Hello! You know leadership is one of those words that stimulates many different thoughts and feelings. Some of these thoughts and feeling are found in how you lead or view your own self. When it comes down to it, I think it takes a whole lot of yourself to know yourself. It's quite interesting because I never envisioned myself as a strong leader. More and more though, I hear "through the grapevine" (as the saying goes) of how great my leadership and accomplishments are progressing from friends and family. Those little boosts of compliments push me more and more to fill a leadership role and who knows? I could also be changing some lives for the better with that role as well!
How do I lead though?
 Currently, I have to be honest here, I'm still don't have an extremely clear view. While my leadership skills are still developing, I can give little insight on how I at least think I operate.

There's a word call empower. Taken directly fromt the dictionary, it says "to equip or supply with an ability". I put this word to action a lot. It doesn't matter if you're a leader of a big compnay or small student activity. Empowering others is what it's about (or at least should be about). If you're a leader or at least want to be a leader, you're making changes in people's lives. You leading them to greater things. Therefore, you need to be able to supply them what they need to get from poor to great. In this world today, there are too many examples of different people being put down for all sorts of reasons. I believe and follow just the opposite. I try to empower all the time. Empowering should be used through wisdom and strenth while using your team as just that...a team.

 Inclusfulness is another word that hits home. I'm a teenager and I know how it feels to be out of the loop. In any team, I run things by making sure everyone has each other's back. There are no enemies if everyone is always there for one another. To feel included is a great feeling that everyone needs to experience really.

There are some cases that I'll need help with.

Purposeful, ethics, and process. Three words that I'll need to work on for now...

Leading: Through Thick and Through Thin

The Youth and Community

The community that I'm associated with the most would be my youth group. We are small (only about 15-20 members) but we are vital in the congregation that we have. Each member comes from a different background and even different stages of their lives. We all have a common goal found in our faith but found respect and openness helps us all to get along. As a youth group, we always empower others to take a leadership role in different community organizations that we want to get involved with. We physically get involved in the community through numerous events and try to reach out by ways of actions (i.e. showing kindness and love to our neighbors and community). We always have meetings to decide on where to go, times and other logistics. During the meetings, we share feedback freely and really try to talk different issues out first. Overall, handle situations by thinking back to the youth group as a whole first and then think of what could really benefit the community. The best example of how we've introduced and implemented change would be just in the past year. Our church moved into a new building with more rooms in it than before. The youth introduced the idea to take over some of the rooms to the congregation and different changes resulting from this taking a stand.

A Better Outlook in Life
In describing my own sense of hope, optimism, and ability to build and strengthen others, I would say that first and foremost, I tend to see the good out of all situations. Throughout my life so far, I've found myself on both the "woe is me" side and the "what happens, happens" side. I quickly figured out that when your hope is lost and you feel your glass is empty, it really doesn't help any cause. It may even hurt it. When I say I have hope, I really mean it. My hope consists of never, ever giving up completely. There are always options in my opinion. I also feel like I'm very optomistic about events. In any case, good or bad, I try to put out the bigger picture and visualize it. That's how I stay optomistic the best. I can nurture hope and optimism by first showing it myself. If the leader is upbeat, the followers will be upbeat too. I can also try to have everyone take a step back and think about the positives first before rushing to conclusions. Optomism is always important in leadership because a team that never gives up won't back down either.

"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by

people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all."

                                                                      Dale Carnegie