8 Rare Signs A Person Is A Leader From The Start, According To Psychology
The most effective leaders share these enviable behaviors.
Julius Espiritu, João Paulo de Souza Oliveira | Unsplash Ever since I was a wee boy with milk teeth, I’ve felt the pressure of stepping outside the boundaries of socially acceptable. The trouble with this is if you never step outside, you’ll be just like everyone else. That may be nice for some, but no one made any significant impact or experienced what life was like as their person when they played it safe.
I can confidently say that whenever I’ve allowed rebel energy to rise within me, I always feel more alive. I firmly believe that if you spend your days conforming, avoiding conflict, and never taking any risks, you’re living a lie. And living out of integrity makes us depressed.
Here are 8 rare signs a person is a leader from the start, according to psychology:
1. They own their uniqueness
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In case you haven’t noticed, the world has gradually been training us to believe that our differences are to be denied and squashed. Refuse to buy into this nonsense. Your true confidence will appear when you give yourself a break and embrace what makes you a weird little stand-out freak.
I’m sensitive as all heck and can barely spend 12 minutes in a crowd. But this makes me special in other ways. I used to hate being called ‘weird’ at school. Now I worry when I’m not.
In a 2020 study published by Current Psychology, a personal sense of uniqueness was positively associated with authentic living and positively related to happiness. They found the relationship between a personal sense of uniqueness and happiness mediated by self-alienation—a core dimension of authenticity. They found a negative correlation between happiness and self-alienation but a positive correlation between happiness and authentic living.
2. They attract a community around them
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There’s something magical that happens when you volunteer to take the lead. You begin to forget your insecurities and see yourself less as a follower or victim.
Adopting a leadership role, whether leading a book group, starting a podcast, running a retreat, or mentoring others, is an empowering and responsibility-taking act.
Whether you choose leadership or rebellion, both will ultimately attract a community around you. Be the leader when most people are followers.
Research studies consistently indicate that while some innate traits might play a role, becoming a leader is mainly about developing critical skills like effective communication, empathy, adaptability, and a strong work ethic, which can be cultivated through experience, learning, and intentional practice. Results from a 2017 study published by the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education highlighted the importance of actively seeking feedback and fostering a supportive environment to enhance leadership development.
3. They are adept at self-expression
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I am fortunate to have my writing, which allows me to express myself fully, as a major component of my work too. My business is driven by my writing. It’s not always infused with high emotions and explorations of color and detail, but the thread is there.
Writing daily has made me more confident and happier because I get to fully be myself through these outlets. And the great thing about full self-expression? It attracts your real fans.
4. They challenge their inner crtic
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No matter how ‘together’ we seem to ourselves and others, we all have that inner voice that shows up to varying degrees. It’s there to keep us safe. We don’t want to be injured or abandoned.
So, the inner critic has developed as our brains have developed, and we can sometimes be overwhelmed by such a voice. The low-energy conformist listens closely to what it has to say and abides by its instructions.
The energized rebel acknowledges it when needed (like avoiding stepping off that cliff) but generally questions it. So you want to start that new project. Wait, you could fail in public? You might lose friends? You might offend some people? What if that didn’t matter as much as you thought? Question, challenge, question. That inner critic is rarely right.
A 2020 study published by Frontiers in Psychology examined the influence of a mindful, loving-kindness compassion program consisting of university students with high levels of self-criticism. The study found that those who completed the program had lower levels of self-criticism and reported less psychological distress when compared to a control group. Results suggest that mindfulness practice can help reduce self-critical thoughts and make one feel more at ease.
5. They seek unconventional role models
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While everyone else is fawning at the same celebrities who spout empty nonsense, you’re digging deeper underground. Who are those people who are quietly contributing in ways that may be underappreciated? And how can you borrow from them?
Mine continually change because when a role model goes mainstream, I drop them and turn to someone still unaffected by the perils of fame. List those legends out. What makes their unusual differences valuable to you?
There’s no shame in emulating these people. It’s the substream likely to contain the gems because anything that the masses adore is likely composed of at least 90% trash.
6. They question everything
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I’ve lost count of all the things I grew up believing were valid, worthy, and essential that turned out to be utter bull excrement. Just because someone wears a uniform and tells us what to do on the news has no bearing on whether what they say is true.
The fool starts nodding before the expert has even finished their sentence. Not you. The art of asking the right questions appropriately is not innate. Bloom’s taxonomy of learning categorizes cognitive levels into several domains.
Questions eliciting responses in the knowledge, comprehension, and application domains are frequently considered lower order. In contrast, questions in the analysis, synthesis, and evaluation domains are considered higher-order questions. Higher-order questions elicit more profound and critical thinking; therefore, according to a 2013 study published by the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, teachers are encouraged to ask questions in these domains.
7. They cultivate self-trust
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Without realizing it, most of us go through our whole lives acting vicariously through other people. We rarely make decisions based on what we want because we don’t trust ourselves deep down. We try to impress others and do things according to what we think would make others happy.
If you want to live true to yourself, you must develop self-trust. How? Listen less to your insecure worries and nurture your connection with inner intelligence. It’s there when you let your mind still for a moment. Rebels change the world because they trust their intuition.
Self-trust is the foundation of confidence—the belief in your ability to navigate life's challenges, make decisions, and achieve your goals. Foundational research published by the American Psychological Association on self-efficacy emphasizes the importance of self-belief in determining motivation, performance, and resilience. Individuals who trust themselves are likelier to take risks, persist in the face of setbacks, and ultimately succeed in their endeavors.
8. They actively make mistakes
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I don’t mean being reckless. I’m talking about going against the grain of what 97% of people are doing, which, in your case, is to allow mistakes to happen.
You will not see success if you don’t make some mistakes. See mistakes as currency for the results you want.
You also want to upgrade your mistakes. If you’re making the same pathetic mistakes as every other Tom, Nancy, and Jane, you’ll get what they have. Which isn’t a whole lot.
Don’t be that guy who blocks his inner rebel from finding the escape hatch. Nurture that part of you, and you will live a life of riches.
Making errors is uncomfortable, even though we frequently make them. Especially in educational settings, educators may be reluctant to ask students to guess before learning the correct information, fearing that their incorrect guesses will be confused with true items and harm future learning.
Results from a 2022 study showed that retrieval and the presentation of corrective feedback were advantageous tools for learning, even when retrieval was unsuccessful. Compared to restudy, retrieval promoted learning by perpetuating correct responses and increasing the correction of pragmatic inference errors. In the absence of corrective feedback, retrieval led to a higher proportion of false memories than restudying.
Alex Mathers is a writer and coach who helps you build a money-making personal brand with your knowledge and skills while staying mentally resilient.