when you first learned to ride, what was the color of your bike?

RED?

Mine was. Ok, it wasn’t my bike. My friend Brian from down the street had a small red bike. Mine was a full-sized, used, hand-me-down bmx. I am not even sure how my dad could have found training wheels for it. The top tube (middle bar for those of you who don’t ride) was almost as far up from the ground as I was. However, the red bike Brian had fit just right. It was a perfect height from the ground for a 5 year old. It had training wheels too! But the greatest thing about his bike is that it gave me confidence to build on for riding my own bike. A few spins on that puppy taught me that I could possibly learn to ride without the training wheels. His dad set us free the very next week. Sure, he held the seat and started us down a small hill near his house to help us get going, but by the end of week two we were flying — skidding to stops AND MOST IMPORTANTLY I was getting the courage to step up to my full-sized bmx.

Leadership is like learning to ride a bike. You will start slow, it will come to you over time, once you learn you won’t forget AND you will gain confidence with each success to step up into bigger situations. Akin to bike riding, you can gain some confidence and some assistance by tapping the experience offered by others who have learned to ride and are out there ‘enjoying the sport’. Save yourself some early pain by dedicating yourself to learning about leadership and easing your way into it, possibly even getting a mentor.

That is what these blog articles will be for… to help you get going. I don’t have all the answers, so you won’t find me writing all the articles. My goal is to make the early experiences in leadership more beneficial. Odds are you will still have some crashes that will cause some pain – those are unavoidable, even with training wheels and assistance. But as you come to experience the thrill of leadership and glean from the insights of others, I am betting you will in turn become a leader who is reaching your potential.

I am looking forward to counting you in as a leader who is learning and making positive impacts in your world!

• keep reading here
• apply what you are learning
• read from other great sources
• start processing WHO will make for a great mentor