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Want to dig deeper? Learn how ZF's Building Blocks support personal growth, affordability, leadership and lifelong learning - at every stage of your journey.
These 10 Building Blocks are more discipline than skill. They build the trust needed to be effective and inspired leaders. Let's commit to these; objectively assess ourselves, live our choices, and develop them
into habits.
1. Be Self-Aware
Become who you want to be. Before effectively leading others, we must lead ourselves. Our choices and subsequent actions define who we are and authentic self-awareness highlights the gaps between who we are and who we want to be.
Not surprisingly, Self-Awareness is the first of our ELP Building Blocks. Not only is it a Building Block, it’s an essential ingredient of all the other Building Blocks. If you don’t know who you are, how can you be authentic? And if not authentic, how can you earn trust and work towards what fulfills you?
We’ve already identified the power of Discovery. Discover who you really are. Begin to recognize how you express your values in your actions and relationships. In other words, our backgrounds, social identities, and experiences shape the perspective we bring: identifying this is a key first step in self-awareness.
Develop a plan to work towards correcting any traits or habits that are contrary to who you want to be. Don’t compromise: be the best you can be. Each of us invested most of our first 20 years building our academic framework and observing leadership. Think about it, you know how to lead. Start leading yourself; be honest, realistic and accountable.
(For further reading on this building block see Personal Values and Development and Transition to College).
2. Have a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA)
Always start with…Why? We are often most effective when we are surrounded by positive people. Lead the way by building an aligned team. With the right team, challenges and adversity can be approached with humor and clarity. How can you and your peers work to overcome underlying challenges that cause negativity?
Authentic smiles are powerful. Make choices that stimulate smiling, soon they will become habitual. Deeper than physical smiles, tone of voice and choice of words are important always and emphasize positivity.
3. Manage your Time
How many hours in a week? 168, no more and no less. How we use our 168 hours determines how effective we can be. Deep down, we all know when we’re wasting time; we must manage both the quality and the allocation of our 168 weekly hours. Time is uniquely valuable; we can’t save it for future needs; invest it or lose it. When managing our time, we must live in the present and treasure each precious minute.
Time management isn’t about doing more, it’s about doing the most important things. Our self-awareness alerts us when we’re wasting time. We waste time by:
Time management is a choice; it requires willpower more than new skills. Human nature seeks gratification over uncertainty and hard work. A compelling and aspirational vision provides the motivation and energy to overcome these natural distractions.
Pareto’s Rule states that if you focus on what’s most important, you spend 20% of your time and get 80% of your production. If you give in to distractions, or unimportant tasks, it will significantly decrease your production and take up much more of your time and energy.
(For further reading on this building block see our Time Management Action Guide).
4. Live Affordably
Affordable Living is one of the more complex Building Blocks. Current income, spending allocation, when to spend, saving, debt, and investments all influence affordability. Fortunately, there are a wide range of personal budgeting tools readily available to help.
Is Affordable Living challenging? Yes. Human nature motivates us to seek instant gratification, it’s biological. Dopamine triggers reward signals to our brain when we experience pleasure or achieve a goal. It motivates us to crave instant gratification. Remember, living affordably doesn’t mean zero spending; we can balance being frugal with spending a responsible amount on things that bring joy.
Affordable Living may seem far-off since its benefits are future net worth. Whatever our income, we need to spend affordably, save and invest in ourselves for future needs. Later in life, we will need additional financial resources because our income will likely stop increasing and will then decrease at retirement. Most of us invested the first 18+ years of our lives acquiring our basic education and developing core skills. As adults, saving and investing sets us free.
About ten years ago, ZF began coaching our scholarship applicants about the financial impact of college choice and affordable spending. The transition from high school to college challenges young adults to make critical financial choices; both near-term affordability and longer-term financial independence and debt repayment. No, it’s not fair, but it's reality.
