Upasna kaushik
Hi Group,

Would like to share this commendable article with you all.

Happy Reading!

SmartLeaders are passionate about personal growth they thrive on it. Leaders understand that the moment you stop growing you have stopped leading. A leader's growth plan has seven steps: 1) Plan to grow; 2) Accept responsibility for your growth; 3) Study purposefully; 4) Share what you learn; 5) Initiate new experiences; 6) Organize your 'leadership lessons'; 7) Network with others. Investing time in personal growth stretches you, strengthens you, sharpens you, stimulates you and catapults you an investment any SmartLeader is willing to make!

SmartLeaders are passionate about personal growth they thrive on it. Leaders understand that the moment you stop growing you have stopped leading. Likewise, the more you grow the more effectively you can lead. Investing time in personal growth stretches you, strengthens you, sharpens you, stimulates you and catapults you an investment any SmartLeader is willing to make!

PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL GROWTH

A great baseball coach once quipped, "Baseball is simple, after all it's just a game of running, hitting, throwing, and catching. Who can't do those things??" He was joking, but he was also making a point: the game can be played well if one masters a few basic principles. The same applies to personal growth. Most of what we need to understand about the current talk surrounding personal growth can be catalogued under three BIG principles:

1. The Principle of Intentional Action: Personal growth doesn't just happen. While anyone can grow, not everyone does because it requires specific and concrete actions. Seven of those specific actions will be discussed below.

2. The Principle of Intrinsic Value: Personal growth is it's own reward. While growing certainly will help you with others (see Principle #3) there is also an intrinsic value that comes from knowing that you are stretching, strengthening, and sharpening yourself for a better future. Hyrum Smith talks about this in his 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management: "You must believe that there is an intrinsic value to be gained from reading a book that is unrelated to work."

3. The Principle of Influence: Personal growth is required for effective leadership. Can you lead without growing? Yes, but not for long! Your circle of influence is determined and delineated by your level of growth. Really, you have only two options: grow or die. And let's face it, the walking dead have very little influence.

These BIG principles of personal growth are offered to you both to help you understand this BIG idea called personal growth and to give you some handles for stirring your passion for personal growth.

THE PARADOX OF PERSONAL GROWTH

When you think about personal growth you most likely find that you become excited (I can't wait to grow!) or exhausted (Growth is hard!). Such thoughts may occur within the same day or even the same hour. Congratulations! You've just discovered the paradox of personal growth, namely, that it is both exciting and exhausting. At times your desire for personal growth is exciting it's as if you can't grow fast enough. You are devouring every book, magazine and leadership lesson in sight. At other times you find personal growth difficult it's as if you just can't get started. You procrastinate. You waste your time on trivial pursuits. Sound familiar?

When your passion for personal growth is high, take advantage of the exciting desire. Don't let a peak learning time pass you by. Your already lit passion can turn into a great bon fire of learning, growing and stretching. When your passion for personal growth is low, take time to examine yourself. Ask if your desire to refrain from growing is from something legitimate or from a self-induced laziness. If you're just being lazy (now be honest!) remember that your mind is often like a child at play, which must be called in to focus on a specific task. At first it will resist the call to growth but once engaged it looses all track of other distractions. When laziness attacks, initiate growth and you will soon find the energy and enthusiasm to continue! Over time, as you continue to reap the rewards of initiating personal growth, you will gain the habit of initiative , and it will become more natural to read that book than to watch that nighttime soap opera or football game.



STIRRING YOUR PASSION

Like any good fire, your passion for personal growth must be stirred. Here are seven practical steps that, if taken, will take you to consistently higher levels of personal growth.

1. Plan to grow. Set goals, and put them on your calendar. As Tom Peters says, "what gets scheduled gets done." (See The Professional Service Firm 50)

2. Accept responsibility for your growth. They don't call it 'personal' growth for nothing! It's up to you.

3. Study purposefully Although meandering minds sometimes randomly strike a worthy insight, purposeful study will more often hit the bull's eye.

4. Share what you learn It's a simple fact: you don't really know it until you share/teach it.

5. Initiate new experiences. Worn paths hold few surprises, take a new route to discover a new insight. But remember to be intentional and purposeful with new experiences, seek the reward of the novel.

6. Organize your 'leadership lessons.' Write it down, and write down where you wrote it down.

7. Network with others. Network not only to share what you've learned, but also to share where/how you learned what you learned.

These principles should stir you to action, but don't let all seven overwhelm you. Take a few, maybe two or three and start putting them into practice right now. Then, over time, add the others. These seven steps will form a framework upon which you can eventually build your own personal growth routines. As you make your way in this journey, soon your personal growth will be in overdrive and your leadership capabilities growing exponentially!

