4. Lead Yourself First
Sreekanth Ganeshi
Leadership Coach | Leadership Development | Transformational Leadership | Communication Skills | Personality Development | Team Work |
“A time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be” — Bruce Springsteen
We often have someone as our mentor or idol, whose ideologies and conduct appeal to us and we follow them to achieve our aspirations as they did in their lives. Their life inspired us in many ways, as it is normal human psychology to get influenced by the people around us.
If I ask you, who is the best leader? You will dive deep into your thoughts and various people’s images might flash before your eyes, who must have inspired you somehow in your personal or professional life. During this chase of finding someone's idol, you forget the most important person, whose every action or activity impacts you. That person is none other than YOU. Now think about the list that flashed before your eyes once again. Did you see yourself amongst those people? One who can lead in a great way is the most important person to lead is yourself. Did you ever feel that why should I be a great leader? But you’re forgetting the most important question, who am I? What do I stand for? What am I willing to sacrifice for? When you are able to answer these questions of who? It’s the beginning of understanding self and when you understand self, you develop yourself, your own personal GPS, one that will always direct you. Leadership begins by knowing who you are. At the end of the day, as a leader, we need to acknowledge who we are. That means we need to acknowledge the good and the bad, we need to acknowledge our successes and also a failure because none of us is perfect. I always wonder what makes people achieve the horizon of success. While a few are following in their footsteps to attain that level of success. I believe everyone has the seed of success within them. All they need to do is to cultivate that seed, water them, feed them, and it will begin to grow. I am spending my life trying to help people by adding value to their lives. I love to see people grow! So, the question is why do so many people fail to grow and could not reach their potential. I have considered that one of the main reasons is low self-esteem. Many people don’t believe in themselves. They don’t see the possibilities that God put in them. They possess a hundred acres of possibilities, yet never cultivate them because they are convinced that they won’t be able to learn and grow and blossom into something wonderful.
Don’t become too concerned about what others might think of you
A man went to a fortune teller to know what she will say about his future. He was curious to know about himself and believed that a fortune teller will let him know everything and he will move the mountains. She looked into a crystal ball for a while and said, “You will be poor and unhappy until you are forty-five years old.”
“Then what will happen?” asked the man hopefully.
“Then you’ll get used to it.”
That’s the way most people live their lives according to what others believe about them. They mould their thought process according to others by whom they are influenced and tend to believe that it is written in their fate. They forget to put the seed of determination and dedication and consider their life not worthy or begin living according to others. A few people who are imperative in their life expect them to go nowhere, and then that’s what they expect of themselves. That’s fine if you’re surrounded by people who believe in you. But what if you’re not?
You shouldn’t become too concerned about what others might think of you. You should be concerned about what you think of yourself. “You don’t have to accept what people say you have to be.” AS Nathanial Braden says, “If you feel inadequate to face challenges, unworthy of love or respect, unentitled to happiness, and for assertive thoughts, wants or needs if you lack basic self-trust, self-respect, and self-confidence, your self-esteem deficiency will limit you, no matter what other assets you possess.” If you want to become the person you have the potential to be, you must believe you can!
Watch Your Thoughts: If you know it or not, you are always running conversations with yourself all the time. Whether it is positive or negative. Do you encourage yourself? Or do you criticize yourself? If you are positive, then you help to create a positive self-image. If you are negative, you underestimate your self-worth. Where does this negative, critical self-talk come from? Is it your surroundings, what book you read, what you heard about people, what channel you watch, what food eat, or what you talk about? All these thoughts have little impact on your life but the major contribution is from your upbringing. But the time you’re seventeen years old, you’ve heard “No, you can’t.” an average of 150,000 times. You’ve heard “Yes, you can,” about 5,000 times. That’s thirty nos for every yes. That means the negatives pop up thirty times more than the positives and this basic feature contributes to the maximum of our thought development. That makes for a powerful belief of “I can’t.” Every time you make a mistake, don’t bring up everything that’s wrong with yourself; tell yourself that you’re paying the price for growth and that will learn to do better next time. Every positive thing you can say to yourself will help.
Don’t compare yourself with others: I realized how harmful it was. When you compare yourself with others either you feel that the other person is far ahead of you and you feel discouraged, or you feel that you are better than the other person and you become overconfident. Neither of these is good for you, nor it will help you to grow.
Comparing yourself with others is really just an unwanted distraction. The only one you should compare yourself to is you. Your goal is to become better than you were yesterday. You do that only if you focus on what you can do today to improve and grow. When you do that and if you look back and compare yourself from your weeks, months, or years ago to those of today, you should be greatly boosted by your progress. That is the mantra of life. Try to be in competition but not with others, but with yourself, and become the better version of yourself.
Go Beyond Your Limiting Beliefs
One of my friends, Veeresh Vadde is working in an MNC company. One day there was a discussion going on between us about career advancement; my friend suggested me to learn a foreign language as I have already learnt. I thought in mind “it’s easy for him to say” when it comes to believing myself, I am a sceptic.
