Today’s guest post is written by Brian Ahearn. Brian’s one of the most knowledgeable guys I know on the subject of influencing people (which is why he’s been a guest here before).  Brian’s blog, Influence PEOPLE, is followed by people in more than 180 countries. You can learn more about Brian at the end of this post. Enjoy!

My wife Jane is an excellent golfer, a poster child for hard work and practice. Many years ago she said, “I’m tired of people saying I have potential. I want good scores!” She started taking lessons, practiced consistently at the driving range and saw her scores drop from 105-110 to the low 80s and occasionally a score in the high 70s! She exemplifies a truism in life – you don’t get good at something by merely learning about it. At some point you have to “do the stuff.”

Over the last few years I’ve conducted many sales workshops where people practice different skill sets. One such workshop was on active listening skills. Good listening skills are just as important for leaders as they are for salespeople.

Excellent leaders recognize the more information they have the better the solutions they can come up with. One important way leaders get their information is by actively listening. I’ll share five pointers to help you become listening “STARS.”

Listening is an active skill so you need to do several things if you want to excel. Listening skills are not things you can’t do. For example, I often tell workshop attendees I can’t dunk a basketball. Never could and it’s not likely at 48 years old, standing just 5’9 tall, that I ever will. Jumping high enough to dunk a basketball is a skill I don’t have and can’t acquire no matter how hard I work. If someone told me my career depended on dunking a basketball I’d start looking for a new career.

But that’s not the case with listening skills! Each of the five pointers I’ll share is within your power to do if you’ll just make the choice to employ them. To be listening STARS, you need to remember Stop, Tone, Ask, Restate and Scribble. Let’s look briefly at each.

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Leadership requires both self-awareness and selflessness. Effective leaders know how to balance the purpose of their organization with their own self-interests.

Today’s post is by Jan Rutherford – author of The Littlest Green Beret. You can learn more about Jan at the end of this post.

The thing about leadership development is that it all starts with everyone’s favorite subject – themselves. Self awareness is the starting point for effective leadership, and it’s always interesting to watch my students obsess about survey results, feedback from peers, aptitude tests, and what it all means to their careers. The focus shouldn’t be on oneself, but on the leader’s effect on others. That is, our primary leadership tool is how we effectively communicate.

The variables are simply how well do we listen and how well do we speak to align expectations and achieve results? Ultimately, we control two things: where we spend our time, and how we respond to our environment. What priorities will best produce the results we’re after, and what attitude will we choose to deal with everyday ups and downs? After all, a leader’s environment is largely made up with a bevy of complex and unending interpersonal relationships.

Nick Petrie once published a brilliant white paper on “Future Trends in Leadership Development” where he discussed the transfer of greater developmental ownership to the individual. As a strong proponent of self-reliant leadership, I believe Petrie expertly articulated the need for developmental ownership to be squarely on the shoulders of the individual. Leadership can be an illusion of control, but changing your perspective on everyday experiences can provide inspirational learning opportunities for personal growth and development.

What questions should you routinely ask yourself? On a daily basis, what steps should you take to find personal success in your life’s work? Do you know your life’s work? Some say it’s the place where your passion and others’ needs intersect. I believe a key determinant of success is whether you can rely on yourself for self-coaching. However, self-reliant leadership is dependent on achieving a balance between independence and the interdependence of working with others to accelerate your own personal growth and development.

Self-reliance and leadership may seem to be contradictory notions, but there are three mutually supporting concepts:

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