Self-Reflection, Making Mistakes & Humility

Complete the interactive activities in the Seneca app to work towards your CPD certificate.

Self-Reflection, Mistakes & Showing Humility

It is important as a leader to be highly reflective, to handle mistakes productively and to be humble with your approach to leading. This humility has to be both authentic and felt.

Making mini-decisions

Every single day you will make hundreds of mini-decisions.
It is really important that you compartmentalise these but equally important that you take time to reflect, for a few minutes a day at most, on what you did, why you did it and how you can be better tomorrow.

Making mistakes

If you do make mistakes, which you will, do not allow the mistakes to win, to take over, to consume you.
If you make a mistake then acknowledge it, accept it and move on. You cannot change it and beating yourself up over it will do you little to no good.
The issue with a mistake is that you are your own worst self-critic. The war with the mistake really is between you, the mistake and your brain.
Most people won’t care or will be too busy and preoccupied to notice your faux pas.

Humility

If you are putting on a sense of humility as a front then you are, by very virtue of your approach, being disingenuous.

It's OK to be wrong

Avoid being the person who wants to always be right, whether that be because you are too proud to admit you may be wrong or because you see it as a sign of weakness.
Adapting to new information, new ideas or a constructive critique is a sign of strength.
It shows that you are reflective, attentive, capable of listening.
If you stick resolutely to YOUR plan, you may well find that you lose the respect of your staff or your team. This is the beginning of the end.

Avoid 'know-it-alls'

‘Know-it alls' often know very little and are usually full of bravado, suffering from the Dunning Kruger effect (when people think their cognitive ability is greater than what it actually is).
We have all encountered people who are convinced that they know everything and want to convince you that they know everything.
Be cautious of these people. These people will become a drain on you.