning how to develop the right habits, learning the right attitude, learning the right approach to different things, and practicing that on yourself first, then I I think you will, at best, I think you'll be able to build a facade of leadership. And at worst, I think you'll start operating in a in a virtual reality where you just start believing your own hype on a bunch of different things. And

You can't ask, I'm you know, I'm a former military guy, former law enforcement guy, you can't ask people to do things that you yourself are not willing to to do to put put yourself out there. And so I think it's important. And, you know, there are a thousand different ways we can do this, but I thought it'd be really good to help the audience kind of understand and take a a peek into how we lead ourselves. Like, how does Megan, what like what what are the Megan, what are your habits? Jody, what are your disciplines? What are my tools and resources that we go to? And

Jody Holland (01:56.437)
Yeah.

Mike Grigsby (02:15.788)
I think the very first thing that I'm just gonna jump out there and I know this group right here is gonna just jump all over. I remember hearing hearing a a phrase, if you wanna lead, begin to read. And that's the very first thing that I would say is it's absolutely essential. You already know everything you know. It is time if you wanna begin into leadership, you gotta start learning what other people know. And it doesn't mean take it all for gospel.

Right. You've got to learn how to interrogate your own thoughts, interrogate what you're seeing, learn how to push against and pull against what you're seeing out there. Get a kind of a an amalgam, if you will, of all the things that are out there w with regard to any one discipline or practice or what have you. But yeah, you guys follow that one up. If you wanna lead, begin to read.

Jody Holland (03:05.256)
Well, you're you're definitely preaching to the choir there because I think I read a lot until I see how many books Megan makes it through on an annual basis. And like I'm still in fourth grade. still not winning the book reading challenge. But I I do think you've got a point with the with that piece of it. I think from my perspective, leading yourself is learning how to catch the stories that you're making up in your head before they come out of your mouth. And I I

Meghan Slaughter (03:18.712)
Yeah.

Jody Holland (03:34.467)
What I mean by that is a lot of times people get upset about stuff because they filled in the gap with all the other stuff that could have been true, but maybe they have no idea if it really is. They made up this story and then they just start talking. They get mad at people, they put people down, they they complain or they overreact, but they didn't control their emotions. Step one in self-leadership is controlling the narrative in your own mind. And I think in order to do that.

You have to get really familiar with your own negative emotional states and the origin of those states. Because most of the time when we react or overreact to things, it's because something happened at some other point in our life and it meant something to us. And we just carry that same story forward and go, I could apply it to this situation and that situation. look, Mike's been a jerk here too.

And it kind of goes back to one of the phrases that you told me you learned when you were going through the police academy. And that was nobody can disturb your peace. And you know, we get cops get called for disturbing the peace, but the nobody can disturb your peace. You have to give it up. And that's what I I think is the number one concept to remember is my emotions are mine and they're based on my stories.

Mike Grigsby (04:41.23)
Yeah. yeah.

Jody Holland (04:59.162)
some of my stories, I'm gonna embrace them and they're horrible stories and it might make me react the wrong way. And then one day I wake up and I go, wait, that was just my story. What if I change that? All right, so Meg, you're up.

Meghan Slaughter (05:11.26)
I do think that's huge because the way that we talk to ourselves and handle and process our emotions leads into how we lead others. And I don't think that you can effectively lead anyone else before you learn how to lead yourself. That comes first. You have to be able to keep yourself in check, stay calm and collected under pressure, and move forward and adapt to the situation in front of you. And so I think the mark of a leader too is being a lifelong learner.

You're learning from other people, you're learning from your experiences, you're adapting to the situation, you're learning from the people you are leading. And so it's this continuous process of figuring out what is working and what isn't working. And Charles Manns actually coined the term self-leadership in 1983. And he really emphasized the importance of self-talk and self-management in leadership and performance. And so

If you can learn how to manage your own emotions and your own actions in times of crisis or just when there's a lot of stress within the organization, you're better prepared to help other people do that as well. And as a leader, people are looking to you as the example. So they're trying to gauge how you're reacting to things. And that goes for in times of crisis, but it also goes for

Jody Holland (06:25.299)
Mm-hmm.

