Leadership Scholarship Essay

Prompt:

An essay in which you address the following:

• a personal leadership statement;
• what you have learned about yourself and others from your leadership experiences;
• specific leadership skills and behaviors that you would like to develop while a student at Hendrix; and
• goals to be achieved while using your leadership talent as a Hendrix student

Boring, right?

Essay:

Leadership is perhaps best described as the ability to inspire others to work toward a common goal.

Inspiration moves.

That is why leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., were able to achieve goals of such great magnitude. He inspired many by setting an example and by teaching.

I aspire to lead by example.

Performing to the best of your ability not only brings rise to a plethora of possibilities for yourself, but also shows others that they themselves can accomplish more than they already have. In newspaper, this was a crucial aspect. Oftentimes staff members would write until all possible constructs of words seemed to have been used. Writer's block is a killer, especially when you're on deadline. For the editors, including myself, it was key that no matter how much we fantasized about throwing our keyboard to the ground, we pushed through our blocks and kept writing. If we were to succumb to the block, our staff members may believe that there truly was no way around it, and the printers would run without any copy. Our paper would be nothing but grey blocks. The blocks would win.

Through this, and experiences similar to it, I learned a very simple lesson. I can achieve much more than I think I can. The realm of possibility extends beyond the borders that I set for myself. You just have to push those borders.

I aspire to lead by teaching.

During my last stage managing gig, I had an assistant who was going to take over the role of stage manager during the coming years as I was graduating that year. The basics were easy to teach–this is how you take blocking notes, this is what you need to check before every performance, this is what you need to have handy at all times–but the biggest lesson was one I was just beginning to grasp myself: almost everything "impossible" only seems that way. During one performance of Bye Bye Birdie, an entire set piece collapsed in the middle of a scene change. A pause. An expletive. A moment when the show doesn't seem like it can continue. But you shove the actor onstage, pick up the broken pieces, and keep going. That was the lesson my trainee received that evening.

I aspire to lead by inspiration.

The most memorable leadership experience I have, however, is one in which I led my friend out of a very dark place. A few years after the fact, a dear friend of mine told me that one of the only reasons she had not ended her life was me. I asked her why, to which she replied that I inspired her, since I had, at one point, also been enveloped in the lonely black of depression, but I set the example that is was possible to push through it, and that I had taught her that no matter how impossible things seemed, the ability to keep going was always there.

I aspire to lead by lifestyle.

Leadership does not simply come with a title or position of power. Perhaps one of the most interesting things about leading is that you can be a leader without even realizing it.

I hope that the skills in leadership that I already possess and that I strive to posses will inspire others at Hendrix and beyond to lead by lifestyle as well. The common goal? A world without confines, without boundaries. A chain reaction of thought, choice, and action that defies the dark that seemingly blankets this earth.

Less boring, in my opinion. ;)