“People begin to be leaders at that moment when they decide for themselves how to be.” This first quote in the beginning really stuck out for me in the chapter. I think its absolutely true. You cannot be a leader when you are still following and being largely influenced by others. I believe that understanding yourself… your strengths, weaknesses, passions, and despises, all enable you to be self-aware hence becoming a better person and a better leader should you want to be a leader. Knowing yourself allows you to take advantage of situational leadership (as discussed in Northouse), because only you will know in what situations will you rise or fail in. If you know that you are good at communicating and relating to others, if a leadership role requires such abilities you could take on that role knowing that you will succeed, whereas if you knew that you were not good and seeing tasks through and delegating responsibilities to others, you would not put yourself in that leadership position because you would be setting yourself up to fail. Understanding yourself aids in the path of finding what it is you truly want to do with your life, may it be becoming CEO of a major corporation or a housewife and parent of X amount of children. I believe this because it creates clarification of your goals and aspirations.
“Noone- not your parents not your teachers nor your peers- can teach you how to be yourself.” This is another quote that stuck out to me because many people let others mold them into the people they want them to be and they never truly break out of the mold and express the person they really are. I think we are always growing and changing and who we are today could be different from who we were yesterday. Others will always have their judgments, criticisms, and ideas of who we ‘ought’ to be but that doesn’t meant that is who we ‘are’ or we we feel we ‘should be.’ That is something that you find on your own through reflection of your own experiences. Others teach you things in a way to have you learn the information as they have presented it to you, rather than using the Socratic method, where one uses their own critical thinking abilities to find their own answers/solutions. The socratic method allows one to think for themselves and allows them to reach within themselves to find solutions to their problems, answers to their questions, they didn’t know they had before. I think using this method also aids people in finding and understanding themselves better. You realize that you had the ability to find the answer yourself the whole time. You learn to be independent of others, and you can begin to rely on yourself. I think this when you learn to rely on yourself is the “moment you decide yourself how to be” as was stated in the beginning of this blog.
