Invest In Yourself First

You can’t grow a healthy garden in undernourished soil. Same goes for leadership. Before you can grow anything around you, you have to nourish yourself first.

Ursula Burns is a good example. She grew up in public housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. She joined Xerox as a summer intern in 1980. She didn’t come in with a big title or a corner office. She came in curious, and she stayed curious for twenty-nine years.

Early in her career, she spoke up in a meeting when she disagreed with a senior executive. That took nerve. It also got her noticed, for the right reasons. The senior executive she openly disagreed with chose her as his assistant where she did good work and took all the criticism she could get. Today, we call that mentoring or coaching.

The nerve and curiosity that got her noticed never let up. That’s what investing in yourself actually looks like – welcoming the difficult conversations, asking difficult questions, and applying effort to understand and ultimately grow.

Ursula Burns kept learning, kept asking questions, kept challenging and kept climbing. In 2009, she became CEO of Xerox, the first African American woman to lead a Fortune 500 company.

She didn’t get there by waiting to be picked. She got there by investing in herself, one hard conversation and one new skill at a time.

I ask my team the same question every year: What are you learning right now that you weren’t learning last year? If the answer is nothing, we have work to do.

Investing in yourself isn’t selfish. It’s the first step. You can’t hand someone else water from an empty well.

Join the Free Webinar: I’m hosting a free webinar called “The Leadership Edge: How Top Leaders Build Influence, Grow Value, and Attract the Best People” on Thursday, October 15th. If any of this hit home, come spend an hour with me. Bring a notebook. Bring your questions. Let’s grow something together. Register HERE.

Keep growing,

Jeff