I would like to focus on my Honesty because I sometimes don’t represent things as clearly as I could. I can often focus on what’s working to make sure that I keep the peace rather than sometimes being positive, yet clear, with what isn’t working.
Does anyone have any ideas about how I can practice this?
Have you tried the practice of daily journaling and setting goals for yourself?
I would suggest a practice that I often do which is explicitly telling people your intentions and their responsibilities BEFORE starting any project/group. However, that is the ideal case where we get to choose who we work with. In practice, we often need to work with people we don't know, and we need to learn how to communicate with them effectively since communication is key to any project. In the latter case, I recommend you to be as transparent(share information equally among all your coworkers no matter their position) and honest( do not show them rainbows and sunshine when they are heading in the complete opposite direction) as possible. Optimism and motivation is essential for good performance. However, tell your team that the journey to success is not a walk in the park, and always end your statements with a solution that would fix the issue. Let them recall their personal interest of joining your project by using "we" to not single them out.e.g: (We need optimal collaboration with you because we are a team, and we all will benefit from insert that specific team member's personal interest here when we complete this project to its fullest potential. As you already know the statement from software engineering that can be generalized to basically everything we can do " Garbage in , Garbage out." would forecast the result of bad input regardless of emotional state.
Try to do this before the storm and not when it becomes too late!! "During writing your code and not during compilation/interpretation where you get to test your result. You can relate how frustrating and time wasting it can be to have null pointers in any medium sized project and then trying to debug it. Try to set your pointers right the first time to prevent wasting precious resources (time/money/positivity lost due to annoying errors)!!
Lastly, I cannot stress the importance of creating the "team" environment that allows everyone to really hold himself/herself accountable to other members of the group. I used it in my team. I created a positive environment for sharing whatever crazy ideas they could come up with to improve our product ,and then trying to modify it until it becomes ideal. Every other day, a person from my team comes up with an idea and shares it. We probably made use of all ideas shared by either adding it to our "to be created" product backlog or defining what not to do, and always ending comments by giving praise to that person.
During my short yet very valuable interaction with you, I noticed how much you value positivity and want everyone to be happy. Think of happiness as an investment.. Invest some of the happiness you could provide for your team now in exchange for greater team happiness later. That way, you can think of your actions as providing much more happiness in the long term. You will not have to suppress your desire of making your team happy, and will not sacrifice any team performance in the process. In fact, you will let your team be better off by getting their project done and provide more happiness in the long term!! In my opinion. trying to find the ideal interval where your team is considered happy yet serious is an invaluable ability a leader can have.
Thanks for this @mjt07! Would you share your results and improvement goals in the Day 1 Optimize subcategory, I’d love to offer some feedback there.
As for your suggestions to improve honesty/authenticity:
First of all I love all the computer science analogies! For a nerd like me it speaks straight to my heart and makes things very clear. For me I’m looking for a few takeaways that I can learn from your comments:
A question for you, what process do you use to help ideation/sharing of ideas. What do you say? Is it a part of the work day? Come up on slack?
Thanks for this and I hope you have a beautiful day 
+BG
To help ideation / sharing of ideas I remind the team that our ideas got us to where we are now . No matter how much drive and passion we have, we need to create something that our target customers want.
Our drive will indeed pave the path to our success. However, our ideas will provide the blueprint to construct that "path" that we are trying to cross. As you noticed, I love using analogies when possible. I can relate this situation to having the best software engineer in town on my team. However, I decide to assign him the task of developing a minesweeper game where the screen prints motivational sentences whenever you press a mine. This would have done wonders to my mental health as a child when playing this game. However, this idea is not innovative/in-demand by all means. I can relate this case to physics in a way where the team has lots of "energy" available. However, they are doing the wrong type of "work".
To sum up, the team must use their energy to do the "right" work.
