“I raise up my voice—not so I can shout but so that those without a voice can be heard… We cannot succeed when half of us are held back.”

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”

“I really think a champion is defined not by their wins but by how they can recover when they fall.”

“Have no fear of perfection; you'll never reach it.”

“Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light.”

“You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.”

“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”

“Don’t ever make decisions based on fear. Make decisions based on hope and possibility. Make decisions based on what should happen, not what shouldn’t.”

“I don't have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I'm as good as anybody, but no better.”

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

“If you're always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”

“There's power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice.”

“We’re all water from different rivers, that’s why it’s so easy to meet; we’re all water in this vast, vast ocean, someday we’ll evaporate together.”

“Tolerance and compassion are active, not passive states, born of the capacity to listen, to observe and to respect others.”

“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

“Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right.”

“Social change is brought about by those who dare and act, who can think unconventionally and who can court unpopularity.”

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right–for you’ll be criticized anyway.”

“If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.”

“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.”

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”

Looking for motivation? Get a dose of girl power with 50 inspiring quotes from strong women throughout history from Michelle Obama to Amelia Earhart.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Inspirational Quotes by Powerful Women in History

You’ve no doubt heard the warning that employees frequently resign because of bad bosses, not bad companies. This may seem like a scary warning until you consider that the reverse is true. A full 56% of professionals would say no to a modest pay raise to keep working under a strong manager.The question isn’t as tough to answer as it might seem at first blush. The most well-respected founders, CEOs, and supervisors tend to share some distinct qualities. Here are some of those commonalities as well as methods for you to adopt them into your leadership style.

Working With An Authentic Leader

To avoid sending mixed messages to colleagues and spurring their mistrust, write down at least five things you value. They could be anything from honesty and humour to spirituality and selflessness.At the end of each day, rate yourself on how well you practised your values. Were you true to them? Remember that what makes an authentic leader is being true to yourself, even when you don’t like the answers.

Authentic Leaders Hold Personal Values Sacred

Many people hold onto the notion that you have to be tough as nails if you’re in charge. To be sure, a “line in the sand” attitude can be helpful in some situations.Can it be challenging to admit to others that you need their help or insights? Is it hard to acknowledge that you’ve made the wrong choice or that you’re feeling worried about the future? Of course. You’re human.Still, leading with your humanity instead of trying to be an omniscient ruler is what makes an authentic leader. Walking around with your “guard up” all the time limits the bonds you could be forging with team members.

Authentic Leaders Show Vulnerability

Some of the world’s most recognized business and political figures are voracious readers. Why? They realize that reading helps you become a better communicator, speaker, and goal-setter.Do you set aside time for learning? Even if you’re not someone who’s apt to pick up a book every night, you can still listen to podcasts or audible books. Or, you could sign up for a self-directed course to make personal discoveries and build your professional acumen. In time, you may even want to launch a company-backed book club to foster camaraderie, collaboration, and innovation.

Authentic Leaders Have a Thirst for Knowledge

Leaders who listen because they have to are more interested in making the problem go away. But leaders who listen because they want to are genuinely interested in helping their employees. Why? Helping someone solve an issue can be beneficial in the long run. After all, you might encounter a similar problem later.There’s no doubt that it can be hard to calm your mind and focus your attention when team members need your ear. Research shows that most people forget half of what they hear only moments after they hear it.

Authentic Leaders Are Eager to Listen

More than three-quarters of professionals admit that they’ve experienced burnout.  As a leader, you can’t afford to allow yourself to get to the stage of true burnout. If you do, you won’t be effective and you may end up hurting your organization. This means you need to be like other strong leaders and make time for yourself.Several fantastic outcomes will happen when you begin to prioritize your health and wellness. According to studies, you’ll sleep better and feel more relaxed, which will allow you to absorb information more easily.

