Becoming Your Best

Becoming Your Best

The 12 Principles of Highly Successful Leaders

Steven Shallenberger

1. Be true to character

Your character says a lot about who you are. It is a means of expressing yourself, the way you act, and the way you treat others as well. To build good character you need to have good habits. When you do good things, little by little they become natural and then the become a part of your character. "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." The more you do something the most passionate you become for that thing. To have a good character, do things that prove that you are caring and devoted in the little things. This will then help you to be more trustable and more respectable in the long run.
2. Use your imagination
To become your best self, you need to use your imagination. This can help you discover a new and creative side of yourself that will help you enjoy life even more. Creativity thrives in your imagination. Creativity is also the seed of success. How can you create something with your imagination? Don't limit yourself to worldly thoughts and think outside the box. Be creative, imaginative, and a wishful thinker.Believe in yourself and your dreams will come true.
4. Apply the power of knowledge
If you want to be more powerful, educate yourself. To be better than yourself, you have to work hard to be smart. If at this moment you learn something new, then wouldn't you be better or smarter than the you before you knew this new information? To know more things is to be better, but to practice what you know is the best way to be the best. Last year, I had a guitar, but didn't know how to use it. This year, I am taking courses to learn how to play the guitar, therefore I can truly say that my self this year, is better than my self last year. In this same way, you can become a better self by learning knew things and expanding your mind. It is always best to keep yourself thinking and always trying to solve new and complex ideas to stimulate your brain. This can also help to keep your memory as you get older.
4.Never give up
In life, there are many hardships. But the key to success is to never give up, no matter how impossible or improbable it may seem. You should never give up. No matter how hard the situation is. Always believe that something beautiful is going to happen. Winners are not that who never fail, they are the ones who never give up. If you ever feel like giving up, just look back on all the things you have accomplished already.Never give up on something you really want. It is difficult to wait but it is more difficult to regret.Like Albert Einstein once said, "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving."
5. Find peace and balance
You cannot be better at life if you are not at peace. By peace, i mean with yourself, with your family, friends, neighbors and your enemies. Forgiving can be hard and forgetting will more than likely never happen, but balancing yourself to love and understand others is a good way to be a better person. It is said that inner peace begins when you choose not to allow another person or event control your emotions.It is wise to remember that peace comes from within. It is of no use to seek it from without.


6. Live the Golden Rule
The Golden Rule is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This rule can be applied to all aspects of human behavior. When you treat others respectfully, they will respect you. If you treat a person as if they are below you, then you are stooping yourself tho their level. Having said this, I believe that everyone should treat each other equally because we are all nonetheless human. To quote Macklemore's "Same Love," "Whatever God you believe in, we come from the same one, strip away the fear, underneath is all the same love."
7. Build and maintain trust

To become a better version of yourself, you must build and maintain trust. Trust, as I'm sure you are aware, is the most difficult thing to obtain and the easiest to lose. It is a lot like love. When you trust someone, it is because they have proved to you that they are worthy of that trust. And everything that they do make you trust them more. As soon as they betray your trust, even if it is with something very small and unimportant, you will not trust them until they prove themselves again to you. This is just like love because in love, we must trust one another. With out trust in a relationship, the relationship is doomed to fail due to the insecurities on both ends.


8. Quick to listen slow to wrath
If you want to be a better person, you have to be a better listener. You also have to understand that many people aren't always going to see eye to eye with you. It helps to remember that you are unique in your views, but be open to others' points of views as well, even if we may not always agree with them. If it makes sense to them, then they, in a sense, are correct. If what you are saying make sense to you, then you are also correct. peoples' points of views are just as valid as yours. If we judge people, then who's to say they have no right to judge you? I think this is something that everyone should know and act upon.
9. Lead with vision

A vision is not just a picture of what could b; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more. If you are working on something exciting that you really care about you don't have to be pushed; the vision pulls you. To be a better person is to be a better leader. Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs. Make your vision so clear that your fear become irrelevant. Create a vision that will make you want to jump out of bed in the morning.
10. Manage with a plan
To be the best version of yourself, you have to know how to manage things. To be the best at managing things and others, you must first learn to manage yourself. For this step, I would advise you to invest in an agenda or a daily planner. This can help you manage your time and efforts better and on the things that matter most. The more effort you put into managing your time, the more time you will have to do other things that you may enjoy doing, once all the other things are done with. "A dream written down with a date is a goal. A goal broken down into steps is a plan. A plan backed by action makes our dreams come true." - Greg S. Reid
11. Do what matters the most

In a world of infinite things that never end, people are constantly finding things to do. Between waking up and eating breakfast to brushing your teeth to go to bed at night and everything in between, people need to learn that in order to be successful and be the best you have to do what is of utmost importance first. This means, putting everything aside until the most important job of the day is done. Now of course the most important thing varies from person to person, but it must be done nonetheless.

12. Be accountable
The last and final principle for becoming your best is to be accountable. When you take responsibility for everything you do, bad or good, then you also become more reliable and trustable.To be accountable for your actions is important to be a better you because when you act, you have to think about the future. If you know what you are doing is wrong, and you know you will be accountable for your actions, you will stop doing bad things so that you may spare yourself the trouble of having to explain why you did what you did.