There is a story about an elephant you might already know it. A gentleman was walking through an elephant camp. He spotted that the elephants weren’t being kept in cages or held by the use of chains. All that was holding them back from escaping the camp, was a small piece of rope tied to one of their legs. As the man gazed upon the elephants, he was completely confused as to why the elephants didn’t just use their strength to break the rope and escape the camp. They could easily have done so, but instead, they didn’t try at all. Curious and wanting to know the answer, he asked a trainer who was standing nearby, “Why were the elephants just standing there and didn’t try to escape?” The trainer replied, “When they are very young and much smaller, we use the same size of rope to tie them and at that age, it’s easy to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe, that they cannot break this thin chain and go away. They believe that rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free. The only reason elephants weren’t breaking free and escaping from the camp was that over time they adopted the belief that it just wasn’t possible. The same is applicable to you. No matter how much the world tries to hold you back always continue with the belief that what you want to achieve is possible. Believing in yourself and helping your team to go beyond limiting beliefs.
Add Value to Others: Making a difference even a small one in other people’s life will increase their self-esteem. It’s hard to feel bad about yourself when you are doing something good for someone else. Adding value to others makes them value you more. It creates a cycle of positive feelings from one person to another. Something small for you can lead to a bigger change in someone else’s life. So, try to become empathetic and kind toward others as whatever you give to the Universe, will come back to you.
Do the Right Thing Even If It’s Hard: One of the best ways to develop your self-esteem is to do what is right. It gives you a strong sense of satisfaction. We always have at least two ways to proceed; a smaller one with an easier way to achieve your targets, and the other one with hurdles and obstacles to learn and grow in between your passage of achieving your dreams. The shorter route always appeals to us but that would only lead to destiny without growth and development, while the other route will make you a better person than you were. The choice is yours. What will happen if you don’t do the right thing? Either you feel guilt, which makes you feel bad about yourself, or you lie to yourself to try to convince yourself that your actions weren’t wrong or weren’t that important. That does harm to you as a person and to your self-esteem.
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Being true to yourself and your values is a tremendous self-esteem builder. Every time you take action that builds your character, you become stronger as a person the harder the task, the greater the character builder. You can actually “act yourself’ into feeling good about yourself because positive character expands into every area of your life, giving you confidence and positive feelings about everything you do.
Be Teachable: All the good advice in the world won’t help you if you don’t have a teachable spirit. This means that you should be prepared to learn from every problem that occurs in the way of your destiny.
To know whether you are really open to new ideas and new ways of doing things, answer the following questions:
If you answered no to one or more of these questions, then you have room to grow in the area of teachability. Remember the words of John Wooden: “Everything we know we learned from someone else!”
Practice Small Discipline Daily: Carson was born on 18th September 1951, in Detroit Michigan U.S. He was a young boy who was extremely distracted in school, the teachers were worried, his mother was extremely concerned and they didn’t know what to do with him. Everyone thought he was a gone case, but the mother was very determined and wanted to transform. So, the mother had a frank and free conversation with her son one day. She told him, my dear son, you have talent and we need to transform that talent into the proper result. I have a suggestion for you, first of all, you will not be allowed to switch on the television till you complete the homework, second, you are allowed to see only two television shows in a whole week that will be strictly followed and the third one is every single week you have to study at least two new books from the library make notes from it and add to your general knowledge. The son was initially quite irritated by hearing this but because he has love and respect for his mother he agreed to follow. Gradually as this schedule wore on, it started showing its effects, when the teacher would ask questions randomly in class this boy because of his track record of diligent study of books could come up with answers that no one in the class knew and even the teacher was shocked. Over a period of time, his grade improved and then he actually started developing a lot of interest and absorption into the study as he saw the result and effect of what he was doing, and finally, he went on to become the most renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson. Later on, Carson became the director of pediatric neurosurgery at the “Johns Hopkins children’s center” in 1984 at age 33, the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery in the United States, and a politician who served as the “17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development” from 2017 to 2021. He was a candidate for “President of the United States in the 2016 Republican primaries”. He is considered a pioneer in the field of neurosurgery. He also won the award “Presidential Medal of Freedom” in 2008.
How did his mother transform him, we can see the ABCD of talent. First A, his mother acknowledged the son’s talent. Number two the mother believed that by following a process the son can realize his talent. Number three C is that the mother also had faith in the son’s ability to transform himself and ultimately showcase the result. Fourthly D, the mother set out a whole path of discipline for the son to follow and the son followed the discipline. So, when each one of us realized the power of
A — Acknowledgement
B — Believe
C — Capability and
D — Discipline, a combination of these transforms the talent into a powerful reality that impacts the whole world.
The mind by nature is always distracted. The mind can be controlled by using intelligence and therefore let us use our intelligence to say no to the distracting proposal of the mind and discipline our mind by using our intelligence to convert our talent into transformative experiences and impactful events in life.
Take Responsibility of Your Life: Our life is our responsibility, take a charge of it. Your life will be fully dependent on what decision you make, and what thoughts you have like we tend to get what we are willing to tolerate. If we allow others to disrespect us, we get disrespected. If we tolerate abuse, we get abused. If we think it’s okay to have a plan and purpose for our lives, we will become part of someone else’s! It may seem difficult at this point time but things will change keep going don’t give up.
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