During my high school days, one of the key life lessons I learned was in the aspect of leadership. This is one that comes to me even though I don't have a strong desire for it, but because others around me felt I'm perfect for the spot, though I wasn't much sure if it's what I wanted, yet I was thrilled, but things went south when I couldn't meet up with the expectations that the position demanded, and today I'll love to tell you all about it.
So when I was in high school, it happened that we were distributed into groups on a project to do research, and at the end of the day, we were supposed to present our findings to our teacher as a team. I was made the head of my group because my teacher felt I was the most brilliant among those with whom we were peered together. That's true, except for the fact that I don't possess the things that make up a leader. So after setting up the group and informing them that I was the team leader, we were left by ourselves to decide on our strategy and plans for achieving our objectives, of which I'm supposed to be the one who guides and instructs others on what to do, but unfortunately I couldn't find my voice, and neither do I have the boldness to instruct anyone on what to do. The thing is that although brilliant, I'm an introvert and I don't like taking the center stage, so that position made me lose my voice, and I couldn't give any meaningful suggestions, and this made our group have drawbacks when other groups were progressing with theirs. As time went on, others had to quickly inform our teacher about it, and he ripped me off of the leadership position and gave it to someone else, who did an amazing job as our team leader. Although I wasn't too happy about losing my position, I was relieved. I was also able to give valuable suggestions freely that aided our group research. Some of the lessons I learned are as stated below:
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Not everyone is bound to be a leader; if everyone were to lead, then there'd be no followers.
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Another is that to be a leader, you must be outspoken, not someone who can't face the crowd or is shy about taking center stage, so even if you are an introvert, you must work on your confidence.
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I also learned that you must be a good follower to be a successful leader, because the guy who later led us didn't just instruct like I did back then; instead, he's always at the forefront of most of what we ought to do, and this made us, the team members, follow his lead and work freely without complaining.
This and many more were what I learned from that experience, and it has greatly helped me as I grew up, as I've now worked on multiple leadership capacities and used those lessons to my advantage.
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Thanks for your time. I hope you enjoy the read. Have a productive week ahead.
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