Strategy One: Evaluate the Quality of Your Decisions
Leadership is not revealed by the number of decisions you make, but by the quality of thinking behind them. Every choice you made this year, either big or small, left evidence. Ask yourself honestly: Were my decisions driven by clarity or convenience? By courage or caution? By long-term value or short-term relief?

Leaders with weak internal governance often default to what feels easiest, fastest, or least confrontational. Peak performing leaders, however, choose what is right over what is comfortable, even when it costs them popularity or ease. Decision quality exposes your leadership maturity because it reflects the strength of your values, the sharpness of your judgment, and the discipline of your internal compass.If your decisions consistently protected comfort over conviction, it is not a strategy problem; it is a leadership readiness problem.

Strategy Two: Examine Your Emotional Behaviour
Pressure does not create character; it reveals it. The truest measure of leadership depth is how you responded emotionally when things were tense, uncertain, or unfair. How did you behave under disagreement, criticism, disappointment, delay, or even success?

Reactive leaders allow emotions to hijack outcomes. They lash out, withdraw, overexplain, or dominate. Regulated leaders, on the other hand, remain anchored, even when provoked. They pause before responding, choose language carefully, and act from intention rather than impulse.

Emotional control is not suppression; it is mastery. Reaction signals immaturity. Regulation signals leadership depth. The more senior your role, the more your emotional behaviour sets the emotional temperature for everyone else.

Strategy Four: Review How You Treated People
Your leadership legacy is not what you achieved; it is what others became around you. Reflect deeply: Did you expand people or shrink them? Did your presence elevate confidence or induce fear? Did you empower voices or silence them?

Intimidation may produce compliance, but it never produces commitment. Leaders who weaponize authority may win battles but lose trust. Respect, however, signals emotional intelligence, moral clarity, and ethical strength.

How you treated people, especially those who disagreed with you, depended on you, or could do nothing for you, reveals who you truly are as a leader. Influence without respect is temporary. Leadership without humanity is hollow.

Now hear this without emotional cushioning. If you desire leadership clarity in the New Year, the Kickoff Summit on January 17th 2026 is NON NEGOTIABLE. This is your leadership realignment chamber, your accountability confrontation, and your strategic awakening. Attend decisively. Show up ready. Reject denial. Embrace growth. This room will either refine you or expose the excuses you have normalised.At The 2026 New Year Kickoff Summit, we will give you performance insights and tools to Unlock New Levels of Excellence & Achieve Spectacular Heights (UNLEASH) in 2026.

Final Reflection
These five strategies are not performance metrics, they are mirror questions. They assess the strength of your internal leadership long before they show up in external results. Because before you can govern organizations, influence people, or lead movements, you must first demonstrate mastery over your decisions, emotions, consistency, character, and growth. Final reflection demands courage. Who did you become this year? A leader who avoided truth or one who embraced responsibility? Growth starts where honesty begins.

This is Performance Insights, and today your directive is bold. Take inventory. Confront weakness. Honour progress. Demand maturity.Leadership does not evolve through excuses or emotional avoidance. It evolves through truth ownership and strategic discipline. You cannot lead beyond the version of yourself you refuse to examine.

Let today become your line of demarcation between complacency and growth, illusion and accountability, stagnation and evolution. The Kickoff Summit stands as your confrontation interval, your growth demand and your leadership calibration. If you claim seriousness about excellence, demonstrate it with attendance. If you desire transformation, show it through action.

2026 will not reward leaders who drift, deflect, or delay. It will honour leaders who decide, discipline, and direct themselves intentionally.
Leadership always starts withinlong before anyone else is watching.

Whether you’re an executive, entrepreneur, public servant, or emerging leader, UNLEASH 2026 is your invitation to upgrade how you think, how you lead, and how you show up in every room. Join the conversation as we shape Africa’s next generation of leaders and equip you to achieve spectacular heights in 2026 and beyond. Send a mail to [email protected] for participation details

Visit www.tppafrica.com for full article where I shared the remaning 2 strategies
About Dr. Abiola Salami
Dr. Abiola Salami is the Convener of Dr Abiola Salami International Leadership Bootcamp ; The Peak PerformerTM FestivalMade4More Accelerator Program and The New Year Kickoff Summit. He is the Principal Performance Strategist at CHAMP – a full scale professional services firm trusted by high performing business leaders for providing Executive Coaching, Workforce Development & Advisory Services to improve performance. You can reach his team on [email protected] and connect with him @abiolachamp on all social media platforms.