Scholarship / Leaders choose to lead - Chevening Scholarships [4]

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Leadership and influence question

Chevening is looking for individuals who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.

(minimum word count: 100 words, maximum word count: 500 words)

Leaders choose to lead. I do believe that the combination of natural leadership skills and nurture through leadership development defines our leadership style. During my academic studies and becoming the Deputy of Girls Association in dormitory I recognized my natural leadership abilities. In addition, coming to my career profession I always endeavored to improve my leadership and influence skills in order to influence people around me to act towards achieving my goals.

First, an imperative feature of being a successful leader is to be a crisis manager, because challenges are like big steps through improvement. As a program officer with ASEWO (Afghanistan Social and Empowerment of Women Organization) we were starting implementation of Access to Justice project in western provinces of Afghanistan. The challenges were plenty in the post-war provinces where almost 90% of women do not had access to formal and informal justice. Thus, convincing of them to come to workshops and learn on the ways to fight for free violence life and consider their basic rights, was the critical situation. I with a team consist of 4 women from Kabul traveled there and begin to discuss to Mulla 's and tribal elders, in order to convince them that nether it is about suffering of family lives nor bringing of western culture. It is to assist the women being aware of their rights and struggle against violence. Due to our uninterrupted efforts, we could implement two years long project and train almost 500 women and girls in each province. It was a big start up and I discovered my potential and energy to help guide others on suitable path.

Further, a person deserve leading should have dedication and diligence to the work. Although I was working with ASEWO and after as Court Management Specialist with Checchi, I always kept my efforts to be a successful leader and influencer. To follow my goals, I with my two friends established Empowered Women Organization in order to change the life of uneducated and deprived women. I as management board member could inspire almost 200 other women within six months to start their small businesses also, encourage stakeholders to provide financial supports to them. As a women working in the post conflict, less educated and traditional society it is not easy to handle multiple tasks of being civil activist, organization manager and influencer. Leadership is my passion and my continuous perseverance to my works is the reason for the follow up. I always dedicate myself to work and looks for my goals to help other deprived people my own.

To summarize, