If you want to be influential and lead others, there is one thing you can do that will have an outsized impact on your leadership.

Get a good night’s sleep.

Before you sign up for an expensive leadership development program or read another book about leadership, pay attention to the basics.

Things like sleep, nutrition, exercise, practicing gratitude, doing your own work to maintain detachment, and keeping your thoughts in a good place. All of those things will improve your leadership much more than another book or program.

If you work on yourself first, everything you do will be more effective. Every interaction you have will go more smoothly, and all your thinking will be more clear.

The first thing that you need to work on, and never stop working on, is making yourself better.

The more we lead ourselves, the more we become a leader. Growing in our self-leadership helps us to embody the practices that we want our team in our organization to engage in.

Self-leadership is not about doing things differently. It’s about becoming someone people want to follow.