Empowering Others

I want to share this great article about empowering others by Brian Tracy. Enjoy!

Get the Cooperation of Others
Empowering people is the key to building a high-performance team. Once you empower people by learning how to motivate and inspire them, they will want to work with you to help you achieve your goals in everything you do. Your ability to enlist the knowledge, energy and resources of others enables you to become a multiplication sign, to leverage yourself so that you accomplish far more than the average person and in a far shorter period of time.

Determine the Key People to Empower
There are three types of people that you want to and need to empower on a regular basis. They are, first of all, the people closest to you: your family, your friends, your spouse and your children. Second are your work relationships: your staff, your coworkers, your peers, your colleagues and even your boss. Third are all the other people that you interact with in your day-to-day life: your customers, your suppliers, your banker, the people with whom you deal in stores, restaurants, airplanes, hotels and everywhere else. In each case, your ability to get people to help you is what will make you a more powerful and effective person.

Always Be Positive
Empower means "putting power into," and it can also mean "bringing energy and enthusiasm out of." So the first step in empowering people is to refrain from doing anything that disempowers them or reduces their energy and enthusiasm for what they are doing.

There are things you can do every single day to empower people and make them feel good about themselves.

Satisfy the Deepest Needs
The deepest need that each person has is for self-esteem, a sense of being important, valuable and worthwhile. Everything that you do in your interactions with others affects their self-esteem in some way. You already have an excellent frame of reference to determine the things that you can do to boost the self-esteem and therefore the sense of personal power of those around you. Give them what you'd like for yourself.

Continually Express Appreciation
Perhaps the simplest way to make another person feel good about himself or herself is your continuous expressions of appreciation for everything that person does for you, large or small. Say "thank you" on every occasion.

Thank your spouse for everything that he or she does for you. Thank your children for their cooperation and support in everything that they do around the house. Thank your friends for the smallest acts of kindnesses. The more you thank other people for doing things for you, the more things those other people will want to do.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, continually look for ways to make people feel more valuable and important. Say things to others that you would like others to say to you.

Second, express appreciation for everything anyone does for you, large or small. Say the words, "thank you" on every occasion.

To lead is to serve,
Coach Carolyn

Leadership is Influence

Welcome to the blog of the Women's Spiritual Life and Leadership Institute. I am so pleased to be able to serve you the readers and leaders in the community. It is my prayer that you will return here often to be equipped, empowered, encouraged, and edified in your journey to being more effective leaders and communicators as you build strong and lasting relationships in all areas of your life.

To begin, I have been teaching and coaching leadership for several years now and I want to share my absolute favorite definition of leadership. My leadership guru is Dr. John C. Maxwell and I will be sharing his wisdom here quite often. He says, "Leadership is influence -- nothing more, nothing less." This is it in a nutshell, as they say. This will be the foundation of this site and its mission.

Everyone influences someone. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do for a living. If your life connects in someway with someone else's, then you have the opportunity to influence. Wikipedia defines influence as the ability to indirectly control or affect the actions of other people or things.

Think about this: Mohandas Gandhi was an influencer, but so was Adolph Hitler. The question is what kind of influence are you having? Are you influencing positively or negatively? What is your life saying about you to those you are in relationship with? To those you merely come in contact with? Does your life and your actions match up? Do you say one thing and do something else? What kind of attitude do you show to the world?

We will explore these issues in this space. If your relationships totally suck, think about what you are bringing to the party!

To lead is to serve...
Coach Carolyn