Follow Through

The theme for August so far has and will continue to be leadership.

August 1 — We, as individuals, are the leaders of our lives.

August 2 — We must make intentional and conscious decisions AND take action about the direction our life is going to take.

Today, we discuss follow through. What does this mean? This idea implies commitment. In other words we make a commitment, whether to ourselves, to someone else or to our employer to complete something. Commitment and follow through are absolutely essential. What if you fail with follow through?

Let’s look at an example of a leader, a manager, or someone overseeing your work. Now let’s say there are certain expectations of their role and they don’t follow through. What happens to your relationship with them? You might lose faith in your leader. You might lose trust in your leader. You might be let down by your leader if they are a person who you hold in high regard. Any of these and more are possibilities.

Now, what happens when we make a commitment to ourselvesand DON’T follow through. What happens to our relationship with ourselves? Is it a positive and relationship-building experience with ourselves? No, it’s usually a negative experience. Now, we’ve introduced a new concept here: CONFLICT. Conflict is a point of two opposing ideas. So, for example, for the leader who has an employee’s trust and then doesn’t follow through there enters conflicting feelings about your leader and your relationship with them. How does it get resolved? One way would be by addressing through an open discussion with our leader about the situation and our thoughts and ideas about what has occurred.

But when we let ourselves down, what happens with us? I think we need to have frank conversations with ourselves as to how we feel having let ourselves down. However, we can’t be too hard on ourselves. We need to have a goal, a plan of action and then actually make the commitment to ourselves and follow through with action.

As the leaders of our lives, follow through is absolutely essential to our success.

As Always, Strive To Optimize!!