Do something.

Note: This article is an excerpt from the “Stocking Your Leadership Super-Powers” book. Enter your info in the sidebar and I’ll send you the e-book free of charge.

A leader that takes a lot of initiative is someone who takes massive amounts of determined action. People that take lots of initiative are also known as “self-starters.”

Initiating a task basically means setting it into motion, or getting it rolling. People like initiators because it shows them that you are passionate and that you are willing to start moving in the right direction. It only works if they are cool with what you’re initiating, though.

If you don’t initiate, people will see that you’re not a doer and that you need others to initiate for you.

By reading this report, you are taking a step in the right direction to initiate, or start getting a conscious handle on, your leadership super-powers.

The Initiation Challenge

One of the greatest challenges as a leader is trying to get people to take the first step on something. A lot of times people’s fears get in the way, and they can’t come up with a definitive way to start something comfortably.

When I worked as a writing consultant, students would come to me all the time with no clue of where they should start their paper.

Essentially, they gave up their power of initiation and said, “where should I start?” In return, they would sit and expect me to give them directives of what to do, which I didn’t. But it definitely caused come confusion in terms of the role I was supposed to play.

When you ask questions like “where should I start,” you immediately give up your power of leadership. If you give someone else the full authority to tell you how to initiate, you are setting yourself up as the inferior. You show the other person that you can’t or don’t want to think for yourself, and your power of influence is minimized.

The Power of Self Initiation

When you initiate something on your own, you build self-confidence and take ownership of what happens afterward.

If you don’t start heading in the right direction for your career, who will?

If you don’t start heading in the right direction for your relationships, who will?

And so on.

You have to take responsibility and get the ball rolling by setting your plans into action. You have to find out what you can and should do now to get started.

Super Initiative Building Activity:

Part of taking initiative is figuring out what the first step is and then completing it.

If you’re going on a trip, the first step is to map out what’s going to happen on the trip.

If you’re going to ask someone out on the date, map out how you’re going to ask them on a date.

What’s the first step once you’ve completed mapping the trip? Getting in the car and driving to where you need to go.

What’s the first step once you’ve completed mapping your date request? Call or meet up with the person you’re going to ask on the date.

The first step is crucial because if you don’t take action and make the first step, you won’t be able to make any of the steps that come after it.

Answer the following questions about initiative:

Question #1: What can I do to get the ball rolling towards my vision of my relationships?

Question #2: What can I do to get the ball rolling towards my vision of my career?

Question #3: What can I do to get the ball rolling towards my vision of my finances?

Question #4: What can I do to get the ball rolling towards my vision of my health?

Question #5: What can I do to get the ball rolling towards my vision of my education?

Question #6: What can I do to get the ball rolling towards my vision of my spirituality?

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Note: This article is an excerpt from the “Stocking Your Leadership Super-Powers” book. Enter your info in the sidebar and I’ll send you the e-book free of charge.

You can have all of the ambition in the world, but if you don’t learn how to harness it, you’re hosed.

Energy management allows you to set the pace at which you accomplish things. Energy management shows people that you expend appropriate amounts of energy on appropriate tasks. Energy management allows you to prove to yourself you can accomplish your goals.

Energy management is prioritizing the most important tasks, and focusing the most energy into those tasks. Subsequently, you reserve smaller amounts of energy for less important tasks.

Energy management is different from time management because you have to manage your energy based on priority as opposed to based on the time you have allotted for something.

For example, you might allot 5 hours of your time to looking over your personal budget. Chances are you’ll stretch your energy to fit that allotted amount of time. But if you say, “I’ve got to get this personal budget stuff done accurately in less than 2 hours so that I have time left over to eat, do the dishes, walk the dog, and get a shower,” then you’re concentrating the bulk of your energy into a smaller time frame to ensure that you have time to spend smaller amounts of energy to get other tasks done.

This also works the opposite way.

You don’t want to pack in and concentrate your energy on things that aren’t as important.

Say you need to get a project done for school and you’ve got 4 hours to do it. You don’t want to spend all of your energy worrying about where you’re going to eat for dinner, what you’re planning on wearing the next day. You’ve got to harness that energy and use as much of your willpower as possible to complete that project in less than 4 hours. It’s not budgeting out your time. It’s increasing the energy you use in that amount of time.

Leaders of energy management focus on their main priorities with high amounts of focused energy. Leaders are able to get the most out of the time they use.

In return, people begin to associate the leader with high energy, and they can trust the leader to be energized.

For instance, I used to know two girls who wrote their final papers in British Literature. One girl wrote her paper over 2 weeks in short, 1 to 2 hour bursts every other day. She wrote an “A” paper. She never felt stressed about the assignment, and the night before it was due she went out to a movie and a dinner with some friends. She prioritized her energy so she didn’t have to get “stressed” out.

Another girl didn’t start writing her paper until the day before in one 4 hour burst. She ended up rushing through it and got a “C” on it. She wanted to go out with friends, but couldn’t. She didn’t prioritize her energy and ended up getting stuck and stressed.

Super Energy Management Building Activity:

As a leader, you want to avoid negative urgency at all cost. When you’re afraid of a deadline, you lock up and freeze. When you get pushed to do something at the last minute, the leadership principles get thrown out the window and you throw something at the wall and hope it sticks.

Many times it doesn’t, even though you might feel you’ve accomplished something great.

