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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to talk about how to become a leader leadership is a very very interesting topic and I didn't realize how deep this topic went until I took some seminars I really started to delve deeper as far as research goes into this topic and one of the first things you start to realize when you start studying leadership is that you really need to be a leader in order to live a full life leadership is not just something that's reserved for CEOs or some corporate bigwigs like we would stereotypically think in fact what I'm trying to recognize the more I study it is that the greatest joys in life come from leadership because the greatest joys in life can only come when you're contributing to the world and to contribute powerfully to the world you really need to become a leader so this video is relevant for pretty much everybody leadership is not just for big business leadership is for yourself as in leading yourself that's where all leadership starts leadership is also for small businesses even if you have a one-man shop business or just a couple of people in your business leadership is very relevant leadership is important with your social circle with your friends leadership is important for your marriage or for your intimate relationship because whether you know it or not you actually either are serving as a leader in that relationship or you're not and if you're not then you're not going to be getting good results and leadership is important for community if you want to have an impact on your community a lot of the ideas I'm gonna be sharing with you here are insights that I got from Evan pagans amazing seminar on leadership and after I watched that seminar and I took a lot of notes and did a lot of exercises from that seminar and had a lot of insights about leadership there and also going to be sharing some insights from Napoleon Hills classic book Think and Grow Rich which has a section on leadership and has some really good points about how to be a powerful leader we've got to start by clearing up a common misconception I think this is just intuitively something that we kind of a sue about leadership is that we tend to think that well what's a leader a leader is someone who fights for power and control right well actually wrong that's not what leadership is leadership is not about controlling or fighting for power that's a very antiquated notion of leadership that's leadership 2,000 years ago that's not modern leadership and leadership in fact by force the kind of leadership that you would see in Empire builders from previous generations or there's a few more despots and authoritative authoritarian rulers left in the world so some of them rule by force but if you look at history and you look at evolution which you find is that throughout human civilization over the last 10,000 years or so what's been happening is that there was a rise of Empires and there was a rise of leadership by force but then what started happening is actually that leadership started dying out and that's because leadership by force is not sustainable not over the long run and why is that well because people actually don't like being led by force instead what people want is the modern leader and the modern leader is someone who leads by consensus building very different it's not about leadership for egos sake or for taking control over a society or a culture or people or a business it's about coming up with a more powerful future for everyone involved who's following you and it all has to start with some dissatisfaction all leadership starts with dissatisfaction so you're dissatisfied with the status quo for some reason in whatever context your leader in right and you can be a leader in in all these different contexts but let's say you're dissatisfied with some element of society the way society is structured society is a system right so there's something that you're not happy with and it arcs you and then as the leader what happens is that you basically start to think about well how can we make it better and what you do is you conceive of a better world and as soon as you're able to conceive of a better world than what currently exists then right there the seed is planted for you to lead others at its core as a leader you need to be able to imagine a better future and communicate it to others very effectively and because of this the core skill of leadership is something very interesting it's the ability to see the future it's being a visionary as a leader you have to see a greater future for other people your followers then they see for themselves and you need to be able to communicate this vision that you have with passion conviction integrity and emotion so the key skill of being a leader is visioning how good are you at that skill visioning the visioning skill in its basic form a vision is simply a clearer picture of the future for whatever change you want to make plus emotional charge not enough just to have any old random vision but you need to have a compelling vision an inspiring vision something that when people see it when they hear it they get fired up they get excited about the future they want to go out there and actually create it and that's what really powerful visionaries throughout history have done is they've been able to formulate a vision that's so strong of the future that their followers buy in and then their followers can go fight to the death in the most extreme circumstances for that vision to materialize because they believe in it so much but it's very interesting because all of that starts with just this very ethereal thing called a vision and how do you quantify if a vision is a high quality vision or a low quality vision kind of hard it's a nebulous thing and yet that's what the leader excels at is that he's able to work with these nebulous things called visions and he's able to articulate very powerful visions that typical people are not able to articulate see there's a problem with the common masses and it really is kind of a problem of homeostasis I just recently shot a video about homeostasis but it is also the case that not only as individuals do we have homeostasis but as a collective we have homeostasis this which means that any system that you try to change and that's what leadership is about as changing systems means that you have to shift its center of gravity and every system almost by definition has a center of gravity doesn't that doesn't want a shift it has a certain inertia to it and so the leaders job is figuring out how do we shift that center of gravity how do we get everyone moving in the right direction and