In discussing Inspirational Leadership there are many defining characteristics and attributes that you own which make you successful. There is one key that will do more to inspire others than any other attribute and that is your own passionate belief system.
Let’s look at the word passion for a moment. One definition of passion defined by dictionary.com as, “a strong or extravagant fondness, enthusiasm, or desire for anything.” If I were to ask you, “What are you most passionate about,” the answer would differ from person to person. Some may mention very general things in their life, others would have very specific answers. If I asked you to narrow down what your are most passionate about to one specific thing, you would most likely come up with one thing that you are emotionally tied too.
Passion is a really strong and emotional word. When you ask someone about the word passion and how it relates to the single most important thing in their life it will begin to evoke images, memories and hopefully an emotional response. If I were to ask you to tell me a little about the one most important thing in your life, I am sure you would not be at a loss of words and it would be easy to open up about why it is important to you.
So how does this apply to leadership and inspiring those that you lead? To inspire others you do not always have to have an inspirational personality profile, what makes up for that is your passion. Passion is a fuel for inspiring, when you invoke personal emotion and feeling into something you are teaching, guiding or coaching on, it becomes the natural ingredient that motivates and inspires others.
If you don’t know how to infuse passion into your leadership responsibilities, then let me help you. The first thing you should do is sit down and list out your top five most important values. These values will be things like family, adventure, religion, balance, beauty etc.. It is the things that you think are most important to just you. Now that you have done this, cross out two of those five you can live without and narrow it down to three. These three chosen values are in reality what in life you are most passionate about, now you have the ammo to infuse that into your goals, vision, mission statement and most importantly leadership.
For the next two weeks focus three times a day on your top three values and begin to align everything you do with them. This would entail anything in your religion, career, family, friendships or anything you do on a daily basis, especially those things that involve people interaction. Prioritize everything to your most important three values and what you will find is that the things that may have seemed boring and stagnant are now filling with excitement and passion. This is a direct result of making the things you value most a key ingredient in everything you do.
Get excited about yourself, get excited about what you do and most importantly get excited about leading others! You are a powerful and inspirational tool to lead others to success in their life. Everyone you come in contact with is a chance for you to stamp your value based footprint on their lives and help them better themselves and in turn become passionate leaders themselves.
The real questions to ask yourself are: Are you passionate? Are you a leader? The answer should always be yes, even if you do not know it yet. You deserve to influence the world and help make it a better place and it first starts by getting excited and passionate about yourself and then you can bubble over and begin to influence others to do the same.
Happy Leading!