Start With A Win - Six Keys to Effective Leadership with Adam Contos, Part 1

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

The topic of this episode of the Start With A Win podcast is the traits of high-performing leaders and how to incorporate them into your work. Adam will be discussing the first three traits in this episode and the final three traits in the next episode. Be sure to catch both episodes!The first trait is mindset. Your mindset is made up of your attitude and your values, and this provides you with your leadership foundation. If you have a negative attitude and no articulated values, your foundation will be shaky and destined to fail. However, if you have a can-do attitude, approaching each day as a new opportunity and pivoting when obstacles come your way, you can’t go wrong. This attitude is influenced by your guiding principles or values, the standards of behavior that drive your life and business. It is crucial that you effectively communicate your values and that you have an abundance mentality, rather than being discouraged by difficulties.Second, Adam discusses emotional intelligence. EQ comes down to how you recognize and leverage the emotions of yourself and others. A big part of this is regulating your own emotions, which Adam breaks down into five parts:1.     Self-awareness – Take notice2.     Self-regulation – Assess and align3.     Motivation – Channel your energy to reach your goals4.     Empathy – Watch for a reaction5.     Social Skills – Communicating and setting expectationsThe third trait of high-performing leaders is emotional maturity. This gets into your choice management and being intentional about the things that you will say “yes” or “no” to. Emotional maturity means that you have specific, calculated goals and plans in place. It also means you practice discipline in working towards and reaching those goals. You will seek to fix problems and accept accountability for future decisions, whether they align with your chosen areas of focus. Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Hey, Win Nation, producer Mark here. Hey, real quick, before we jump into this episode, I have a favor to ask. Can you do me a really, really simple favor? Go into where you listen to your podcast and give us a five-star rating and leave us a simple review. Doesn't have to be complicated. Just say something nice or say something you like

about the show. But what that does is it helps us get the word out about Start With A Win and reach more people. Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to Start With A Win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. And coming to you from someplace near Remax world headquarters in denver colorado it's adam cotto ceo we start with a win you know you and i have been talking a lot about traits of high

performing leaders right yeah and and we've we've broken it down to six particular traits of high performing leaders what do you say we... Let's dive into this. Yeah, let's get into this. Let's break it up into a two-part series. So we're going to go into three of them this episode and then three the next episode. Create that hook. People got to come back to close the story loop, you know?

Well, I hope they come back. All you people in WinNation, you should be coming back for more, our friends. And thank you, WinNation. We crossed the 10,000 download mark a month, which is awesome. Woo-hoo! Yeah! That's so fantastic.

But yeah, let's jump in because we have a lot of listeners who are leaders, right? They lead their brokerages. They lead their businesses. They lead a team. Geez, I mean, sometimes I feel like I'm leading my family. You know, I my kids and whatnot and so uh i think this is one of those things that can never get old and that we always need to be reminded of so i love that you've broken this into six parts because it's easily digestible so all

right okay here's the first one mindset matters number one is mindset matters so i mean the really the big question here is did you jump out of bed fired up because it's monday or did you have a mindset good for you i love it even though this is not airing on a monday how did you jump out of bed this morning for crying out loud on this wednesday i uh whoa two feet on the ground just ready. All right. Was there a smile on your face? My gym bag pre-packed. Ooh, you have been listening to my show, my friend. I'm living the show. You are the producer. So, I mean, this is incredibly important because mindset is a combination of your attitude and your values. So, if you don't have these two things to focus on in your leadership, then you're really missing this foundation of all the rest of these, you know, the next five.

There's a reason why this is number one. This is number one because this is the foundation to this skyscraper of leadership you're building here. So, you know, and I want to break these two things down. So first of all, let's talk about your attitude. How do you view challenges? Do you have this can-do attitude or a why-should-I attitude? Half full, half empty kind of. Yeah, totally.

I mean, do you know anybody out there who's like, if I have to? Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, come on. I hope that person's not a leader, right? Yeah, I hope so. But sadly, there are leaders like that. But hey, you need to change if you're that leader. Yes.

It's your opportunity to make a difference. So here's the thing. It's time to hold up the mirror, folks. What does your attitude say about you as a leader? Does it say that you are unstoppable? There's nothing you can't do. Even if you're going to fail, it's okay. Because you know what failure is? It's an going to fail, it's okay because you know,

failure is, it's an opportunity to do it again and to do it better. And so you've got that attitude or you've got this attitude of, ah, bummer. All right, I'm done. And, and a lot of people just, they give up at the final mile and, and he's just, you can't do that. There's, you know, there are all these different concepts. There's three feet from gold where you own this gold mine, you're digging, you don't ever find anything. Next guy comes in and buys it and digs three more feet, and he's the biggest gold mine in history, things like that. That's really what leadership is like. It's about attitude of, I'm going to keep going, and I'm going to keep doing this. I'm going to make my adjustments. And if I have to make pivots, that's great. But I'm not going to stop.

