2025 July 1 You can be the leader

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Being the Leader: How to Take Charge with Confidence

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about being a leader. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, send me a message.

Tonight we're going to be talking about how all of us—yes, even you and I—are capable of being leaders. Being the one in charge. The one who gets people together to make a change. That person who's always doing things. You probably know that leader sort of person—they walk into a room and immediately people are asking them what needs to be done, or what the plan is. And it seems they didn't do anything other than just walk into the room!

So how did they do that?

Tonight we're going to show you how you can be that person. You don't have to grow a foot taller. You don't have to get that deep commanding voice. And you don't have to be the loud person always shouting orders to other people.

What you do need to have is confidence in yourself and in your abilities—and that confidence comes from practice.

I've mentioned before that I'm a wilderness first responder, but much of my involvement in accident scenes is in the so-called front country—on regular roads and highways and parking lots and things like that. But even the biggest highway scene I was ever involved in—ending up with four cars involved on both sides of an open interstate highway at almost midnight, just over the crest of a hill with no police presence for nearly a half hour, where I was the only person in charge on the high-speed side of the road—one thing immediately became clear to me: I was those people's best chance to survive with no additional injuries and no deaths.

Once I defined that in my mind, I immediately took charge of the entire scene—including traffic management, emergency medical care, and everyone there—with no hesitation. People just looked to me for direction. That isn't boasting in any way; it's simply illustrating what happens when you gain confidence in yourself.

Because the rest of the story is that when I got out of my car to first approach the traffic scene, I was thinking, Am I crazy? I'd never actually really done this before for real—certainly not with multiple injuries in a dangerous situation. I had confidence in my training—thank you, SOLO Schools in Conway, New Hampshire, and thank you to my teacher, John Clancy. And those things made me confident when I approached those groups of people, announced my credentials, and took over control of the scene.

Nothing changed in my height or in my voice or any other physical characteristics. What did change was my confidence, which changed my attitude, which changed how those people perceived me.

Think about that person who walked into the room and magically took charge by doing nothing. Actually, what you may not have even noticed is that they probably did a few small things when they walked into that room. They were tiny things, but they were important.

They probably walked in confidently, making eye contact with everybody. When I say walked in confidently, I mean their shoulders weren't down and they weren't looking down—they stood up tall, however tall they were. They didn't have to be a tall person, but they filled their frame. They were smiling. They were accepting the gaze of everyone who looked at them.

Somebody looked at them, they looked back and said, Hey. Hey, hi Barney, how's it going?

A quick side story—Joseph McClendon, he's another life coach I follow and have worked with indirectly, has a cute story. It's about him teaching his young son—I think he was about eight or ten years old, a very young boy—how to walk into a room with confidence.

So, for fun, I used all the same techniques he described the next time I walked into the local health food store. Now, I live near a place that often has famous and semi-famous people. When I walked in using Joseph's techniques, a number of people were looking and watching me. I could see them talking to people near them, and I could hear names being mentioned—is that... is that somebody?—wondering if I was one of those people they knew.

The only thing that changed was how I held myself when I walked through that door. I was still dressed like a bum, as I often do, wearing trail running shoes—but I walked in like I owned the place. So everyone just assumed I did.

But back to our make-believe scenario—probably that confident person looked around the room and said something to let people know they were aware of what was going on. Like, Wow, looks good—I see you've been busy already. They may have asked a couple of simple questions, something like, Hi Mary, are you in charge of the tickets again this year, or is someone else doing that?

Not ordering anyone around, but establishing that they're willing and able to organize things.

Every single thing they did—and what I did in my initial accident scene—was small. But we were confident. We knew the outcome we wanted. We knew that we probably knew the best ways to achieve that outcome. And we were willing to adjust things as needed and to be open to other ideas.

In my case, there were two more cars involved in the accident scene still before the police arrived.

And I assigned someone to manage the other side of the road and instructed them to contact me if they needed to—and they were really grateful to have some guidance.

Maybe the woman in our make-believe scenario just found out some important item they were expecting didn't arrive, and she just adjusted the plans to work around it.

People tend to follow someone who is confident in their actions, especially when things don't go as planned.

