Authentic Leadership:Discover your Uniqueness As a Leader

Authentic Leadership will help you find your place in leadership, eliminate confusion in your life and guide you through your leadership journey. Have you wondered why life is unfulfilled, confusing with no passion?

It's no surprise at all, because most of our leadership programs and courses focus on skills, rather than the basic and foundation of leadership.

A leader’s discovery of purpose determines the skills he develops, because purpose is who you are. When you lead from who you are that's authentic leadership.

Most leadership programs and courses helps people acquire skills and not help them discover purpose, therefore even though they achieve success in their fields they still end up unfulfilled and unsatisfied with life. This results in a leader leaving a double life.

Now leadership has become a role one plays rather than a life one leads. Leaders are attempting to divorce their personal lives from their public responsibilities and their personal standards from their public lives.

To many leadership is an act and not a calling. Therefore when they are in their offices, they act a certain way, but when they leave, they lead double lives. This is because we have focused on skills and not the individual.

Many institutions, fortune 500 companies, government agencies, organizations and nonprofit entities spend billions of dollars every year training thousands of would-be leaders in management techniques, human manipulation, skills, method of control and persuasion in the hopes of producing potential and better leaders. Yet such seminars cannot produce leaders. Leadership is not a technique, a style or the acquisition of skills, but a manifestation of a spirit.

Defining Authentic Leadership

Authentic leadership is a leader's attitude that naturally inspires and motivates others and it comes from an internalized discovery about yourself. You cannot learn an attitude.

If someone learns an attitude it is called conditioning, that's not leadership. A discovery of who you are, your passions, assignment and gift is the key to authentic leadership.

Authentic leaders lead from their lives, they lead by what is true to their hearts. They draw their inspiration from their own lives. They are self-actualized individuals who are aware of their strengths, their imitations, and their emotions.

They show their real selves to their followers, they do not act one way in private and another in public. They are leaders that lead from their hearts, then their minds.

Authentic Leadership is all about being the person you know in your heart you have always been destined to be, it doesn't come from your title or position, it comes from your being the person you are, a discovery of your purpose.

Do you want to be an authentic Leader? Here are steps you must follow;

Steps To Becoming An Authentic Leader

• Self-Discovery

It is discovering the original reason for your birth, you are not a mistake, and you were born to do something important. This has to happen to you personally. This discovery gives you a sense of meaning and knowledge of what you’re meant to do in life.

Leaders know who they are, their strengths and weakness and how to fully deploy their strength and compensate for their weakness. This helps you know your uniqueness.

As a leader, you lead from your life, not your position. When you discover your assignment in life, there is a feeling of obligation to deliver the solution to your world. This attitude is what makes you not to settle for less or compromise your values, believes, ethics and principles.

• Self-confidence

Self-confidence is a believe in your significance, in who you are. When you discover your purpose, automatically you will discover you are important to the world. This is hard to accept because we have been conditioned not to believe in ourselves. Self-confidence is a spiritual experience because you have a connection with who you are and why you are born.

• Clear Vision

Vision is simply purpose in pictures. Conviction will always begin to show up in pictures, you see how you are supposed to help the world, your organization and your followers. Vision determines what and how you’re going to contribute to your generation.

• Passion

What makes it possible for people who might seem ordinary to achieve great things, the answer is passion. Passion is the first step to achievement.

Passion increases your will power. Passion makes you more productive and a dedicated person and that increases your ability to impact others. Passion makes the impossible possible.

A leader with great passion and few skill, always out performs a leader with great skill and no passion. You can’t start a fire in your organization except you are burning.

• Inspiration

Inspiration comes when you capture a clear vision. You can only inspire people through your inspiration.

When you become inspired by your vision, that inspiration becomes contagious and moves others to reorder their priorities.

• Love for people

A leader must pose a genuine love for people if not, he cannot lead effectively. You cannot lead someone you don't like. Your love for people will drive you to see the best in them. People don't care about what you say or do, until they know you care about them. Authentic Leadership is people’s business.

• Commit to principles and values

A leader commits to spiritual and moral ethics and truths that form his character, that enable him carry out his vision. Vision has inherent principles and values that need to be adhered to for vision to be fulfilled.

True leadership therefore always includes a personal code of ethics, moral standards and values that safe guard’s character necessary for the leader to pursue and fulfill his or her purpose.

• Invest in yourself regularly

To keep leading you must keep learning. Teach ability helps a leader grow. Your growth determines who you are, who you are determines who you attract, and who you attract determines your success in your organization.

Sometimes people stop growing when they achieve a particular goal. Effective leaders always keep growing, because the day they stop growing they start dyeing. Effective leaders know that what brought them to success doesn't keep them there, so they keep growing.

Conclusion

Authentic leaders are positive people with truthful self-concepts who promote openness. By building trust and generating enthusiastic support from their subordinates and followers, they are able to improve individuals and team performance.