Authentic Leaders Take Care of Themselves

Now that you know what makes an authentic leader, you can start to work on new characteristics and behaviours in your everyday life.In time and with effort, you’ll become a more trustworthy, reliable leader. And you’ll have an incredibly devoted, engaged team to prove that you’re on the right path.

The Bottom Line

Have you ever wondered what makes an authentic leader? Here are 5 leadership examples that you can learn from.

What Makes an Authentic Leader? 5 Examples

The Stockdale Paradox was made famous in Jim Collins's From Good to Great.  It gives wisdom for how leaders can manage an unrolling crisis. As CEOS in crisis, a central concern that keeps them awake is understanding complex and rapidly changing circumstances accurately and responding to them by keeping the short and long-term goals in mind.

The Stockdale Paradox - wisdom for leaders in uncertain times

Stockdale was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for seven-and-a-half years. His memoir describes grim details that are hard to bear. However, Stockdale's later life was happy. When asking how he survived when he did not know the end of the story, Stockdale answered: “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

James Stockdale -- a prisoner of war

Prisoners in Vietnam who were optimists didn't survive. They were saying 'We're going to be out by Christmas", "We're going to be out by Thanksgiving", and when it didn't happen, they eventually died of a broken heart. The paradox is this: "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

The Stockdale Paradox: have faith but confront reality

You may pin your hope on some other event or date when the crisis will come to an end, but the possiblity remains that you don't know how long the crisis will last. During a crisis, accept what you cannot change and make the best of what is in your power. You can't change anything if you don't accept it. In disasters, take goal-directed action to survive within it.

Create goals

All disasters have common phases: Pre-impact, impact, and recoil. <ul><li>In short-term disasters, the three phases are followed by rescue and post-traumatic adjustment.</li><li>In long-term disasters, there is no rescue, or the rescue comes long after expected. Those who survive move into the adaptation and consolidation phase.</li></ul> Adaptation is breaking and unlearning. Consolidation is where the new circumstances are accepted as the new normal.

How survival works

There is no point where things will ease up. Success in a long-term survival situation means getting up with determination and fighting every day while not being entrapped by the previous day's failures. The role of faith: Having a value system, a sense of identity, and a purpose for one's existence increases the chance of survival and resiliency. It is also vital for maintaining relationships during crises. If you want to keep your self-respect and certainty to friendship and support, you must realise that your enemies are fear and guilt, not pain.

What long-term survival looks like

It is helpful to keep in mind that the crisis will affect individuals drastically. Each team member is likely to be in a different reaction phase to the crisis. A leader's most important job in a crisis is to articulate the overarching purpose and connect each day's tasks to it. The planning implies a future, and this future is often in doubt. Start meetings by having each person introduce themselves by their name, job title, mission and immediate tasks. This gives practical information and helps bring people back to themselves and focus again.

Commitment to a high-level goal

Ask regularly at meetings: "What is something that doesn't fit in, that doesn't make sense?" It isn't easy to know what data points matter during rapidly changing circumstances. Individuals can become hyperfocused on tasks without paying attention to the environment. <ul><li>Create regular times to discuss facts that don't fit the narrative.</li><li>You and your team members will inevitably make mistakes, lose focus, and fall victim to errors. Normalise admitting these mistakes. Discuss weak spots, analyse mistakes, and do damage control.</li></ul>

Know which data points matter

<ul><li>Use "as if" exercises, roleplay and assigned mental exercises to help the group articulate thoughts and feelings that may be too scary to acknowledge. Use these tools often.</li></ul> <ul><li>Use mental contrasting, a sequenced visualisation exercise: A person first visualises a goal and its rewards, then imagine what obstacles can get in the way, including their own behaviour. For example, a person might visualise receiving a promotion but then would envision budget cutbacks or loss of a client.</li></ul>

Create ways to help your team articulate threatening thoughts and feelings

The Stockdale Paradox and survival psychology contain wisdom for how leaders can manage the coronavirus crisis, according to Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams.

business

Business

What the Stockdale Paradox Tells Us About Crisis Leadership

How self-aware are you? How well do you know yourself? Do you know how others perceive you?  There are two kinds of self-awareness: internal – how we perceive ourselves – and external – how others perceive us. To be truly self-aware, we need to gain both an internal and external perspective. To successfully take others’ perspectives in highly charged situations, we should start by “zooming in” on our perspective first to better understand it. Next, we should “zoom out” and consider the perspective of the other person.

