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.
The Unexpected Secret to Reaching Your Goals: Slow Down!
The quickest way to success starts with being slow, You are filled with passion; you are eager to achieve your goals and you have a lot of ideas about what to do. What you don’t have is the time and patience to do what needs to be done. You want to grow fast and live your dreams as soon as possible. Being impatience about getting where you want to go makes you hurry up, think of the fastest ways to achieve big goals, and look for shortcuts. In the short run, you may gain some positive results and feel good about it but as you go along, the reality starts to kick in and the pain of failure after failure keeps discouraging you from going forward. In the beginning, you move fast but sooner than later you slow down to a halt. Therefor, the beginning of every long and worthy journey is slow, tedious, and time-consuming but essential. If you take your time for good preparation and work on the fundamentals, you can build your success on it. As you go along, gradually you speed up and become faster and faster toward your goals. It is better to start slowly and gradually speed up than start fast and keep falling. Work hard and fast but grow slowly. This is how you go long.
Why making a promise is so important
A promise is a conversation for action. When you promise something either to yourself or to others, you assure them of an action or a series of steps that would lead to a result in the future. Therefore, a promise is a powerful tool we use to pave the way to a specific future, and when this promise is to others, we hope to create cooperation and support. We all make promises, but the level of our commitments varies among us. Some people can hardly get much support by uttering a promise, while others can build an excellent level of collaboration. There are three levels to making promises, as explained below. Overpromising at this level is when you make a promise that you don’t mean it. You make the promise, but you are not planning to deliver it at all (which you are lying about), or you don’t show much commitment to its delivery when it comes to bringing your promise into reality. Being in the habit of overpromising and underdelivering gives you a reputation for being unreliable and untrustworthy. The longer you keep this habit, the harder it becomes to gain the people’s trust and the harder it becomes to gain their cooperation. Over time, you lose the power of your promises. When trust is an essential factor in your relationship with yourself and others, you are careful not to make promises that you can’t deliver. To build a reputation for being reliable, you deliberately work to provide more than you initially promised. When you make such behavior a habit, you create a reputation for being trustworthy and highly reliable. This reputation gives you the power to rely on the support and cooperation of other people at the times when you need them most. Level two is a great way to build credibility and trust and achieve goals, so it’s an excellent place to start; however, it is not enough for the leader who has a great vision and wants to bring significant changes in their organizations or societies. Under-promise is an invitation to be cautious and do what you can do. It has the danger of limiting yourself to your comfort zone and never setting more significant goals that you have never achieved. It is incredibly limiting when there is a need for other people’s cooperation to achieve challenging goals. How about overpromising but trying your best and bringing all the resources you have to make sure you deliver your promise? If you succeed in providing what you’ve promised, you can happily celebrate it with those who stood beside you. But if you fail, you take the blame, thank those who trusted you, and learn from the experience. Perhaps you lose some people’s confidence, but many might realize and see your effort as a confirmation that you did your best and were honest with your promise and might be willing to give you another chance in the future. While overpromising can be a powerful tool to achieve significantly challenging goals, it is not wise to overuse it; otherwise, you may build a reputation as a delusional leader who dreams big but can’t deliver.
The power of our thoughts
“Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”― Stephen Covey, What you think, defines how you live. So if you want to change your life, start with changing your thoughts.
Would you want to live ordinary or extraordinary? Choose your way!
You cannot achieve extraordinary goals while living an ordinary life. Either change your goals and expectations so to be ordinary and easily achievable or, Change your lifestyle to be able to handle extraordinary challenges and do what an ordinary person never can or is willing to do.
3 steps to achieve success and fulfillment in life
First: Define your future This step involves three key components: Create a clear vision. See the future you wish you to arrive as clearly as possible. Once you know it and once you see it, don’t ever change it but see it every day. Define your goals. Breakdown your vision into tangible and measurable goals. Design a roadmap: Build a strategy to get there. (change it along the way as you get more experienced) Second: Transform who you are You won’t get to a new external reality in your life unless you change internally first. So the first step toward a new future is to have a new you. You need to work on the following based on your vision, goals, and strategic plan: Your belief system and your core values Your habits and rituals The people around you Third: Execute your plan and achieve your goals This is both the hard part and the fun part. Usually, the people who are good at step one, are not so good at this step. So even if you are not good, you need to change this in step two and become great at execution otherwise you will be stuck at steps one and two forever. If you complete steps one and two successfully, this step becomes easier and more fun.