Meghan Slaughter (06:37.56)
What can I get away with? So if there are rules within your organization, you as the leader must abide by them. You are not above the rules, you are not above the work. You have to be able to maintain the example that you want people to follow. And so you come back and you check with yourself, you evaluate your emotions, you evaluate your actions, and if you ever catch yourself slipping.

You have to be the one to bring yourself back and recenter your focus on what's important to the organization and to your team.

Jody Holland (07:14.61)
Yeah, and I think that recentering, that's painful for a lot of people. That's the part that I've watched first-time supervisors, managers, even CEOs avoid the hard conversation. And that is not getting control of your own state or your own self. And just to you're both of you are talking about learning from the things around you. I remember thinking when I was how old was I when I started this? Twenty-seven, twenty-seven years old, went into business.

Meghan Slaughter (07:18.911)
yeah.

Mike Grigsby (07:27.105)
Mm-hmm.

Jody Holland (07:43.147)
I'm meeting these CEOs and execs, and I noticed they all competed at something. They were runners, or they were weightlifters, or they played tennis, or they played golf all the time. I thought, what is the deal with pushing yourself? And it wasn't until a little bit later, which I did martial arts still at that point. So I did the same thing, just different sport. It wasn't until a little later that I started thinking, I think it's the more I can manage me.

Mike Grigsby (07:50.978)
Mm-hmm.

Jody Holland (08:10.98)
Easier it is that I can manage and lead others. So forcing yourself to do the hard thing when it's not just emotional really does help. That's why I think I enjoyed the two times I've gone through 75 hard, and I'm sure I'll do it again, because it's 75 days of just sheer discipline. You work out twice a day, you you don't drink, you you know eat a certain way. There's a whole lot of you you journal every day, you read in a book every day.

A lot of the things that are just really good for living your life, you're just forced to do it for 75 straight days. And if you screw up, it's not a big deal. You just start at zero. So you get seventy-two days in, you sure don't want to screw up because you lost 72 days of the 75 hard and nobody brags about 72 hard. You know But I I think that's the point that I got is the thing that made those successful people stand apart.

Meghan Slaughter (08:52.888)
Yeah.

Mike Grigsby (08:53.704)
Right.

Meghan Slaughter (08:58.565)
Exactly.

Jody Holland (09:06.462)
Was that they made themselves do something difficult on a regular basis, so that when they got into business and they needed to do something difficult, they had already trained their brain. And I believe it's the medial prefrontal cortex, which is impulse control. But that's also like our emotions feeding into our amygdala for fight or flight. And you've got to go have a difficult conversation. Your brain goes, That's dangerous. You should run away. Be scared. And then you

Don't have the conversation, you go, well, maybe it'll just work itself out. Maybe they'll just quit on their own. Truth is, when you got to have a difficult conversation, you just got to have the difficult conversation. It's not always fun. And I'm not saying you just say mean things to people. Okay. So don't hear me the wrong way. I'm saying being tactfully honest, even when it's tough, is a conditioned response. And you learn that conditioning by disciplining yourself when it's outside of the

Mike Grigsby (10:01.846)
Yeah.

Jody Holland (10:02.866)
emotional vortex of difficulties at work.

Mike Grigsby (10:07.138)
I that's just it, right? It it requires discipline. And I think that is probably one of the things that is is it's so simple, but it is not easy at all, right? And and there's not going to be anything. It doesn't matter whether you're trying to launch a business, doesn't matter whether you're finishing school, doesn't matter whether you're trying to join the PTA or some program for tighter abdominal muscles, right? It it's going to be difficult, right? It's going to be difficult. So

You know, there's a great quote from my favorite Shakespeare play, which is Merchant of Venice, where Portia says that if to do were easy, as to know what to do, chapels have been churches in poor men's cottages, princes' palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions. I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of the twenty and follow my own teaching. And that's why we've gotta that's why we've gotta learn

this this notion of leading yourself, you know, the discipline. I I'm a four AM guy. I used to work out in the in the evenings after after work, but you know, with with family needs and everything else, there's no competition to get on any equipment at four AM. And so I get up, I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll get my you know, get myself ready, I go to the gym, I come home, you know, or you know

Jody Holland (11:26.29)
I would not know.

