Unconventional Leaders MENTAL PRE-PLAN FOR NEXT YEAR

Written by Coach JoyGenea with AI assistance from Brendon Burchard AI

Are you thinking and planning for 2026?  I am, and so are most of the leaders I coach and am mentored by. I have one mentor who started asking me about 2026 back in August. I was blown away, and it has been fun to be building in the present and the next year. 

 

I want to INVEST in my unconventional leaders. Those amazing different thinkers, some of whom are persons with ADHD, dyslexia, and autism. Now is the time to be dreaming of your future and bringing that into next action steps. When it comes to leadership, there are three ways to grow the fastest, and I am thrilled to be talking about that with you. 

 

 

Leading better starts with a commitment to excellence  in three areas:

  1. Knowing yourself
  2. Serving others
  3. Driving meaningful results 

 

Let’s break this down in a way that’s actionable, because leadership isn’t just about theory. True leadership is about showing up every day with The Big Three C’s. 

  • Clarity 
  • Courage 
  • Consistency 

 

Let’s dive in deeper to these three areas so as you plan you are making sure to support your growth in all three of these areas. 

 

  1. Know Yourself and Your Role as a Leader

Leadership begins with self-awareness. If you don’t know who you are, what you stand for, and where you’re going, how can you expect others to follow you? Here’s what to focus on: 

  • Clarity of Purpose: What’s your mission as a leader? What’s the bigger picture you’re working toward?   

Make sure to write it down. Say it out loud. Make it your mantra.
 

  • Honesty About Weaknesses: Great leaders don’t just lean on their strengths they address their weaknesses head-on.
    Ask yourself: What’s holding me back from being the leader I want to be? 
    Write out your answers and then, commit to improving in those areas. (I will give you a hint, these are areas you can focus on in the next months and year.)
     
  • Confidence Through Action: Leaders know that confidence doesn’t come from waiting until you’re “ready.” It comes from stepping up, taking bold action, and learning as you go. What they forget is that their team and employees don’t know that. They may never have done that. As the leader you need to be CONTAGIOUS with your confidence. You need to teach your team that they don’t need to be perfect, and you need to be present so you can adjust as you ALL learn. 

 

 

  1. Serve Others Relentlessly

Leadership isn’t about you, it’s about the people you serve. Your team, your clients, your community, they’re looking to you for guidance, inspiration, and support. Here’s how to lead with service: 

  • Empower Your People: Stop micromanaging. Start trusting. Give your team the tools, training, and autonomy they need to succeed. Even if they’re not “ready,” let them try. That’s how they grow and how you create more leaders. You will thank yourself six months from now.
     
  • Communicate with Purpose: Be clear, consistent, and compassionate in your communication. People need to know the “why” behind what they’re doing. Remind them often. Often is daily, sometimes many times a day. You can’t say it enough. Cut back, ONLY when people tell you to stop.
     
  • Model the Behavior You Want to See: If you want your team to be disciplined, innovative, or collaborative, YOU need to embody those traits first. Leadership is caught, not taught. 

 

 

  1. Focus on Results That Matter

High-performing leaders don’t get bogged down in busywork. They focus on what I call Prolific Quality Outcomes (PQO), the key activities that drive the biggest results. Here’s how to do that: 

  • Identify the Needle Movers: What are the 2-3 things that, if done consistently and with excellence, will move your mission forward? Spend 60% of your time on those.
    Write these things down. Make sure you are talking about them ALL THE TIME.
     
  • Set Clear Goals: Your team needs to know what success looks like. Define it. Measure it. Celebrate it. Here is a coach JoyGenea bonus. Have team members restate it back to you. This hint will blow you away. You want those goals to be stickie and stickie goals are those people can easily repeat.
     
  • Balance Productivity with People: Results matter, but so do relationships. NEVER sacrifice one for the other. High-performing thriving teams excel when there’s both accountability and connection. Most of the time, this is what great leaders love, the people. 

 

 

  1. Lead with Courage

Leadership is hard. I know that it can be lonely and isolating. It requires making tough decisions, standing up for what’s right, and staying calm under pressure. Courage isn’t about being fearless, it’s about acting in spite of fear. Here’s how to build it: 

  • Express Your Ideas Boldly: Don’t hold back your vision or your values. Speak up, even when it’s uncomfortable. Don’t be afraid to let your team know that you don’t have all the answers for how to make this idea a reality. Some vulnerability and reality of the process is important
     
  • Take Responsibility: When things go wrong (and they will), own it. Accountability builds trust. Accountability is one time when you start with the word “I.” There is an “I” in team. It’s when you take accountability.
     
  • Stay Resilient and Teach Others your Resilience: Challenges will test you. Obstacles will frustrate you, but resilience you have. That is how you became a leader. Teach your team about resilience because it is built by focusing on what you can control and showing up anyway. 

 

  1. Build a Culture of Growth

The best leaders create environments where people feel safe to grow, fail, and try again. Ask yourself:  Am I creating a culture where people feel valued, challenged, and supported? If not, what needs to change?
Write down your answers to these questions. Be real with yourself, so you can grow. 

 

Final Thought: Leadership is a Practice

Leadership isn’t a title or a destination, you know this, it’s a daily practice. It’s about showing up, learning, and striving to be better every single day. And here’s the truth: you don’t have to do it alone. Surround yourself with mentors, coaches, and peers who challenge and inspire you to grow. 

 

So, what’s one area of your leadership you feel needs the most attention right now? Is it clarity, service, results, courage, or culture? Let’s dive into that and create a plan to level up. What’s your next move? 

