Seven Ways to Be Grateful Like a Leader
The opportunity and ability to contribute is the great privilege of leadership. Be grateful every time you open your hand and heart, even if results fall short.
Generosity expands life.
Gratitude and position:
Authority, respect, and position enhance the power of gratitude.
The more highly regarded you are, the more powerful your gratitude. The less need you have, the more powerful your thanks.
Servant leaders aren’t mealy-mouthed losers. They realize their power to make a difference and use it to benefit others.
Frailty:
Frailty produces gratitude; superiority drains it.
Those who feel better-than don’t feel thankful.
The less you need to say thanks, the more you should, and the more it’s appreciated by others.
7 ways to be grateful like a leader:
- Express happiness for the growth, progress, and success of others. Real leaders love the success of others.
- Look through the eyes of others and honoring what you see.
- Enjoy helping.
- See strength in others.
- Say thank you and walking away without making demands.
- Give more than you receive. Worry more about appreciating others and less about being appreciated.
- Delight in serving with others.
Servant leaders feel grateful for the opportunity to serve.
How can you be grateful like a leader?
Can’t say this enough: “Servant leaders feel grateful for the opportunity to serve.” Business success is predicated on the Servant Mentality. The best business mindset!
Thanks Chuck. I agree! Serving is the heart of leadership.
Be supportive and thank people for their presence in my life…seeing things clearly in perspective. Thanks..! It’s so nice reading these tips before I embark on a new career journey.
Thanks Dennis. You have my best wishes as you embark on this new phase of the journey.
Let it be good…!
Dan, you are truly grateful for something these days. Your continued focus on thankfulness, gratefulness and grateful generosity is evidence you practice what you preach. And KaPow! You’ve done a great job of it!
We may or may not have a history of gratitude. We each have created our history, or we can create it starting now. It is said a people’s “memory” is history. And as a man without a “memory”–so too a “people” without a history cannot grow wiser, better.
The late Pope John Paul II spoke to history and gratitude: “The tragedy of human existence isn’t we are nasty by nature, rather we allow ingratitude to our fellow man to power and shape our history. History keeps secrets longer than most of us. Yet one secret is revealed to us in the greatest confidence: Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. Why fight to win, when we can be grateful and not lose?”
Thanks Books. I find your reference to Pope John Paul II profound and helpful. Best
” Real leaders love the success of others.” Dan, every leader needs to have that statement on their wall and tattooed on his or her brain. When a team member fails, a leader also fails and “real leaders” own that. Insecure leaders blame the team member.
As a former psychotherapist and now an executive coach and life coach, my philosophy (when a client fails to reach their objectives from the coaching or when therapy client “failed”) is: I failed to reach that person, connect with them or help them unleash their own power to grow and transform. If I blame the client, I learn nothing and I fail to grow to help the next person.
Okay, I left something out. Clients do have to own their own behavior and performance and some people just aren’t ready to be helped. But I always tell myself, “If I keep learning and developing my skills, perhaps I can help the next person who is just as challenging as the one I just failed with.” It’s not about self-criticism in a negative sense,, it’s about a vision for greater effectiveness moving forward.
We tend to forget that gratitude is a very powerful form of recognition that touches one of our most basic needs – that of affirmation. We are probably even more forgetful that the power of gratitude extends across virtually every level of relationship – with very positive effects that work in both directions: http://wp.me/p2k449-ai. And it’s so simple and easy.
Sorry, that should be: http://wp.me/p2k440-ai.
Dear Leadership Freak, my rock star leadership colleague & friend Vicki Flaherty sent me over, and I’m sure glad she did. 🙂 What I find fascinating is that the most well-meaning, nice leaders repeatedly overlook the opportunity or even the need to say thank you. Maybe it’s a big company thing…. no culture of gratitude, but even so, as an individual leader, one should know the power of thank you. No?
Ah this is great: “Say thank you and walking away without making demands.”
To do otherwise is to undermine the “thank you.”