See Yourself With Clarity

When coaching others, I’ll often focus a conversation on why the other person wants to change. This isn’t a bad thing per se, but there’s a risk that we don’t get to the ‘actionable’ part of our insights or emotions. We need to ask ourselves about the “what”. Why questions draw us to our limitations, what questions keep us curious. What can I do? What do you like? These kinds of “what” questions are geared towards personal growth, to seeing our potential.

Don't Ask Why, Ask What

A simple but powerful tool is to spend five minutes at the end of every day reflecting on the following questions: <ul><li>What went well today?</li><li>What didn’t go well?</li><li>What did I learn and how will I be smarter tomorrow?</li></ul>

Daily Check

Reframing means that we look at our circumstances, our behaviours, and our relationships from a different angle. I know from experience how easy it can be to be drawn into a single view of a circumstance, and therefore struggling to find a good way to change things. We need to instead look at the good and the bad from multiple angles, as a way to help maximise our insights and chances of success.

Reframing

Instead of focussing on the problem all the time, we need to mine solutions, dedicating a good amount of our efforts to exploring different ways of solving a problem. To increase your ability to mine problems for solutions, try the Miracle Question:Suppose that one night, while you are asleep, there’s a miracle and the problem that brought you here is solved. However, because you are asleep you don’t know that the miracle has already happened … Think for a moment … How's life going to be different now? Describe it in detail. What’s the first thing you’ll notice as you wake up in the morning?

Mining Solutions

If being individually self-aware means who you are and how others see you, a self-aware team commits to that same understanding at a collective level. There are five cornerstones of collective insight that teams can access and address: <ul><li>Objectives – What are we trying to achieve?</li><li>Progress – How are we doing? </li><li>Process – The processes we’re employing to achieve our objectives.</li><li>Assumptions – Our assumptions about the business and our environment.</li><li>Individual Contributions – What impact is each team member having on the team’s performance?</li></ul>

Awareness At Team Level: Collective Insight

Leadership is not about trying to control every move of the employees. Leaders should help connect their employees with the bigger picture, give them the right tools and provide them with the space to make mistakes whilst still holding them accountable. Leaders can ask some key questions to their employees to make sure that teams share their collective insight: <ol><li>Do we all know the plan?</li><li>Do we all know the status of the plan?</li><li>Are we all aware of the challenges the company is facing?</li></ol>

What Leaders Need To Do

Learn how to develop self-awareness and use it to become more fulfilled, confident, and successful. Most people feel like they know themselves pretty well. But what if you could know yourself just a little bit better—and with this small improvement, get a big payoff…not just in your career, but in your life? Research shows that self-awareness—knowing who we are and how others see us—is the foundation for high performance, smart choices, and lasting relationships. There’s just one problem: most people don’t see themselves quite as clearly as they could. Fortunately, reveals organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, self-awareness is a surprisingly developable skill. Integrating hundreds of studies with her own research and work in the Fortune 500 world, she shows us what it really takes to better understand ourselves on the inside—and how to get others to tell us the honest truth about how we come across. Through stories of people who have made dramatic gains in self-awareness, she offers surprising secrets, techniques and strategies to help you do the same—and how to use this insight to be more fulfilled, confident, and successful in life and in work. In Insight, you'll learn: • The 7 types of self-knowledge that self-aware people possess. • The 2 biggest invisible roadblocks to self-awareness. • Why approaches like therapy and journaling don't always lead to true insight • How to stop your confidence-killing habits and learn to love who you are. • How to benefit from mindfulness without uttering a single mantra. • Why other people don’t tell you the truth about yourself—and how to find out what they really think. • How to deepen your insight into your passions, gifts, and the blind spots that could be holding you back. • How to hear critical feedback without losing your mojo. • Why the people with the most power can often be the least-self-aware, and how smart leaders avoid this trap. • The 3 building blocks for self-aware teams. • How to deal with delusional bosses, clients, and coworkers.

