Words cause pain, they evoke anger, they make us hate, they lead us to war. But they also make us laugh, bring us joy, and satisfying our emotional hungers.

True leaders have so much power they are willing to give it away. Power is not a fixed, quantifiable sum; instead it is an unlimited abstraction which grows as it is shared.

current research is showing that true leaders enjoy using their power and are comfortable with it - so comfortable, in fact, that they don't mind sharing that control when it is appropriate to do so.

leaders seem to have a high tolerance for ambiguity. Recognizing that the brain does not work in a completely linear fashion, leaders demonstrate a comfort with the chaos of exploding ideas, many of them seemingly unrelated to the stimulus that caused them.

The team developer realizes that at times the leadership 'torch' must be passed on to others. This empowerment of others serves a dual purpose; it helps them hone their own team-building skills and it brings a fresh approach, perhaps even a special expertise, to the group's efforts.

Generally speaking, followers will not commit themselves for very long to a leader who is not also a pragmatist. As most of us have discovered, dreams are only powerful when we believe they can come true. Pipe dreams belong in the realm of fantasy; leaders' dreams belong in the realm of possibility.

There is no doubt about it: we are judged by our language as much as (perhaps more than) we are judged by our appearance, our choice of associates, our behavior. Language communicates so much more than ideas; it reveals our intelligence, our knowledge of a topic, our creativity, our ability to think, our self-confidence, et cetera.

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