Responsibility

What Actions Can Turn An Effective Leadership Into A Tyranny

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The thesis of leadership has been a matter of scholar and philosophical interest since the time of Socrates and Plato. For many years people speak, discuss, read and think about the qualities of leaders and their journey in their life. From Alexander the Great to Napoleon Bonaparte and Hitler to Donald Trump, each is a leader in their own rights. However, there is a thin line of difference between a leader and a tyrant. In “The Republic,” Plato professed that desire for freedom often leads to tyranny, and strong leaders eventually turn into demagogic autocrats. Some of the strongest and charismatic leaders transformed themselves into a dictator over time. Robert Mugabe, the former President of Zimbabwe, is the perfect example of a leader-turned-tyrant. To quote Joseph Campbell, “The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow unless he crucifies himself today.” There have been already written a lot of informative essays on the topic of leadership, which describe various theories about the qualities of a good leader, an interesting resource for this is https://phdessay.com/free-essays-on/leadership/, and it is worth noting that no matter how the world around us changes, the portrait of a true leader unaltered for centuries. 

What makes an effective leader?

Leadership is more than just giving orders and getting things done through subordination. It is more about influencing their behavior and guiding their actions to achieve the goals of the organization. Leadership is fundamentally different from management. That’s why it is said that “all leaders can be managers, but not all managers can be leaders.” Here are some of the qualities of an effective leader: 

1. Leading By Example

Good leaders set the bar high for the team by setting even higher standards of performance for oneself. Such leaders can naturally influence their followers with their confidence and charisma.

2. Decision making

Influential leaders are well-informed and aware of their environment. The ability to make the right decisions in difficult situations and the guts to take responsibility for the consequences sets them apart. 

3. Helping others grow

Good leaders focus on team building and helping others grow. Instead of merely giving orders, they motivate and inspire followers to achieve their full potential.

4. Visionary and Risk-Taking

Prominent leaders never lose sight of their goals, even in the face of serious obstacles and challenges. They can adapt to changes and take risks with the bigger picture in mind. 

Effective Leadership

How does leadership turn into a tyranny?

To ensure better team performance, leadership should focus on helping, mentoring, and rewarding the employees. However, the person leading the group can quickly descend from leadership to a banal tyranny of orders, coercion, and punishment, striving to maximize the effectiveness of work in the simplest way possible.

1. Desire to control

Leadership is all about power. Sooner or later, the desire to concentrate power to oneself and control the subordinates can transform the leadership into tyranny. 

2. Divide and Rule

This develops from the desire to control. People are much easier to control when they are individuals rather than a group. It can be realized when informal channels of communication are restricted in the organization.

3. Desire to be perfect

When the leaders are obsessed with perfection, they demand utmost obedience from their subordinates. Before they know it, once a liberal working place turns into a concentration camp. It will negatively affect the efficiency of the team.

Leadership is all about power and influence, and when there is power, as Lord Acton put it precisely: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Empathizing with your employees can help to understand the situation correctly. Sometimes, tyrant leadership may be the need of time, but we have to distinguish between professional and unprofessional behavior of the leader. Good leaders must be kind, reasonable, and flexible, but they can sometimes be harsh and formidable. The key is to move the team in the right direction, neither too violently nor too indifferently. Effective leadership is the balance between these two extremes.

Positive Words Research – What Actions Can Turn An Effective Leadership Into A Tyranny?

Challenges as a Social Worker and How to Overcome Them

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The fundamentals of social work revolve around helping people. Social workers have the taxing responsibility of supporting troubled individuals to cope with their struggles. They are involved in scenarios where individuals face behavioral problems, marital troubles, substance abuse, domestic violence, etc. A social worker aims to bring a positive change in society by helping individuals become better people.

But one element that gets often forgotten about social work is the challenges encountered while fulfilling this heavy responsibility. Moreover, we usually overlook the consequences of the social worker of shouldering people’s problems day in and day out. Focusing on one issue while neglecting the other creates an imbalance in the society. That is why we felt the need to discuss the challenges a social worker has to face in their profession and talk about how we can overcome these challenges.

Awareness

The most significant challenge in the way of social work is the lack of awareness amongst the masses. Even today, in the 21st century, where we expect many things to have evolved and cultural norms challenged, seeking personal help from professionals is stigmatized. Individuals dread going to mental health counselors fear that people will consider them weak-willed or incapable of handling their problems. 

