Let me begin by saying I do not know Jim Rohn personally but he has had a huge impact on my life. I have learned a great deal from him and Michael Hyatt who he mentored. I wanted to post this article he wrote and teach further on each trait he mentions in this article. Please continue to research his materials and glean from his rich wisdom and vast knowledge.
7 Personality Traits of a Great Leader by Jim Rohn
The qualities of skillful leadership
If you want to be a leader who attracts quality people, the key is to become a person of quality yourself. Leadership is the ability to attract someone to the gifts, skills and opportunities you offer as an owner, as a manager, as a parent. Jim Rohn calls leadership the great challenge of life.
What’s important in leadership is refining your skills. All great leaders keep working on themselves until they become effective. Here’s how:
1. Learn to be strong but not impolite. It is an extra step you must take to become a powerful, capable leader with a wide range of reach. Some people mistake rudeness for strength. It's not even a good substitute.
2. Learn to be kind but not weak. We must not mistake weakness for kindness. Kindness isn't weak. Kindness is a certain type of strength. We must be kind enough to tell someone the truth. We must be kind enough and considerate enough to lay it on the line. We must be kind enough to tell it like it is and not deal in delusion.
3. Learn to be bold but not a bully. It takes boldness to win the day. To build your influence, you've got to walk in front of your group. You've got to be willing to take the first arrow, tackle the first problem, and discover the first sign of trouble. Like the farmer, if you want any rewards at harvest time, you have got to be bold and face the weeds and the rain and the bugs straight on. You've got to seize the moment.
4. Learn to be humble but not timid. You can't get to the high life by being timid. Some people mistake timidity for humility. But humility is a virtue; timidity is a disease. It's an affliction. It can be cured, but it is a problem. Humility is almost a God-like word—a sense of awe, a sense of wonder, an awareness of the human soul and spirit, an understanding that there is something unique about the human drama versus the rest of life. Humility is a grasp of the distance between us and the stars, yet having the feeling that we're part of the stars.
5. Learn to be proud but not arrogant. It takes pride to build your ambitions. It takes pride in your community. It takes pride in a cause, in accomplishment. But the key to becoming a good leader is to be proud without being arrogant. Do you know the worst kind of arrogance? Arrogance from ignorance. It's intolerable. If someone is smart and arrogant, we can tolerate that. But if someone is ignorant and arrogant, that's just too much to take.
6. Learn to develop humor without folly. In leadership, we learn that it's OK to be witty but not silly; fun but not foolish.
7. Learn to deal in realities. Deal in truth. Save yourself the agony of delusion. Just accept life as it is—the whole drama of life. It's fascinating.
Life is unique. Leadership is unique. The skills that work well for one leader may not work at all for another. However, the fundamental skills of leadership can be adopted to work well for just about everyone: at work, in the community and at home.
I pray you learned from this article and will stay with me for the remaining 6 days as we look at each one of these closer from a Bible prospective. Today learn to be kind but not weak.
Learn to be kind but not weak. We must not mistake weakness for kindness. Kindness isn't weak. Kindness is a certain type of strength. We must be kind enough to tell someone the truth. We must be kind enough and considerate enough to lay it on the line. We must be kind enough to tell it like it is and not deal in delusion.
"A warm smile is the universal language of kindness." -William Arthur Ward
Kindness is defined as the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.
In a study conducted by Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, psychology professor at University of California, Riverside, students were assigned to do five random acts of kindness per week for a period of six weeks. At the end of the study, the students' levels of happiness had increased by 41.66 percent. Being kind had a profoundly positive effect on happiness.
"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."-Franklin D. Roosevelt
Years ago Steve Sjogren started a congregation outside Cincinnati, Ohio with only a handful of people. They started something called “Servant Evangelism” in which they continually performed acts of kindness to people in their community. They never took any money for these good deeds. Today, over 4,000 people attend the church that started this conspiracy of kindness.
“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ, God forgave you.
Why should we show kindness to others? There are at least two good reasons. First it is the command of God. You read it for yourself–“be kind and compassionate to one another.” Jesus commands us to love our neighbors. Love for others is not an emotion or a feeling, it is a choice. We choose to love others because God tells us to.
So we are kind because Jesus told us to be but another reason to show kindness is the character of God. God tells us to show kindness to others because that is part of His wonderful character. He is full of loving kindness toward us. God has forgiven us not because we deserved it–He forgives us for Jesus’ sake.
God didn’t just tell us He loves us, He proved it. Romans 5:8 says, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” It’s not enough for us to say we love others; we must show it.
"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late." -Ralph Waldo Emerson