Leveraging Leadership
Are you ready to up your leadership game? Tune in to Leveraging Leadership, where Chiefs of Staff, executives, and business professionals find the tools, strategies, and insights they need to excel. Hosted by Emily Sander, a C-suite executive turned leadership coach, this podcast delivers practical and tactical takeaways every week.
Whether you're tackling tough conversations, fine-tuning your KPIs, or mastering delegation, this show offers new perspectives and actionable advice to help you feel confident and thrive in your role.
Each Monday, enjoy interviews with leaders from diverse fields—primarily business, but also from military, politics, and higher education. Every Wednesday, catch a solo episode where Emily shares concise, actionable insights on a specific topic you can apply immediately.
If you appreciate relatable, informal conversations that pack a punch with no fluff, you’re in the right place. While especially valuable for Chiefs of Staff and their Principals, the insights are useful for any leader aiming to grow.
Don’t miss your chance to advance as a leader.
Leveraging Leadership
Prioritizing Time, Energy, and Attention for Leadership Growth (Part 2)
Emily Sander explains the "wheel of life" exercise, a tool to review different areas like career, relationships, community, hobbies, and physical or spiritual life. She gives examples of focusing on being a better parent, manager, or entrepreneur, and suggests honestly assessing where you're doing well and where you could improve. The episode encourages setting practical New Year's goals based on current priorities and where your energy is best spent.
Get in touch with Emily:
Want help assessing where you’re thriving and where to focus next? Book a clarity call w/ Emily here.
Who Am I?
If we haven’t met before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want.
Time Stamps:
00:31 Understanding the Wheel of Life
01:26 Identifying Your Stakeholders
02:08 Self-Assessment and Goal Setting
03:09 Practical Steps to Improve
04:47 Balancing Different Life Areas
06:14 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
All right. Part two of new Year's goals, The next element here is the different parts of our life. So there's this notion called the Wheel of Life, or a framework called the Wheel of Life, and you can think about it like a pie chart or a wheel with spokes, but basically. We're us all the time, and hopefully we're genuine and authentic to us all the time, but we have these different areas we show up in. And so a lot of us have a work life and sometimes that slice is called a career or your professional life. We have the personal life, or some people call it relationships. And then you might have, um, sub slices in there, which are, your spouse or significant other romantic relationships. It could be friends, it could be, um, acquaintances. All of those things. You could have things like your community or hobbies or spiritual life, physical life. there's lots of different ways to slice and dice it, but you, if you think about it, you'll generally know. The different areas of the life you show up in. I was going through this exercise with um. With one of my clients, and we basically talked about it in terms of who are your stakeholders. He liked the word stakeholders and also constituents. So, um, we often heard, hear stakeholders in, in work terms like, Hey, you have, uh, these stakeholders you have to answer to, or you have these end users, or customers or things like that. But that can also be applied to other areas of your life. So in your family life, you certainly have stakeholders. You certainly have people who are depending on you or at least looking to you to set the tone and they take their energy from you and their cues from you, all these different things. So you have stakeholders and constituents and audiences and people you wanna show up for in a certain way in all aspects of life. So an exercise for you might be going, okay, like, let me plot out and map out. These different areas could be like two slices if you wanna keep it simple. Could be quadrants, like maybe it's a four slice pie or whatever you wanna make it. You can get in depth or keep that as simple as you want. And then if you go online, there's little quizzes you can take that kind of asks you questions about these different areas. But the principle that you can do by yourself is, okay, basically how am I doing in terms of how I want to show up? if I was. Doing this as best i, I was being like the best, uh, parent that I can be. Here's what that would look like if I was being the best, uh, manager at work. Here's, here's what that would look like if I was being, um, the best volunteer at this community activity. Here's what that would look like. And then go through with how you're showing up today. Don't berate yourself or rake yourself across the coals during this part of the exercise. Just be truthful and accurate. Be candid with yourself. Um, accurate data is the best to deal with, so just think about it like that. Get yourself in a space where you can approach it like that and then say, okay, you know, there there's a gap between this one. What would help me close that gap? What steps or activities or things that I would need to do or not do or let go of would allow me to close that gap or for this one. Wow. Like that's like on point, like I'm on point there. How do I continue doing that? Is that just automatic, like just keep doing what I'm doing or No, no, no. I've taken some intentional steps to get those things closer and now that I think about it, it's working. Alright. Those are also good data points and. Ideally in a theoretical sense, if you have these, if you have a wheel, so it's a circle and these different spokes going out, you'd want them all toward the outer rim. So in the exercise quiz, you can do on the interwebs, if you are a reality meets your ideal state, you're all the way to the outer rim. That's the top score. And so if you have the top score for all the spokes in your wheel, then you have a wheel that turns. Right. So if you think about a wheel, a wagon wheel going down a path, if it's, if it's uh, an an actual wheel shape, it's gonna turn the best. If it has one big chunk of it totally missing, it's gonna go unk, unk. So it's gonna be a very bumpy ride if you have a. One spoke that's just like a little bit shorter than the others. It's still there and it kind of holds its weight, but it could definitely use some improvement. You have that type of wheel so you can think about the wheel of life in that sense. And that might be a good, a good exercise to say, okay. Hmm. Where, where can I be putting some more time and energy, or where would some more time and energy? Best be spent. Maybe it's, hey, for this, again, this, we talked about this last episode, but for this phase of life, I really wanna focus and concentrate on my personal life and developing that relationship with, uh, you know, maybe if you're early in life, you wanna find your spouse or significant other, like, I'm gonna go find my person and I wanna be really intentional. I wanna take the time to do that. Right? And this is a big choice that's gonna affect the rest of my life, so I'm gonna concentrate on that. Great. Cool. It might be okay. This type of, uh, this type of my life. Look, I got this company off the ground. I'm the founder. I'm the entrepreneur. This is my baby. For now, this is where I need to be. right now the market is frothy or whatever. Like it might be just the right timing for this next 18 months, for this next 12 months. I need to be here. Like this part of the wheel, this part of the pie slice needs to get my most attention. That could be a thing you have this year. It could be, okay. I've done kind of like the lumpy wheel, like kind of is rolling down the hill, but it's about to fall apart. I need to be more well-rounded. I wanna actually make these things even, and maybe it's okay, the whole like ideal picture thing, Emily is. I don't like that. It freaks me out. It intimidates me. So maybe I'm just gonna make a small wheel where it's like, Hey, I'm just gonna get a tiny bit better in all these areas, but I'm gonna try to be well-rounded and I'm gonna try to even these things out. And that's important to me and that's important to my stakeholders, and that would serve my stakeholders well in all these different areas of my life. So that could be a goal you have, but that's the second element. Just think about the different areas of your life and where your energy and time and attention is best spent right now.