This is a guest post from Muhammad Alwaeli, Muhammad is a young leader based in Bagdad Iraq.
Where does leadership start?
Well, Leadership starts with You! It starts when you are able to understand yourself, control yourself, and make yourself achieve things. Otherwise don’t put too much hope in becoming a leader, not to mention a good one.
Just like you have to be nice to other people, understand them, and try to be an inspiration to them you have to do the same with yourself.
Be wise. Don’t start doing something that is too hard to achieve, given the circumstances and resources available, and then blame yourself and when you fail. Choose rather what you want to do more effectively, big things but not impossible things, and work gradually but steadily to achieve what you want, one step at a time.
Be nice. Don’t reward yourself only when you achieve things. Reward it also when you are working heard even if you are not achieving anything right now. You need motivation just like others need it. Your best motivator is you.
Inspire yourself. Always visualize a time when you did something in a great way. Remember your attitude and the feelings you had. Assert to yourself that this achievement is evidence of your capability to succeed.
Don’t torture yourself. Mistakes are not crimes. You are just in the same mode of a baby that is learning how to walk.
You need peace inside yourself to become a leader. Do you think a country suffering from civil war is able to have large impact on the international community?
Too often I have tried to convince others about a project but totally failed because I myself wasn’t OK from inside. How can I convince others to do something regularly, if I’m a procrastinator? How can I make others believe in something I lose faith in after a while? How can I expect others to achieve if I don’t have the right understanding to determine the right methods of workings?
One of the great values of understanding yourself and being in peace with yourself is that you get to understand others through this way. Many of us fail to realize that we share a large part of what we feel and how we are with others.
Yes, each one of us is unique, but you’ll be surprised to know how much we humans have in common. After you understand yourself better and are able to make it achieve things, you will be more capable to show others how to find self-peace and how to perform better.
This is why it makes sense to say that leadership starts inside yourself, and that you are your own first follower.
If you enjoyed this post from Muhammed then you can read more at Leadthrough
Gordon Tredgold
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