SELF-HELP

Excerpt on Personal Leadership from Brian Tracy's Maximum Achievement Seminar. This is from the very first session entitled "The Keys To Peak Performance."

Leadership means having the ability to influence people and shape events. You only have two choices in life, you can influence others or you can be influenced by others. You can lead others or you can follow others. You can shape events or you can be merely a passive agent while events are shaped around you.

Your job is to be a leader and leaders are action oriented. Leaders take initiative; leaders go where no person has ever been before. Leaders throughout history have always been people who take action! They're ones who think about what needs to be done, they plan, they set goals and then they move quickly. Non leaders always wait for the leaders to go first.

I've studied the studies of more than 3,300 studies on leadership to find out what are the leadership qualities. And what we know is that the basic leadership qualities have been discussed and re-discussed going back for more than 600 years before Christ. There's dozens of them but I've come to the conclusion that there are what I call the "big four".

The very first of leadership qualities, the one that every study on leadership has in common is VISION. Vision is the ability to see the big picture. Vision is what separates leaders from followers. Leaders have long time perspective. Leaders can project forward five or ten or fifteen years and leaders can think through where they want to go and what they have to do to get there. Leaders practice what is called "back from the future thinking". They project forward five or ten years and they imagine what it would look like if they achieved their goals, and then they look back to the present and ask, "What would I have to do to get from where I am today, to where I want to be?"

Leaders then have the ability to share this vision with others and to get others to buy into what they want to create. You need a vision for your family, you need a vision for yourself, you need a vision for your marriage, you need a vision for your department, you need a vision for your company and you need a vision for your life.

And the very act of setting a big vision increases your self esteem, your self respect and your personal pride. Now, your vision is based on values and virtues. Leaders know what they believe in. Leaders are very clear about the values they believe in and espouse. Leaders know who they are and what they stand for.

One of the very best definitions of a leader is that they know who they are; and they know what they are not. They know what they are good at and what they are not good at. They know where their interests and abilities lie and they are willing to accept that there are areas that are not within that range.

Who are you? What do you stand for? The more you think about it the more you become a leader the more you develop a vision. Vision and Values are always expressed in your mission.

So what is your mission? Do you know what kind of future you are working toward? Leaders always have a mission. They have personal mission for their lives which is always to be an excellent person and they have a mission for their business which is to always be excellent somewhere in the market place. What is your mission? What are you working toward in the future?

Leaders also have a purpose or purposes. Leaders know why they are doing what they are doing. Leaders know where they are going. And especially, leaders have clear, written, specific goals with plans of action to achieve them.

Leaders have vision, values, goals, missions and purposes. What are yours? The very establishment of them makes you a leader and raises your self esteem, self respect and personal pride.

The second quality of leadership is Courage! Winston Churchill once said that "Courage is the foremost of the virtues for upon it all others depend." Leaders have the ability to face their fears, to confront their fears, to do the things they need to do, even if they are afraid.

Leaders have the ability to act without guarantees. Followers always have to wait till everything is guaranteed. Followers want assurances for everything but leaders dare to go forward, they dare to move towards fulfilling their vision and living by their values even though there is no guarantee or warranty that they will be successful.

Remember this, everyone is afraid! If everyone is afraid, why is it that anything ever gets done? Well I'm afraid and you're afraid… but the reason things get done is because the people that rise to the top, who have control that things get done, have the willingness to act in spite of their fears. They dare to go forward even though they are afraid. That's the mark of a leader.

The third quality of leadership is Realism, and realism is the ability to see the world as it is, not as you wish it was. Jack Welsh, the President of General Electric, says that the reality principle is the number one quality of leadership. It's the mark of the exceptional person.

The exceptional person is willing to see the world, the market, the business, the self, the people around them, as they are and not engage in wishful thinking or self delusion or mind games. They look at it honestly and openly. We know that superior people are honest and objective and realistic with whatever situation they face, with whatever strengths and weaknesses they have. They're always looking for ways that they can use their strengths, but they never play games with themselves, they're completely realistic.

