Personal Leadership: Lead Yourself First
The most difficult and important person you'll ever lead is you; write your mission, values, and six P's.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
Behar teaches that the most difficult and most important person you will ever lead is yourself, and that leading yourself well makes everything else less difficult. The method, drawn from a self-leadership book similar to Covey's Seven Habits, has three artifacts: a personal mission statement (his is to nurture and inspire the human spirit, beginning with himself), a distilled set of 8-10 core values chosen from a list of 300 (his are honesty, fairness, respect, responsibility, integrity, trust, caring, and love), and the six P's that govern how he does everything: purpose greater than himself, passion, persistence, patience, performance, and people. He does something small each day, even picking up litter, to nurture the human spirit.
Origin
Behar was introduced to self-leadership by mentor Jim Jensen and worked through a now-out-of-print book similar to Covey's Seven Habits, later adapting his mission statement partly from Starbucks' own.
Core principles
- 01Your primary responsibility in life is to lead yourself first.
- 02If you're not okay with you, it's very hard to help anyone else.
- 03A written mission statement answers why you are here.
- 04Naming 8-10 core values fixes what you live by come hell or high water.
- 05The six P's (purpose, passion, persistence, patience, performance, people) govern how you do everything.
How to run it
- 1
Write your mission statement
Answer why you are here and what you are here to do, in about 50 words or less. Expect it to evolve over time.
Pro tip Behar's: to live every day nurturing and inspiring the human spirit, beginning with himself and then for others.
- 2
Distill your 8-10 core values
From a long list of human values, narrow down to the 8-10 you live by no matter what, and define what each means to you.
Pro tip Take your time; Behar worked from a list of 300 words and it took a while.
- 3
Adopt the six P's
Run everything through purpose (greater than yourself), passion, persistence, patience, performance, and people.
Pro tip Be patiently persistent; persistence gets over the rocks, patience accepts they don't clear on your timeline.
Watch out The person you most need patience with is yourself; too much self-frustration makes you give up.
- 4
Nurture the spirit daily, starting with you
Do something every day that nurtures and inspires the human spirit, beginning with your own, because you can't help others if you're not okay with yourself.
Pro tip It can be as small as picking up a piece of litter and binning it.
In the wild
Behar carries a card in his briefcase summarizing his life in 50 words or less: his mission statement, his eight core values, and his six P's, which he reviews and lives by.
→ A written, portable self-leadership system that has anchored his decisions and identity for decades.
Common mistakes
Leading others before leading yourself
Trying to help and lead others while not being okay with yourself makes genuine leadership very difficult.
Running out of patience with yourself
Getting too frustrated at not hitting your own timeline leads you to give up; patience with yourself is the hardest and most necessary.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone in or heading toward leadership who wants a durable internal operating system.
Not ideal for
People looking for a quick external tactic rather than deep self-examination.
From the transcript
“the most important person you're ever going to have to lead in your life is you”
“if you're not okay with you it's very difficult to help somebody else”
From the episode
Howard Behar: Former Starbucks President Reveals How Starbucks Grew to 15,000 Stores