Tips for Aspiring Leaders (#2 Speaking Your Vision)

Effective leaders have the ability to carve out space in the world for their ideas and commitments in such a way that the world actually shifts and changes around them. Part of this ability comes from keeping your word. I wrote about this in Tip #1.

My second tip for aspiring leaders is to cultivate your ability to “speak your vision”. By this, I mean learning how to speak in such a way that what comes out of your mouth paints a picture of a world or environment that’s consistent with your vision. This isn’t hard, but it does require creativity and discipline.

You have to start with a strong vision before you can speak it. Having a strong, clear and consistent vision is a fundamental quality of effective leadership in and of itself, but I’ll talk more about that some other time. Right now, we’ll assume that the fundamentals of a strong vision are all there in the background. This means, you’re already clear about what you want to accomplish as a leader, you know what the world around you will look like when you’ve accomplished that, and you can see it all clearly in your mind.

The next step has to do with creating a network of interrelated conversations that all articulate or describe some facet of your vision. Extraordinary leaders throughout history have skillfully woven the fabric of their vision into their conversational network. To an effective leader, every conversation is an opportunity to expound on some aspect of the vision they serve. All of those conversations together create an inter-related web, or network of conversations.

Using every conversation as an opportunity to articulate and include others in your vision is a subtle art and a fine line. It’s vitally important to create conversations that engage the interest and passion of other people. This is what makes the difference between telemarketers and world leaders. The conversations you generate, while playing a critical role in the articulation of your leadership vision, have to be relevant and interesting to the people you converse with.

Continued…

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