career

Career

books

Books

Insight

Connecting with people improves our lives. But only connecting with them because we want something from them feels cringey. 
People are more important than a career. If you don't know how to network, don't just make connections. Make friends.

Networking with people on the right terms

<ul><li>Compliment people's work. Without being transactional, tell people when you admire their work.</li><li>Don't compliment people's appearance. Instead, compliment them on the things they do and create.</li><li>Respond to questions. Most people post questions because they want to start a conversation.</li><li>Don't insert yourself into conversations between people you don't know. First, get to know at least one person.</li><li>Be funny. If you find an opportunity to be funny, use it.</li><li>Bring up information people will like.</li><li>Don't argue with people you barely know.</li></ul>

How to connect with people online

Connect with people. Go to meetups and spend time with people online. Do this without the expectation of getting something in return. Do it because talking to people is great. Then, when you need something, ask. Friends like to connect friends looking for a job with friends trying to hire.

Connect people to each other

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

teamwork

Teamwork

Forget networking—connect on a human level | Zapier

Success looks different for each person—as does fulfillment. 
<ul>
<li>Organizations usually put so much weight and focus on the need to grow into a leader that they're failing to see that individual contributors often lack a unique plan to help them forge their path to success.</li>
<li>Making sure your individual contributors are heard and seen is vital. Leaders are great for seeing the big picture and creating a strategy, while your individual contributors are great at understanding the mechanics and nuances within the strategy.</li>
</ul>

Leaders And Individual Contributors

You need to identify who your leaders are and who your individual contributors are early on in the process. Failing to do this is going to create a lot of frustration for you and your team. Sit down with them and ask what they enjoy, what gets them excited for work, and—this is important—what they aren't interested in.

Identifying Individual Contributors

There are a million opportunities left, right, and center.<ul><li>An individual contributor doesn't need to be stagnant in a cycle of repetitive tasks. Give them the opportunity to manage projects from start to finish. Or you can expose them to different areas of the business where they can contribute, while also expanding their knowledge and skillset.</li><li>Recognize their efforts. As they manage more projects and take on more responsibility, the pay and title should reflect that. Growth isn't only about leading people—it's about responsibilities, skills, pay, and title. </li></ul>

Up Isn't The Only Way One Might Want To Go

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

Not everyone wants to be a leader

Successful and rising entrepreneurs have a key behavior trait that propels them towards their goals: Motivation towards that goal, the constant fixation in their minds to what they want to achieve.

The Secret Sauce: Motivation

Successful entrepreneurs know what they want in life, and what is the purpose of their existence. They have chosen a destiny and defined their purpose of living.

Define your Purpose

Successful entrepreneurs have a system, a daily set of habits, a power routine that defines their work ethic, eventually defining the course of their lives.

Everyday Motivation

For daily motivation to arise, mental preparation (the night before and during the morning) is key. Certain visuals, music, and other trigger pieces can set your mind towards your goal.

Mental Preparation

Self-discipline and willpower can be in short supply and fail you, but this is your inner fire, your motivation that will sustain you.

Self-Discipline and Willpower

Successful and motivated entrepreneurs set aside all external forces and distractions and have their own set of high standards. They do things a majority of people find difficult to do, like waking up early or avoiding TV or junk food.

Set personal high standards

Goal-setting makes your mind think differently and drives you towards it naturally. The obstacles appear small to a person having enough motivation.

