True leaders take a positive stand on many things, but one component of leadership that influences all other aspects of this role is the conviction that knowledge and the ongoing pursuit of it can make or break a person. Buckminster Fuller, someone who acknowledges this concept, once said, "All children are born geniuses; 9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently degeniusized by grownups." As a leader, you must reverse this trend and bring back the innate ability and potential you were gifted with at birth.

Every person has the power to write his own history, a history that is based on choice. Every leader has the responsibility to choose to be the best he can be and not limit the future by what has happened in the past. Acknowledging that being a victim and placing blame on others is a choice and counterproductive for the leader is a beginning to a more positive future. However, not taking this positive approach only assures that negative behavior is repeated, offering more opportunities to be victimized and the recipient of bad luck or perceived mistreatment.

If you have traveled this road, now is the time to take a new path. Reinvent yourself into the kind of leader who makes positive choices rather than reactive responses to life and others. You take this new path by learning about yourself and about strategies that foster being more positive.

Everything that happens to people is a cause/effect relationship. An event, comment or incident happens, and the person responds. That response brings about another event, comment, incident and the cycle continues. How positive or negative this experience turns out to be is dependent on the response. If we take a moment, we can see that between the event and the response is the opportunity to make a choice. Should the person respond the way he has always done? Should he say exactly what is on his mind with no thought to the outcome? If so, he is destined to repeat history, a history that may not be his most shining moment.

This realization that people have control over their destiny can be either liberating or terrifying. We can design our future and not be locked into the past. Because we are not locked into our behavior, unless we choose to be, we can be anything we want by choosing to make a new response rather than the automatic reaction. This puts the onus on us. We are now, however, accountable for our actions and the outcome of those actions. This accountability takes away the excuse and the victim status, a scary prospect for some people, but the gift of a lifetime for others.

As a leader, you can model this positive behavior and through your experience teach this to others. You will have more than just the information to guide you in your leadership; you will have practical life experience to assist you and give you the validity others want in a leader.