Best Regards,

Upasna Kaushik

From India, Delhi
Upasna kaushik
Hi Group,

Just go through...Leader in you...

Awaken the Leader in You

Ten easy steps to developing your leadership skills by Sharif Khan.

The miracle power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance, under the promptings of a brave determined spirit.. . Mark Twain



Many motivational experts like to say that leaders are made, not born. I would argue the exact opposite. I believe we are all natural born leaders, but have been deprogrammed along the way. As children, we were natural leaders - curious and humble, always hungry and thirsty for knowledge, with an incredibly vivid imagination; we knew exactly what we wanted, were persistent and determined in getting what we wanted, and

had the ability to motivate, inspire, and influence everyone around us to help us in accomplishing our mission. So why is this so difficult to do as adults? What happened?

As children, over time, we got used to hearing, .No,. .Don.t,. and .Can.t.. .No! Don.t do this. Don.t do that. You can.t do this. You can.t do that. No!. Many of our parents told us to keep quiet and not disturb the adults by asking silly questions. This pattern continued into high school with our teachers telling us what we could do and couldn.t do and what was possible. Then many of us got hit with the big one . institutionalized formal education known as college or university.

Unfortunately, the traditional educational system doesn.t teach students how to become leaders; it teaches students how to become polite order takers for the corporate world. Instead of learning to become creative, independent, self-reliant, and think for themselves, most people learn how to obey and intelligently follow rules to keep the corporate machine humming.

Developing the Leader in you to live your highest life, then, requires a process of .unlearning. by self-remembering and self-honoring. Being an effective leader again will require you to be brave and unlock the door to your inner attic, where your childhood dreams lie, going inside to the heart. Based on my over ten years research in the area of

human development and leadership, here are ten easy steps you can take to awaken the Leader in you and rekindle your passion for greatness:

1. Humility. Leadership starts with humility. To be a highly successful leader, you must

first humble yourself like a little child and be willing to serve others. Nobody wants to

follow someone who is arrogant. Be humble as a child . always curious, always hungry

and thirsty for knowledge. For what is excellence but knowledge plus knowledge plus

knowledge - always wanting to better yourself, always improving, always growing.

When you are humble, you become genuinely interested in people because you

want to learn from them. And because you want to learn and grow, you will be a far more

effective listener, which is the #1 leadership communication tool. When people sense you

are genuinely interested in them, and listening to them, they will naturally be interested in

you and listen to what you have to say.



2. SWOT Yourself. SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities,

and Threats. Although it.s a strategic management tool taught at Stanford and Harvard

Business Schools and used by large multinationals, it can just as effectively be used in

your own professional development as a leader. This is a useful key to gain access to selfknowledge,

self-remembering, and self-honoring.

Start by listing all your Strengths including your accomplishments. Then write

down all your Weaknesses and what needs to be improved. Make sure to include any

doubts, anxieties, fears, and worries that you may have. These are the demons and

dragons guarding the door to your inner attic. By bringing them to conscious awareness

you can begin to slay them. Then proceed by listing all the Opportunities you see

available to you for using your strengths. Finally, write down all the Threats or obstacles

that are currently blocking you or that you think you will encounter along the way to

achieving your dreams.



3. Follow Your Bliss. Regardless of how busy you are, always take time to do what

you love doing. Being an alive and vital person vitalizes others. When you are pursuing

your passions, people around you cannot help but feel impassioned by your presence.

This will make you a charismatic leader. Whatever it is that you enjoy doing, be it

writing, acting, painting, drawing, photography, sports, reading, dancing, networking, or

working on entrepreneurial ventures, set aside time every week, ideally two or three

hours a day, to pursue these activities. Believe me, you.ll find the time. If you were to

video tape yourself for a day, you would be shocked to see how much time goes to waste!



4. Dream Big. If you want to be larger than life, you need a dream that.s larger than

life. Small dreams won.t serve you or anyone else. It takes the same amount of time to

dream small than it does to dream big. So be Big and be Bold! Write down your One

Biggest Dream. The one that excites you the most. Remember, don.t be small and

realistic; be bold and unrealistic! Go for the Gold, the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the Oscar, the

highest you can possibly achieve in your field. After you.ve written down your dream,

list every single reason why you CAN achieve your dream instead of worrying about why

you can.t.

5. Vision. Without a vision, we perish. If you can.t see yourself winning that award and

feel the tears of triumph streaming down your face, it.s unlikely you will be able to lead

yourself or others to victory. Visualize what it would be like accomplishing your dream.

See it, smell it, taste it, hear it, feel it in your gut.



6. Perseverance. Victory belongs to those who want it the most and stay in it the

longest. Now that you have a dream, make sure you take consistent action every day. I

recommend doing at least 5 things every day that will move you closer to your dream.



