Leadership is a fundamental skill for men, for life in general. It’s something that has atrophied in your average man and society suffers because of it. People today are taught to be passive, subservient, and weak when they should be strong. And taught to be loud, obnoxious, and arrogant when they should be quiet. Much of the modern world is essentially the subversion of what is good. Up is down, left is right, and so on and so forth.
People aren’t given or taught the skills that they need to succeed in life, that they’ll need to make this world a better place. We have to go out, find, and then develop these skills ourselves. For schools, churches, homes, and everywhere else have unfortunately turned against these valuable skills. The skills that develop courage, wisdom, and character. The skills that comprise the warrior poet and the men that embody that ideal.
We’ve talked about many of these skills but one that we haven’t gone that deep into is leadership. Leadership is another critical skill for you to understand and develop within yourself. Not only how to lead others and what that truly means but also to lead yourself and to live as an example of your ideals as much as you can.
To Lead Others You Must First Do This…
In order to lead others you must first lead yourself. True leadership, like respect, cannot be forced. It cannot be gained through title, station, or coercion of other means. True leadership, again like respect, must be earned. No one wants to follow a man who can’t even lead himself. Like so many other good things in life, leadership starts with self-discipline and with leading yourself. But what does it mean to lead yourself and what does it look like?
We’ve talked about this before all well but I’ll reiterate here. Self-discipline is the path to self-mastery, which I don’t think can ever be achieved but in pursuing in one can become more than they ever thought before. Sort of the whole by chasing perfection we attain excellence thing. Self-discipline means working every day to break bad habits and forge good habits. It means doing hard things because they have to be done and they’re good for you physically, mentally, and spiritually.
It means not giving into your baser nature and not being controlled by emotion or circumstance. I’m not saying don’t have emotion as that’s not healthy, I’m saying don’t be controlled by your emotions. Likewise you should have desires but you shouldn’t be controlled by those desires. You should be in control, your conscious mind. By daily disciplining yourself into good habits that over a long period of time will forge for you the life that you want.
It means being free of numbing agents and bad habits. Being free of things that you can’t control and that bring you down. It means when you look at your average day it is spent in productive pursuits things that take you out of your comfort zone, that challenge you, and that are good for you. And that you are for the most part free of things that bring you down and overtime ruin or at least dull your life.
Lead By This Or Be Forgotten
So the first step to leadership is to lead yourself first and foremost. Never expect others to do what you yourself will not do, that never works, and people can sense the hypocrisy right away. They’ll resent following you and that’s ineffective leadership, not true leadership at all when people follow you because of coercion. And that never lasts long. Be ready to do everything that you’d ever ask of others. You have to lead by example or you can forget ever being a leader of meaning. You have to do what you require and want of others, granted that it’s within your ability.
You have to be willing to do what you ask of others and prove that to those you lead. That’s critical. You can’t say one thing but then do another. Your words must match your actions, otherwise you can never be an effective leader for long. Even on dull minds trickery has its limits. This is another reason who self-discipline is critical before you can ever hope to become a leader.
When you look at great leaders throughout history they often went out of their way to show that they walked the same path that their followers walked. You must be ready to deny yourself for those that follow you. You must be a “servant leader” a leader that looks first to serve and then knows that through that can they ever truly be served. You must look to work first, be first in and last out, put in more work than those you follow. And stick to the path even harder than they do.
You must lead by example.
How To Develop Leadership
Look for places to lead. If you have a family then you already have a natural point of leadership. The man is the head of the household, no matter how much that irks the backwards modern world. Healthy families have strong and wise men at their head. But even if you don’t have a family there are plenty of places of leadership. Again the first and foremost being yourself. You have to lead yourself before you lead others so learn to walk a path that is hard but rewarding. We can all lead ourselves and we all have work that needs to be done on ourselves.
And leading ourselves is a process that never truly ends. But once you have a handle on yourself, or as much as you can then look for positions of leadership within your community. A quick side note on this, don’t think that you have to be perfect before you assume a position of leadership that’s not what I mean by master yourself first. What I mean is you need to get yourself right and headed on the right track, in the right direction, before helping others. Don’t be a hypocrite and all that. But don’t think you have to be perfect anyways.
And don’t worry about becoming a big leader in the world. The world is corrupt and disgusting. Forget about the world, help your community, help your people, that’s where the true good can be done, that stuff that actually matters. Focus on the world around you, your own little world. That’s where you can actually change lives, that’s where you can actually make a difference. And that’s where you should focus. Become a coach, start a group of some sort, become a church elder, whatever.
There are plenty of places to serve and become a leader. Get yourself headed in the right direction, stay going in that right direction, and seek these positions out so that you can better the world around you and truly make a difference.
If you have any questions you would like to see answered in a future post send them to me at charlessledge001 (at) gmail (dot) com. If you found value in this post then I would encourage you to share this site with someone who may need it as well as check out my books here. I appreciate it.
-Charles Sledge
