8 Tips For Leading By Being Yourself For A Living

by Robin Wheeler, July 2007


1. Be Yourself For A Living

The only real way to succeed in the truest sense is to be yourself for a living. Choose and build your business based on who you are, your potential, and what the world needs. This will optimise your performance and fulfilment, guide you through challenges and make you the best leader you can be. Don’t try to be something you are not, and don’t let anything stop you being who you are.


2. Be Entrepreneurial

The world and business are changing fast. Wherever you work, adopt an entrepreneurial approach. Know yourself, understand your context, look for opportunity, take bold steps and see them through. Use business principles to bring your ideas and visions into reality. Be a change agent, a positive force for growth. Manage yourself as a personal brand.


3. Understand Leadership

Leadership must come naturally from who you are, yet it can be developed enormously by what you learn from others. Read everything you can on the subject, especially biographies by people you admire, and get close to mentors from whom you can learn the important lessons of leadership. It is an invigorating and challenging journey, so begin and go for it.


4. Be Creative and Innovative

Business today hinges on the ability to innovate the way forward, as an individual and a group. You must be doing what you love, bringing yourself to your work, and inspiring those around you to succeed. If you are a source of creativity in your business, and known for your innovative impact, you will be positioned perfectly for maximum success.


5. Be Patient

All meaningful and substantial endeavours take time. Leading means balancing enthusiasm with staying power, drive with wisdom. What you envision and intend will materialise but perhaps differently to the way you picture it. Stay focused and persistent yet open to the mysterious and wonderful way things unfold.


6. Embrace Resistance

People live in comfort zones and naturally resist change and growth. If you lead the way and initiate progress, you will be in the business of handling resistance. Entrepreneurs work with this. They see resistance as support and find innovative ways to help people make their resistance work for them and the greater good. Resistance is energy, so learn to channel and direct it.


7. Make Money

Wealth is good, and money is a natural component of true success. It is also the main language of industry. So work out where and how money is made in your business and stay close to that. Improve the bottom line and you will be valued and well paid. Enrich yourself and others, using the rest of the principles here, and you will be a shining light to people.


8. Enjoy!

The point of life is to live to the full and enjoy every moment, so this should be your priority. Your endeavours should all be a celebration of life, for your benefit and for that of your customers and colleagues. In this knowledge based economy, human value is they key to success. Live your potential through your business, be a catalyst and example to people around you to do the same in their careers, and have serious fun doing it.