Such people might also fear losing jobs or to tarnish their chances of having a prospering career if their counseling sessions become public news. Culturally, seeking marital or domestic violence counseling is often considered taboo. Family members may feel an aversion to treatment options such as medication, which becomes a further hurdle in handling victims effectively.

Therefore, the first step towards ensuring a better society is to eradicate this stigma from people’s minds. Only when this negative belief gets neutralized will people start feeling comfortable and confident in seeking help from professionals. As a social worker, you can put in efforts to eliminate this anti-counseling culture by creating awareness among the masses. You can initiate campaigns, collaborate with known public figures, or affiliate yourself with some government body and take support in bringing a positive change. You can also interact with your social work fellows and initiate movements to create awareness in the general public. For example, if you have completed a masters in social work online, you will surely have a circle of mentors and individuals who can help you create a positive perception of your work. 

Compassion Fatigue

Being a mental health counselor or dealing with individuals who have PTSD may sound like an easy thing to do. However, it is quite the contrary. Managing the troubled emotions of other people round-the-clock is an exhausting task. Being a social worker requires empathy. It demands of you to feel the pain of the people who are seeking your help. Once you put yourself in their shoes, only then can you reach out and help them fight their evils. But this process of empathy, reaching out, and resolving may sometimes result in compassion fatigue.

Handling extremely traumatic emotional scenarios day-and-night may take a toll on your mental health as well. You may feel drained out and exhausted after a period of prolonged work. Apart from mental health, your physical state may also be affected by challenging situations. Many social workers are known to deal with stress headaches and pains, which are direct consequences of the kind of work they do. 

It brings us to the significance of work and personal life balance. Even though this is an essential thing for any professional, social workers should be extra conscious about ensuring they are giving enough time to themselves as well. A social worker needs to make sure that they have devised adequate strategies for distressing and unwinding because this will play a critical role in maintaining good personal health.

A 24-hour Job

If you ask a mental health counselor who deals with a patient tackling anxiety and self-harm, they will tell you that their duty is 24-hour. If your patient calls you up and tells you that they feel suicidal, you do not tell them that it is sleep time and hang up. The criticality of the job is such that it requires you to be on your toes day-and-night. You will have to rush if your patient has an emergency in the middle of the night, and you cannot complain about it. That is what a social worker’s job entails.

However, such a routine obliges you to manage time effectively. It would help if you spent the breaks you get in between your works to practice distressing. Also, you should ensure that your personal life and health does not take impact because of such a routine. They say you cannot pour from an empty cup, which means self-care should always be a priority. To make sure you give your best at work, you need to maintain a proper balance between work and life.

Affordability

Often, people want to take up a service but cannot because they cannot afford it. It might happen with seeking counseling as well since it is a relatively expensive facility. One challenge that you may encounter as a social worker would be to take advice readily available to all. Accessibility is a significant hindrance to an evolving society. Additionally, low-income households tend to have higher counseling needs due to more problems. That is because poverty is a significant cause of many other mental and physical difficulties. 

However, everything has a solution. You can try and affiliate yourself with government bodies and initiate positive movements on a national level. It needs to be understood on a governmental level that the mental and emotional health of individuals is as essential as their physical well-being. With the state’s help, you can try and make the availability of counseling easier for all.

Conclusion

Social work is slightly diverse from common professions. It involves dealing with people and their emotions, pain, and struggles. And requires more than just knowledge and skill. It entails being empathetic and having the ability to understand an individual’s trauma. This diversity puts some extra burden on the shoulders of a social worker. It is a continuous and relentless job which may not always yield monetary benefits. On the contrary, it also puts various hurdles and challenges in the social worker’s life, such as the ones mentioned above. However, all you have to do as a social worker is keep a pure intention, do your best, and keep self-care always a priority despite all the obstacles and barriers.

Positive Words Research – Challenges as a Social Worker and How to Overcome Them

Social Worker

Is Inner Peace So Difficult to Achieve: Best 7 Ideas and Tips

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You’ve probably come across a couple of people in your life that seem to have this implacable calm to them. They maintain a healthy distance from whatever is negative, while at the same time accepting themselves, other people and whatever is going on in their lives. How do they do it? Although a beautiful feeling, that inner peace you can sense in them is more than just an abstract concept. It’s a state of being that you reach by working on several little, but important aspects of your life. Let me show you what these are:

1. Clear Up That Waiting List

Whenever we set ourselves tasks that we don’t eventually finish, we add them instead to this invisible, but heavy-weighing waiting list of things-yet-to-be-done. If you are unable to finish certain things, make sure you completely remove them from your life unless you want that emotional burden to get larger and larger. It may seem overwhelming at first, but just start with the smaller tasks and you’ll soon get the ball rolling.