Because you're only a failure if you quit trying. And your attitude has everything to do with it. So you got to have a can-do attitude. People's mindset determines their outcome. It determines their outcome. That's the attitude. You got to have this mindset where your feet hit the floor and you're like, I cannot wait to go after the biggest

challenge I have today. And if you think that way, you're going to be a great leader and people are going to go, I like where that person's head at, head is at. I'm going to go with them. So, so that's half of it. That's half a mindset. The other half, what are your guiding principles? What are your guiding principles? These are your values. What are your values of being a human being? What are your values in your business, your principles and standards of behavior? And it should be something you can easily talk about. So, I mean, I know what our company values are more M-O-R- R E deliver to the max, be customer obsessed, do the right thing. And everybody wins. I mean, it's that easy. You should be able to

recite your values as a business leader for your organization very, very effectively and very quickly. So somebody can go totally makes sense. I understand where you stand. So you combine those two things together and you are unstoppable. I love what you said that, what did you say? You can't fail unless you give up. You only fail if you quit. You only fail if you quit. I love that because that this is, it just perpetuates motivation where it's like, listen, if I don't give up right now, I haven't failed technically. So let's keep pushing. Exactly. All right. So that's part one, Mark.

Part one. Get your mindset. Oh, I want to add one more thing on to step one. So let's do step 1.5 here. Oh, okay. There's a difference between an abundant mindset and a limited mindset. Okay. So we've got this can-do attitude. We've got this set of values. Now, things aren't always going to go your way, and there's always going to be a headwind. You might put on your running shoes to go run, and it's raining outside. Does that mean you quit? No. Do you let external circumstances determine your outcome, or do you let your decision to continue to win determine your outcome? So who do you blame for challenges? Do you blame people in society and things like that? Or you just go, challenges are just part of the game, right? That's currency that makes that end result more valuable to me. Yeah. Stop making excuses, right? I hate excuses. You got it. Excuses are

just rationalized failure. And you're, you're just sitting there trying to figure out reasons not to go do it. Get rid of those. But, um, we have to have an abundant mindset. I can, I am, I will and go do it. And really that's a big difference between a lot of successful people and unsuccessful is unsuccessful. People stop at the first challenge. They stop at the first challenge. It's too hard. Nope. You just paying your dues to get there. That's right. All right. Number two. All right. Number two, emotional intelligence. So I talked about this before. Oh yeah. I love this. Emotional intelligence, you know, EI, EQ, however you want to put it out there. Ultimately, this is one of the critical pieces that people forget most frequently. In fact, coaches say this is the number one piece of advice that you should give

to a leader is control your emotions. So emotional intelligence, it's really defined loosely as how you recognize and leverage yours and other person's feelings and how you leverage this knowledge and behavior to manage relationships and decisions. So instead of just thinking about the task or the process, think about the people and the feelings. This is really interesting because a good question to ask somebody in business is not what do you sell, but who do you serve? And that is truly understanding emotional intelligence of your business and of your customer. And then as a leader, you ask yourself, who do you serve, right? Is that- Exactly.

Correct. You're serving your people, right? So that they can then serve well. That's it. That's it. So really, once you see others' emotions and recognize where they're coming from, it's easier for you to come alongside them and lead. You're not trying to push them. You're trying to influence them.

You're trying to push them. You're trying to influence them. You're trying to help them by harnessing their emotions. You can then solve problems and make progress on things. So, you know, the big question is how do you regulate your emotions? So I actually have a five-step process for how do you regulate your emotions? You want to hear it? Yes. Okay. Awesome. All right. So the first thing you need to do is have self-awareness. Take notice. Okay. Pretty obvious, right? Yeah. Take notice. We have self-awareness. Here's where a lot of people fall off is they're not really self-aware. They're more just responding out of emotion instead of being self-aware and then taking the second step of self-regulation. Fear, worry, doubt.

Yeah, impulsiveness. Anger. Just responding to those things. Exactly. More of a reaction to things. So your first step is self-awareness, taking notice. Second step is self-regulation, which is assess and align. So assess their emotions, assess your emotions, and align those emotions.

