What’s stopping you Achieving Your Full Potential?

One of the commonest things encountered by people working in developing human potential is individuals who have low self-esteem.

This can be manifest in a number of different ways but one of the commonest is a tendency to view potential outcomes with an unrealistic degree of pessimism or to engage in self-deprecation with an associated “can’t do” mentality.

Why is this so regularly encountered, particularly in programmes designed to assist in Aboriginal and Torres Islander leadership development?

Well, there is no one single answer because these problems can arise in people due to a number of different causes, though what is often found is that they have their origin back in childhood, adolescence or teenage years.

Just a sample of some the things that can introduce such self-inflicted negativism about your capabilities include:

1.    Body image problems

2.  Parental and/or social conditioning encouraging you to “recognise your place” in the world

3.    Failing to see your own strengths and to deploy them accordingly

4.    Being forced to participate in activities based upon somebody else’s terms of reference rather than your own

5.   Having tried and failed in the past, leading to assumptions that failure is an inevitable outcome of your activities

6.    A media culture that portrays beauty and universal high achievement as being the norm for all, which creates feelings of inferiority.

7.    Personal relationship challenges and failures

8.    Etc.

The difficulty is that we live in a prevailing culture which glorifies competition and achievement.  On a day-to-day basis, we are all conditioned by the electronic environment surrounding us into believing that success in all things is constantly achievable for large numbers of people who society sees as ‘winning material’.

Some people are able to see through the fallacy of such views and they refuse to allow themselves to be constrained by them.

Other individuals seem to find that more challenging but they can be helped to throw off the oppressive weight of these constraints with appropriate coaching. The difference such development can make to individuals with low self-esteem can be phenomenal. 

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50 Habits of Highly Effective Leaders...

Through our collective experiences over the last 35 years, along with our research and observations we have come up with 50 healthy habits which we believe successful leader live by.

Leadership is not a position or title.

Leadership is a LIFESTYLE!

Checkout our Leadership Blueprint Resource 2 called 50 Habits of Highly Effective Leaders. You can find it in the RESOURCE SECTION of our websitewww.starsleadershipinstitute.com

Here are a taste of the Habits Effective Leaders live by:

* leaders don't s have an attitude of "I'll try". Leaders have an
attitude of "let's get the job done corrections are always an option
when needed and required
* leaders create other leaders
* leaders are patient but don't tolerated irresponsibility, injustice or
toxic attitudes
* Leaders are willing to take risks that other people wont

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Youth Leadership Development - Can anyone make a leader?

Whether leaders are born or made has been one of the greatest philosophical debates in leadership development over thousands of years.

It doesn’t matter how many learned academic works you read, you won’t find a single cohesive answer in response to the question.  It tends to be an emotive subject and one in which passions can occasionally run hot.

Many authorities would agree that before starting the debate, you need to decide what type of leadership you are talking about.  Some people provide what is termed inspirational leadership by setting an example of desirable behaviours others can follow.  They may not have a position of authority as such but they show people around them what can be achieved by having the right mind-set and application etc. 

In a sense, that is a pretty sound definition of leadership.

Of course, leadership is sometimes rather more direct and requires people to motivate a group of individuals around them and occasionally make decisions where consensus cannot be reached.  Those individuals also have to position the group to help them deal with failure or problems just as effectively as they do success.

These issues and challenges are universal.  Groups need to be motivated and led just as much in say European societies as they do in Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander leadership societies.  

Almost anyone who has worked in coaching people to step into leadership roles where decisions will need to be made, will perhaps privately admit that some individuals are rather better positioned, in terms of psychological makeup, to assume the mantle of such a role than others.  That doesn’t mean that other people are not capable of being developed and grown into such positions but the techniques required to do so may be different to those applied to individuals who have more latent orientation in that direction.

In a sense, it is possible to make a case for saying that some people are born with a greater predisposition towards assimilating leadership responsibilities than others.  However, that doesn’t mean that they will necessarily make good leaders unless they have appropriate training. 

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STARS - Making a Difference

YOU CAN DO IT!

Believe it or not self-doubt is very natural. Its your brains way of keeping you safe by avoiding having you doing anything that with put it or you under threat!

To make the difference you are here to make, and live the life you are excited to lead you must learn to master self-doubt. 

STARS loves to re-educate people in how to focus your emotions and redirect your thoughts so they don't run away with your dream...

Practice redirecting your thoughts each time self-doubt creeps in. It does take time, intention and attention.

Enjoy Yarra Yarra

http://www.starsleadershipinstitute.com/

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Critical: Self-Evaluation versus Self-Confidence

One of the biggest inhibitors to the development of leadership potential in First Nations peoples is that of a lack of self-confidence.

To be fair, this isn’t just an issue for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.  All around the world, leadership development programmes have to work hard to try and empower people who, for one reason or another, suffer from low self-esteem and low self-confidence.

Of course, in the context of Australian history, this is a particular problem for the First Nations – as we see regularly at the Stars Institute.

Yet being self-confident as a leader needs to be balanced against the need to also be capable of realistically assessing how well you are performing.

This isn’t easy to balance for any indigenous leadership program because there will be a tendency on the part of many people to fall into one of the following traps:

·         That they are somehow lacking the pre-requisites for effective self-development and leadership meaning, by a faulty logic extension, that they must always be wrong when a difference of opinion or problem arises;

·         That their performance in a given activity or task by definition cannot have been good enough because for most of their life they have been told that they aren’t capable;

By complete contrast, that leadership means never being wrong or at least if you are, that you can’t admit to it.

In a brief blog of this nature, there is no way that we have the space to outline how effective leadership programmes deal with these sometimes conflicting tendencies.

What is important is to teach techniques to assess the realities of a situation and to be able to differentiate between an allocation of responsibility and blame. 

If something goes wrong, you can’t learn from it unless you understand how the problem arose and who was responsible including, if necessary identifying objectively that the fault was yours. Of course, that doesn’t mean beating yourself up either. 

Blame, whether personal or directed at others, is simply recrimination and that’s usually pointless and counter-productive. 

Developing the strength of your personal character is all about being able to objectively decide when you are right and when you are wrong.  It’s not an easy skill to learn but we’ll help you! 

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