Five Tricks to Becoming a Better Leader

Great leadership isn’t about authority—it’s about influence, inspiration, and impact. Transformational leaders empower others, encourage growth, and create environments where people feel motivated to do their best work. They value their followers and inspire them to perform beyond expectations. So how can you embrace these qualities and become a stronger, more effective leader? Here are five proven strategies to get started.

1. Understand Your Leadership Style

The journey to better leadership begins with self-awareness. Take time to reflect on your current leadership style. What are your strengths? Where do you struggle? Honest self-evaluation helps you identify areas that need improvement and allows you to build on what you already do well. Once you know yourself as a leader, growth becomes intentional rather than accidental.

2. Encourage Creativity and Innovation

One defining trait of transformational leadership is intellectual stimulation. Effective leaders encourage creativity and invite new ideas from their teams. Create opportunities for followers to think differently by offering meaningful challenges—while providing the support they need to succeed. When goals are ambitious yet achievable, people feel motivated to stretch their abilities and contribute innovative solutions.

3. Lead with Passion

Passion is contagious. If you don’t believe in the goals of your team, why should anyone else? Great leaders genuinely care about the work they do and the people they lead. Their enthusiasm fuels motivation and commitment. You can cultivate this quality by actively expressing your excitement, celebrating progress, and reminding your team why their work matters.

4. Listen and Communicate Effectively

Strong leadership is built on strong communication. Transformational leaders prioritize listening as much as speaking. One-on-one conversations help build trust and show followers that their opinions matter. When leaders clearly communicate their vision, followers feel inspired, aligned, and motivated to work toward shared goals.

5. Keep Trying New Things

Leadership is not a one-way relationship—it’s a continuous learning process. Seek feedback from your followers and be open to change. Reflect on what has worked in the past, but don’t be afraid to experiment with new approaches. The best leaders are always looking for fresh ways to inspire, motivate, and recognize their teams.

Final Thoughts

Becoming a better leader doesn’t happen overnight. It requires self-reflection, adaptability, and a genuine commitment to helping others succeed. By understanding yourself, encouraging creativity, leading with passion, communicating effectively, and staying open to new ideas, you can develop the qualities of a transformational leader—and make a lasting impact along the way.

Organizational skills needed to be a SMART LEADER

• Skill set: Failing to organize will often lead to chaos or, at the very least, an increase in stress levels. This occurs as you attempt to make sense of everything that surrounds you for the sake of making life easier. That’s why strong organizational skills are key to being a smart leader.
  
• Time management: Poor Time management is at the root of so many issues within a school or community. As the leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure that things run like clockwork. This is only possible by having a firm understanding of what it is to be organized. Failure in this area will lead to you being unable to stay on the task at hand. Suddenly, your ability to juggle everything at once diminishes before you. It won’t take much before it all comes crashing down, resulting in you being viewed as unreliable.
• Planning: Planning makes organizing easier, but we are often lacking when it comes to being able to plan ahead. Again, poor planning leads to dis organization and puts more pressure on you.
• Maintaining efficiency: Organization and efficiency go hand in hand. Efficiency leads to the need for planning as the smoother something runs, the fewer problems you encounter. Being efficient also allows you to know where you are in project at any moment. This is due to you having organized things to such an extent that you are able to foresee problems before they occur. Remember that efficiency and your ability to identify issues, work in unison. If you fail to be organized, then it is impossible for this to happen. 

Homeschooling tips for parents

Homeschooling during vacations doesn't have to feel like a core for you or your kids. With a little planning, creativity and flexibility, you can turn this time into a fun and enriching experiences. Whether it's exploring new subjects through hands on projects, incorporating learning into travel, or simply keeping a light but consistent routine, the key is to make education enjoyable and stress free. Remember, the goal isn't perfection, it's progress. Embrace the unique opportunity vacations offer to inspire curiosity, build strong family connections, and nurture a lifelong love of learning.

Create a proper learning space: Younger kids might not have their own room but that doesn’t mean parents cannot create a learning space for them to make them feel like they are in home-school. The learning space should be away from the TV, video games and you should keep mobiles away from there. Also don’t let your child eat at the study desk. If your child already has a study desk, make it more organized as that is where your child will spend the majority of his/her daily time. When your child is studying in his learning space, he or she should know that the area is meant only for studying.

Make a daily routine for your kids: When your children go to school, the majority of their time is spent in a proper schedule. During the vacations, kids are unable to maintain a routine in their daily lives as they don’t have to go to school. As a number one homeschooling tip, parents should ensure that they sit down with their kids and create their own routine to follow at home. A proper routine helps a child’s body clock adjust in a manner that their eating, sleeping, learning and playing times remain fixed. If the child gets bored with the routine, change it in a week again.

Don’t Spoon-feed your children: Since parents are not trained teachers (most of the time), they might not have the patience to teach children at home the right way. Parents need to allow children to come up with solutions on their own and struggle with textbook problems to develop critical thinking skills. Often, to save time, parents solve the answers in their children’s notebooks and ask the kids to learn. But this doesn’t teach them anything. So, don’t take the fun out of learning.

Follow the prescribed curriculum in school: Parents can coordinate with other parents of their child’s classmates at school to better understand how others are homeschooling their children and which topics from which subjects they are tackling and teaching first.

 

Doom scrolling affects your mental health

What is Doom Scrolling?

The exercise use of screen while scrolling through predominantly negative news is called doom scrolling/surfing. It is common to find yourself swiping past page after page searching for more details about a disturbing or negative news piece. 
Most of us can’t stay away from constantly reading/watching negative news. We keep checking different websites news channels to get new pieces of information. You will be surprised to know that phenomenon is nothing new. Our tendency towards negative news is more, as compared to positive news. But we all know that this is not good for our mental health. Here are few ways to reduce this habit and stay stress free:

Limit the time spent on social media: Smartphone have a feature where they can keep a record of the time you spend on each app. Keep track of this so that you are not lured into continuous use. Try to avoid scrolling before going to bed and right after waking up. The best way to do this is by keeping the phone away from your bed.

Keep track of your health: Regular exercising helps release neurotransmitters that have a feel-good effect. Yoga and meditation also help in de-stressing. Eat a healthy and balanced diet and avoid munching on sugar and salt laden junk foods while scrolling through your phone.

Practice mindfulness: Be mindful of any task that you are doing. Whether you are reading, writing or working out, you must pay full attention to the same. Make sure the news source you are reading from is genuine. Inculcate the habit of reading positive news and things, too and share the same with your friends and family.

Try the STOP technique: If you are unable to control the scrolling, you can try the STOP technique. If you feel you have exceeded the screen time and are unable to control your fingers, say STOP loudly and give yourself a physical stimulus at the same time, which can be a tap on the hand. When you do this repeatedly, your brain will get trained that it’s time to stop the current activity.