Personal Development: The Shortcut to Being a Great Leader

The very connotation of improving one’s life has “it’s all about me” written all over it. Truth be told, though, you can create a glorious life for yourself and lead others to victory at the same time.

The industry jargon seems to point to a perfectly selfish course of action. SELF improvement, SELF empowerment, PERSONAL development. To be sure, you can hard wire yourself for success on every imaginable level using every imaginable system.

However, suspend your own needs and desires for one moment and think about how wonderful life would be if you led the people in your circle of influence on a quest for success at the same time that you create that success in your own life.

Let’s start by identifying a few habits that are shared by most successful people:

• Willingness to go the extra mile to attain their dreams
• Ability to consistently apply effective success strategies
• Open to continually learning and applying new concepts
• Flexible enough to roll with the punches when things don’t go as planned

That is a short list, but if you have achieved any measure of success in your life or if you know of people who have, you will recognize those types of traits as common among successful people.

In order to double the return on your personal development time and financial investments, why not practice great leadership by helping the people around you to achieve success as well?

You are probably familiar with the negative effect that “energy vampires” can have on your life. Even if you are keeping a positive and energetic outlook on life, people around you who are not on track to personal or professional success can suck the life right out of an otherwise positive situation.

However, everyone loves a good success story, and by becoming that success story, the people around you will often want to emulate your behavior so that they, too, can experience success. Consider the following examples:

If you have decided to lose weight or start cleaning up your health, you will inspire the people around you to do the same when they start to see you achieving results.

On the other hand, if you tell people that you are going to start leading a more healthy lifestyle, but then you don’t do it, why would they respect the things in the future that you claim you are going to do?

Finances fall under the same umbrella, especially in the home environment. Whether you have a family or if you live with roommates or friends, by making an on-going and dedicated effort to stop living outside of your means, the people around you will at least respect that, if not pick up the habits themselves.

Oppose that scenario to one where you tell your spouse or your partner that you are going to start saving money, but then you squander hundreds or even thousands of dollars on non-critical expenses such as recreation, material possessions, etc.

This concept could even be applied to something non-tangible like keeping a positive attitude. Actually keeping a bright and cheerful demeanor in the home or in the workplace will have an almost domino-like effect on the people around you. Even people who are normally very negative will at the very least start avoiding you, if not actually cheering up themselves.

I’m sure that you can think of many similar examples where this type of thinking could come into play, and the takeaway point for you to remember is that it is only by doing that you will become a Leader who will actually inspire the people around you to start achieving success.

You can talk, talk, talk all day long about how you are going to lose weight, get rich, or stop living your life in a funk. However, talk is cheap, and no one is buying it.

If you truly want to inspire the people around you to succeed, then you have to succeed! Nothing less than proof positive that your ideals are solid will get the people around you to consider following in your footsteps.

Does all of this mean that you need to become a great leader in order to achieve your own desired levels of personal development? Absolutely not.

Personal development and self improvement do not require you to help anyone but yourself. However, before you put the “it’s all about me” cap back on, take a few minutes to think about how great it would be if the people around you started picking up some positive habits.

At the very least, it would keep them from constantly trying to drag you down to their level of negativity!