We are surrounded by people who want to loan us money. Beware of BNPL, Buy Now Pay Later. BNPL encourages over-spending that limits your investment funds, dramatically limiting your financial resources when needed for retirement income, financial emergencies, hobbies, entertainment and travel. When you save and invest your savings, they grow and work for you. Affordable Living, like education, is self-investing where you earn future rewards.
(For further reading on this building block, see College Affordability and Money and Finance).
5. Build Trusting Relationships
No matter how effective we are, we have limitations. What if we had a trusted group of family, friends and colleagues that wanted to help us overcome these limitations? Think of Dorothy traveling the Yellow Brick Road with Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion; together they reached the Emerald City and the Wizard of Oz. Would they have made it alone? Probably not.
We actually see the power of relationships when playing or watching team sports. Think of tennis which offers singles and doubles formats. They’re very different games; in singles, each player tries to overwhelm the opponent while in doubles, partners build on their complementary strengths and compensate for each partner’s weaknesses and the more effective team usually prevails.
Toxic relationships lead to self-serving, negative behavior where the combined value becomes less than the parts and much less than their potential. Sometimes, it can be difficult to recognize a relationship as toxic. Be diligent and honest with yourself about how a relationship affects you, listen to your gut.
Effective adults and inspired leaders embrace interdependence and develop trusting and win-win relationships. Think of relationships as true partnerships, beyond superficial friendships. Once or twice every year take an hour or two to inventory and assess your relationships. Make a list and note the mutual benefits it provides and in what ways it might be toxic. Be honest and self-aware, go beyond charisma and enjoy being with them. Are these relationships making you and them “better?”
How you live is who you are and who you spend time with becomes part of how you live.
(For further reading on this building block see Personal Values & Development and Transition to College).
6. Live Healthy
Successfully traveling our ELP requires emotional and physical vitality. Living Healthy becomes a great investment; it benefits now and even more later. Healthy Living requires discipline, work and commitment. It looks different for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.
Start now to develop good habits so healthy living becomes part of who you are. Later in life, as you enjoy your family and career accomplishments you will reflect on your personal legacy – why should future generations care that I was here? You may need additional time and energy to build your legacy.
Physical health is well researched and always concludes that a balanced diet, exercise, and sleep are key. Use a careful web search and consult with your doctor to discover the keys to healthy living. There is a massive amount of misinformation and alluring trends that distract from what is right for you. Develop and list your personal guidelines and commit to them. Keep it simple and don’t cheat.
Mental health is a bit more complicated and it all starts with personal vision; who do you want to be? You want your ELP to guide you toward your vision. Toxic relationships are likely to be the biggest threat to your mental health. Fix them or end them.
(For further reading on this building block see Live Healthy).
7. Choose to Lead
Every day we witness examples of self-serving leadership that corrupts life. We need, and owe, higher quality leaders to future generations. Please choose to lead and inspire those who choose to follow.
We spend most of our first 20 years learning life’s basics. In addition to core academics, we also begin developing social skills. We will discover that effective living is a team effort where the whole is likely better than the sum of its parts.
Without knowing it, we begin studying leadership while very young. We analyze the leadership skills and practice of our parents, teachers, friends, relatives, neighbors; we grade them and adjust our relationships. Take time now thinking about your experiences and discoveries and start developing real insights.
As we approach adulthood, we try to emulate people in leadership positions rather than build on our earlier observations. We learned leadership as followers and are just unable to put it all together. ZF believes that unleashing our leadership capability can be summarized in three words.
(For further reading on this building block see When You Talk to Yourself..LISTEN, 7 Habits Action Guide and Six problem-solving mindsets for very uncertain times.
8. Seek Win-Win Solutions
Envision your opportunities as a pie and you own a slice. Self-serving motives lead to cutting yourself a bigger slice of the pie, but win-win motives want to make the pie bigger, so that everyone’s slices are bigger. Making pies bigger are win-win solutions.