2. Choose to Be Responsible In Your Relationships

Unfortunately, responsibility in regards to other people doesn’t come easy to us nowadays. We tend to think that it’s others making us behave in a certain way and that we cannot always be held accountable for our reactions. This couldn’t be further from the truth – our behavior is up to us entirely. However if at times you feel anger or frustration just beneath the surface, you should just walk away from the situation for a while and come back with a fresher perspective.

3. Slow Down and Process

Adrenaline is key in today’s society and we sometimes can’t help ourselves but get another shot of it to get us through the day. That means we always tend to run on high-energy, moving from one goal to another, even at the expense of our well-being or relationships. Try to slow down and find a different, more relaxed pace in your life. I promise you you’ll lose absolutely nothing. Instead, you will achieve the inner peace you covet so much and simply be happy.

4. Ask Questions Whenever You’re Unsure

Lots of anxiety typically builds up around uncertainty. This is why it’s best to just dive right into fuzzy situations and ask the questions you need to get clarity in your life. This will not only help you but will help other people as well to get a better feeling of what’s expected of them or what they can receive from you. 

5. Clean Your Workspace, Clean Your Mind

If you spend your day in a cluttered environment, you’ll find that your brain also gets foggy pretty quickly. We need space and cleanliness to function properly, so take the time to declutter your workspace or living room. You’ll become more relaxed, more mindful and more productive. Soon enough, you’ll want to have this positive emotion in other aspects of your life as well, so start simplifying and organizing your life.

6. Break Down Your Issues

Life is a beautiful, complex journey that’s often filled with challenges that can feel insurmountable. Whenever you are up against such an issue try to breathe in and zoom out. Will you still feel its impact in five years’ time? Are there people out there that are facing challenges greater than yours? How can I tackle the issue step by step? What’s the first thing I can do about it? What’s the worst thing that could happen if I don’t get the desired effect? By asking these questions, you can rid yourself of anxiety and get a clearer picture of what can be done.

7. Live and Let Be

This is one of the most powerful ways to achieve inner peace and happiness. Buddhists discovered a long time ago that acceptance represents the key to a positive mind and a more fulfilling life. Stop ruminating on what someone did, said or on something that happened to you. Stop feeding that endless loop, accept everything that’s going on and start creating new emotions instead. Allow yourself the opportunity to be more present in your life and more appreciative of it.

If your life so far has been an endless race and you don’t seem to catch a break, this is a clear indicator you need to find a new way of being. Take some time to introspect and ask yourself what’s an ideal version of yourself and what it would take for you to become that person. In the end, nothing else matters but for us to be in perfect alignment with what we need and want from life, while also respecting what our resources and natural gifts are.

About the Author

‘Claudia Spataru is a free spirit located in Bucharest, Romania and always in search of answers to life’s greatest questions. She loves to understand how people work, what makes them tick and find ways to help them reach higher grounds. She adores the sea, traveling and laughing.’

Brighten your day with more than 1400 nice words from our list of positive words.

Is Inner Peace So Difficult to Achieve

Write Down Your Problems: Why it Helps and How To Benefit

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We all have emotional problems, and sometimes – if not even most of the times – we don’t really know how to handle all those complicated feelings. Our brains and thoughts are spinning very rapidly. Therefore, we can’t properly focus on our main problems so we are jumping from an idea to another.

Writing down your problems comes really helpful on this matter. You can’t write as fast as you think. Therefore, by writing, you are forced to focus on a specific problem before you jump to the next. In fact, this is a very good way to understand your problems, which, of course, leads to solving them.

Furthermore, in order to be more specific, there are several reasons for which writing down your problems helps. In today’s post, we’re going to discuss the most important benefits you’ll get from writing down your problems. Pay attention!

1.  Stress Release

When we say problems, we say stress.  No matter how hard you try to delay your issues or pretend that they’re not there, the stress won’t leave until you deal with them. Writing comes in really handy if you want to cut all that stress off.

