Welcome to For Leaders, your go-to source for essential leadership insights and perspectives shaping today's world.

In this week’s newsletter:

• Strategic Summaries: Key insights and takeaways on the importance of challenging limiting beliefs

• The For Leaders Podcast: Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly

• Words of Wisdom: A powerful leadership quote to inspire

• Leaders’ Library: What we’re reading this week

A curated community of leaders.

Strategic Summaries

A weekly roundup of the most interesting, useful and thought-provoking articles to help you be a better leader. This week we’re focusing on challenging limiting beliefs.

Create your own reality. Neuroscientist, dancer, and science communicator Crystal Dilworth talks about expectations in this video interview.  

Our take: The premise is that our expectations create our reality. So, can we create a reality that’s more advantageous? How do we “master” creating the life we want to live, the company we want to lead, or the business we want to build?   

We can think of this like the game of mad libs: each sentence we need to fill in is like an expectation. Our brain (a “probability machine”), uses our past experiences to make its best guess at what the blanks should be filled in with.   

Like Natalie Portman’s imprisoned character in the film, V for Vendetta: she eventually realizes that her imprisonment is fake and that she could have escaped at any time. It was the beliefs she had about the experience that held her captive. 

Key takeaway: To change our limiting beliefs into more positive and action-oriented ones, we need to test them. Rather than automatically following our probability machine brain, we can become aware of what is limiting us and then try something new instead.  

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Create alternate beliefs. Best-selling author Mark Manson writes about how limiting beliefs prevent us from pursuing our goals. 

Our take: Mark talks about three types of limiting beliefs: the ones about yourself, about the world around you, and about life (these make you feel that things are too difficult to even try). 

An important one in leadership is the belief that someone else has already done the thing you want to do, leading you to give up before you even begin. Or seeing another leader doing something innovative, which, instead of inspiring you, completely deflates your efforts.  

You can counter a limiting belief in four steps: 1. Ask yourself, “what if I’m wrong?” 2. Ask yourself, “how is this belief serving me?” 3. Create an alternative belief. 4. Test that alternative belief to see if it is true. 

Key takeaway: Like the video above, the key is testing your beliefs. Once you become aware of a limiting belief, question it. Write it down and come up with four alternatives. Now act as if one of those alternatives are true. This may lead to an unexpected outcome, changing the limiting belief into something more aspirational.   

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High performers. In this video, Mental Performance Coach Dr. Cindra Kamphoff talks about how leaders can gain a performance edge by challenging their limiting beliefs.  

Our take: Limiting beliefs can keep us in our comfort zone, even if that comfort zone doesn’t serve us well. We might not even be aware of what our limiting beliefs are, but they reflect our own self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness.  

You might have thought to yourself, “I’m not smart enough” or “I don’t have enough time or resources” to pursue something you truly believe in or to make a change to your business when there’s a chance of failure.  

Cindy prompts business leaders to finish this statement: “I believe I cannot expand my greater potential because of ______.” Notice how this is holding you back and replace it with a more productive statement. 

Key takeaway: Moving beyond limiting beliefs is a critical step to being successful. It takes self-awareness and hard work to change them, but the new opportunities this can bring makes the work valuable to leaders in any industry. 

🎧 For Leaders: Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly leads a long-standing American business. For over 60 years, Emerald Packaging has been navigating the unpredictable agriculture industry to provide packaging solutions for about half of the produce you'll find in grocery stores across the country.

Kevin spent a decade working as a reporter for Business Week before becoming the CEO of Emerald. 

In this episode, Kevin shares key insights on:

• Leveraging their location near agricultural hubs to dominate the market.

• Food packaging’s role in sustaining the vulnerable food system.

• How AI and tech can address key operational and environmental challenges. 

Words of Wisdom

One weekly, impactful quote for leaders.

Leaders’ Library

Every week, we share an interesting long-form piece of content to contemplate.

Today, we’re reading the book, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna Wiest.

The metaphor of climbing a mountain has been used in the contexts of performance, success, building resilience, overcoming obstacles, and probably many more. 

Briana uses the metaphor in the context of self-sabotage. She explores what it means to obstruct your own success, where that behavior comes from, and how we can stop ourselves from doing it. 

The Mountain Is You digs deep to make us think about how we got to where we are now, what habits we've reinforced that are damaging us, and why we resist efforts to change. She then offers us ways to better understand ourselves and pave the way to reach our highest potential. 

A thought-provoking and empowering read. 

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you next week with more powerful leadership insights and inspiration.