Now, you have to do the alignment a lot of times because they're not aware a lot. The person you're dealing with in your emotional intelligence may not be aware of what their emotions are and what yours are. So what do you mean by align? So I've assessed my emotions on something, and then I look at the other person and assess their emotions, and then I align myself. What does that mean, and how do we practically do that? So here's a good example. Are they operating from a position of fear or position of love? Now, nine times out of 10, they're going to be operating from a position of fear. Fear is demonstrated by fight, flight, or freeze, or rationalizing. Are they saying, but, because they're rationalizing an excuse for something. You cannot really help somebody who has fear if you're implementing fear. So if they're

argumentative about something, think about your kids. They're in trouble or they're angry or whatever. You can't go in and just yell at them. So that's attacking fear with fear. That's fight with fight. What happens? Nothing good, right? But if you assess and align, you can only align love with fear.

You can't align fear with fear because then all you're doing is perpetuating the fear. You're making it worse. So you look at fear-mongering. Fear-mongering gathers people who align fear with fear. Makes it worse. So all you're doing is creating more tension and you're making the matter worse

instead of helping the matter. So you have to align with their fear by deploying your love into that. So you may come up to somebody who's afraid of something and say, you know, I love your passion for this. I love your perspective on this. And they're like, what? What are you talking about? But you're aligning with them. So now you're in a calm conversation with them or you're in a conversation with them to begin with. And it's not a fighting conversation. It's an alignment conversation. You're acknowledging where they're at and what they're doing and their feelings on this

whole situation. Yeah, I think it's interesting because as a creative, one of the things I always try to do with my team members on the creative side of things is I always try to find something that's really good or positive that I like about what they're doing before I mentioned the things that I'd like to correct or change about what they're doing. So, I can always lead with that because I think as, you know, humans, we instantly get defensive if someone comes at us defensive. You know, if I come at somebody with just, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, then instantly their guard goes up. But if I come alongside them and say, oh, this is right,

I like this, I like this, and then come with, well, but let's change this and let's maybe try to do something different here, that just always seems to go a lot better. Exactly. So did you see the difference there between coming at them with fear, fight, flight, or freeze? You can't go after, and if you go after flight with flight, everybody's running from the problem. Freeze, nothing gets solved because everybody's standing around looking at each other. Nobody's solving a problem. They're scared. You're scared. Nothing happens. Fight, all you have is you're building rage. Yeah. So, but, but you came after you looked at it and you said, okay, how do I come alongside

and help? Love is unconditional giving. It's, it's acknowledging and it's giving. So you, you know, when you look at it from that perspective, there's really not a problem you can't solve with love. Now it might take longer in some circumstances. I'm not saying this is a magic wand, but the reality is this is the gate to get there. You have to cross through this gate because if you don't and you just put up fear against fear, you're not getting anywhere. It's just the way it is. So you, I think I interrupted you, but the five-step process. We've got self-awareness. Okay.

Taking notes. We have self-regulation, which is assessing and assigning. Then we have motivation. Okay. Okay? So now we've aligned. Now we have to channel our energy to reach goals. So we've gotten people alongside us, or we're alongside them.

Let's get in the same direction and move together and channel that energy to reach goals. Because they're really what people want when they're in a challenge. They want to find a solution, right? So you just came up and you're like, hey, I think we can get a solution together. Let's go. And that's where you move together. And then the fourth one is empathy. Okay. Watching for a reaction. Because you're going to have this ebb and flow of emotion going on here.

This ebb and flow of emotion. Empathy is number four there. And then number five is social skills. Social skills have to do with communicating and setting expectations. If you have trust and transparency and communication, expectations are clear and there's no surprises. So people know where they've been, where they're at and where they're going. And they also need to understand. And you know what? Some things may change on this, but that's okay. We'll get there together. That really in and of itself is a great five-step process

for going through problem solving through emotional intelligence. Okay. So part one, we got the mindset that matters. That's where we start with our mindset. Then gaining emotional intelligence, which five steps to get that is self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, social skills. Yep.

And then what's our third part? Well, before we get to our third part, I just want to make a statement about emotional intelligence because this is incredibly important. Mm-hmm. Leaders with strong emotional intelligence have up to a 20 to 30% positive impact on the performance of a company. Leaders that have no emotional intelligence are shooting themselves in the foot by not implementing this emotional intelligence. It reduces the bottom line of the company. It's the reality. So to be a good leader, to maximize the performance

of your company, you have to have emotional intelligence. You cannot just be that rigid, not empathetic, doesn't care about the highway. It's it. Exactly. So next part, part three, emotional maturity, emotional maturity. Emotional maturity. You see the trend in leadership here? You're leading yourself to lead other people. Yeah. It seems like a lot of self-evaluation here. Am I emotionally intelligent?

