In today's fast-paced and competitive world, the need for effective leadership is more crucial than ever. However, true leadership goes beyond achieving goals and driving results—guiding others with integrity, compassion, and moral clarity. In this context, values and affirmations are vital in shaping principled leaders who can positively impact their communities and organizations. Affirmations and personal values also play a significant role in building our personal leadership confidence and integrity. Affirmations and values begin to frame the now and future leader we want to be.

Defining Leadership Affirmations

To affirm someone is to validate a significant quality about them. It is a positive statement that is true and binding about a person's character, capacity, or competency. Self-affirmations must be anchored in humility and revealed truth. When we thoughtfully consider and affirm certain traits in our lives, we declare something core about our being to ourselves. Affirmations are "I am . . . " statements, declarations about who we are as a leader and who we want to become. The expression and practice of these affirmations is never toward self-aggrandizement but always toward service. They are meant to help us transcend self and serve others.

Here are a few examples of leadership affirmations:

• I am a leader who makes room for and celebrates others.

• I am a leader who will take risks, is unafraid, and is not bound by past conventions.

• I am a leader who is a strategic problem solver.

• I am a leader who is a principled learner.

Developing Leadership Affirmations

Here are four practical suggestions for developing your own leadership affirmations:

• Start with “I am.”

• State the desired quality or goal in the present tense.

• Focus on qualities and goals that align with your personal values.

• Make them believable by focusing on your real strengths.

Defining Personal Values

A value is an underlying belief that helps to guide our decisions and actions and ultimately shape our days and careers. Your leadership effectiveness is not solely determined by your knowledge, experience, and leadership skills; it is deeply intertwined with your personal values. These values act as an invisible compass, subtly guiding your decisions, actions, and the culture you create within your team.

A value is anchored in belief and expressed through daily behavior.

This statement lies at the heart of a value and its functions. Most organizations have a set of core values that are printed on an office wall or are recorded in an onboarding manual. However, few organizations make the critical move from belief to behavior. How do we behave to fulfill the mission of our organization? How am I to behave to fulfill my role and personal calling? It must show up in our daily behavior if we say we value and believe in something. Otherwise, we court hypocrisy.

Developing Personal Values

Here are four suggestions for crafting your own values:

• Limit yourself to five personal values in any one year. Anything more than five becomes difficult to remember and live out.

• Evaluate your values annually. You should not make wholesale changes, but you might add or alter one or two.

• Anchor them in Scripture. Values must be anchored in belief at some level. For the follower of Jesus, the Bible is a great source for building your value foundation.

• Express them in behavioral language. This will make it easier to recall and live it out.

Here are a few examples for your consideration.

• Courage-to live with a full heart

• Beauty-to bring a beautiful dominion in everything that I do

• Integrity-to live sound inside and out

• Generosity-to live generously with my time, words, and resources

• Growth-to live moldable toward ongoing growth

There is a beautiful and unique sermon in the book of Matthew in the Bible. In chapters five through seven, Jesus speaks to a gathered crowd on a hillside in Galilee. This sermon may reflect the greatest three chapters in the Bible on kingdom values. It is the longest teaching section by Jesus in the New Testament toward the masses. It is a rich description of how any Christian or any church should behave. It is certainly worthy of our consideration. Spend some time in this passage and see how it informs your affirmations and personal values.