that can only happen with a cohesive vision but interestingly enough most people are stuck so badly in present circumstances that they're not able to see a really compelling powerful future of what their life could be like or what society could be like or what business could be like or what the family could be like or what this marriage could be like or what their personal lives could be like right most people don't think that far ahead most people aren't bad visionaries and so the leaders job is to serve as the proxy visionary for those people who lack vision and creating a powerful vision can be difficult most people are so stuck in the present moment they're so crippled by their immediate problems and needs and their own selfishness that they're not able to see their own greatness their own potential or the potential of this business or this society or this culture or this relationship they're not able to see past themselves the leader is able to see past himself and in a sense the leader kind of lives in his own little bubble of fantasy really he lives in a higher reality than the average person because the average person is so concerned with what reality is right now that they become stuck in it mired in it like in quicksand the leader though is able to detach from present limitations in reality and see the potential in the future and then tell everybody around him hey reality is this way but it can be that way too let's work towards that over there and to do that he has to be in in his own little bubble of reality because it's interesting how reality works is that reality is what it is until it becomes something that it wasn't and once it does become something that it wasn't then people look back and say oh this is so obvious it should always been this way and yet all these same people when they existed prior to the change they resisted the change and in fact they said the change was impossible the change was crazy was not going to work and they laughed at the leader and they called him a space cadet and they called him crazy and they called him weird names and made fun of him and criticized him but the leader he had such a powerful vision that he was able to persevere past all that nonsense and he was able to bring everyone along with him into the future he didn't just go himself but he went to the Future himself first in his mind then he got everybody else to somehow come along with him for the ride not in his mind but actually in reality and through this means you can create huge changes in reality if that's something you're interested in and I hope that you are because I think that this is where you can get the most fulfillment in life where the the sweetest joys of life come here is when you're able to shape reality for the better I don't know how else to describe it it's a it's an amazing feeling when you're able to do that when you're able to have that kind of impact and I think it's one of those P experiences that very few people in life get to savor because they're just so stuck being part of the middling masses and they miss out I think we need a lot more leaders in this world a lot more people who understand what leadership is and who understand that leadership is not just like I said for some you know CEO and a fortune 500 company but it's for you for a normal everyday person and if you're a CEO and a fortune 500 company it's is for you too right it's for everybody the leader needs to know how to rally people by showing them that change and evolution is in fact safer than staying in your comfort zone so when I talk about that center of gravity that homeostasis what that is really is that that's the minds default tendency to want to stay in comfort zone the human mind wants to do this and also human social systems behave this way too we have these comfort zones and we don't want to change and whenever someone comes in there says hey let's evolve let's progress to the next tier let's transcend all this stuff that we've been mired in what do people do usually what they do is they pull their pitchforks and they get the noose and they start lighting the bonfire kind of thing right because people are very afraid of breaking out of their comfort zone except what the leader realizes is that actually evolution is the way to be the most safe in this reality because in this reality the only constant is change stuff is changing all the time we live in a competitive environment businesses are competing organisms are competing species are competing who knows maybe planets and solar systems will be competing when we discover some nearby neighbors right so life is about competition and it's about evolution and so if you want to survive and one of the reasons that human beings have been so prosperous as a species on this planet is because we've been very adaptable and we've been able to evolve in all these different extreme circumstances into all these different extreme environments well how does that happen in large part that happens because we've had powerful leaders right but just because that evolution is happening doesn't mean that everyone is going along with that there's been a lot of resistance and if you're a student of history you know how much resistance has existed since since prehistory to all these changes that society has experienced so it's really cool that as a leader your job is to go out there to convince people that hey if you want to be safe staying in your comfort zone that's not actually the best way it seems like it'll be the safest way but actually counterintuitive if you do that you're going to go the way of the dinosaurs which is not what we want plus it's not nearly as exciting as doing something new and fresh and progressive don't confuse leadership and being a visionary with idealism it's not that you need to have a vision you need to have a dream as Martin Luther King would say but you also need a realistic plan see being a leader means you need to have the ability to shape the world not just talk and be a demagogue and be a preacher but also actually get [ __ ] done so you need to be able to build realistic plans based on your visions and one of the most challenging things for a leaders that the leader needs to learn and understand how systems work and how to affect change within a system this means that the leader needs to be savvy the leader needs to be able to see the world and society and different people from multiple perspectives and situations he's to be able to step outside of himself outside of his own selfish Enda and see other people's self agendas and he needs to be able to moderate and mediate between those to find a workable practical solution and this is a skill that very few