And the essence of realism is integrity. Integrity means to tell the truth. It means to live in truth with yourself, it means to live in truth with others, it means to have a reputation to be a truthful person. We know that the core quality of integrity, the essence of the superior person is truthfulness. It means that you tell the truth about who you are.

You live the truth, you walk the talk. You act the truth and you are absolutely adamant about living in truth. Integrity is the foundation of character and a most important quality looked for and expected of leaders.

The fourth quality of leadership is Responsibility. And that means self reliance. Leaders look to themselves. They say, "If it's to be, it's up to me"! The most superior people throughout society are those who fall back on their own resources and they don't expect other people to do things for them.

Leaders make no excuses and they don't blame other people. They don't complain, they never explain. If they're not happy about the situation, they do something about it. Leaders don't practice criticizing or bad mouthing. Leaders say "the buck stops here". Leaders accept responsibility, leaders take responsibility.

Leaders volunteer for responsibility because they know that you always rise to the level of responsibility that you take on. If you want to rise any higher, just ask for more responsibility.

Leadership is the key, and here are seven rules for peak performance and personal leadership. These are the rules that will take us into the 21st century:

Your life only gets better when you get better. If you want to have a better family, become a better spouse. If you want to have better children, become a better parent. If you want to have better staff, become a better boss. If you want to improve any aspect of your life, go to work on improving yourself. Your life only gets better when you get better.

It doesn't matter where you're coming from, all that matters is where you are going. You see the past is the past. That was then, this is now. You've probably done a lot of foolish time wasting, money wasting things in the past, but they're gone now and they don't matter. Except to the degree that you have learned lessons from them it doesn't matter where you're coming from, all that matters is where you're going and where you're going is totally under your own control.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first. And often it's worth doing poorly several times. Do you know why people grow? They're willing to try things and fail. And people don't grow because they try things and if it doesn't work they quit. You can grow and grow and become better and better by being willing to try and fail and learn and try and fail and learn because anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first and often it's worth doing poorly several times until you master it.

You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. In the information age there are no limits on what you can learn. You can become a better manager, a better boss, a better engineer, a better technician, better parent, better spouse, and better cook. You can learn languages, you can learn skills and abilities. You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself as long as your goal is clear and you are determined.

You are only as free as your options. You're only as free as your well developed alternatives, your choices. So one of the most important things you do is you continue to develop new options, new choices, new possibilities, so that if something doesn't work out, you have choices and you can move quickly to something else. If you only have one choice, one option, then you are not free at all. You're out of control and you're controlled by circumstances.

Within every difficulty you face there is the seed of an equal or greater benefit or opportunity. Within every problem you have today, there is a solution. In fact, the problem that you're dealing with today, your biggest problem has been sent to you to teach you something that you need to learn in order to be successful in the future. All really successful men and women realize that problems contain within themselves precious gems of benefits and advantages that if they can find them they can turn them to their own advantage for the future. So look within every problem you are dealing with for what you can learn, the valuable lesson, the opportunity and possibility for tomorrow.

The only real limits on what you can be or do are self imposed. This is the greatest of all principles...the only real limits on anything you can be or do with your life are limits you set on yourself within your own mind. You have within you right now, the abilities to achieve more than you've ever achieved before if you just learn how. By developing the qualities of peak performance and personal leadership you can move to ever higher levels of self esteem, self respect and personal pride. You can become everything you're capable of becoming and in the coming sessions, I'll show you how.

If you're interested in more of this kind of information, I urge you to examine the entire Maximum Achievement Seminar. There are 24 video modules combined with a 300 page workbook. You can view it online or offline with your own DVD-ROM at your own pace in the comfort of your own home. Join the millions of indivduals who have experienced profound transformation as a result of taking this course...which we now provide in an easy go-at-your-own-pace, home-study format.

To learn more, go to http://www.empowermeonline.com/ma

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