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 3 days as we look at each one of these closer from a Bible prospective. Today we look at #4 Learn to be humble but not timid.
“I know that the best and humblest person who has walked the earth was tortured to death because he was accused of blasphemous arrogance. “This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him because . . . he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18). So I don’t expect his followers will ever be able to avoid the accusation of arrogance. If you are the humblest outspoken witness for Jesus as the only way to God, you will accused of arrogance.” ~John Piper
Somethings about humility if you are wondering if you humble is this, humility is glad that God gets all the credit. The next thing is humility recognizes and admits that all good things come from God. In ourselves we could do no good thing. (1 Corinthians 4:6-7)
Humility (James 4:13-17) gets under God and His sovereignty and power knowing if He doesn’t do it-it doesn’t get done. Anything we get to do is by His power. (Colossians 3:12-13) Humility recognizes that this virtue is only found through Jesus Christ and His word. Without the gospel of Jesus Christ there would be no humility found in the world and man.
(Philippians 2:3-8) and (Mark 10:45) lets us know that humility serves others. Humility is concerned with the needs of others. When we are always thinking of ourselves then we are not humble. Our model, Jesus came to serve not to be served. He came because He wanted to serve us.
(Mark 10:42-44) “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.”