Throughout our lives we were taught leadership in the political or military sense but never those lessons were taught in a way that we can use in our daily lives. Later on we grow up and we attend leadership related training sessions and workshops and we are told that leadership is the ability to lead others towards a common vision or objective.

I am not against the above, especially that the most famous leaders in the world are more of political or military nature. I am also not against the fact that leadership means - from a first glance - leading others. Leading others means there is a leader and there are followers. Thus there is a basic element in the definition of leadership that must be there so that the definition is complete. This basic element is the existing of followers. Many definitions and books say that without followers there is no leader. In fact on of the books that I am reading now says that a leader without followers is not leading, he is just taking a walk. 

At the end of 2009 I started training on freelance basis. Many of my training sessions at the time were to university students. That was still before I became a certified life coach. It was during those sessions that I started disagreeing with the limitation of mainstream definition of leadership. The reader must remember that I don't think that the definition that includes "followers" is wrong, I just think it is limited and that humanity is losing a lot because of that limitation.

As much as "leading" means the leading of other into a certain objective, but I truly believe that before we are able to lead others, we need to have the ability to lead ourselves into a certain vision or objective. Yes..lead ourselves. If we can't lead ourselves to such a destiny how are we expected to lead anybody anywhere.

Leading yourself entails having all what a leader - who leads others - needs to have. You will need to have:

- Vision/objective: To know what you want to achieve

- Simple and clear communication: If you think there is no one to communicate with, then you are totally wrong. Monitor yourself and see how you are talking with yourself as long as you are awake. This is called the internal dialogue, which is one of the most important factors to our success & failure. So you must be able to communicate to yourself simply and clearly what is it that you want to achieve.

- Creativity: The ability to find way to go around obstacles.

- Consistency: Changing your tactics without a reason will always make you lose time and will put you in never ending circles.

- Persistence: Keep on trying and never let go or give up.Once you give up you will hurt your self esteem, and if you can know the importance of self esteem you will not ever hurt it.

- ...etc: The qualities of a leader are numerous and are not within the objective of this article. 

The art of knowing and designing what you want to achieve, planning for it and implementing your plan to achieve is at the core of leadership. It was Stephen Covey that mentioned Personal Leadership and I admire him for that. If you are able to put yourself in that process one time after the other you will be flying from one achievement to the next and you will be living a life that you never thought possible.

Life Coaching helps you to realize and design what you want to achieve, helps you to plan for it, and helps you to implement your plan. This means that life coaching actually helps you to become the leader that you would love to follow.