In this episode, I am going to teach you three ways that you can establish yourself as a leader or if you are an aspiring leader and you want people to start noticing you or recognizing you as a leader, these tips are going to help. This episode is brought to you by my Goal Setting Guide, it is a FREE guide that you can download. The link is at the end of this blog. It is going to help you refine your goals and set them in such a way that they will be achievable and you will actually see success.
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Here are three tips on how you can establish yourself as a leader if you are an aspiring leader or want to be noticed as somebody that should be given more responsibility or be given opportunities to lead. This is part one of a series I am going to do, I am going to do three parts on this, so this is part one and these first three tips are absolutely essential.
1. Recognize Your Skills & Work on Developing Them
The first thing is this, you need to recognize and work on the skills that you need to develop. So if you want to become a leader, start preparing yourself to be a leader. Do not prepare yourself once you become a leader, you prepare yourself before you become a leader. Do the work to actually learn and understand how to be a more effective leader. Read, do some courses, go and study, whatever it might take but do the work to develop the skills you have to become a more effective leader so that when the opportunities show up you will actually be ready for them and you can jump in rather than saying, ” I want to be a leader but then when the opportunities come you fall flat on your face because you were not prepared.”
It is always better to be prepared, so when the opportunities come you actually excel and you will actually show people that you deserve to be there.
2. Learn from Others
The second thing is this, learn from others. Do not be somebody who thinks they know it all. Humility as a leader is absolutely crucial. Find people around you who are ahead of you on your journey and learn from them. Look for mentors, look for people who can speak into your life, people that can impart their wisdom and impart their experience into your life. Also learn from your peers. Your peers can teach you a lot and just because they are on the same level as you or on the same journey as you, it does not mean you cannot learn from them. So have peers whom you trust, that you can get advice from and that you can spend time talking through your challenges with.
Also take somebody under your wing so as you train others you will actually learn. I have three stages of mentorship where I try to find somebody that speaks into my life, someone who is ahead of me, somebody that is above me that I can converse with and somebody that I’m mentoring or training. That is how you learn from others around you.
3. Learn to Believe that you are a Leader even before you become one
The third tip is this, learn to believe that you are a leader before you become a leader. Leadership is very much about mindset. There was a study done on Fortune 500 leaders and they found that 80% of the leaders that were in positions of influence actually got to those positions predominantly because of confidence not competence. The way you walk into a room, the way that you greet somebody, the way you shake their hand conveys a sense of confidence in yourself and who you are as a person and as a leader. If you want people to follow you, people want to know that you are actually confident in your own ability. If you are hesitant, if you speak in halting tones, if you speak with an articulation that sounds like you are unsure of yourself, if you do not look people in the eye, then all of those things convey a lack of confidence.
You have got to be able to convey confidence in your own ability before people will start believing and trusting you and that all starts with believing in yourself. You have got to learn to tell yourself that you were born to be a leader. Tell yourself that you are developing as a leader, that you have the skills to do the job that is required and you are going to do the work to develop whatever skills you do not have. Start with your mindset, if you have a positive healthy mindset about your own leadership people actually start to believe you because they will see it in your face, they will see it in your body language and they will hear it in your tone of voice.
So these are three ways that you can start to establish yourself as a leader, if you are a young leader or a beginning leader and you want people to start giving you opportunities. So the first thing is to put in the work to build the skills that you require to become the leader that you’re aspiring to be. Secondly, do not assume you know everything, learn from others, find mentors, learn from peers and mentor others so that you can also learn as you teach. The third thing is to start to change your attitude about your leadership. If you lack confidence, if you lack self-belief then you need to work on that and start believing you are a leader before other people will believe you are a leader.
I hope that was really helpful for you, don’t forget if you want to learn more about leadership check out our course “Leading for Success” the link will be in the description below.
If you would like to learn more about effectively growing in your leadership, why not check out our FREE Goal setting guide. See below for details. https://leadcommunicategrow.com/free-goal-setting-guide/
5 Steps to Set Goals that Work
Online Leadership Course: https://calmer-classrooms.thinkific.com/courses/leading-for-success