Am I emotionally mature? Do I have a good mindset? We haven't even started talking about anybody else yet. Exactly. But the reality is you're not forcing people, you're influencing people. And they want to know that somebody has the right attitude, that somebody cares about them. So those are the first two. And emotional maturity is seeking to fix problems and accepting accountability for your actions. So really this is about the action

and decision management that you're making in order to get things done. Let's put it in two words, choice management. Choice management. How do you manage your choices as a leader, Mark? This is a fun game to play with yourself. You have to ask yourself, am I emotionally mature? Emotionally mature people are specific in their choices and decisions. And that may be saying no to more things than you say yes to. You hear a lot of really key business leaders saying, I say no to a thousand things for every one thing I say yes to. That is some serious emotional maturity. And it's not just that flippant where you're like, no, no, no, no, no. It's that you are very calculated in where you're like, no, no, no, no, no.

It's that you are very calculated in how you align your priorities and your decisions. In life, we have big decisions to make. So if you say yes to something, you're saying no to all the other things that that takes up the time of. And emotional maturity helps you recognize, prioritize what needs to be done and give you the strength to say no to other things. So if you had five friends call you and say, hey, Mark, why don't you come over and watch the game? Which one do you pick? Or if you're sitting there and your kid's at the kitchen table scratching their head going, I need some help with my homework. Now you have six things that you need to decide amongst right and i think this is a big one as far as achieving our goals right is having the emotional maturity uh if you have a weight goal

uh well the emotional maturity would be to say no to that double cheeseburger or if you want to you know sleep more which a lot of people lack good sleep. It's like, okay, choosing not to watch Netflix and going to bed. So I think this is definitely one that- Mark, I love what you just said, buddy. I love those two examples. You know why? Because the perfect example of emotional maturity is your day planner, your daily calendar. Because you can put things on your calendar all day long, but do you choose to go do those things and do them in a focused manner? Or it might be like you're prospecting for new clients. Okay. You get on Facebook and you're thumb surfing on Facebook and you're like, all right, I prospected for an hour. No, you didn't. It's the same as, you know,

like you just mentioned, you go to a restaurant and maybe their portions are designed to feed a family of four and you order the big dinner plate and you look at it and you're like, oh my gosh, I got to eat all that. I mean, what decision are you going to make there? Have a little portion control discipline and be emotionally mature. It's like other people saying, I'm going to set 10 goals this year. No. What are those 10 goals? Be specific. I've seen a lot of people say, let's talk about one I like to talk about a lot, video. You want to put video in your business. I'm going to make some videos. I mean, no, that's not it. I'm going to make a video a day that I'm going to put out on Facebook every single day for a week. I mean, that's a pretty specific goal.

You can even get deeper in it and say, it's going to be about this, and it's going to be this long, and it's going to have me in it or whatever it might be. But the reality is the more vague you are, the more emotionally immature you are. And that's not meant to be insulting to anybody, but the reality is vague people are non-committal and that's a deep demonstration of how emotionally mature they are. So you got to take a look at that and figure that out because people do not want to follow you if you're emotionally immature. And that is not a conscious thing that a lot of people think about. Man, I'm so glad this is a two-part series because I feel like just on these three pieces

alone, someone can really just reflect and listen back on this and say, all right, where do I land on each one of these things? So let's give them some's give them some homework, Mark. Yeah. Yeah. What's the homework for this, for this week until next episode, the three parts here are mindset matters. Mindset is your attitude and your values. The second piece is emotional intelligence, which is how do you understand other people's emotions and yours and control your emotions to help with theirs? And a third one is emotional maturity, otherwise known as choice management. So everybody needs to write down those three topics and where you're at and what you need to do to improve on those. Because we have three more key leadership principles coming up next week.

And these traits are so important in your leadership development and how people view you that they will notice them when you start adjusting them. And it's so much fun to improve your leadership and help other people by deploying these things. So that's your, that's your challenge between now and next week. Work on your mindset, your emotional intelligence and your emotional maturity. Make sure you reach out to us and let us know how those things are coming along.

And I think we'll see you next week. That's right. Hey guys, thanks so much for listening to start with a win. If you'd like to ask Adam a question, leave us a message at 888-581-4430. And don't forget to go into iTunes and subscribe. Write a review and rate the show. It helps us get the word out and reach more people. And hey, for more great content, head over to startwithawin.com, follow Adam on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. And remember, start with a win.