Lesson #4 Fundamental Leadership

Once a person has decided to be a leader, has committed to the type of leader they will be, and has discovered their strengths and weaknesses they then begin to select and implement success traits.  What are success traits?   You may have heard or even read the book by Steven R Covey, “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People? There are a variety of books and articles about success traits, habits or practices.  From these examples we learn that there are small and simple things we do each day that bring us success and abundance in life.  Over the years I have identified my list.  It is titled “Twelve Steps to great success and abundance.  I will share the topics with you in this article.  To cover the details would require a book.  The point I wish to make is that successful people strive to learn and implement in their lives daily practices that move them to a better way of living.  What’s on your list?  Want an upgrade? Learn more success traits. 
“Twelve Steps to Greater Success and Abundance” by Jason McCormick

• Inspirational relationship with a higher power.

• Goal setting and actuation.

• Learning

• Alignment

• Emotional Intelligence

• Social Skills.

• Coaching

• Presenting

• Organizing

• Your relationship with Time and Money

• Giving and Service

• Diet and Exercise



• Inspirational Relationship with a higher power.  From your higher power you gain a definition of Identify, Purpose, Internal compass, direction and motivation to overcome challenges.  The higher power may be deity, nature, humanity, or political party to name a few.  Strengthening one’s inspirational relation is the first and most important success trait. 
  Goal Setting and actuation.  Successful people have goals, really successful people have advanced methods of goal actuation.  The levels of goal setting are: 0. No goal, 1. Think a goal, 2. Write it down. 3. Share the goal. 4. Create a Vision board of all your goals. 5. Add notes and plans to the vision board. 6. Add Music when you review the vision board each day.  7. Add smells when you review the vision board each day.  The point is, moving to a higher level of goal setting & actuation will greatly improve your success. 
  Learning, There are 7 different learning styles.  Knowing how you and the people on your team learn will help you learn more effectively and teach other people.  The seven styles are Visual, Audial, Verbal, Physical, Logical, Emotional and Social. 
  Alignment is an emotional intelligence technique of aligning your inner beliefs and values.  There are five elements of alignment.  Believe in Self, belief in people, belief in work, belief in outcome, Your values and what you value.  If something is out of alignment your ability to achieve goals is impeded.  If people on your team are out of alignment that will impede their performance.  Time to work through the issues and get back in alignment.
  Emotional Intelligence is learning to recognize and have an influence on your emotions and the emotions of others.  Examples include affirmations statement, journaling, approaches to forgiveness, an AM and PM routine and so on. 
  Social skills including learning the basic categories of personality styles and how to interact with all of them, body language, how to properly complement other people and so on. 
  Coaching is the ability to see potential in other people and know how to help them tap into it.  It’s a process of interpersonal communications that elevates those you work with.  Having a life or executive coach and being a coach are both vital to success.  “We don’t know what we don’t know.”
  Presentation is the skill of public speaking.  To truly be effective as a leader one must get a lot of people involved in the cause and keep them engaged.  This is done through public speaking. 
  Organization is a skill of organizing things in your life starting with your thoughts, feelings and actions, then your environment.  Many people will tell you they feel overwhelmed.  When you ask them the questions, “How do you keep track of all the things you need to do and all the information you need to do your work?”  Most people, who are overwhelmed, will say “Its in my mind?”.  This is why they are overwhelmed.  The brain is not an effective storage device.  It is a much better problem solving device.  Successful people have a system, outside of their brain, for capturing, sorting, prioritizing and retrieving the things they need to do.  This is a very important practice to develop in order to be more successful. Also,  people are a product of their environment.  Organizing our environment elevates our life and those we interact with.   
  Relationship with Time and Money is an interesting discovery.  Some people have had negative experiences with money.  Learning to overcome these thoughts and feelings will help a person be more successful as they engage with time and money. 
  Successful people have learned that there is a law in the universe as strong as gravity that in order to receive you must first give. 
  Diet and Exercise enables us to stay physically, emotionally and intellectually healthy. 
  The key to the secret of success traits is to be continuously learning and strengthening some of the traits. Pick a month for one topic, learning something new and apply it to your life.  You don’t have to have twelve.  Start with one two or three success traits that you recognize in yourself and in others.  Build on it until you are ready to add another.  The principle is this:  Our being is composed of four elements, our thoughts, feelings, actions and spirit.  If we upgrade our thoughts we will improve our feelings, which will cause us to have more effective actions and change who we are.  Success is all in the mind.  Success Traits reprogram the mind. 
  A successful man by the name of Ron Willingham said “People believe most what they discover for themselves.”  You will believe most in the success traits you discover through learning and application. 
  “Your higher level of success is just one thought away, don’t over think it. Keep it super simple”  Jason McCormick