Mike Grigsby (11:34.893)
get get done working out and then I'll get my my breakfast, you know, you know, my get dressed, get ready for the day. And then I l I carve out an at least an hour and a half. At least an hour and a half before I answer an email, before I look at my phone, before I do anything of just preparing for the day. And that could be meditation, it could be reading, it could be a lot of different things, but I don't let the electronics

Jody Holland (12:03.956)
So let me

Mike Grigsby (12:04.123)
hit my brain for at least the first hour and a half after I've already been up working out.

Jody Holland (12:07.466)
Yeah, I'm gonna throw this in there. So you think about that. Did you just wake up one day and that's who you were? Or did you train yourself?

Mike Grigsby (12:17.282)
No, I I had to train myself. And yeah.

Jody Holland (12:18.89)
So when you're leading yourself, essentially what you're saying is, I am developing an advanced training system for the future self that I wanna be. What you do today determines who you get to be next.

Mike Grigsby (12:31.278)
And and I'm gonna say this too, and and I was just reading another book. So you mentioned the the word the phrase future self. I would challenge everybody on here, do not refer to what you want or what you are endeavoring to become as your future self. Because the minute you do that, you are creating a chasm between where you are and where you want to be. Think of it more in terms of tuning into a radio station that is already playing. Your

What you think is your ideal self already exists. You just have to tune your frequency into that. I didn't w what's that? I don't know who Jose is, but God bless Jose.

Jody Holland (13:06.942)
The Jose Silva method. Jose Silva method.

He cr yeah, that was he was actually when he was nine he didn't go to school, but when he was nine, he went through a correspondence class back in like the nineteen forties to learn to fix radios. He needed to contribute to the family. And later the Silva Mind Control method was developed because he figured out that the human mind was just like a tuning into one frequency or another. You tuned into who you could be or who you're limited as.

Mike Grigsby (13:31.309)
Yeah.

Jody Holland (13:43.327)
And whatever radio station you're on, that's the music you're gonna hear. That was his premise, is that he went a lot further than that with it too. But his premise initially was with his own children, he wanted to teach them when he was an adult that you can tune into whichever version of yourself you want to be real. But you will tune in and only listen to the version that's real and don't tune back to the other station that limits you.

Mike Grigsby (14:09.646)
I mean, for those of us old enough to remember when you had to actually, you know, tune your radio, I mean, you would get s you would catch yeah, you'd turn the dial, you'd catch static from the the adjacent frequency and it was it was you know, it was so frustrating, right? You'd the good song would be on the one that was coming in and out, right? And then you'd have some, you know, s something you don't want to hear on the on the s solid channel.

Meghan Slaughter (14:14.664)
Turn the dial.

Jody Holland (14:15.668)
mega one.

Jody Holland (14:31.412)
So take it out.

When you're leading yourself, I'm gonna throw this one out to Megan. Is it more about figuring out how to get up at four AM? Or do you think it's more about figuring out identity, or is it more about figuring out your value structure? Like, what do you think it is that you're really tuning into that changes who a person is?

Meghan Slaughter (14:54.828)
It boils down to growth. So you're stretching yourself and you're stepping out of your comfort zone. You're doing the hard things and you're doing them consistently because eventually those will become habit. I haven't always been a reader. Obviously, I am definitely a reader now. I love to read, but there have been times in my life where I could not make it through one page in a book, and it was really difficult. But I decided that I

I wanted to grow myself in that way. So every night before bed, I was going to read at least five pages. And then it was one chapter of a book. And then it just turned into whatever I wanted it to be because I was so consistent in that action that it did become a part of my identity. And I love to do that now. It's not hard for me now, but it was hard for me at one point in my life. And so I think the consistency and the stretch.

Is what's going to take you so much further. You can't unlock new potential if you're not growing and expanding. You have to step into that if you want to get better. And as you grow, your potential grows with you. And so you're constantly striving to do and be better, and you're raising the bar for yourself, for your organization, for your team, for your life.

Mike Grigsby (16:01.326)
That's very true.