You may be thinking that the examples I've given aren't really typical, but even in little situations, all the same things hold true. You're at a child's birthday party and it starts to rain suddenly. Uncle Bob says, Hey, I saw our neighbor had a pop-up canopy from yesterday's yard sale. George, can you go down and see if we can borrow it for the afternoon?

Uncle Bob just took charge—and now everyone's looking at him for further instructions. Should we start moving the cake and the presents? How big is the canopy? He's established his authority just simply by being confident.

So now you're getting the idea of how to kind of take charge. And how do you change that into being the leader of something like a movement or a local group to do something in the neighborhood?

Well, you probably already have all you need to do that.

One of the best ways to feel confident is to remember that you already have the tools you need to do what you need to do. The first part of that is knowing exactly what it is that you want to accomplish. And how do you do that? Of course—SMART goals.

Now you just have to explain these goals that you've already worked through carefully to the other people so they can understand what it is that you want to accomplish—and then give them some guidance as to what they could do to move toward those goals.

Of course, you may need some time to fully explain the goals—why they're beneficial and why others would want to be involved. That's all part of establishing your credibility, and that'll be helped by your justified self-confidence.

Obviously, there are many small steps that may have to be taken, but the big takeaway is this: if you prepare for a situation, and you're careful about how you plan what you want to do and how you're going to do it, and you have confidence in yourself because—well—you're prepared, then people will naturally be drawn to your leadership.

But—what if I'm one of those, Come on Jim, you know I do best as a number two—the assistant? That's the decision you have to make. But let me tell you something—because I do that a lot. Being an assistant is very important. But a good assistant is also able to lead when needed, if the big leader isn't available.

So if things go differently, and they're out on the other side of the building doing something, and someone says, What should we do next?—you have to have enough of a grasp of the whole situation that you can confidently say, These things need to be addressed right now.

So if you're really a good assistant, you're already leading. So you know you can lead. Now, you just have to decide that it's important enough to you to take that next step and become the real leader.

That's it for the evening. Your homework tonight is to think about some situation you were in where everyone was sort of looking around, milling around, looking for a leader, and not much progress was being made.

What could you have done to take charge and move things forward? Think about all the little things. Think about how you acted. Think about just asking questions. What would've happened if you'd said, Hey, we thought Janet was gonna be here—she couldn't make it. So, I have a couple ideas of what we should do. If you just said a simple phrase like that—not taking authority from anybody else or anything else, just saying, here's some things we can do—how do you think it would've changed how people perceived you?

Extra points if you make a plan for the next time a similar situation arises and how you could just present yourself as the person in charge. It could be small or it could be large things, but often just saying something like, I'll find out some information that people are looking for and I'll contact everybody, just a little teeny action like that is enough to establish yourself as the leader.

Write down what you did—or what you planned to do—and how it worked out.

So that's it for the evening. Thank you so very much for joining me. As always, please remember the many wars, political and social unrest throughout the world. There's a lot of stuff going on—everywhere, every which way.

The link to support the people in Ukraine is UKR7.com. There are links there to help other organizations who are working in Ukraine. And then the World Central Kitchen, WCK.org, is a fantastic group. They work in disaster areas. They do a lot of good things everywhere they're working.

But as we always talk about, there are a lot of local places also looking for help—and those are always good to do.

It could just be something small—just you helping out a neighbor. It could even be something really tiny that doesn't even involve your time or money. Maybe you just see somebody on the street looking a little down—or just somebody walking by—and you say, Hey, good morning. How you doing? Hey, that necklace looks really nice. Ooh, I like that jacket—is that new? Just something that lets them know you noticed them.

Because a lot of people, especially these days in the age of social media, tend to feel that nobody ever sees them. That they have to stand out in some way. And you're just saying, Hey, you stood out enough for me to say good morning to you and to notice something about you. I really liked those running shoes—something I was thinking about getting. Just something to say you're worth noticing as a human being.

So that's it. Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others,  to look outside yourself and into the rest of the world. So if you can and you're able, please check out UKR7.com, WCK.org, or any local organizations. Just be nice to the people around you.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. Please subscribe, hit that like button. If not, drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear.

Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.