Today is Day 7 in our 7 Day Series on Personality Traits of a Great Leader. At the end of the article is new Blog information just in case you are in a hurry and read the article yesterday. For those that missed yesterday thanks for joining me this morning.
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. As we looked at these leadership characteristics closer from a Bible prospective. Today we look at #7 Learn to deal in realities. Deal in truth, the last in our series.
One of the biggest problems with many today is that they have a hard time dealing with reality. People often believe that they can live a life void of God. Reality is every breath we take is only because God allows us to do so. In and of ourselves we can’t do anything, especially anything of good.
Psalm 16:2 (NIV) “I say to the LORD, "You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing."
2 Corinthians 3:5 “Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God.”
With all the social media we can be fooled to believe that everyone has a better life than we do. We see snap shots of others highlights and compare our life to those snap shots. If we could see the entire film of their day to day life we may see things are not as though they appeared. Regardless of how hard life seems we must continue to press toward the higher calling.
Philippians 3:14 (KJV)”14 I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
Action step-If you don’t like how your life is make a decision to change it and begin right now. Then pray and ask God to help you. If you’ve ignored Him begin by asking for forgiveness and then ask Him for help and direction. He will answer.
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