Leaders strive to be the best.  They know what they want and they have the drive to get themselves where they want to go.

A key ingredient that allows you to strive to be the best, is to take personal responsibility for your life.  And I mean every aspect of your life.

Think about it this way.  If you go for something that you want, do you get it? If you don’t, do you find lots of reasons for why it didn’t work or do you find redirection, those things you need to learn so that you can be successful in accomplishing this goal.

Non-performers have lots of reasons, lots of excuses for why their lives aren’t the way they want them to be.  You know what it’s like to be in a conversation with someone who provides one excuse after another for why they didn’t succeed and they easily talk themselves out of continuing to purse the goal.

Compare this with top performers.  They get results and when they don’t, you better believe they learn from the situation so they are even better equipped in the future.

Here’s a exercise for you.  Think about something that you recently attempted, but you didn’t get the results you were hoping for.  Think about how you responded to the situation, did you analyze it for lessons learned or did you find lots of ways to let yourself off the hook.  Take another look at your outcome and identify all the things you can learn from this situation.  Then give yourself permission to let it go and decide if this is still something you want to pursue.  If it is, apply those lessons you learned and go for it!