As a leader, you want to use positive energy management. You want the sense of urgency to get something done because it’s important, as opposed to it’s threatening you.

A great way to plan out the use of your energy is to first determine those things that are most important to you. Look back at your purpose, vision, ambition, and determine what the most important things are in your life, relationships, career, finances, education, health, and spirituality.

Some people ask “How do I know what my greatest priority is?” and the answer to that question is tricky because it depends on the individual’s purpose, vision, and ambitions.

Ask yourself the following questions of all your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly actions to figure out what your priorities are:

1. How clear is my vision of the future? How critical is the task to my vision?
2. What will the impact of completing the task be? How will the task help me achieve my vision? What’s the return on investment?
3. What will happen if I procrastinate and not complete the task?

Some things may seem urgent to you, when in fact they aren’t and your time would be best spent elsewhere. And vice-versa.

Use your powers of foresight to keep a journal that has plans for your day, week, month, and year. Set aside blocks of time to accomplish your most important tasks for the day, week, month, and year.

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So one leadership question that a lot of people seem to be talking about is whether it’s more important to have leadership skills, or to be able to develop relationships with other people.

Some people think that it’s better to have a well defined skill set, and through those skills you can attract people and influence them through the value you offer.

Others think that it’s better to have relationship skills, and with those relationship skills you can attract people, develop strong bonds with them, and influence them through your relationships.

After reviewing the different viewpoints, I’ve come to the conclusion that having a strong skill set and strong relationship skills is the real way to go.

Let’s look at some of those famous quotes:

“It’s not about who you know, but what you know.”

Essentially, the argument is that if you know a lot in a given subject, or you can perform a task exceptionally well, you will attract people and develop relationships around that skill.

While you can attract people with your skill you run the risk of people being interested in you only for your skill. This makes it a lot easier for people to take advantage of you, or take you for granted. When you are known by your skill, you are that skill, and your human qualities are irrelevant.

However, there are many benefits of specializing and developing your skills. For instance, if you’re good at working on cars, you become infinitely more attractive to someone who has a broken down car.

You can use this skill to attract people to you, and provide them with results. When you are able to deliver value to the other person, you will develop bonding and trust.

The other drawback is that the bonding and trust is built around your specific skill set, as opposed to your value as a person. Sure you are valuable to the marketplace, but in a non-marketplace context what value can you offer the other person?

I’ll give you an example.

When I came down with a mysterious illness in college I went to the doctor. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Finally, they admitted me to the hospital to run a bunch of tests to see what was wrong.

The doctor that was seeing me was rude. A real jerk. He had zero bedside manner. He came in, said what tests he was going to perform, and left. He cared nothing about how I felt, only doing his job and applying his skills.

The result was that he carried out the tests with utmost precision, and I trusted that he could do it, but I still felt really uneasy that he had no desire to be friendly. He was as cold as ice. He cared nothing about developing a doctor-patient bond. He was too pre-occupied with applying his skill set to care.

The result? While I would trust him to carry out the procedure, I would rather have had a doctor that actually cared about how I felt, and listened and tried to understand me and my situation.

“It’s not about what you know, but who you know.”

They say that the best way to the top of your profession is to wine and dine with those at the top of the profession. The more people you know in positions of power, the better your chances of success.

Here’s why this line of reasoning just doesn’t work for me:

Let’s say my doctor was a real social butterfly. He befriended all of the top doctors in his profession, and he tried to be their friend as much as possible. He focused so much on building his professional relationships, he didn’t take the time to improve his craft.

So, he was a mediocre doctor at best. He might not be ruining all of his procedures, but he’s not really improving his skills as a doctor, so he’s falling behind.

How much trust would I have in a doctor who just wanted to be my friend but was average when it came to administering tests and reading results? Agh! I don’t want any mess ups. It’s my health we’re talking about here.

Perhaps a better way to describe this is the teacher that wants to be everyone’s friend. In high school, there was this teacher that didn’t do very much of anything in his classes. He just sat around and gossiped with the class day after day, week after week.

Sure the students had fun “yucking” it up with the teacher, but the guy had little respect amongst the students because he didn’t actually teach. He didn’t apply his teaching skills, and the class suffered. When it came time to move on to the next grade and a harder teacher, the students were woefully unprepared.

The fact is, trying to focus on developing friendships with people to the point of neglecting your skill base is a bad idea. You can know people, but if you’re not adding value, you’re missing the boat.

Here’s the quote that I came up with:

“It’s about who you know, how well you know them, how much value you add to their life, how valuable your skill set is, and how much you are applying yourself.”

That’s the truth as I see it.

• Knowing people high-up can be beneficial, provided you know, like and trust that person, and that person knows, likes, and trusts you. The stronger your bond with that person and the more value you add to their life, the more they are likely to help you.
• You’ve got to have the skills that make you an attractive person to advance as a leader. If you’re an auto mechanic, you’ve got to know how to work on cars. It’s as simple as that. You’ve got to have the skill set and be improving the skill set every day.
• It’s not just enough to have super-awesome skills. You need to be applying those skills in meaningful ways. Apply your skills to add value to other people’s lives, and you’ll be able to influence those people in greater ways.

So, in a nutshell:

1. Get some awesome skills.
2. Use and develop those awesome skills.
3. Create and develop relationships with some movers and shakers.

What do you think?

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