"The biggest reason you don’t have the life you want is because you are focussed on what you aren’t getting. You see only your lack of luck. Successful people live life as they desire because they focus on what they are getting." 

 

This view on the importance of the mindset from trainer Drawk Kwast, who expressed his views in a recent CEO Magazine article, has attracted much attention from the leadership world.

 

And, you’ll be interested to hear that Kwast’s view is by no means an exclusive club, because other big hitters share his opinion that a large part of developing leadership skills and increasing success rates in business and life, boils down to keeping an open mind, spotting opportunities and simply creating your own luck.

 

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire conducted a study that asked two groups of people, a "lucky" group and an "unlucky" one, to look through a newspaper and tell him how many photographs were in it. On average, the lucky people had their answers in seconds, while the unlucky ones took two minutes. 

 

The lucky ones saw a large message taking up half of the second page that said: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." The unlucky ones totally missed it and kept counting.

 

An essential ingredient of good and effective leadership coaching is the ability to coax belief out of leaders who may not be as successful as they want to be, because once leaders believe that they opportunities exist and know how to spot them, their success rates will grow.

 

Developing leadership effectively can adopt a number of different approaches, but mindset and how focussed that mindset is on success is a huge factor in separating the mediocre from the top performers. 

 

This is about spotting opportunities, interacting with people and creating chances.

 

"It’s not about luck," adds Kwast. "It’s about keeping your eyes open. It’s not that I have better luck than other people, it’s that I can see things that others can’t." 

 

And, it is important for leaders to understand that very often, developing leadership skills in a dedicated programme or success training course, will entail the coaxing out of capabilities that already exist, not necessarily the learning of new ones. 

 

Good training companies accept that many leaders have reached their position on merit, however the last stage is the tricky one: becoming one of the very successful leaders who will achieve enough and reach enough people to actually leave behind a legacy, and a blueprint for future leaders.