Learning To Lead: Essay #1: The Personal Essay
Leadership Step By Step, Unit 1: Understanding Yourself – The Personal Essay (Essay #1)
Recently, I’ve started reading Joshua Spodek’s Leadership Step By Step, a book that teaches, as the title suggests, a step by step methodology for becoming a better leader in whatever area you choose. Each chapter ends with an exercise that he recommends you do to advance your leadership ability, with each exercise building on the skill from the previous, and after finishing each exercise, he recommends you write a reflection on how it went.
As I started through the book, I was doing the exercises, but skipping the reflections to save time, but after I spoke with Josh personally, he encouraged me to do the reflections and post them, as they not only help me more deeply analyze myself and my own newly developed skills, but also because it will give me some accountability to continue.
So I’ve decided to go back and write reflections for each exercise, starting with this one: The Personal Essay, an essay designed to make me reflect on myself and my thoughts on leadership and to direct and clarify my focus for the course.
Essay #1: Understanding Yourself – The Personal Essay
Leadership has always been mysterious and elusive to me: what does leadership mean? How do you lead effectively? Can anyone be a leader with practice? Getting along with people has never been a problem for me: learning body language, showing empathy and understanding, and being a likeable person to a wide range of people…But leadership is on another level. It requires not only getting along with someone, but also having a deep understanding of their values and their motivations, and influencing them to want to grow. In particular, how to you lead people to do things they never even thought they wanted to do before, even if it’s good for them? Can you lead someone to eat healthier and exercise if it’s never occurred to them to want to do either? At what point does leadership become just trying to convince other people that you have values worth following? These are the questions that make leadership something that is hard to define and even harder to understand and do. But I’m hoping that by doing these exercises, I will come to understand leadership more.
But why, you may ask. Why am I even interested in leadership at all? To be honest, I’ve always had great respect for great leaders. There is something that is almost magical about people who can lead well: people are drawn to great leaders, and they are able to enact change in people and the world. Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. are of course fantastic examples…But I also have known some people personally that also carry that “leader” aura…that command respect and make you WANT to hear what they want to say and to follow them.
It’s this respect for great leaders that I’ve always been envious of, and have made me want to learn to become a leader (if it is indeed something that you can even truly learn). If I’m being honest with myself, I have some doubts that I can become even a mediocre leader, but I figure that I have nothing to lose by trying; I can only become better than I am now by going through these exercises.
This leads me to ask myself, “what do I want to lead in?”, which is a tough question to answer. I feel like I very often go between different ideas of what kind of leader I want to be, and part of me feels like I need to explore myself more, and another thinks I just need to jump in and start leading in any related area to find what I want to lead in by exploration. For years, I’ve felt that climate change and pollution are the biggest problems humanity face right now, and that solving these problems require huge changes to how we live our lives, as well as huge changes to pretty much every aspect of society: from how we build buildings to how we make things to how we relate to others and how we think (i.e. our culture). There are problems in almost every aspect in how we live our lives in respect to our planet, and pretty much no one has solved them for modern society. In fact, it often feels like we’re going entirely in the opposite direction and making things worse and worse all the time.
I hope that by going through the exercises in this book, I will learn some basic skills of understanding other people and how to motivate others to act. I hope to challenge myself to communicate better, empathize better, and hopefully lead others to do the same. I hope to learn to respect other people more, and to in turn be more respected. Also to learn to help others become better versions of themselves. I hope to be someone who can leave the world in a better place than before I was here. I hope to be respected and remembered, even long after I’m gone.
A tall order, I know. Maybe impossible, even. But I think there’s no where to go but up. There’s no way to become but better. I’m excited, but also a bit nervous (I did many exerises from Josh’s other book, Initiative, and some of them pushed me past some limits I never realized I had). I’m excited to lead myself to lead others. Time to start leading!
For anyone who wants to learn more about Joshua Spodek or Leadership Step By Step, find it on Josh’s homepage.
Correction: Previous version of this essay stated that Josh ‘convinced’ me to write reflections. Josh would prefer to think he ‘encouraged’ me to write them, as would I.