In order to seek win-win solutions, we must be mindful of how our actions and place in the community affect others. Even if you aren’t directly causing a win-lose situation, you may be contributing to it or enabling something that does. Using our position and/or privilege to uplift others is an essential part of finding shared solutions. Sometimes, a solution that seems fair to you or to management may have flaws or injustices. It takes time, communication, and critical thinking to arrive at truly shared solutions.
It isn't a coincidence that this building block shares win-win with the Relationships building block. Without trust-based relationships, leadership becomes self-serving and win-win solutions are only a dream.
Always seek win-win alternatives. Get creative if you can, there are always better solutions; dig deeper and find one.
(For further reading on this building block see Win/Win Interviewing Action Guide).
9. Innovate
Peter Drucker, the great management visionary, emphasized the difference between invention and innovation.
Incremental improvements are fine but innovation enables dramatic advances. Also note that innovation isn’t limited to high tech, it comes from creative or nonlinear thinking. In 1913, Ford Motor Company introduced the modern assembly line, replacing individual craftsmen to assemble cars. Today, assembly line manufacturing enables mass production at high quality and low cost. Effective adults encourage and practice creative thinking from themselves and others. There are always better ways to develop your creative thinking - when making important choices take a few minutes to challenge yourself to discover them.
For further reading on this building block see Six problem-solving mindsets for very uncertain times.
10. Be a Lifelong Learner
ELP isn’t limited to young adults. ELP is a lifelong journey to discover our potential and develop ourselves. It’s never too late to start. We asked AI: Can you still be a student when not enrolled in a formal school? AI replied:
Absolutely! Being a student isn’t limited to formal institutions; it’s a mindset and a way of approaching life. You can always pursue learning through personal exploration, books, online courses, workshops, or even by having conversations with others. Curiosity and a willingness to grow are what truly define a student.
Knowledge gains value through innovation. Knowledge gained when solving real-life problems becomes uniquely valuable and ready for additional application.
into habits.
1. Be Self-Aware
Become who you want to be. Before effectively leading others, we must lead ourselves. Our choices and subsequent actions define who we are and authentic self-awareness highlights the gaps between who we are and who we want to be.
Not surprisingly, Self-Awareness is the first of our ELP Building Blocks. Not only is it a Building Block, it’s an essential ingredient of all the other Building Blocks. If you don’t know who you are, how can you be authentic? And if not authentic, how can you earn trust and work towards what fulfills you?
We’ve already identified the power of Discovery. Discover who you really are. Begin to recognize how you express your values in your actions and relationships. In other words, our backgrounds, social identities, and experiences shape the perspective we bring: identifying this is a key first step in self-awareness.
Develop a plan to work towards correcting any traits or habits that are contrary to who you want to be. Don’t compromise: be the best you can be. Each of us invested most of our first 20 years building our academic framework and observing leadership. Think about it, you know how to lead. Start leading yourself; be honest, realistic and accountable.
(For further reading on this building block see Personal Values and Development and Transition to College).
2. Have a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA)
Always start with…Why? We are often most effective when we are surrounded by positive people. Lead the way by building an aligned team. With the right team, challenges and adversity can be approached with humor and clarity. How can you and your peers work to overcome underlying challenges that cause negativity?
Authentic smiles are powerful. Make choices that stimulate smiling, soon they will become habitual. Deeper than physical smiles, tone of voice and choice of words are important always and emphasize positivity.
3. Manage your Time
How many hours in a week? 168, no more and no less. How we use our 168 hours determines how effective we can be. Deep down, we all know when we’re wasting time; we must manage both the quality and the allocation of our 168 weekly hours. Time is uniquely valuable; we can’t save it for future needs; invest it or lose it. When managing our time, we must live in the present and treasure each precious minute.
Time management isn’t about doing more, it’s about doing the most important things. Our self-awareness alerts us when we’re wasting time. We waste time by:
- Multitasking - poor time quality
- Being Distracted - we’d rather spend our time doing something else
- Prioritizing Unimportant Tasks - save unimportant work for when the essential tasks are done
Time management is a choice; it requires willpower more than new skills. Human nature seeks gratification over uncertainty and hard work. A compelling and aspirational vision provides the motivation and energy to overcome these natural distractions.
