How great leaders can inspire the leader in you

I love reading inspirational quotes on President’s Day because they give us insight into how great leaders think and act. I’ve spent my adult life in leadership roles, so I know how invigorating and exhausting it can be at the same time. It’s hard to imagine the level of responsibility the President of the United States carries each day.

 

Let’s take a peek into some of the best bits of insight from people who held one of the hardest jobs in the world:

 

“Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.”–Franklin D Roosevelt

“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger–but recognize the opportunity.”–John F Kennedy  

“The test of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.”–James Buchanan

“Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.”–Herbert Hoover 

“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”–Thomas Jefferson

“It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn’t.”–Martin Van Buren

“I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.”–Woodrow Wilson

“Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.”–Andrew Jackson

“Unswerving loyalty to duty, constant devotion to truth, and a clear conscience will overcome every discouragement and surely lead the way to usefulness and high achievement.”–Grover Cleveland

“If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.”–Calvin Coolidge

“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”–Lyndon B. Johnson

“An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable victory.”–Millard Fillmore

“The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.”–James Madison 

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”–Barack Obama

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”–John Quincy Adams

I find these quotes so motivating because they remind me how powerful our choices are. Every moment, we decide again who we want to be. We continue to learn, love and grow as people. The audiobook by Dr Joe Dispenza, The Reinvention of Self, is an excellent tool to help us re-examine ourselves and how we relate to others – allowing us to become better leaders.