Leadership in the Philippines: How to Lead the Filipinos

Every country needs great leaders to attain its common goals, such as economic progress, national security and sustainable living for its citizens. That is why local and national elections of government officials and leaders are considered as among the most important events that happen in any nation. In the Philippines, poverty, crimes and corruption are still among the imminent problems that most Filipinos are grousing. These problems have already become so common that many Filipinos have already lost their hope of a great grand change. Instead of having a strong desire to join others in developing our nation, many of us have been stuck in making that goal only a dream.

Now, we all need to stop dreaming. Let us again transform that dream into a strong desire. Let’s put that desire in our heart – the heart that we can’t live without. A great leadership in the Philippines must become alive, and it’s never too late to start. If you’re a Filipino whose love is for his own country, you should learn how to lead the Filipinos. The following discussions shall guide all of us.


Start leading the first Filipino that you can – yourself

Leadership is not only for mayors, governors, congressmen, senators or for the president. It’s not only for priests, famous artists or the business icons. Leadership is for all of us. You can be a leader of yourself. That is why if you want to lead the Filipinos, you should start by leading the nearest Filipino within your reach – you.  Corruption is not only happening in the government agencies or in the house of legislations. Corruption can also occur within us. There, it actually starts it all. Ask yourself why there are some people who succeed in life despite of the perhaps dirty politics that’s happening in our country. They actually live a better life despite of that. The reason is that they are not affected and corrupted by that external force of corruption. They are on their own uncorrupted selves which they have achieved through personal development. So how can you lead yourself anyway? Here are some things you can do to accomplish it.

– Lead yourself to finding your real talents and in developing it.
– Lead yourself to learning good virtues, such as patience, diligence, kindness, generosity, compassion and humility.
– Lead yourself to evaluating your current values and principles, and in correcting what’s wrong with them.
– Lead yourself to a healthy lifestyle and in overcoming your vices.
– Lead yourself to bringing your own business or profession to success.
– Lead yourself to financial freedom.
– Lead yourself to keeping honesty and integrity.
– Lead yourself to loving God, your family, and our country.
– Lead yourself to becoming a law abiding citizen.
– Lead yourself to many other activities that can cause your self development.


Analyze our national problems

If you have made yourself great and personally developed, you are now capable of becoming a selfless person. This is because you are now a stronger person who can prioritize others rather than yourself. You are now more capable of leading other Filipinos. To lead our countrymen, we need to find out the problems that our country is experiencing. We need to explore not only the problems that we see, but also the roots of these crises. Here’s how you can be aware of what’s wrong with the Philippines now.

– Watch, read and hear the news about the Philippines inside and out our country. You can do these with TV, radio, newspaper or the Internet.
– Join and observe people’s discussions about what’s happening in our country. You can join forums and groups online, such as on Facebook or in Twitter.
– Study economics
– Learn the right politics.
– Read our Philippine History and the previous governments.
– Study the current laws and regulations in our country.
– Look around you.
– Talk and discuss with your friends, classmates and officemates any current issues about our country.
– Do other things that will increase your awareness about the Philippines.

In other words, you should not ignore what’s happening with our nation. Remember that loving starts from knowing. Hence, if you want to love our country, you should start by knowing it. Know our country and analyze our problems. You can start it by gathering important data though the list above. We need to sacrifice our self-interest. If you spend more time in following the news about Lady Gaga, Britney Spears or Justine Bieber, why not start allocating more time on the news about the Philippine realities. If you are already bored and uninterested in hearing the current news, you can go back to our history or look forward to our future to get information that can be useful for our nation today.


Discover solutions to those problems

After collecting information about our country and about us, it’s time to do something with those pieces of information. Leadership is not all about knowing, isn’t it? Thus we need to find solutions on those problems that we realize. But how? There are obvious crises that we are facing, such as poverty, war in Mindanao, street crimes, the possible destruction of our natural resources, overpopulation and corruption in the public offices. If we make researches, we can actually understand that the solutions to these problems are simple. It’s just not easy.

