All of us want to do great things and achieve success, greatness, name and fame, and most of us end up in frustration because we can’t achieve what we aspire for. And those who achieve success become leaders and set examples for others. Leaders are not born, they become great leaders by sheer grit and determination. Great leaders learn from others, read autobiographies of their favourite leaders, pick up skills along the way… but never lose their authentic voice, opinions and, ultimately, how they make their decisions about things they do.

There are six key characteristics of people which make them stand out from the crowd and hence make them great leaders.

• Be Confident

A leader truly instills confidence and ‘followership’ by having a clear vision, showing empathy and being a strong coach. As a leader, you should be assertive, yet always try to maintain your status quo, which underscores kindness and generosity. The two work well together in gaining respect for you to be a leader.

• Believe in Yourself

In order to achieve greatness, a leader must create a culture of optimism. There will be many ups and downs, but the prevalence of positivity must keep you going. This requires fearlessness and a firm belief in yourself and your ideas. You have to truly believe in making the impossible possible.

• Commit Yourself Towards Your Goals

To be a great leader you must love what you do. In order to be truly successful at something, you must obsess over it and let it consume you. No matter how successful your business might become, great people are never satisfied and constantly push to do something bigger, better and greater. Great leader leads by example not because they feel like it’s what they should do, but because it is their way of life. Patience is the real key, patience really is courage that’s meant to test your commitment to your cause. The path to greatness is always tough, but great leaders understand when to leave the cause and when to stay the course. If your vision is big enough, there will be thousands of reasons why it ‘can’t be done’ and plenty of doubters, but it takes courage and unflinching commitment and dedication to your goal to pull off something big.

• Get Your Priorities Straight

It is of paramount importance that you keep your priorities straight, it takes insight every day to be able to separate that which is really important from all the incoming fire. It’s like wisdom—it can be improved with time, if you’re paying attention, but it has to exist in your character. Leaders work in a different way where they unclutter the things which might be distracting and only focus on their priorities.

• Learn to say NO

Leadership is the art and science of being selective. Start by carefully assessing every demand that comes their way, and align the tasks with the highest-valued contributions that they’re most skilled at making. For those requests that draw on this talent, you say yes and carve out the time and attention to be intimately involved. But for those requests that don’t align they say NO. Everyone can’t do everything with perfection, so to be a great leader you should only invest your time and efforts in things which you are good at.

• Manage Your Time Efficiently

What’s the one thing no one can get more of “Time”. And you can’t fight it. You can’t control time. But you can manage it. That’s what the leaders do, they manage their time very well and focus on doing things which are their priority and ignore things which are distracting. They don’t try to do many things at a time which leads to multiple mistakes or imperfect work, rather they put their attention to every minute detail and do only a handful of things with utmost care and make them perfectly right which sets examples for others.

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Also published on Medium.