Goal Setting

Entrepreneurs who keep rising and stay motivated are the ones who never lose sight of their goals, always keeping them at the forefront of their minds.

Keep your goal in sight

"Self-motivation despises the role of luck, dismisses the component of self-discipline and looks to the power of goals for ultimate achievement in life."

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Presented by How do some entrepreneurs overcome obstacles, maintain intense focus, exemplify ironclad discipline and create companies out of thin air? Genius? Luck? Some secret sauce of success? Related: 20 Quotes to Help Motivate You to Hustle Like Never Before Much of the answer lies in motivation.

habits

Habits

problemsolving

Problem Solving

The 7 Secrets Self-Motivated Entrepreneurs Know

You will stand out in some specific skills and tasks. Those are the skills others pay for and where you add the most value.
But you probably don't spend that much time using your skills because you try to do everything else by yourself. You may know that you should delegate more, but it's just too difficult to do.

Focusing on your skills

Allocation is giving other people work to do. 
Delegation is giving other people some of your own work to do, where you give them the whole problem to solve, not just a task on its own.

Delegation is not allocation

Delegation means giving up control and trusting others with your work. Reasons that delegation feels hard:
<ul>
<li>You think someone else won't do the job the right way</li>
<li>You're afraid you'll be replaceable</li>
<li>You don't know how to assign work</li>
<li>It involves managing other people</li>
</ul>
But delegation is a skill. Like any other skill, it requires practice and resources to get good at it. It requires you to manage projects and people.

Why delegation is hard

To delegate efficiently, ensure you choose the right person for the job with the necessary skills.
<ul>
<li>Identify the required skillsets for the role</li>
<li>Define an hour and money budget for the task</li>
<li>Identify prospective candidates for the job.</li>
<li>Interview the candidates if necessary</li>
</ul>
When you are hiring, make a practical test simulating the task you are delegating. If you need a video editor, ask for a quick video.

Find the right person

<ul>
<li>Level 1: Do as I say - At this level, you give instructions. You already know exactly what you want and require the other person to stick to your specifications.</li>
<li>Level 2: Research and report back - When you need information to make a decision, you don't need to gather the information yourself. You can delegate the Research and ask for a Report.</li>
<li>Level 3: Research and make a recommendation - You are not looking for a regular report but actionable recommendations. This means researching, outlining options, and making the best recommendations possible with pros and cons.</li>
<li>Level 4: Decide and inform - At this level, the employee makes the decision by himself and then informs you.</li>
<li>Level 5: Act independently - At this level, there is total freedom. There's no need to report back. This is best for responsibilities that are not very important or that you are not best suited for.</li>
</ul>

5 levels of delegation

Staying organised while delegating can be difficult. To ensure you are on top of everything, follow this 3-step process.
<ul>
<li>Create your work environment around your goals. Then organise your tasks based on the goals. Lastly, organise your time for efficiency.</li>
<li>Organise your physical and digital files.</li>
<li>Follow up with team members regularly. Set up meetings and feedback sessions.</li>
</ul>

How to stay organized at work

How many hours do you spend using your most valuable skills? If the answer is less than 80%, you need to learn the 5 Levels of Delegation

productivity

Productivity

communication

Communication

timemanagement

Time Management

The 5 Levels of Delegation You Need to Gain Back Your Time

People are not accustomed to thinking hard. They are often satisfied with a plausible answer that comes quickly to mind.
The prospect theory - the empirical exploration of risk assessment, loss aversion, and reference dependence, explains why people consistently behave in ways that traditional economic theory could not predict.