people have this is not a skillet you're just born with it's something that you need to practice and really develop and I don't see that many people consciously working towards developing this skill they don't even know that this is a skill that they need in their life a leaders job is also of course to create the vision then to champion the vision which we've already said but then also it's to stand in the eye of the hurricane so to speak so when [ __ ] goes down when everything's going wrong when there's chaos around and people are losing their heads and they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off the leader needs to stay and be like a pillar in the middle of all that and he used to be even more calm and even more grounded than ever before and needs to be able to champion that vision and push it through he like the backbone of this social organism and again that could be in a business context it could also be in just a one-on-one relationship context so like in a marriage for example if you're a leader in a marriage you need to be able to be that pillar in the marriage even when the other person your partner your spouse is losing his or her mind and doing some crazy nonsense you need to be able to stay strong and me love all that and it should be clear by now why we have so few leaders it's because being a leader is hard doing all this stuff is like a balancing act it's like you're watching walking on a tightrope I need to balance something just perfectly so you don't tip over and fall off and break your neck see if if you want to bite off the challenge of being a leader then you can never play victim you need to take full responsibility for yourself but also for what's going on around you and also you could never sit back and cruise and coast in your comfort zone you're always going to be outside of your comfort zone a leader needs to get comfortable being outside is comfort zone which is a pretty rare character trait and one of the things I learned when I went through my life coaching program to get certified as a coach is one of things they taught us is that all leadership begins with self leadership if you can't lead yourself then how are you going to lead other people who's going to trust you to lead them if you can't even lead yourself so all leadership begins with self leadership and the key things you need to learn as a self leader is you need to learn how to manage your own fears and stresses you need to also learn how to manage your self-talk and you need to learn how to manage what influences you so fear self-talk and influences if you can't manage these for yourself then you cannot lead yourself and you cannot lead other people and also you need to study and learn how to systems because in whatever context you're leaving you're going to be leading a system it's all about systems that's a bit of a tangent topic that I don't have time to go into now the study of how systems work and how to affect changes in systems that's a very deep field of study but you need to start studying that and also developing niche-specific knowledge of how to change the specific system you're working within right so your specific business your specific market your specific marriage or your specific social circle let me give you eight key roles that a leader plays that I got from eben pagan I think these are very important because this kind of defines the domain of what it means to be a leader first is visionary leader needs to be a visionary next is a liner a leader needs to be able to align different agendas and values together to create a cohesive direction for the system to go into conflict resolver leader needs to be able to resolve conflicts a creator a motivator a conscious role model the leader is always a role model the question is is he conscious of what role he's modeling or is the role that he's embodying and playing as a leader actually sending the wrong signals to his followers that one's hard because as a leader that means you've got to walk your talk you can't just come up and preach and then after the preaching is over go back home and then go drink some booze and have some sex and do some drugs and all that kind of stuff because then you're not a congruent leader and then you're not a very good role model and then people follow you also a facilitator you got to be able to facilitate and what this means is you don't solve people's problems for them but you help you facilitate them to solve their own problems that's a whole skill you need to learn how to develop and lastly leader needs to be a bringer of people from the known to the unknown see people like to live in what's known the known right here existing society the existing relationship to your existing social circle your existing business that's already known people are comfortable there and then they tend to get conservative and dogmatic and what the leader needs to do is he needs to be able to open up their minds to go into the unknown to venture into new uncharted territory where perhaps there might be dangerous animals and rough terrain and unknown traps potential dangers maybe even death lies over the horizon right makes me think of how the the Explorers the Columbus's and the Magellan's of the worlds ah how they led people literally over the edge of the world because at that point in time people weren't even sure if the world was round and they would lead sailors and men and entire expeditions into uncharted waters uncharted territories not knowing where they were going right going from the known to the unknown from Europe to South America or from Europe to the Spice Islands or wherever explorers would go and that takes a very special kind of skill and determination speaking of which what I want to do is I want to give you ten key qualities of leadership that are necessary for successful leadership and these come straight from napoleon hill's book Think and Grow Rich but I think that these are very powerful and important to mention so they are unwavering courage self-control a keen sense of justice definiteness of decision definiteness of plans the habit of doing more than paid for that's an interesting one a pleasing personality sympathy and understanding mastery of detail willingness to assume full responsibility which we've already touched on and cooperation so those are the ten keys from Napoleon Hill and now I don't give you is ten more fail your points for leadership from Napoleon Hill so these are the things as a leader if you're going to engage in these activities right here then you're going to fail these are also important to know because these are very very common pitfalls that we make and I notice myself making a lot of these