Because there can only be one president in our republic, it’s not practical to try to solve all of those problems above. What we can do is to choose the specific problem which we believe we can have the highest rate of success in solving it. For example if you’re an environmentalist, you can focus on protecting our environment. If you’re a businessman or an entrepreneur, you can concentrate on providing more jobs in the country. If you’re a financial expert, you can educate more Filipinos with financial literacy. If you’re a blogger, you can influence people online with nationalism. In other words, be an expert – be an expert servant.


Test and practice those solutions

We need to ensure that we’re doing something right. That is why we need to not just promise ourselves to do them, but we need to actually execute them. For example, if you want to lead many Filipinos to good governance, you need to be a role model. You need to prove that you’re an effective leader. You need to show that you can indeed govern effectively even in just your small organization. The key to determining our effectiveness is to start doing what we need to do. Remember that as we go on, we will know what we need to change and improve. Therefore make your talk your walk.


Influence other Filipinos

To better inflict a major change in our country, you need to expand your influence. This is because the more people you will convince the more force you can create. If you don’t have enough financial resources, you can use the Internet and the social media to widen your reach. Here are some ways on how you can leverage the social media to leading people into a common goal:

– Create a blog and post stories, images and videos that are related to your cause regularly.
– Make a Facebook page and promote it to more people. Post your blog posts on your page.
– Start a Facebook group, invite people and make it grow.
– Create a Twitter account and also tweet your motivational messages, as well as the links to your blog posts.
– Build your personal Facebook profile or timeline and attract more friends and subscribers.
– Build a presence in Google+ and other popular social networking sites.

Nowadays, everyone who wants to promote something to a wider audience should not ignore the power of social media.


Join forces with other leaders

It’s time to collaborate with other leaders who also want to bring our country to progress. We might have been in different and unique groups, but when it comes to uniting a nation, we should all go along to create a single force. Uniting with other organizations can help each group in strengthening their power. They can use each other to lift each other. This is the essence of collaboration, where everyone can enjoy their shared assets and resources. So if you are leading a group of people whose goal is to make our country clean and green, you can join forces with other groups, such as those in the financial, social, and spiritual groups.


Conquer the problems and seize victory

It sounds pretty tough to accomplish, isn’t it? Of course it is. That is why we have discussed all the tough instructions above. But leadership is what it’s all about. And since our country is suffering from a difficult problem, we need leaders who can do the hard work. The hard work will actually start in developing ourselves – that’s what we’ve discussed at the top, right? It’s really tough to develop ourselves. The self-discipline, selflessness, compassion, kindness, generosity – those things are actually hard to achieve. But if we can overcome our own weakness, we can be stronger to conquer the problems of our society. The key to success is simply persistence, that is, we should not quit until we can claim our victory. Let’s not lose hope. Let’s try it all over again.


Create new generation leaders to maintain success

We have a long way to reaching our nationalistic goals. But, if we become better leaders, we can lead a significant number of Filipinos to our righteous goals. We can also create our own success with the organizations we lead. And to reproduce and multiply that success, we should create new leaders. We should ensure that our legacy will be passed on to the new generations. This legacy is not about ourselves; it’s not about our fame or name. This legacy is about what we did. This legacy is about what the generations should be doing now and in the future.

Final thoughts

Making the Philippines as one of the most developed country in the world is such a difficult task. However, it is not impossible to realize. If our neighboring countries can make it, then why can’t we? I’m not proud to be a Filipino because I don’t want to give pride to my country. But I am honored to be a Filipino because I want to bring not pride, but honor and glory. In this kind of hard situation that our nation is facing, we don’t need pride. What we need is humility – the virtue we need to serve humbly. Yes, bringing our country to the top is such a tough mission. But if we will tell everyone we can’t accomplish a great goal like that, then it’s just the same as telling that there are already no great Filipinos that are living in our country today. I believe that there are still Filipinos who can raise their power to do the most difficult things for our country. I know that there are still many Filipinos in our time that can be great leaders. I believe that you are one of them.