7. Honor Your Word. Every time you break your word, you lose power. Successful

leaders keep their word and their promises. You can accumulate all the toys and riches in

the world, but you only have one reputation in life. Your word is gold. Honor it.

8. Get a Mentor. Find yourself a mentor. Preferably someone who has already achieved

a high degree of success in your field. Don.t be afraid to ask. You.ve got nothing to lose.

Mentors.ca is an excellent mentoring website and a great resource for finding local

mentoring programs. They even have a free personal profile you can fill out in order to

potentially find you a suitable mentor. In addition to mentors, take time to study

autobiographies of great leaders that you admire. Learn everything you can from their

lives and model some of their successful behaviors.



9. Be Yourself. Use your relationships with mentors and your research on great leaders

as models or reference points to work from, but never copy or imitate them like a parrot.

Everyone has vastly different leadership styles. History books are filled with leaders who

are soft-spoken, introverted, and quiet, all the way to the other extreme of being outspoken,

extroverted, and loud, and everything in between. A quiet and simple Gandhi or a

soft-spoken peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter, who became president of the United

States and won a Nobel Peace Prize, have been just as effective world leaders as a loud

and flamboyant Churchill, or the tough leadership style employed by .The Iron Lady,.

Margaret Thatcher.

I admire Hemingway as a writer. But if I copy Hemingway, I.d be a second or

third rate Hemingway, at best, instead of a first rate Sharif. Be yourself, your best self,

always competing against yourself and bettering yourself, and you will become a first

rate YOU instead of a second rate somebody else.



10. Give. Finally, be a giver. Leaders are givers. By giving, you activate a universal law

as sound as gravity: .life gives to the giver, and takes from the taker.. The more you give,

the more you get. If you want more love, respect, support, and compassion, give love,

give respect, give support, and give compassion. Be a mentor to others. Give back to your

community. As a leader, the only way to get what you want, is by helping enough people

get what they want first. As Sir Winston Churchill once said, .We make a living by what

we get, we make a life by what we give.. ¦

Happy Reading!

Best Regards,

Upasna Kaushik

From India, Delhi
scare_crow
2

Hi Upasana,
human s cannot do SWOT analysis, thy can only do strengths & weakness analysis...oppurtunities& threat analysis is done for companies i.e SWOT is done for companies and S.W is done by humans...i hope i am right.. what say????
regards
scare_crow 8)

From India, Mumbai
Shubhda
Dear, A leader is one who leads by setting an example. Leaders are not born, the quality of leadership is inculcated.. Rgds,
From United States, Santa Clara
shoOOonya
12

Hi Scare-Crow ...

I feel SWOT can be applied to Individuals too ... along with Teams / Groups adn even Corporates.

The reason is simple ... Every Individual / team / Group will have their own share of opportunities adn threats.

lets take an example of an individual in a company ....

Opportunities - Getting into one or more projects, Training and skill upgradation , Performance linked to pay .... Another Job in another company / city / country ....

Threats - Same factors as above .... if the above are not there ,,, thier absence becomes a threat,

A similar example can be given for students too ....

Opportunity - Further Studies , Job in different companies in different functions , job in india and abroad .....

Threats - Market Conditions , Opportunity Cost while doing further studeies , Study Loans , Situation at Home (Father Reirement, expenses , medical problems etc ) , Joining a Top School for further studies in which you rank in the bottom 10% of the class ?!?!?!

Similarly ... teams and Groups will also have their share of Op / Threats !!

Give it a thought !!

Comments from other members invited ...

. . . shoOOonya . . .

From Switzerland, Geneva
sunayna
12

hi ppl
i read this SWOT here.
we had to write an essay on MYSELF (dont laugh..i know it sounds silly..but it was for 5 mks..and the prof made us write it)
i dint know how to write jus one page on myself..so i did a SWOT..n the prof was impressed
so thnk u upasana
dint know wt to write on threats though...so i wrote on a funny note > of prof not liking this idea and giving me less marks :wink:

From India, Mumbai
shoOOonya
12

hey Sunayana ...
that was a real cool one ... reminds me about an ESSAY asked in a pretty senior level exam for 50 marks ....
Topic - What is COURAGE !!
Please supplement your answer with facts , report references and appropriate data.
Marks 50 !!
A student actually left 3 Full Pages BLANK and wrote at the end ....
"This is COURAGE !!"
. . . shoOOonya . . .

From Switzerland, Geneva
shoOOonya
12

well ... I guess he got 52 out of 50 !! 50 for the essay ... and 2 marks for NEATNESS ;-))
From Switzerland, Geneva
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