so here we go first is inability to organise details next is unwillingness to render humble service nobody likes an arrogant leader humble service expectation of pay for mere knowledge and what this means is if you expect that people are going to respect you just for how much you know and how much you read then you're mistaken a leader doesn't get paid or respected for mere knowledge he needs to actually use that knowledge apply it to get stuff done to create results and then that's what he's judged on is the results he creates the change he actually creates gathering of knowledge by itself doesn't create change next is fear of competition from followers so if you are afraid that your followers will out lead you then you're not much of a leader are you lack of imagination that's the next one make sense given that the leaders whole purpose is to be a visionary and create powerful visions if you lack a strong imagination then you're going to be stuck in present reality and then you've got nowhere to lead to selfishness another pitfall in temperance or anger another pitfall disloyalty another one emphasis of the authority of leadership so are you abusing your authority are you flaunting your authority and you're not a very powerful leader and lastly emphasis of title kind of goes along with the last point of authority so those are the 10 failure points so notice those notice how much there is here how much depth there is what I wanted to do with this video is I wanted to give you kind of a big-picture overview of just how important how broad and how deep this topic of leadership is because there's so much here I can't cover all of it even in a one-hour video so what I want to give you instead is I want to like give you a sense that oh man this is so important you put leadership on my radar because if I put this on my radar then I can create a really powerful organization really powerful relationship I could really influence the world in a powerful way so hopefully you're seeing how much meat there is in this topic right and then you can go off and maybe you buy a leadership book or you take a leadership seminar leadership course or you just start being more conscious of how you lead others in your life maybe right now you don't even think of yourself as a leader because you tell yourself well Leo I mean I don't have a business or I don't have a marriage but even if you're just part of a family even if you're not even adult yet and you're still part of a family you can be a leader in that family and in fact you kind of a leader the question is are you a shitty leader or you powerful visionary leader right anywhere where you're engaging interacting with people or you're working inside of a system in a family unit is a system at school in college that's a system a relationship intimately is a system the career you have and the job you're going to defer work that's a system right so structure to be more cognizant of how you're playing the leadership role because that's the first step is realizing that you are a potential leader in the making whether you realize it or not you know one of the things that I stress in all the actualized org material is the importance of personal development but one thing that I realized is I was doing research for this video here is that one of the most compelling reasons that I can find for doing personal development is leadership because to me a powerful life a fulfilling life comes from changing the world for the better and to change the world for the better you need to be able to lead other people to help you do that and to lead other people what do you need to do you need to master yourself first you need be able to lead yourself how are you going to lead other people how are you going to change the world if you can't get up out of bed in the morning on time if you can't eat healthy food the way you're supposed to if you can get your ass off to the gym on time if you can't put in a full day's work consistently at your job who are you going to lead you're not a master of yourself you're not a master of your own thoughts your own bad habits if you can't fix this stuff in yourself if you can't master your own psychology then you're not going to be able to change the world and so for me that's why personal development is so important right because a leader realizes that he isn't just born a leader no one's just born a leader like this is a massive area of development of skills you need a lot of skills you need to develop across the board both within leadership but also just like personal skills interpersonal skills social skills understanding of how emotions work understanding what charisma is and how to use it to influence other people building mental tools such as creativity the ability to imagine and to visualize a more powerful future the ability to write to speak to communicate through whatever medium you want to do it through right because all these are going to come together leadership is like a it's really kind like a Renaissance man skill because all these little things have to come together to create a powerful leader a leader is not just uh you know a single-minded one focused specialists he's not like a computer programmer who can just know his computer programming and then just be good at it that's enough know a leader has to kind of be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades but also he has to be at the same time a jack-of-all-trades but still get a lot of [ __ ] done at the same time right so it's uh it's a really challenging skill to develop because it it takes a holistic development of your entire being of your body of your mind of your emotions all that has to be grown and developed if you want to live into your full potential as a leader if you take anything away from this video what I want you to take away is that to lead others you need a strong vision for them notice not a strong vision for you but a strong vision for them you see the difference you can have a personal mission statement for example for yourself in your own life and you should I hope you do but that's not enough need to have like a mission statement for them what's in it for them why should they follow you hopefully it connects with your own mission statement too so what I want to wrap up on here at the end is I want to give you my vision for you with actualized org if you're watching these videos and you're vesting a lot of time my videos are pretty long interesting all this time watching my videos what are you gonna get for it why are you doing this I mean maybe you found one of my videos because you thought like well I just went through a breakup I need some advice about how to deal with my