How to Become a Leader: The 3 Essential Steps to Initiating Leadership
To become a leader, you don’t need to wait for a bestowed position of authority, nor must you wait for followers to acknowledge you as their leader. You become a leader once you’ve completed these three essential steps: Step One: Choose to Be a Leader Leadership is a choice – a challenging choice to make. A leader’s life differs significantly from the lives of others. By opting to be a leader, you consciously embrace hardships and welcome substantial challenges in life. As a human being, you inherently possess the potential to lead. The distinction between you and other individuals lies in your decision to embrace leadership or shy away from it. Once you’ve made this choice, you embark on the journey with this inaugural step. Step Two: Assume Responsibility At the core of a leader’s essential characteristics is caring. You care about being a valuable asset to the world rather than a burden. You prioritize an extraordinary existence over mere survival, extending your concern to address others’ problems and offering solutions. This sense of care propels you to take on responsibility, take action, initiate change, and commit to resolving problems irrespective of potential challenges. Step Three: Cultivate the Leader Within However, caring and assuming responsibility alone is insufficient. You need the capacity to lead; otherwise, you will fail and become increasingly frustrated. To evolve into a successful leader who delivers tangible outcomes instead of merely discussing them, you must focus on self-development. Dedicate yourself to acquiring knowledge, honing essential skills, and, above all, mastering a positive mindset, even during the most arduous times. Dare to live a remarkable life. Choose to be a leader and transform into one.
On daily rituals
What you repeatedly do on daily basis will gradually accumulate momentum that can empower you to complete the biggest projects and accomplish such goals that are usually perceived impossible. Daily rituals appear to be too simple to pay attention to but have such an immense power that can uplift the most gigantic obstacles. “A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.” Mason Currey “A day is too short and nothing much can be done and it’s ok to lose a day or two”. So we often think. We continue to lose many of such days in unplanned activities and half-done and half-hearted projects. “One day I will start all over and will work hard on my big project”, so we dream. Building a house starts with one brick at a time. If we don’t care about one brick, we don’t care about the whole house. In order to build your life, one should focus on building his or her day first. If you build one day, there is a chance that you continue such a day and build your entire life. We all love the freedom of doing whatever we like in a day, but submitting to such a craving would cost us our own success in life. Alternatively, we should submit to a list of things that we commit to doing on daily basis, and stay patient until we see the fruit of our consistency. Keeping a list of daily rituals is a common habit of successful people. Whether you like to be a successful entrepreneur, a CEO of a public company, a director of a multinational non-for-profit organization, a writer, or a reward-winning movie producer, you need to know what the most important thing is for you to do to get there and then decide to work on it every day. A writer might commit to a daily few hours of writing, a politician might commit to reading while a businessman might commit to meeting with his key staff every morning. You may have one or multiple daily rituals, but you need to have daily rituals in order to bring success into your life. Daily rituals are not just for big goals but for keeping us healthy and prepared. There are few daily rituals that we all can share, regardless of what our professions are. Here is the list of some of the most common daily rituals practiced by highly effective people around the world. You may already have one or more of them. Meditation Most people prefer to do meditation in the early morning when it’s calm and peaceful, the air is fresh and they can prepare themselves for a good day. But you can do it at any time that works best for you and your schedule. Visualization This is an amazing technique to see the future you are going toward and prepare yourself mentally and emotionally for any challenge that might come that day for the sake of the future you envision in the morning. Planning and reviewing It’s obvious that a day that starts with a good plan works much better for you and a review at the end of the day will tell you what you can learn for the next day to improve. Reading You can read every day or every other day but as long as you keep a habit of reading regularly, you are feeding your mind proactively in order to improve your thoughts and therefore to improve your life. Exercise You can exercise as little as twenty minutes or as long as two hours depending on what is your goal for the exercise but not having the habit of exercising at least three times per week is not an option. Journaling Journaling is not for children only who would write about their days. Many great adult leaders in the past and present have had the habit of journaling. Write about your day, write about what’s in your mind and keep them for yourself, it frees your mind, clears your thoughts, and gives you a better perspective about your life. Do you have any daily ritual(s)? If yes, tell us about them and tell us what has been their impact on your life. If the answer is no, think about it and see what keeps you from not building some.
Why build a character?
You take your time and build your character and then your character serves you for the rest of your life. It will serve you as a power behind all your successes, it will be most needed when you fail and you need to get back on your feet, it will be there for you when you are faced with the most difficult questions in your life and it will support you when no one is around you to provide you support. Character is the central part of any human being. If you fail to build your own character yourself, it will be shaped on its own. A character built on its own is not your character but a character shaped up of a thousand un-integrated pieces.
The generosity of free advice
When you receive something valuable from someone and you give them a sincere expression of appreciation, you encourage them to give more and often. It would be extra generous of them if you don’t show appreciation and they still give. Free advice is something we all need time to time. Feedback received from a friend, colleague or relative is something that could lead to a great deal of self-improvement. Of course, you don’t have to follow whatever advice you receive. And you don’t have to accept every single feedback you get. But you always need to show appreciation. Appreciation is the recognition of their generosity. Free advice is not really free. Like no gift is really for free. The person who gives it to you is, in fact, investing in you and in the relation. If they don’t see that their caring advice creates any positive improvement, they might eventually give up on you and even the relation. The more we value the honest effort of such caring people the more we can receive their generosity.