Four Tips For Learning Leadership Through Positivity and Creative Ideas

Some believe you have to be born with leadership qualities, as if it’s an innate skill. Yet as a young person, I never would have pegged myself as a leader. I’ve developed into one, almost reluctantly at times, proving that it can in fact be learned.

Now that I’m nearing a more mature stage of my career — one where many of my mentors have retired or stepped back — I’m realizing I have to drop the reticence and own the title of “leader.” With that comes a responsibility to step up as a mentor for others, defining leadership for them.

If I have to narrow down characteristics that embody leadership, I’d first point to perseverance and positivity — two elements that sometimes amount to the same thing. I often find I can pull off things that other people can’t. From observation, this generally happens because most sensible people give up long before I do. Or they don’t even attempt the task if the odds are against them.

Yet those same people often ask, “How the heck did you do that?” as if there’s a secret to it. The first step is that you have to believe that you can. If you’re the type to default to insisting a task is impossible, please ask yourself: Do you secretly hope it can’t be done, so you don’t have to exert the energy? It’s easier to label a task impossible than to tackle something difficult. But that’s a sure path to failure, or stagnancy, at best.

In doing promotions for my novel Once in a Lifetime, I’ve been asked over and over by various podcast hosts: How did you make this happen? How do you push forward and attain your goals? I still come back to the concept of leadership and success as being 90% self-determination. Maybe you need to be ridiculously stubborn. Maybe you need to be overly taken with your own opinion. Maybe you need to have a certain amount of control freak in you.

In a podcast with life coach Patricia Friberg, she asked me to take the VIA Institute character test, which identifies your strongest personality traits. Although I felt the questions were a little leading, the test definitely emphasized the power of hope, and how positivity elevates people’s circumstances. And as a volunteer for the American Cancer Society’s Camp Adventure (a program for children with cancer and their siblings), they made us do an exercise very similar to the VIA test.

We were given a sheet full of different colored stickers, then had to answer questions about how we’d react in different scenarios. Each response earned a colored dot representing major personality traits. The stickers you accumulated determined whether you were a diligent “supporter,” a bold leader, an analytical researcher, or a self-centered star.

According to the exercise, I was a leader with a little bit of self-centered star mixed in. I then reviewed the test and mentally put my family members into their respective groups: My husband was the analytical researcher with a bit of star; my (at the time) “tween” daughter was a star and budding leader. However, my young son was more of a loyal supporter — and one that was stuck in a house full of bold stars and leaders. It made me realize how overwhelming it must have been for him as a growing kid, being surrounded by opinionated spotlight hogs.

Yet in looking back, there’s no way I was always a leader with a penchant for the spotlight, either. As a young person, I certainly would have fallen squarely into the “supporter” category. Although I carried out all my tasks admirably, I waited for instructions instead of taking the reins. I looked toward teachers and elders for marching orders, or even to peers whom I considered more empowered than myself.

Eventually, I got tired of watching decision-makers and thinking, “Why are they doing it that way? Wouldn’t it be much simpler to do [blank]?” After much frustration, I finally, timidly, raised my hand amid a group of co-workers and said: “Why don’t we try it like this….”

That was the moment I became a leader. I learned that being a creative type lends itself to unique problem-solving capabilities.

Here’s the truth: Once you show yourself to be a person with creative ideas, you become a leader whether you planned to or not. Suddenly, everyone gravitates to you, asking how to do the next thing on their lists. Because a creative idea is a rare and intriguing thing, and everybodywants one.

So here are some tips for those with an eye on taking a leadership role:

Remain positive, but know that positivity takes work. It’s not naturally occurring. Force yourself. Persevere. Say positive things out loud. Develop a mantra. Avoid pining, wallowing and abject displays of anger — they’re unproductive.

Focus on execution. To quote a saying often attributed to James Baldwin: “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” Know that if you’re not the guy doing the thing, then you’re the guy in the way.

Trust your ideas. Don’t settle for doing things the way they’ve always been done, or the way someone told you to do them. Attack each problem as if no one has ever done it before, and imagine the best way you can think of to do it. If you come upon a good solution, you’ll know. Because everyone around you will start to do it that way, too.

Credit yourself for every little accomplishment. Make lists, and take joy in crossing off the things you’ve done. Save the lists and look back on them later to remind yourself how much you’ve accomplished.

I still feel a twinge of imposter syndrome in writing about leadership, as if the girls from the back of my middle school bus are still out there, waiting to tell me all the things I’m not.

All I can say is, when those voices come for you, put in earbuds and keep going.