You Can’t Be A Leader Without This Key Ingredient
You are a young person with grand aspirations to change the world.
Our naivety, for better or worse, is what this world needs. But our vision for a better world relies heavily on a specific ingredient that can be hard to find in society today.
Turn on the news, and watch our politicians. You won’t find it.
Scroll through your feed; all you will find is blame for the other party, whether it’s political or a sports team. The power of social media has given us all a voice, a platform to speak our minds.
You use your platform in a positive way.
You put out messages of hope and a way forward. But posting on social media doesn’t require the secret ingredient. The secret ingredient isn’t instant gratification.
The secret ingredient is RESPONSIBILITY.
Why Responsibility?
Think about it, we want to make a change in this world, but we believe it’s up to our politicians or the people in charge. But they often never listen to us.
“It’s their fault, so why should I clean up their mess?” We say.
Having an us vs. them mentality will never result in a positive change. We need people working together, not against one another.
It may be the dagger to our society.
But if my belief is we are all doomed,, I wouldn’t be writing this piece for change. I would tweet, “we are doomed and beyond repair.”
So let’s take a good hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves how we will begin taking more responsibility in our lives?
It Begins With Priorities & Values
We all have the same amount of time in a day, 24 hours and 7 days a week. Unfortunately, we can’t take action and be responsible for all of the world’s problems.
But we can choose 1–3 areas in our life that we will take responsibility for to make a change.
As a youth basketball coach, I am responsible for doing my best to inspire the next generation of leaders to play the game of life with a WE mentality.
As a content creator, I am responsible for doing my best to inspire, uplift, and empower people to become the best versions of themselves & magnify their impact on the teams around them.
As a brother, son, boyfriend & friend, I am responsible for prioritizing the people most important to me by giving all my love to them.
Being an Impactful Leader Begins With You
Creating an impact on the world begins with each of us at the individual level. How do we empower ourselves daily to ensure we have the energy we need to impact the people around us?
Are we fully aware of ALL the responsibilities and opportunities around us?
You’ve heard it before; you have to find your WHY. While I do believe finding your WHY is important, it’s still fundamentally missing something.
It’s missing our responsibility to impact something bigger than ourselves.
Once you recognize it’s bigger than you; you will take full RESPONSIBILITY for a greater purpose.
Aligning Responsibilities With a Team
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” -African Proverb
Once you have found the areas in your life you are committing to being FULLY responsible for, find people who share those same values.
I’m at the beginning stages, but, as a youth sports coach, I am aligning myself with other coaches who want to impact the next generation on and off the court.
It’s liberating to collaborate with others and spend time impacting the world together. Will, we always agree with the people we are working with? No. But it’s our responsibility to work through those challenges to find a better way forward.
Choosing a Collective Mission
All great teams need a vision for a better future to strive for. There will likely be numerous objectives included in the vision for a better future.
The vision needs to be crystal clear with the picture painted of how the ripple effect of OUR collective responsibility will affect the future.
For me, I imagine a youth sports world where ALL kids feel safe and have the opportunity to enjoy playing sports. While enjoying sports, they learn the valuable life lessons of discipline, compassion, teamwork, and the constant pursuit of a better self.
Then by creating more sports leagues, more little humans become better leaders. Our communities become more RESPONSIBLE with better leaders and work better together in harmony.
We Are All Responsible For the Future We Are Creating
Whether we like it or not, our everyday actions affect the future we are creating as a society. Every moment you spend blaming others is time wasting precious time.
Impactful leadership requires responsibility for the greater good in our everyday actions.
So choose wisely.