Jody Holland (16:16.808)
Yeah. And I James Clear talked a little bit about that and I think it was atomic habits, but he was describing that whenever you take an action, it's like you're casting a vote for the person you want to be. So you reading five pages is a vote for you being a consistent reader. in psychology, you have what's called psychological set points. You have it for weight, for happiness, for stress, for the amount of money you have in your life.

It's basically where your identity converges with your action. And think of it, I would describe it like a rubber band. Like, here's where you're at. You've got this point right here. And through motivation, you can pull in this other direction, but you're still likely to snap back to the set point of who you were. That's why so many people, when they diet, they are like, Well, I'm I'm a 200 pound person.

And then they diet and they work really hard and they're motivated and they take classes and whatever else and they become a 180-pound person. But in their mind, they're still a 200-pound person. So as soon as the diet plan is over, they go back to eating like they used to eat, and there's back to being a 200-pound person. Even weight loss surgery a lot of times ends up backfiring because they didn't change their identity. And when you're leading yourself, I think you're leading identity. You're trying to lead.

And modify those set points. I am, and then what follows it has a profound effect on the things that we do in our life. And that rubber band always snaps back to the I am point. And that's the place that we have to figure out well, how do we get ourselves past that? Well, it's some of it's through habit, like Mike getting up and saying, I'm a 4 a.m. workout guy. Megan saying I'm a reader and readers read. You know, I got.

Pushed by one of my friends at one point. I'm like, I want to be an author. Like, you either are or you are not an author. You don't want to be. You either are or you aren't. I'm going, fine, I'm an author. And she goes, Well, what do authors do? Like, they write every day. So I started writing every day and I became an author because I believed it. And then I acted on it. And then through what's called mastery experiences, I looped back into that identity and I mastered a new concept.

Meghan Slaughter (18:23.314)
Mm-hmm.

Jody Holland (18:39.24)
Which made me move, you know, I was right here. You master it. Well, now you're over here because you got to stay within that mastery loop because that's who you are now. And I the mastery experiences are the things that are the biggest impact on who we actually believe we are and therefore who we demonstrate that we are. And I I think that's when you're leading yourself, you're saying, I am going to train myself for the future.

Cast votes every day through my habits and my practices, have amazing experiences that reinforce the new identity that inch me forward. But if you take a professional athlete, somebody that had grew up in poverty, worked their butt off, made it to college, got a full ride, got drafted into pick your professional sport that you like the best. And they went from having nothing to they got a million dollar signing bonus. A lot of times that million dollars.

It's gone. They pay off their friends, they pay off everybody around them. They should give the money away because they don't know what it is to have a million dollars because they're not the kind of person who has a million dollars. That's the problem with fast success, you don't condition yourself in the right direction. I am all for being an overnight success now that I have more than a quarter of a century of experience. But had I adjust.

Mike Grigsby (19:48.374)
Yeah.

Meghan Slaughter (20:03.922)
Yeah.

Jody Holland (20:05.082)
like day one been wildly successful, I probably would have blown it all and not known what to do with it. So I think leadership and temperament, like tempering the pace, a lot of times go together so that you learn and grow at a pace that you can sustain.

Mike Grigsby (20:08.75)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Grigsby (20:20.61)
Well, I mean, you know, y you say grow at a pace you can sustain. I mean, think about this, you know, let's just get it down to kind of third grade, you know, logic here. In the history of construction, there's never been a penthouse built on the ground floor, right? You've got to build a foundation and then the first floor and the second floor and the third floor, right? All of this stuff is like you have to put one brick on top of another brick and and you know, leadership

Jody Holland (20:36.287)
Yeah.

Mike Grigsby (20:47.564)
Whether it's for yourself or leadership of others, you have to you have to build and develop some really solid habits. Good leadership is is an outcome. It's not the only thing, but it's an outcome of really, really good habits. And sometimes, you know, you don't naturally, you I'm not naturally a 4 AM guy, right? I had to identify and say, this is the time that I want to do it. I know this is the the habit that I want to create.

