If you consider underlying drivers that made you good at hands-on work, you will discover that those same drivers apply in your new leadership role. The passion for output will be just as applicable in helping you skill up in your new profession as it was with previous one.

The next step is to accept we need to learn new profession. Maybe at some stage you tried a few leadership courses and read some books but, they didn’t seem have too much impact. - The difference this time is going to be commitment.

Over next year, and it will take at least that long to make a good start, I am going to focus on what it takes for me to move from simply being a leader to showing leadership. Of endless resources available, I am going to endeavour to highlight just key ones that helped me make start in right direction.

This is not about becoming greatest leader known to man, this is about basics of a profession that I don’t remember choosing to be part of and that about which there is so much information I am struggling to know where to start.

Through building a community of people with same challenge, sharing our experiences, and learning together, we will not only regain satisfaction of our previous success, but revel in exhilaration of greater team’s performance.

Join with me and lets us share this experience together. I have a central site (http://2leadership.com) that I am starting to collect resources and will be posting experiences and reviews to. I have set out a very basic agenda, but this journey has a different destination for all of us, so expect lots of changes to path.

Please email me and comment at blog site (http://2leadership.blogspot.com). If you have a specific area or concern you want covered raise it now and let’s see if we can build it into curriculum.

Be brave, be famous.

Cheers Steve

Here are some practical suggestions when connecting:

* Don’t begin by asking for advice: Offer suggestions first; provide ideas before asking for any

* Get to know others before you ask them to know you

* Don’t ask others to be creative or perceptive for you; it’s too much work (Be intuitive, recognizing of course, that given chance, they’ll manage to complicate this thing as well)

* Be clear about your own ideas — be focused

*Get ready. The question, what are you looking to do… can befuddle unsuspecting person forcing a response that is weak, irrelevant or even fatal

* Move people towards embracing your ideas by listening carefully to theirs Look people in eye and reflect on what you are hearing * Don’t judge

* Ask yourself, Is message getting across; is content clear?

* Don’t use jargon. If someone understands it, they won’t be impressed; if they don’t, they’ll take out a book and read

* Take your ideas, and those you accumulate, to next contact, and so, and so on and so on

* Keep this maxim in mind at all times: You must first build a relationship before you can do business

Like most career professionals, you have a vision for moving onward and upward. Unfolding a career is like charting a new frontier—and sometimes equally as difficult to predict and control. What are your ideas? What do you want to do with them? How do you want to go about it … when?

A vision without a plan is a hallucination Before you spend hundreds of hours hunting for success, spend a few defining it. Consider some of history’s greatest athletes — gold medal Olympians. Early on in their lives they set goals. From then on they squashed everything in their lives that didn’t pertain to those goals, and went on to win gold!