Helping Student learn how to Lead and Leverage

I enjoy mentoring teenagers.  I like helping them make a difference in their life as well as helping them think forward of what trajectory their life is going.  
But it does have its challenges.  One of those challenges I've often come across is how to encourage students to lead.

Often students believe that to be leader you have to be;

- LOUD

- Willing to talk in front of people

- Popular

- Shop at all the right stores to look the part of "cool"

For so many students the campus they walk and the culture they live in there is a lot of legitimacy to their feelings of what makes up a leader.  They quickly develop their own stereotype and if they don't fit the mold they feel they are excluded.

Then there are some students who feel they are a leader but really they just boss people around.  They have a dictatorship view of what leadership is about and they do use their loud or manipulative personality to force upon others what often they'd never be willing to do.

Helping students learn how to lead & leverage opportunities in life is something I've grown to enjoy. I enjoy helping them look at their own life and circumstances with a different perspective. Often students need to be reminded of the power of their own wiring and giftings.  

Each student has gifts, talents & experiences that has already shaped them to have influence in their world.  They need to be encouraged & shown how and where they are gifted.  Breathing life into someone nourishes them feel like they have what it takes to do something with their own life with a sense of empowerment and that their life can matter.

Students need opportunities to lead and test out their leadership.  If you are an adult that oversees something you have the power to let a student be influenced by some leadership opportunities.  That also means you are going to have some areas that don't look perfect with their young leadership and it probably won't look as put together and might even could end in a train wreck.  But you have the ability to help shape and develop a young leader in a significant way.

So if you are going to let students leaders here are 5 foundational tips you'll need.

• Their probably going to be a bit nervous & a bit naive.  So encourage, encourage & encourage them.
• Starting off help them fail safely.  Yep, "fail" safely.  Give them tasks early on in leadership that they'll probably fail at the first time around but the failure won't be so grievous that they are crushed by the shortcoming.
• When they mess up be willing to show, explain & communicate clearly how & why they messed up from your perspective.
• Help them learn the art of evaluation.  Have them evaluate themselves, the task & even how they managed the task.  Help them see the great & the no so great moments around them.
• Remind yourself they are human & taking a risk.  So don't crush or squash them, but do what you can to help them grow.

If you want to dialogue more about this leave me a comment and we'll connect up.