breakup so you search that and you found my breakup video or maybe you want to get better at dating so you find one our dating videos or maybe you have some emotional issues so you found one of my emotion videos or maybe you want to learn how to meditate you found one of my meditation videos and that's fine you know that helps you with a specific little problem you got in your life and that's cool but that's not my vision for you my vision for you is a lot bigger than that I don't want to just help you put a band-aid over a little problem in your life what I want to do is I want to help you to find a cause that's worth fighting for in your life I want you to go and put yourself on track on the hero's journey the hero's journey that's a concept from Joseph Campbell very common mythical archetype is the hero on the journey fighting for a cause that he is willing to bleed for that he's willing to die for because he's found something like that in life he's found something where previously he was just kind of like a lazy bum just sitting around kind of twiddling his thumbs in life or doing the ordinary stuff but then something came across his radar and something's like damn that's something really important in life that I need to be a part of that's something I need to go take some action on there's some injustice in the world or there's some improvement that needs to be made and I'm the one to do it I'm not gonna I can't let this is to impart I can't let somebody else come in here and do it for me I can't sit around and just wait and hope that somebody else will do it for me I have to be the hero I have to be the leader and my vision for you is that you find that thing for yourself and that you live you make your life living about something for something that's larger than yourself because what most people are doing if they haven't undertaken hero's journey is that they're living a very shallow petty existence and they don't realize that they're they're wasting their precious one opportunity in this life you only get one right only once do you live and it's going to go by all too fast so instead of living this petty existence that you currently live what I want you to do is I want you to find something outside yourself something that you're living for something outside your family something outside your social circle that you're willing to fight for to work for to bleed for to die for and then what I want you to do is I want you to develop yourself I want you to put every bit of energy that you have into growing yourself growing your consciousness growing your your body growing your emotional awareness growing your skillset for years for decades until you become that fully realized leader who's able to congruently powerfully make change in the world happen and then what you do and this is the part I like best about this whole thing is that it's as though you climbed a mountain like imagine that you climbed Mount Everest and if you ever seen footage from Mount Everest then that thing is so high up in the stratosphere that is it's higher than you are when you're taking an airplane ride it's about the same altitude as a jumbo jet flies except you're standing on the Mount and you're looking down and you're seeing this this beautiful range of Peaks beautiful range of peaks and clouds and the the sun shining through it's just like this this pristine crisp air and you're standing there and you you are on top of the world and you're looking down on the entire world kind of like a God God's eye view of the world and it feels like you conquered it you conquered the world and really what you've done is you haven't conquered the world so much as you've conquered yourself and that clean feeling that high consciousness clean feeling of having conquered yourself having climbed all the way up here this giant slog through the mud and the snow and the dirt and the rocks and all the perils and this journey that you went went on right and you made your life about this this mission to climb this mountain to get to the very top and then you finally did it and to do it what you had to do is you had to persevere and you have to you have to really break yourself down because that small little person that you started out as at the base of the mountain is not the same person that's standing on the top that small petty little person down there at the base he could not get to the top he had to die along the way and then what made it up to the top is something something very interesting something godlike something spiritual something that is beyond the ego transcendent if I was to speak of it poetically and what you get is you get that taste of the highest beauties and joys of life right that's satisfaction not of a little titillation or some pleasure that you kind of get when you go eat a fine meal or when you go have some nice sex or do some drugs not that kind of pleasure I'm talking about a high cautious of satisfaction and this this feeling of connection to the world into reality and to life right you feel really alive and you feel this immense like gratitude well up inside you and that to me is what life is about is that living your life to the fullest that's what I mean by living your life to the fullest and then after that what you can do is you can die your life with no regrets and that's what I want for you is I want for you to be able to lie on your deathbed and look back at your life and have this feeling of this this solid confidence that you really live that you gave it your all and that you sucked every last ounce of beauty and joy out of life that was there for you and you look around at everybody else and you and you say to yourself how grateful I am that I did this when nobody else around me had the balls to do it everybody else around me is going to die not knowing what life is really about but I'm gonna die having savored the highest beauty in life that's my vision for you hope you like it now my parting question for you is what's your vision for the world what is that thing worth fighting for what is your Mount Everest all right this is Leo I'm signing off go ahead post me your comments down below click like button please share this video with a friend because we need more leaders around and finally come sign up to my newsletter right here free newsletter I'd actualize that org I release new videos on self-actualization topics every single week all this stuff will help you to master your psychology all this stuff will help you to become a more powerful leader because like I said being a leader is about mastering many different skill sets and really becoming a man or woman if you desire alright so sign up is three I'll see you soon you