Type "A"

A leader is not made, but born. The skills to effectively lead cannot be learned: they must be innately discovered.

I have always been a natural leader, not necessarily with voice, but by example. My integrity and morals run deep and I can't seem to betray them. While peers around me fell to drugs and alcohol, I remained strong--and I'll admit a lot of that sucked. I lost friends left and right. I never regretted my decisions because deep down, I knew I had done the right thing. I work my tail off and in time have achieved great things, but also have failed many times. Throughout this I have gained the respect of many, which I see as my best leadership quality. In being the voice of leadership, my skills are substantially weaker. My methods work for a while. I am a driving force and perfectionist--I always hold others to my high standards and their best potential. When things break down and fall apart, I get frustrated easily and sometimes panic (not exactly effective). Although I have mastered staying calm externally, externally in this situations, I let emotion rule me. I try to stay level headed and mostly stay that way, but I ultimately don't trust myself. A leader must be fearless, and sometimes I lack this.

Upon taking the personality quiz, my top 5 leadership qualities were:

*Significance              (Influencing)
*Input                          (Strategic Thinking)
*Restorative                (Executing)
*Individualization       (Relationship Building)
*Strategic                    (Strategic Thinking)

I see significance in the way I push forward, reaching beyond expectations. Go big or go home, in my own personal life I never look at challenges and back down. I aim high and sometimes get shot down, but it's a part of who I am. When I lead a group, I want us to achieve and aim for big goals. I also want to be the go to person when in doubt. I need people to need me.

My input is shown in the way I love to learn. I constantly seek knowledge and experience. Because of this, I have gained wisdom and give good advice. In a leadership setting, I give great guidance.

Restorative really boils down to this: I like to fix people. When someone is upset, I am extremely observant and don't really need any sort of explanation as to what happened. Body language, tone, and aura is really enough to tell me the whole story. For this reason, I gain trust extremely easily. I value everyone's mental health and on set, I can read a situation and fix it before anything has even been directly addressed.

Back to my relationships with people, I value everyone's Individuality, and can delegate roles sufficiently. Certain people were made to do certain jobs and if delegated correctly a job runs perfectly smooth. In addition to this, valuing each individual's worth and genuinely caring can get a leader a lot further with their crew. It builds trust and establishes mutual respect.

Strategic really sums up my existence. I am constantly planning ahead, organizing, and observing to predict the future so I have a back up plan/counter-attack. Organization is extremely important in being a good leader.  

As for an "aha" moment- Upon reading the explanations of each of these traits, I was shocked at how accurate each of them seemed for me. I'm currently working on the anger aspect of my leadership (I also need to think people are less stupid according to my mom). LeeAnn's presentation was fantastic. She is such an inspiring, spunky lady who really connected with all of us. (At least I thought so because I loved her energy. If she wouldn't have acted so excited, I probably wouldn't have paid as much attention to what she was saying.

I NEED TO BE NICER AHH. HOW DOES ONE HAVE AN IRON FIST WITHOUT BEING A LITTLE MEAN??

Haley