The nature of the human judgment

There are two thinking systems, each with distinct characteristics.
<ul>
<li>System 1, or intuition. We think in this way most of the time. We respond to the world in ways that we're not conscious of and don't control. System 1 operations are fast, effortless, associative, and emotionally charged. They're governed by habit, so it's more difficult to modify or control.</li>
<li>System 2, or reasoning. It is a deliberate reasoning system. It's slower, serial, effortful, and controlled.</li>
</ul>

The two-system theory

In statistical thinking, professional statisticians informally think the degree of the probability distribution in a small group will closely resemble the probability distribution in the overall population.
In other words, even people who should know better make these mistakes. When they're not computing seriously in System 2 mode (reasoning), they rely on their intuitions for simple problems.

The law of small numbers

The perception of and reaction to risk is often dismissed as emotional. The first thing that happens is you're afraid, and from that fear, you feel risk. So the view of risk is becoming less cognitive while emotion becomes dominant.
Emotion is about what might happen, not so much the probability. The more emotional the event is, the less sensible people are.

The perception of risk

<ul>
<li>Groups are better equipped than individuals to recognize an answer as correct. But, when the whole group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals.</li>
<li>Polarization can occur in groups. One major bias in risky decision making is optimism, while doubts are suppressed. If an individual in a group is thinking differently to the group, it is easy to understand how they would suppress themselves.</li>
<li>However, in groups of competing individuals, such as the corporate investment committee, the different dynamics can lead to better decision-making.</li>
<li>In an internal marketplace where groups come to a consensus about the risks and rewards associated with their decisions, internal incentives can shape how the group perceives risks and rewards that are different from the reality of the risks and rewards in the external marketplace. The incentives can distort risk perception.</li>
</ul>

Group decisions are not risk-free

Both individuals and groups need mechanisms to review how their decisions are made.
<ul>
<li>Many businesses are averse to appointing someone to keep statistics on the decisions made and evaluate the biases, errors, the wrong forecasts, and the misjudged factors to make the process more rational.</li>
<li>Individuals do not even keep track of having made the decision or forecast. We're also unaware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. Instead, people reconstruct their past opinion and believe they always thought that.</li>
</ul>

Mechanisms needed for individuals and groups

Decision making can be divided into three systems: Emotional, rational, and perceptual systems.
The rational model is one where the beliefs and desires are supposed to be determined, but decision analysis of the last thirty years has shown that it doesn't work. Even people who are explicitly trained to used System 2 thinking (reasoning) in problems don't do so, even when they know they should.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't take decision analysis, just that decision analysis are not effective if decision-makers do not want to relinquish the intelligence function to somebody else.

Decision analysis

Decision analysis is based on the idea that decision making is a choice between gambles. Managers think that they are fighting risk in a controlled way. The idea that you are gambling is an admission that you have lost control. It is detestable to decision managers, and the reason they reject decision analysis.
It is advisable for organizations to dedicate some effort to study their own decision processes and their own mistakes, and to keep track so they can learn from those mistakes.

Why decision-makers don't like decision analysis

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

Daniel Kahneman: The Thought Leader Interview

<ul><li>No large meetings unless they're of value to everyone.</li><li>Don't have frequent meetings unless the matter is truly urgent. </li><li>If you are not adding value to a meeting, walk out.</li><li>Don't use acronyms and nonsense words for objects, software, or processes.</li><li>Avoid any terms that require an explanation - they inhibit communication.</li><li>Communicate directly with individuals rather than through a chain of command.</li><li>Don't follow any "company rule" that doesn't make common sense.</li><li>Ideas that increase productivity or happiness are always welcome.</li><li>Never do anything that would make a great Dilbert cartoon.</li></ul>

Elon Musk's management rules

Elon Musk is best known as an innovator, business owner, visionary, and bon vivant. What gets lost in that public image, though, is that he's a management theorist. Musk seems to approach running a business much as he'd approach a complex engineering project: Figure out what works and do that, even if it doesn't make sense to anyone else.

Inspirational Quotes by Powerful Women in History

What Makes an Authentic Leader? 5 Examples

What the Stockdale Paradox Tells Us About Crisis Leadership

Insight

Forget networking—connect on a human level | Zapier

Aurora M.