4 a.m. just happened to be the best time to get these other things that I wanted to do. So that's something that I do. And I know for for me especially, I do not get onto my email or social media or anything for the first two hours of the day, two maybe even close to two and a half hours of the day. What are some of the things, Megan or Jody, what are some of things you do that are like non-negotiables for you with regard to your own leadership and kind of what you would

put in as part of your quote unquote success formula.

Jody Holland (21:46.474)
You're up, Meg.

Meghan Slaughter (21:47.603)
That's a great question. And I think it has been different during different phases of my life. Currently, I don't like to be on social media before bed or even on my phone. I like to put technology away, which means I'm not checking my email, text messages. I'm not comparing myself to anybody right before I go to bed because I'm trying to get my mental state in the right place so that I can get a good night's rest.

Because when I'm taking care of myself, it's a lot easier to take care of other people. You can't pour from an empty cup. So I'm letting my mind relax at the end of each day. And then I am starting off the day with positive intentions in mind. I am always thinking about what I want to accomplish and how I'm going to do it. And I'm not trying to stress about how much there is on my plate.

but I I love having a planner. I love writing out my thoughts. I like to write encouraging notes to myself as well because I do believe that self-talk matters. And so the way that I am presenting even my own day to myself is critically important. And I'm just trying to stay in a good headspace so that I can be a better person for other people.

And my presence can make a difference, and I can provide the value that I'm trying to provide to other people.

Jody Holland (23:11.07)
That's really good. I was just thinking

Mike Grigsby (23:12.718)
Phenomenal, yes. If I if I had only known that at your age.

Meghan Slaughter (23:13.244)
Yeah.

Jody Holland (23:16.57)
Like I make myself suffer. I didn't have a part of it. No, I mean I go back to the exercise thing. I think that's part of my habit of being ready to deal with the difficult things is if I push myself physically hard at the gym so that I know when I'm dealing with stuff in the workplace, I've already proven I can do something I didn't think I would do I could do. Like I didn't really start jogging until I was forty nine years old. And once I started jogging, I'm like,

Meghan Slaughter (23:16.582)
Yeah.

Mike Grigsby (23:18.658)
Yeah, that's it.

Meghan Slaughter (23:19.388)
Yeah.

Jody Holland (23:44.617)
I'm gonna jog at least one mile a week. And then the next year I'm like, I'm gonna jog at least a hundred miles this year. And then the next year I'm like, I'm gonna job 365 miles this year. I wanted a the equivalent of a mile a day. And I did. And so you keep picking harder targets because I think moving through self mastery experiences, like I was saying earlier, that's critical. Whatever you accomplish a little bit more is what you want to see if you can do.

And it's not it's not for the money, it's not for the success, it's not for accolades, not because anybody cares. Like nobody once, when I have bought new shoes in my adult life, has asked if I could run faster because of the new shoes. Nobody.

Meghan Slaughter (24:29.627)
That's a shame.

Jody Holland (24:43.646)
I can be not working out with more weight right there, you know, something like that. But really what it's all about is can I push myself a little further? And then you try to do it in other areas. Once you've physically mastered yourself, you think, can I go 24 hours with only positive thoughts and only positive things coming out of my mouth? Like, can I go a week? And I I tried that one. I tried to go a solid week and just start it over every time I didn't make it. And it took me

Meghan Slaughter (24:46.8)
Yeah.

Jody Holland (25:12.702)
Just over a year to get one week without only positive thoughts and only positive things coming out of my mouth. But it was a fantastic year. So I I think challenging yourself with the next level goal of whatever the version 2.0, 3.0, 100.0 of yourself that you want to be, that's the main thing that I do is I just want to know if I can do a little bit more than what I did before.

Meghan Slaughter (25:39.453)
Yeah, and I think there's a really great exercise for that too, that I've used in the past, and it kind of ties in what Mike was talking about earlier too, of tuning into your ideal self. You can sit and write about your life as if you have already achieved everything that you wanted to achieve. So typically I would recommend about one year out, write the date. So let's see, today's July twenty-seventh.