On traveling the journey of life
What is life? Life is a journey that starts with your birth and ends with your death. Within this journey, you experience your own existence in an unknown world. This is the reason you are born with the ability to learn, with a strong sense of curiosity and a passion to discover more and more about your world. You are the center of this world and the more you know about it the more you enrich your experience. The most important mission of your life is to stay alive so your period of experience in this world extends longer and longer and what comes naturally is that you just love every moment of it and appreciate this amazing experience. Your experience gives you a variety of sensations that you receive through your five senses. You feel pain, you feel pleasure, you feel love, you feel a connection, you feel fear, you feel envy, you feel joy and the list goes on and on. As you grow, your mind grows and this gives you the ability to expand the level of your experience and even go beyond what is surrounding you at the moment. You can think of the past and enjoy or suffer from the memories of it, your imagination can help you to think about the possible future and what you wish it to be. You learn to see things that don’t exist now but existed in the past or might exist in the future. And by this capacity, you improve the level of your experience and enhance your life further. Life and death We naturally fear death. This fear of death prompts us to take action and do something for our survival. But death is the best thing about life. It puts a cap on the time we have. It reminds us that we need to value our time as the most precious thing we have and to use it only for the most important things. Death also teaches us that there is an end to everything both good and bad, both pain and pleasure. While fear of death is natural and has been the best alarm to keep us alive, obsessing and worrying about death is not natural and it is a creation of our mind. Now we don’t fear dying at just this moment so we should do something about it to avoid the actual danger in front of us, but we are afraid of dying eventually. This fear is not helpful but harmful. We are afraid of what is inevitable. Natural fear is when we fear something that we don’t know if it’s happening or not. That uncertainty about the risk makes us do something about it and avoid the risk from happening. We might fight or flight (escape). But we are naturally not afraid of the inevitable. We embrace it. So we created a new type of fear, and now we have learned wrongly to fear something such as death as if by fearing we may become immortal. Love: “Would you become a pilgrim on the road of love? The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.” (Rumi) Love is the most amazing and best gift of life. As humans, we have the capacity to love and crave to be loved. This capacity connects us to each other and even to other things. With love, we can go as deep as we want and still there is more to go. When we proactively love, we make it an art. We learn how to connect and give and receive and bring warmth to our hearts and to our lives. With love, everything we experience gets much more interesting. The purpose of life: We have developed a culture to seek purpose for life. We wrongly seek reasons to live; some of us go out of our ways to find what our life is about. While we seek to find a complicated and strange meaning for life, we forget to look at it differently and see that the answer is as simple as this; the purpose of life is to live it, to be, to exist, and to experience it, to appreciate everything about it and to thrive in it. Yes, life is a journey and it’s our journey and despite that, we didn’t choose to begin it and we don’t have a choice but to end it one day, as long as we are alive, we have the choice to live it so we should live it. Giving and taking: As living things, we are both destined to take and give. We don’t have a choice in this but to do both. All living things do so. This taking and giving make us part of the eco-system that we live in. For example, we eat food but we are a great source of food for other creatures and eventually, we will be completely consumed by other creatures. But as human beings, we have developed a culture to take and give beyond what other living things do. We are part of the human family and from the time that we are born, we receive things such as protection, food, education, love and intimacy and so many other things from our family, friends, and the rest of the society. As we receive, there is an obligation to give. By giving we complete this cycle and we appear more natural, we enjoy our being among others and we feel there is a meaning to our life. Listening to our inner voice: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” – Steve Jobs Some of us are lucky enough to find our passion meets our talents and we find that what we give can be focused on a specific area and it takes shape as a mission of life. We are not happy just for small