Uncommon Leadership Quotes

Teamwork is the secret that make common people achieve uncommon result.

The point at which things happen is a decision. In stead of focusing on yourself, focus on how you can help someone else.

Leadership, at its core, is about making other people better as a result of your presence—and making sure that the impact lasts in your absence.

The best predictor of success is grit. How you choose to respond to life’s trials—your uncommon moments—is everything.

Success is not a matter of mastering subtle, sophisticated theory, but rather of embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence.

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

Limitless Leadership is the secret ingredient that helps common people, create high performance teams, that achieve outstanding and uncommon results.

Leaders influence more through who they are than by what they do.

If you really want to be an uncommon leader, you’re going to have to find a way to get much of your vision seen, implemented, and added to by others.

While Abraham, gifted with physical agility and uncommon athletic prowess, had to make his mind, Teedie, privileged beyond measure with resources to develop his mind, had to make his body.

BRAVE EMPATH, that is what I will be calling you in this book as I coach you in empath skills. You are brave. Otherwise you wouldn’t have been attracted to this system for helping empaths. Plenty of other books exist to console empaths who feel like victims. It takes uncommon courage to embrace who you are, to pursue skills that can abolish empath-related suffering, and to claim the leadership role that is rightfully yours. Yes, leadership role. Of all the skill sets I teach, Empath Empowerment is my very favorite because that leadership is so important. Granted, before you gain skills as an empath, you may not feel much like a leader at all.

An uncommon intuitive capacity and interpersonal intelligence allowed him as a child to read the intentions and desires of his parents, to react appropriately to shifting household moods—gifts that he would nurture and develop in the years ahead.

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. PTSD is not uncommon in cases of spiritual abuse. After fearful, dangerous, or traumatic events, people often suffer for months (even years) with the aftereffects of those events, including upsetting memories, fear, sadness, nervousness, and bursts of anxiety.6 In short, “people who have PTSD may feel stressed or frightened even when they’re no longer in danger.”7 For spiritual abuse survivors, experiences that remind them of their abusive pastor or church situation usually trigger these effects. These triggers could be something as simple as going to church, hearing a sermon, or seeing individuals from their former church. A complicating factor in spiritual abuse cases is that the abuse is perpetrated by an institution or a person the victim knew and trusted, known as “institutional betrayal.”8 Studies have shown that abuse within a trusted relationship is significantly more traumatic than abuse by a stranger. And there is a natural trust that is fostered between a church member and their pastor (and the larger leadership body). Smith and Freyd show that such betrayal has a substantial emotional impact: “Betrayal trauma is associated with higher rates of a host of outcomes, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociation, anxiety, [and] depression.

Organizations that create a climate such as that described in this chapter will naturally experience an acceleration of their OODA loops. So the question becomes how to install it. Boyd suggested, in his briefing “Organic Design for Command and Control,” that it will grow naturally if the senior management sets the proper conditions. He defines the two essential elements necessary for running any human organization along maneuver conflict—rapid OODA loop—lines as: •   Leadership—implies the art of inspiring people to enthusiastically take action towards uncommon goals. It must interact with the system to shape the character or nature of that system in order to realize what is to be done. •   Appreciation—refers to the recognition of worth or value, clear perception, understanding, comprehension, discernment, etc. It must not interact nor interfere with the system, but must discern (not shape) the character / nature of what is being done or about to be done.

We have heard much in the past few months about the common man...I have a great devotion to them, for out of them rises the uncommon man. They are the seedbeds of leadership...we believe in equal opportunity for all, but we know that this includes the opportunity to rise to leadership-in other words to be uncommon.

Listen to Paulette’s description of her own values development, and you will begin to understand her uncommon strengths and

For almost one hundred years, leaders of the white South managed to freeze race relations and racial ideology in something close to the Confederate pattern, thus demonstrating that the passage of time by itself does not erase a conflicted past. Elite southern men and women created an ideology of the Lost Cause that wrapped antebellum society, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and postwar racism in the mantle of a protective, laudatory myth. The Lost Cause portrayed the white South as cultured, chivalrous, and superior while making the North into the aggressor—crude, unprincipled, and vindictive. [...] Even after 1900 the Lost Cause ideology continued to gain strength under the leadership of a new generation, until most southern whites came to believe that their history and the myth were identical [75—76].