Pareto’s Rule states that if you focus on what’s most important, you spend 20% of your time and get 80% of your production. If you give in to distractions, or unimportant tasks, it will significantly decrease your production and take up much more of your time and energy.
(For further reading on this building block see our Time Management Action Guide).
4. Live Affordably
Affordable Living is one of the more complex Building Blocks. Current income, spending allocation, when to spend, saving, debt, and investments all influence affordability. Fortunately, there are a wide range of personal budgeting tools readily available to help.
Is Affordable Living challenging? Yes. Human nature motivates us to seek instant gratification, it’s biological. Dopamine triggers reward signals to our brain when we experience pleasure or achieve a goal. It motivates us to crave instant gratification. Remember, living affordably doesn’t mean zero spending; we can balance being frugal with spending a responsible amount on things that bring joy.
Affordable Living may seem far-off since its benefits are future net worth. Whatever our income, we need to spend affordably, save and invest in ourselves for future needs. Later in life, we will need additional financial resources because our income will likely stop increasing and will then decrease at retirement. Most of us invested the first 18+ years of our lives acquiring our basic education and developing core skills. As adults, saving and investing sets us free.
About ten years ago, ZF began coaching our scholarship applicants about the financial impact of college choice and affordable spending. The transition from high school to college challenges young adults to make critical financial choices; both near-term affordability and longer-term financial independence and debt repayment. No, it’s not fair, but it's reality.
We are surrounded by people who want to loan us money. Beware of BNPL, Buy Now Pay Later. BNPL encourages over-spending that limits your investment funds, dramatically limiting your financial resources when needed for retirement income, financial emergencies, hobbies, entertainment and travel. When you save and invest your savings, they grow and work for you. Affordable Living, like education, is self-investing where you earn future rewards.
(For further reading on this building block, see College Affordability and Money and Finance).
5. Build Trusting Relationships
No matter how effective we are, we have limitations. What if we had a trusted group of family, friends and colleagues that wanted to help us overcome these limitations? Think of Dorothy traveling the Yellow Brick Road with Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion; together they reached the Emerald City and the Wizard of Oz. Would they have made it alone? Probably not.
We actually see the power of relationships when playing or watching team sports. Think of tennis which offers singles and doubles formats. They’re very different games; in singles, each player tries to overwhelm the opponent while in doubles, partners build on their complementary strengths and compensate for each partner’s weaknesses and the more effective team usually prevails.
Toxic relationships lead to self-serving, negative behavior where the combined value becomes less than the parts and much less than their potential. Sometimes, it can be difficult to recognize a relationship as toxic. Be diligent and honest with yourself about how a relationship affects you, listen to your gut.
Effective adults and inspired leaders embrace interdependence and develop trusting and win-win relationships. Think of relationships as true partnerships, beyond superficial friendships. Once or twice every year take an hour or two to inventory and assess your relationships. Make a list and note the mutual benefits it provides and in what ways it might be toxic. Be honest and self-aware, go beyond charisma and enjoy being with them. Are these relationships making you and them “better?”
How you live is who you are and who you spend time with becomes part of how you live.
(For further reading on this building block see Personal Values & Development and Transition to College).
6. Live Healthy
Successfully traveling our ELP requires emotional and physical vitality. Living Healthy becomes a great investment; it benefits now and even more later. Healthy Living requires discipline, work and commitment. It looks different for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.
Start now to develop good habits so healthy living becomes part of who you are. Later in life, as you enjoy your family and career accomplishments you will reflect on your personal legacy – why should future generations care that I was here? You may need additional time and energy to build your legacy.
Physical health is well researched and always concludes that a balanced diet, exercise, and sleep are key. Use a careful web search and consult with your doctor to discover the keys to healthy living. There is a massive amount of misinformation and alluring trends that distract from what is right for you. Develop and list your personal guidelines and commit to them. Keep it simple and don’t cheat.
