What a leader is to me

"In your own words, based on your experiences in this class -  define "leadership". Additionally, write a philosophy statement that describes the components of effective and successful leadership." What experiences in this course, in your job, in conversations with others, campus involvement, etc. contribute to your philosophy? How does your philosophy now differ from your attitudes toward leadership at the beginning of the course?

To  effectively describe what  leadership is, let me first tell you what it is not. It is not control, it is not power; leadership is not being the boss or making the final decision. Leadership is more like the ring leader of a circus. One who's job it is to not only showcase the talent of others, but to create the big picture and enable the others in your group to play off of each others strengths. Leadership is not being the one that talks first, or over everyone else but someone who listens to others and helps to make the best idea become a reality. I learned a lot about this during this class because I was in a room full of leaders. It was difficult to see at first, but after a couple activities, it became clear that it is not always that one person has to lead, but that there could be multiple leaders within one group.

When I cheered in highschool, before we went out on the floor we said this chant that stated "for 2 and 1/2 minutes 20 hearts will beat as one," as corny as that sounds it is true. It means to put all differences aside and come together for a common purpose, to hit a perfect routine. This relates a lot to leadership because a large portion of the time you are going to be working in a group with a lot of different personalities and you will need to come together for whatever common purpose you have. This relates to class in many ways, we obviously all come from different majors, ages, backgrounds, and yet we all had to come together to complete the tasks that we were given to complete. One activity that really stood out to was the star activity, this was easy to identify that we used everyones different strengths to complete the creation of the star. David came up with the idea and I used my big mouth to get his idea implemented into action. All in all that it's not a leader that's so important but the team, showing me that what a leader really is is just a member whose duty it is to assist in the creation of a team, not a group of individuals.