Despite the popularity of the leadership industry, a real competence in building and leading teams is uncommon, and there isn’t a generally accepted way to teach these competencies.

Fighting unemployment by methods far more costly than the opening of bread lines and soup kitchens would not have been given serious consideration, regardless of which party might have been in office. Since 1932 all that is reversed. The Democrats may or may not be less concerned with a balanced federal budget than the Republicans. However, from President Eisenhower on down, with the possible exception of former Secretary of the Treasury Humphrey, the responsible Republican leadership has said again and again that if business should really turn down they would not hesitate to lower taxes or make whatever other deficit-producing moves were necessary to restore prosperity and eliminate unemployment. This is a far cry from the doctrines that prevailed prior to the big depression.

You do not make it through SEAL training without the support and encouragement of the guys around you. It is in the crucible of training that the bond—the uncommon commitment—of the SEAL brotherhood is built.

superpowers. They have developed those superpowers

In the agile model, and especially in the context of the servant leadership mindset, it is not uncommon to have weekly or even more frequent check-ins—not in a punitive or adversarial way, but simply to find whatever roadblocks are standing in the team's way and to ensure that everyone has what they need to move forward.

You can’t outperform your self-image. You have the choice to take the cap off and stretch yourself and do what’s both uncommon and uncomfortable.

Psychiatrically speaking, living people are more difficult to examine than the dead: those who are alive naturally want to protect their privacy; the dead cannot do so. Now we come to the controversial tale of John’s sister Rosemary. Did she too have a mental illness? The standard story is that she was born with mental retardation that worsened over time, leading to being institutionalized from her mid-twenties until her death in 2005 at age eighty-six. Her sister Eunice, in a widely read 1962 article, revealed Rose’s mental retardation. Decades later, historians discovered that when she was twenty-three years old Rosemary received a frontal lobotomy from the founders of psychosurgery, neurologist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon James Watts. This revelation raised the question of whether Rosemary had, like most lobotomy cases, preexisting mental illness. In retrospect, Rosemary probably had mild mental retardation from birth, with delayed developmental stages (walking, talking) uncommon in mental illnesses.

A ‘good’ leader recognizes that they have been granted the uncommon experience of leading common men. A ‘great’ leader recognizes that of all men, they are likely the most common.

Competency is required, Proficiency is expected. Excellence is uncommon, Aim for that.

he conceived an Open Conspiracy of his own. He dated his social invention from “the mid-twenties in Germany.” If so, then he went to see Wells in 1929 as much from enthusiasm for the Englishman’s perspicacity as for his vision.50 C. P. Snow, the British physicist and novelist, writes of Leo Szilard that he “had a temperament uncommon anywhere, maybe a little less uncommon among major scientists.51 He had a powerful ego and invulnerable egocentricity: but he projected the force of that personality outward, with beneficent intention toward his fellow creatures. In that sense, he had a family resemblance to Einstein on a reduced scale.” Beneficent intention in this instance is a document proposing a new organization: Der Bund—the order, the confederacy, or, more simply, the band.52 The Bund, Szilard writes, would be “a closely knit group of people whose inner bond is pervaded by a religious and scientific spirit”:53 If we possessed a magical spell with which to recognize the “best” individuals of the rising generation at an early age . . . then we would be able to train them to independent thinking, and through education in close association we could create a spiritual leadership class with inner cohesion which would renew itself on its own.54 Members of this class would not be awarded wealth or personal glory. To the contrary, they would be required to take on exceptional responsibilities, “burdens” that might “demonstrate their devotion.” It seemed to Szilard that such a group stood a good chance of influencing public affairs even if it had no formal structure or constitutional position. But there was also the possibility that it might “take over a more direct influence on public affairs as part of the political system, next to government and parliament, or in the place of government and parliament.”55 “The Order,” Szilard wrote at a different time, “was not supposed to be something like a political