 

Set yourself up for greater success in 2026. I want to see more and more people thriving in their lives. Please join me in growth. 

 

Coach JoyGenea 

Unconventional Leadership and International Neurodiversity Coach 

 

Video Transcription:

The unconventional leaders pre-plan for next year. It’s that there is a time of year, I call it fall, and that is a perfect time to be starting to plan for the next year and starting to add some clarity as to what you learned in the existing year, to start to pull out the learnings and the teachings and those types of things. So when it comes to that mental pre planning, I’ve got a few things to go over. Leading better starts with a commitment to excellence in three main areas. Number one, knowing yourself, I talk about that a lot. You need to know yourself to make better decisions, to lead better, to have more confidence about it. It’s important. Number two, serving others, it’s just part of leadership, it’s part of why you’re doing leadership. It is serving others in different capacities. I’ve learned everybody sees that differently, frames that differently, has different language around that. That’s part of it. And number three is driving meaningful results. You are in this because you like the results, good or bad. Unfortunately, some of them might not be overly functional and might be what’s called dysfunctional. But you are in this and a leader because of the results, so understanding that and being clear about the more functional side of that or how to shift something out of less than functional to highly functional. And in my article, if you go over to my blog, what I really focused on for this topic was about clarity, courage, and consistency. So I go over those three main things, and then I also have some talking about, and through the lens of clarity, courage, and consistency, I call them the big three Cs. And I call them the big three Cs cause they apply to most circumstances, most problems, most searches for solutions, those types of things. You are in search of clarity, you’re in search of some courage to take on or tackle something, and you are looking for some consistency in follow through, consistency in not seeing that problem again. There’s a consistency factor in most things. Number one thing I want to point out, there’s three that I have in that article, but knowing yourself and your role as a leader and being honest about your weakness, one of the greatest things you can bring there is transparency about your weaknesses. You have them. I’m not saying dwell on them and not point them out like massively, but own them when they happen and share what you’re learning from them. Boy, oof, I let that one get away from me here. You know, here’s what I’m learning about that. I should have brought a few of you in a little sooner. I should have communicated more about X. That’s when I’m talking about that. That’s part of the authenticity and transparency that’s necessary for you, for your team. When it comes to number two, serve others relentlessly. I always think about the number one out of that whole section is model the behavior that you want to see. So often I see people leading, leading their families, leading their team from a place of just, just do this this one way, but I’ll be over here doing it another way. Nobody hears anything you said. They hear, they see, and they experience everything you do. So remember that. Are you modeling that? And if you’re not, that’s part of the breakdown and dysfunction that can easily, once it gets tweaked, you’ll be surprised, it’ll fix a whole bunch of things. I also talk about focusing on the results that matter, and the number one thing out of there is being really clear about the goal. Anytime you’re delegating, anytime you’re even dealing with something, can you speak the goal? Have you spoken the goal? And if you’ve spoken the goal and it’s really clear and you’ve shared it enough, everybody else in your organization should be able to share the goal too. I should be able to walk in at any time or tap any employee’s shoulder and say, hey, tell me what the big goal is for this year. If they can’t answer that, you haven’t talked about it enough. You haven’t told enough people. You have not engaged them enough. And that’s really important as leaders, highly important. Another is to, this one’s so easy though, I say lead with courage, but you’re already leading with courage. If you’re running a company, if you’re an entrepreneur, even if you’re a solo entrepreneur like you are, if you are in top management, you are already leading with courage. I already know that you’re showing up day after day. It’s not always easy, it can be lonely. I got that part. The thing so often people forget, and this is a great gift of being an unconventional leader, is the fact particularly if you have ADHD, dyslexia, or autism, in particular of those, you have incredible resilience. You don’t quite even know how resilient you are. I promise you I’m often teaching most of my clients how resilient they are and helping them to see that. In saying that, you need to have contagious resilience. That means you are resilient, you need to teach your team that resilience. You need to demonstrate that resilience, you need to learn to talk about that resilience, because that resilience comes from a place and a conversation that’s going on in your head. You need to pull parts of it out and share it with others. It will make a huge difference. You’ll just be utterly surprised. Leadership isn’t a title, it’s not a destination, and you know this. It’s a daily practice. It’s a practice we do for ourselves that flows out of us in other directions. It’s about showing up, it’s about learning, it’s about striving to be better every single day. And here’s the truth, you don’t have to do it alone. Surround yourself with mentors, coaches, and peers who challenge and inspire you to grow. So when you are mapping out your 2026, as I am talking about, or your next year, in case you’re watching this later on, just recognize if you can’t put on a short list your mentors, coaches, and peers that you’re talking to about what you’re working on in the next year, your list is too short and you need to bring more people into that. I promise you the things you are working on will get better, will move faster, when you are bringing in more support for you in your leadership. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. I love your comments, I love your engagement, I really enjoy your stories. I would love to hear more from you. Please feel free to comment below and share this with others, and sit down with a piece of paper or your favorite app and start to map out 2026. What would be amazing if it happened in 2026? Maybe there’s just one thing in there, once you list it all out, that boy, if this one thing, this one thing tweaked just a little bit, it would shift the whole thing. I want next year to be incredible for you. I want this year to wrap up and for you to feel how amazing it is. For that to happen, you need to start engaging in it. That’s the only way it happens. I’m JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach and International Neurodiversity coach, helping those different thinkers find the right systems, processes, and understand themselves so much better that they can lead from a whole new place of incredible. Thanks, bye now.

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