The first step to becoming a great leader is choosing to be a great leader. Most people become leaders by default. Due to some unexpected turn of events, one person finds himself in a leadership position and is then more or less forced to lead the group.

If you are a leader of any kind, remember the time in your life when you first realized that you were a leader. For me, it was during high school that I realized that my friends often turned to me for direction and that if I didn’t plan interesting activities for a night out or weekend, it was going to be pretty boring with everyone sitting around. wondering what we would do. should do.

Also, I have a tendency not to like the plans others make for me, so I learned early on to come up with a plan for myself. There have always been others happy to follow my example.

However, stumbling into the role of leader does not automatically make you a great leader. It does not even guarantee that you will be a good leader. In fact, you may be a bad leader and still have a lot of people willing to follow your example.

As Reggie McNeal, whose talk inspired this article, put it: “There is no shortage of poor leaders. There must be a factory somewhere that pumps them out by the thousands.”

So if you find yourself in a leadership position, you still get to choose what kind of leader you want to be. This article is for those who choose to become great leaders.

According to McNeal, the first step in choosing greatness as a leader is to become self-aware. While I am very familiar with the pursuit of self-awareness, this is a topic that many Christians seem to shy away from. I was very happy to hear Reggie mention this very important point for spiritual leaders.

To develop spiritually and intellectually, we must know where we are and what we have to work with. Becoming aware of ourselves and our own conscience is essential to advance in any process of personal development.

So how do we become aware of ourselves? For leaders, we often look at the ways in which we are different from other people. Why do we lead and others follow us? Realizing that there is a difference in the way we are made is a step towards self-awareness.

Another part of self-awareness is embracing our own personality and its particular quirks. Many times we see personality quirks as flaws or imperfections, but we must also remember that God made us that way. He gave us our personalities for a reason. And while we are free to choose how we express ourselves at any time, we would benefit from looking at the strengths of our natural personality before trying to switch to something different.

Much of your personality and relationship styles are inherited from your family. How your family handled conflict and stress in your early years will have a big impact on how you choose to handle conflict and stress as an adult. If your family suppressed extreme emotions, then a silent crisis response will feel more natural to you than it would to someone who grew up in an environment where yelling, yelling, and crying were the common way of coping with stress.

And while as an adult leader you can choose how you’ll handle each situation as it arises, you’ll benefit from being aware of what your natural bias is and knowing why it’s there.

To be a great leader, you need to give clear instructions to your followers. And while he may feel that his instructions are perfectly clear because he understood exactly what he meant, his followers may be looking at life through different lenses and not think that his instructions are clear at all. .

For example, if you tell someone who grew up in the country to take the dog for a walk, they might just open the door and push the dog away. But give the same instructions to someone in town and chances are they’ll pick up the leash and poop scooper and then hitch up the dog and take it to the park.

Great leaders also understand that the people need a champion. While people may be shy about taking action on their own, they will be much more inclined to take action if they know there are others who will back them up. They are even more willing to take risks if there is a strong leader who not only encourages them but also shows them what actions to take.

Great leaders are also subject to some traps that are unique to leaders and they take special measures to overcome them. Knowing and understanding these weaknesses is an important part of self-awareness.

One of the most common problems leaders, both good and bad, face is burnout. If we don’t take the proper precautions along the way, we will all reach a point where our leadership skills are compromised because we simply don’t want to keep doing it.

To combat and possibly prevent burnout, there are some critical factors that you need to incorporate into your lifestyle.

The first is to set aside a time of spiritual renewal. You must realize that the power you give your followers does not come from you but through you. Also, if you are a spiritual leader, the time you normally set aside for your followers to be renewed is not the time that you will be renewed. You must set aside a different time.

This renewal of mind and soul takes the form of recreation, meditation, or perhaps just sleep. Many leaders are sleep deprived and consequently make poor decisions. Take time to sleep if you need it. But be sure to make time each week for the renewal of your own spirit or your leadership skills will suffer.

The second factor that you can incorporate into your life is simplification. Many great leaders are reduced to bad leaders by trying to do more than they can handle. While there are an endless variety of good programs to choose from to lead, there are a very limited number of ones that have the tools and ability to do it right. Focus on what you can do well and let someone else take over leading the others.

One of the factors that I see missing in spiritual leaders lately is the search for quality. My experience is the industry where being the best in your market was the only way to guarantee success off the tee. The term “unique selling position” was constantly on our minds. However, in most cases, I do not have the same zeal to be the best service provider for spiritual leaders. I see more of a tendency to try to provide a wider variety of poorly done services than to provide a few really good services.

Truly great leaders will focus on what they do well. They will be sufficiently aware of their own strengths, interests, talents, and abilities to know what they can do well. Great leaders learn to eliminate other tasks, delegate them or share them.

A great leader must also realize that while service to others is important, taking care of yourself must come first. You cannot give to others unless you first take care of your own needs. While we can teach that it’s not just about you when you motivate people to serve, to be a great leader you must realize that it’s about you. Your need to lead and serve must be met in order for you to honor God for creating you to lead.

Being self-aware also means learning to know your limitations and weaknesses.

One of the most common limitations to go from being a good leader to being a great leader is perfectionism. The desire to be right is common among good leaders because it is easier to get people to follow you when you are right more often than when you are wrong. However, the pursuit of perfectionism hinders progress. There will be failed experiments. There will be things that are not as at first sight. However, the great leader takes all this into consideration and moves on. He is not afraid to make a mistake if necessary to progress.

Another obstacle to a great leader is arrogance. By definition, it is very difficult for a leader to be aware of arrogance. Usually someone will have to point this out to you. When they do, he takes their heads and listens. Don’t be too arrogant to ignore good advice.

The most overwhelming limit to be a great leader is indecision. People expect their leaders to make decisions for them. That’s why they have leaders. Often, leaders must make a decision before all the data necessary for that decision is available. A great leader cultivates his intuition and demonstrates his ability to make decisions quickly and effectively.

The choice to be a great leader is often based on one’s own talents. While skill can be developed with training and practice, each of us has certain innate talents that God gave us at birth.

By recognizing these talents and harnessing them, we can take our leadership skills to a new level of greatness. To be a great leader, we must learn to work and exploit our natural talents and interests. In fact, these natural talents become necessities in our lives. We have a built-in need to express and develop our talents in order to be truly satisfied with life.

The final step in becoming self-aware and choosing to be a great leader is to look at your experiences in life. May he know that God has followed all the advice of the great self-help writers and created him with an end in mind. He knew what he was trying to achieve from the start. All your life experiences are pointing you towards that goal.

That goal is etched into the fabric of your soul through your interests, desires, talents, and experiences. The things that happen in life are not mere coincidences, rather they are formative lessons for you as you proceed on your path of personal development. Both the good and the bad times have given you experience on how to deal with similar and different situations in the future.

When I read the biographies of great leaders, all I keep coming across over and over again are stories of how they overcame great suffering and setbacks on their way to becoming a great leader.

You may not have consciously chosen to be a leader. He may feel that it was just an accident that he was put in a leadership role. But you have to trust that you are exactly where you are supposed to be right now. Now you can choose what kind of leader you will be. The first step in that choice is to determine who you are and where you come from. You must become aware of yourself.