 Developing your leadership philosophy is one of the keys to becoming a great leader. Today I'm going to show you how to get started. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Today we're going to take a little bit deeper into developing your own personal leadership philosophy and leadership style and what I really want to help you do is get a solid idea of the kind of leader you want to be. In order to do that what we're going to do is start defining the types of leadership traits that you most want to exhibit in your daily interactions with other people. Now we all have experience with leaders who have their own unique combination of traits. Some traits that are considered generally positive are honesty, authenticity, transparency and selflessness. Some traits that you might consider negative are impatience, being a poor listener, being dishonest or being secretive. All of the traits that a leader has in combination are what start to make up their own personal leadership style. As we start to develop your personal leadership style we want to consciously choose traits that you're going to be able to exemplify every day in your interactions with other people. Now you may be saying this is starting to sound a lot like the core values discussion we've had in the past and you're absolutely right. Great leaders know and understand that in order to truly live in their core values they've got to exemplify traits and behaviors every day that are in alignment with those core values. To get you started figuring out what traits you'd like to have as part of your personal leadership style I've got an exercise for you to do this week and I call it observe and report. What I want you to do is that you're going about your daily business at work or in the community this week I want you to record the traits that you see both good leaders and bad leaders in your communities have. It's always important to not just look at the successful side of things or the negative side of things but to look at them in combination. So I want you to record in your leaders journal the traits that these successful leaders and these not so successful leaders have. And I want you to also record why you believe those traits make them a successful or unsuccessful leader. The nuance to this is you're going to find some successful leaders that probably have a few negative traits and some unsuccessful leaders that probably have a couple of good traits as well. One more thing I want you to consider as you're going around your communities is that not all leaders are official formal leaders. You'll probably experience in your travels around your community for the next week that there are some people who are informal leaders who don't have any authority over anyone but are just kind of gathering together and trying to help them all be a common goal. And one of the things that I think is really important is you should record if these informal leaders are exhibiting different traits both positive and negative than the formal leaders in your community. Once you've gathered your information about the leaders in your community and their leadership traits both positive and negative it's time to make a list of the traits that you'd like to include in your leadership style and any negative traits that you'd like to make sure you leave out. Once your list is done, now comes the hard part. It's time to do an honest self-assessment about how well you exhibit and exemplify each of these traits. This can be really hard for a lot of us to do so I recommend doing your own assessment but then going to a trusted friend or colleague and asking them to assess you on the same things. Combine those assessments and see if there's any areas you need to work on. If you do find that there are areas you need to work on make a plan on how you can do that. Think about some behaviors that you can exhibit every day to really exemplify those traits. And when you do come up with those behaviors and that plan of action make sure you're recording your leaders journal and make it part of your daily practice to work on those things every single day. We'd love it if you'd share in the comments some of the traits you think make successful leaders and if you're having a little bit of a problem coming up with a plan on how to work on some of those areas you feel like you might need improvement in contact us. We'll be glad to help you out. Going to have a blog later in the week talking more about leadership traits and the best way to get ahold of that click on that globe off to the right that says subscribe that will bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Thanks again for watching and remember the future is out there. Lead the way.