Of 2026. So I would be writing as July 27th of 2027. And then I start writing, I have accomplished this, I have achieved this, I have met this goal. And it's all of the things that I hope to accomplish in the upcoming year. But if you start imagining your ideal self as if you've already reached that point, then you realize you start to exhibit the behaviors that that kind of person would do.

in order to achieve those things. And it just becomes a part of your routine.

Jody Holland (26:39.806)
That makes me think about your speech, Mike, at your MBA graduation. Like you don't own a Bentley yet and you haven't found a fighter jet. I think those are the two things that Yeah. You had like a hundred and four goals that we set at the Zig Ziggler goal setting conference we went to back in eighteen forty seven. I don't remember what year it was. It was a long time ago. And I had I found I still have that book, by the way.

Mike Grigsby (26:42.846)
gosh, yeah. Yeah.

Come.

Mike Grigsby (26:51.054)
They're on deck. They're on deck.

Meghan Slaughter (26:52.81)
Yeah.

Meghan Slaughter (27:01.496)
Yeah.

Mike Grigsby (27:04.344)
It was a long time ago, yeah.

Jody Holland (27:08.178)
I found my book after you talked about that. I went and dug through all my old notebooks and stuff. I still have my Zig Ziggler goal setting book with a hundred plus goals written in there. And it's interesting 'cause I I don't think I got quite as many of mine accomplished, but I accomplished a lot of them. There's a lot of things that I I did that man, I I wouldn't have done it had I not set the goal.

Mike Grigsby (27:30.22)
You know, Megan brings up a really good point. And tying it into this notebook. We wrote we did that notebook. I I think it was either the year two thousand or two thousand and one. I can't remember, but we did we we went through that course and I wrote down and there was probably thirty some, thirty-five, maybe fifty things that I wrote down of goals that I was that I wanted to do, and I had put some time frames on them. Here's the reality. When in two thousand seventeen, when I graduated my MBA program,

Jody Holland (27:40.318)
Yeah coordinate it.

Mike Grigsby (27:58.517)
I had accomplished better than 50% of those goals, but I didn't pay attention to them. It was not on a daily basis. I wasn't paying, I wasn't like mastering and like trying to trying to drive those and and I had completely forgotten them. But when I found that notebook 17 years later, almost to the day, I had accomplished 50% of them. Imagine what you can do when you're doing like Megan, where you're like

very practical, very deliberate, very intentionally thinking about these things, right? It it it makes a makes a big difference. And, you know, the yeah.

Jody Holland (28:36.392)
Yeah it does. That's pretty awesome. All right, Megan, give me your parting thoughts on this. Like one piece of advice for people to learn to lead themselves effectively. What's the most important thing they need to think about?

Meghan Slaughter (28:50.02)
say do the hard things don't be scared of them celebrate the successes and learn from the failures because either way you're going to learn from it so you might as well do the hard thing now get it out of the way and it's gonna be so much easier in the future.

Mike Grigsby (29:07.566)
True. Yeah. I'm gonna end with a quote and it's from Thomas Stirner, the author of one of my favorite books called The Practicing Mind. And he says, A paradox of life is the problem with patience and discipline is that developing each of them requires both of them. When you're going through this, you're learning your own leadership for your for yourself or for others, it requires both patience and discipline. And I'll say

Jody Holland (29:08.234)
That's really good. Mike, can you top that one?

Jody Holland (29:18.194)
That's the road.

Mike Grigsby (29:36.246)
A smidge of grace. You gotta give yourself a lot of grace as you're going through this.

Jody Holland (29:41.144)
I've got two things that I want to kind of end with. One is that having self-awareness doesn't mean anything unless you also have self-discipline. So kind of like the practicing mind, understanding where you are and what your limitations are without being able to discipline yourself to take better action accomplishes nothing. So the self discipline is the linchpin for that to happen. And then the second is people talk about wanting to get promotions and move up and be successful in life.

The greatest promotion that I think any of us will ever receive is becoming the person that our future deserves from us. And that is again coming back to being the kind of person today that would make the future me really proud. So thank you guys for joining us for this Become the Leader podcast. Hope you enjoyed Lead Thyself and our proper English terminology there. we've got Megan Slaughter, Mike Grigsby, and me, Jody Holland. We cannot wait.

To see you on the next episode.