As you saw on the Leadership Star poster, one of the points is labeled Character. Why?

Take a look at the heart of this poster. Character speaks to a leader being a principled person. In any given situation, you may not know what the leader’s going to do, but you will know out of which principles that leader operates.

The leader has made it clear what are his or her convictions, his or her beliefs.

In my leadership training, one of the very first gifts I give those who attend is a blank journal. I encourage them to label pages with the words that are on this Character poster.

They label the various pages with the words success, money, your company, your market, help, learning, wealthy people, poor people.  Over the course of my training they write on those pages what their current set of beliefs are about that particular topic. In their life, what have they grown to be convinced of within the realm of that topic?

Two interesting things occur. One is that this exercise tends to grow those convictions so that they can increasingly tell people, “This is where I stand — these are my principles.” They become increasingly principled people.

The second is that they may uncover hidden self-limiting beliefs. It might be a belief placed in there by a well-meaning parent or other significant adult in the individual’s childhood or even well into adulthood.  Its might be a manager in whom they put great confidence and trust who might have inserted what has now become a self- limiting belief.

A self- limiting belief might have to do with wealthy people (i.e. “Wealthy people are significantly different from me”).  Such a belief would surely create a self-limiting paradigm regarding the growth of that individual’s wealth.

All of these topics have self-limiting beliefs that can be uncovered if an individual takes the time to inventory their current beliefs and convictions. The goal is to grow towards becoming a principled person — a person of character — a person that others can increasingly trust because they know the principles on which this leader has chosen to live his or her life.

Categories: Passion

Tags: Passion