Mental health is a bit more complicated and it all starts with personal vision; who do you want to be? You want your ELP to guide you toward your vision. Toxic relationships are likely to be the biggest threat to your mental health. Fix them or end them.
(For further reading on this building block see Live Healthy).
7. Choose to Lead
Every day we witness examples of self-serving leadership that corrupts life. We need, and owe, higher quality leaders to future generations. Please choose to lead and inspire those who choose to follow.
We spend most of our first 20 years learning life’s basics. In addition to core academics, we also begin developing social skills. We will discover that effective living is a team effort where the whole is likely better than the sum of its parts.
Without knowing it, we begin studying leadership while very young. We analyze the leadership skills and practice of our parents, teachers, friends, relatives, neighbors; we grade them and adjust our relationships. Take time now thinking about your experiences and discoveries and start developing real insights.
As we approach adulthood, we try to emulate people in leadership positions rather than build on our earlier observations. We learned leadership as followers and are just unable to put it all together. ZF believes that unleashing our leadership capability can be summarized in three words.
- Discovery – All the basics are in our brain already. Think about them; grade leaders as good vs bad and begin to develop good leadership habits. Practice on yourself.
- Trust – Trust is earned and we must develop deep trust to lead.
- Vision – We must have a worthy vision that attracts people to follow us.
(For further reading on this building block see When You Talk to Yourself..LISTEN, 7 Habits Action Guide and Six problem-solving mindsets for very uncertain times.
8. Seek Win-Win Solutions
Envision your opportunities as a pie and you own a slice. Self-serving motives lead to cutting yourself a bigger slice of the pie, but win-win motives want to make the pie bigger, so that everyone’s slices are bigger. Making pies bigger are win-win solutions.
In order to seek win-win solutions, we must be mindful of how our actions and place in the community affect others. Even if you aren’t directly causing a win-lose situation, you may be contributing to it or enabling something that does. Using our position and/or privilege to uplift others is an essential part of finding shared solutions. Sometimes, a solution that seems fair to you or to management may have flaws or injustices. It takes time, communication, and critical thinking to arrive at truly shared solutions.
It isn't a coincidence that this building block shares win-win with the Relationships building block. Without trust-based relationships, leadership becomes self-serving and win-win solutions are only a dream.
Always seek win-win alternatives. Get creative if you can, there are always better solutions; dig deeper and find one.
(For further reading on this building block see Win/Win Interviewing Action Guide).
9. Innovate
Peter Drucker, the great management visionary, emphasized the difference between invention and innovation.
- Invention is creating something new – often a novel product, technology or idea; typically rooted in science and engineering.
- Innovation is about making that invention useful and valuable in the real world. Innovation creates impact.
Incremental improvements are fine but innovation enables dramatic advances. Also note that innovation isn’t limited to high tech, it comes from creative or nonlinear thinking. In 1913, Ford Motor Company introduced the modern assembly line, replacing individual craftsmen to assemble cars. Today, assembly line manufacturing enables mass production at high quality and low cost. Effective adults encourage and practice creative thinking from themselves and others. There are always better ways to develop your creative thinking - when making important choices take a few minutes to challenge yourself to discover them.
For further reading on this building block see Six problem-solving mindsets for very uncertain times.
10. Be a Lifelong Learner
ELP isn’t limited to young adults. ELP is a lifelong journey to discover our potential and develop ourselves. It’s never too late to start. We asked AI: Can you still be a student when not enrolled in a formal school? AI replied:
Absolutely! Being a student isn’t limited to formal institutions; it’s a mindset and a way of approaching life. You can always pursue learning through personal exploration, books, online courses, workshops, or even by having conversations with others. Curiosity and a willingness to grow are what truly define a student.
Knowledge gains value through innovation. Knowledge gained when solving real-life problems becomes uniquely valuable and ready for additional application.