Let’s say you want to make the perfect gift for someone special. First, you think that you will eventually figure something out. But as the event gets closer, your wish becomes stressful. While you are running out of time, you might consider buying something basic and stress more because she or he might not really like it.

Why do this when you can write down everything you know about that person and make a personalized present with which you can’t go wrong? And with this, you’re freeing your mind from all that unnecessary stress.

But that was just an example. It is true though that stress is gone whenever you write down your problems. It helps you understand the problem and lets you see what you have to do. So, you will see no more reasons to stress out.

2.  Focus

It is normal not to know where your starting point is considering that you have too many problems on your mind. Writing down these problems is truly useful. It’s just like writing a to-do list, but with issues which you’ll have to deal with. By the means of writing, you can put your mind in order and focus on each problem in particular.

Of course, you can do it in your mind too. However, thinking is a fast process in which your mind can fly away. I mean, how many times you started thinking about something and ended up thinking about a completely different thing? I know, most of the times. That’s why writing is the best. It keeps you focused on the matter.  Next time when you know you have a lot of things to deal with, try writing them down and see for yourself how much it helps to focus on one problem at a time.

3.  Connect the Dots

Throughout your life, you’ll be facing unexpected issues and challenges that you’ll barely understand where they’re coming from. You keep your mind busy by trying to understand. But have you ever tried to write down what happened? Put the events head to head? That’s what I thought, no. Why? Because you don’t see how this can help.

Well, while you are thinking, you are missing lot of important details. In the process of writing, as you see what happened trough words, some things may pop up in your mind. These details help you connect the events and lead you to a better understanding of what you are dealing with.

4.   Calm Down

Problems tend to make us nervous, angry, or sad. We keep all those feelings to ourselves. Nevertheless, writing down your feelings can release all that negativity and calm you down. Not only that you can exteriorize yourself in this way, but you can also write slowly, with much calm, letting your brain enter a relaxed state.

This rhythm has the same effect as the beats of the heart. It keeps you calm or it can make you go crazy. No one likes being angry for a long time. Angriness is definitely a negative emotion that’s rarely going to benefit your life. While you’re writing down your thoughts with calm and in silence, the feelings of angriness will suddenly lose power and you’ll start feeling neutral again.

5.  Discover Your Next Goals

Think of your brain as a very complex hard drive where you keep all the memories, emotions, ideas, and problems too. Writing down helps you understand your issues, and of course, it eventually aids you in solving them. When we’re out of stress and we’re in control of our lives, there will be less internal chaos.

When you have a lot of “free space” in your mind, you’ll always feel the need to fill it with more important matters. This offers you the perfect opportunity to have a goal-setting session and think of what you want to do next.

Think about your most important goals in the current moment. Brainstorm, Note down. Start dreaming like kids do before Santa arrives. Maintain a relaxed state of mind and finish your goal setting. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be better organized and better motivated to make progress!

6.  Improves Your Writing Skills

While you write down, you’re obviously training a skill. In fact, you’re training one of the most important skills that people can possess right now: writing skills. One of the easiest and the most pleasant way of regularly training your writing skills is by keeping a journal. People that journal is usually better writers, as they keep practicing each and every day.

Keeping a journal have its perks. For example, your memories are preserved and they’ll hardly go away. After all, your life’s happenings are in that journal, always at your disposal. In a short time, you will realize how your writing skills would have never been so developed without your consistent commitment to journaling.

7.  Write down Your Ideas on The Paper

Most of the times, when in your mind comes up brilliant ideas, you forget about them as you never store them somewhere. This is a mistake. And as with all mistakes, it would be pay off really bad if we’d repeat it more than once.

Therefore, you’d better be prepared all the time, because good ideas should never be left in the wind. If you already have a journal, keep it close to you. If you don’t, you should get one. I mean, who knows where these ideas might lead you in the future?

Conclusion

Experiencing an internal chaos where thoughts come and go without control becomes a normal aspect of our contemporary society. Nevertheless, what’s truly important is that you assume responsibility for these thoughts and take action towards sorting them and paying attention to the most relevant.

That’s why writing down your problems is so handy on this matter. Not only that it helps you relieve stress, but it also forces you to visualize the roots of your problem in a more rational way so you will know where to look in order to make things better. And because writing down a few words on a paper is not a hard thing to do, every one of us should be doing it!

Robert Morris

Author’s Bio

Robert Morris is a marketing expert and a freelance writer. Currently, he is working as an editor for the best resume writing service.

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