An Introduction to
Individual and Shared Leadership
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Historical Leaders
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Boot Camp Survival Tools for Dealing with Change
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Now, take a few minutes to put all of these ideas into perspective for yourself. As you work through each practice exercise, remember to print a copy of your work for your TRY-IT Personal Leadership Portfolio.

Have fun!

Identify a leader whom you admire and respect. It may a public figure in the national or state news, a person at your school or in your community or a member of your family. Using the outline below, think about how the leader you have identified meets your definition of a leader, as well as the five leadership challenges.

Stop and think about yourself as a leader. Remember: We are all leaders; we just have different current strengths and weaknesses that we can work on to improve as leaders. Think about how you compare to your definition of a leader, and think about yourself in terms of the five leadership challenges we’ve discussed.

After thinking about these ideas as they relate to you currently, use old magazines to cut out words and pictures or images that communicate the strengths and weaknesses you’ve identified in yourself. Using glue or tape, attach your cut-out leadership words, pictures, and images to stiff construction paper cut into various shapes and sizes. Attach a 12-inch piece of string to each individual shape. Finally, using drinking straws as cross beams to support them, arrange your leadership words, pictures, and images in a three-dimensional mobile that can hang in your room. The biggest challenge will be to arrange the individual words, pictures, and images so they are balanced and your mobile hangs freely, swaying in the breeze.

Here are a couple of photos of two Personal Leadership Mobiles constructed by members of the North Carolina State University State 4-H Staff. Notice how the straws and dowels support the individual images mounted on construction paper using glue and tape.

Before you move on in this module, go to your Reflection Journal, enter today’s date, and jot down your immediate thoughts about how your Personal Leadership Mobile is like real life in “balancing” different aspects of being a leader.

Look at various business and commercial advertisements in your local newspaper. Notice how they promote positive aspects of the products they endorse and how they point out the ways the product can help people or make their lives better, nicer, or easier.

Now, using the advertising space in the Leadership Times, design and create your own newspaper advertisement that “sells” the leadership strengths you have to offer others. Be certain to connect your advertisement to your definition of leadership, as well as tell how you can help meet the five challenges of leadership we have discussed. Have fun!