Amazing Rainbow

To be a leader, you must have confidence in your own abilities. The confidence must be both in your own ability to lead as well as in your ability to complete successfully whatever the task is that requires leadership.

Some people are born with the innate ability to lead and to lead well. Others may have to work harder to find it, but that ability does lie within each individual.

It just may take work for some people to find it and bring it out. Born leaders by nature have more self-confidence and higher self-esteem. To bring out leadership qualities in yourself, first you must build confidence in your own abilities.

If you want to take on a leadership role for the first time, it is best to start small. Volunteer to lead a small group on a project at work, for example. Or choose to head a committee at your child's school.

Often the first step to becoming a good leader is to get over the fear of being in charge. As the leader, people will look to you for answers. Even if you are not one hundred percent sure of what the answers are, you have to give off a certain amount of confidence in order to gain the trust of the group.

It is best to volunteer to head a project in an area in which you have some experience or expertise. Imagine that your child's school wants to run a used book sale in order to raise money to build a new library.

Also imagine that you work at a popular bookstore. You know all about selling books, so chairing this project is a perfect fit for you. Despite the fact that you may not have ever led a committee before, you are still bringing powerful knowledge. Your knowledge in the field should give you confidence that you can best lead this group to raise the funds successfully.

Realizing that you have the skills necessary to lead the group is the first step. Second, is volunteering to lead the group and sharing the information that makes you qualified.

Again, exuding confidence is crucial at this point because no one will follow a leader who does not seem to know what he or she is talking about or doing. There is a difference, however, between confidence and arrogance.

It is one thing to show that you are confident in your ability to run a successful program but you should still maintain a degree of humbleness. It is perfectly acceptable, and even preferable, to say that you believe you could do a good job leading the project, but that you will require the help of the other committee members and that you will value their input and ideas as well.

A good leader always takes into account the strengths and weaknesses of the committee members and ensures that everyone working on a particular project feels an amount of ownership and accountability for the project. To be an effective leader, you not only need to have the confidence in yourself but also in those on your team.

You need to know when to delegate and which jobs you really should do yourself because of your expertise. In the case of the used book sale, you would want to use your bookstore experience to design the lay-out of the sale or possibly to price the books. But you may want to delegate the task of creating flyers and advertising to someone on the committee who has that kind of expertise.

A very important and major component of leadership is delegation and knowing when and to whom to delegate the key tasks. You need to know yourself and your own abilities first in order to do so effectively. In another words, you need to know how to lead yourself before you can lead others.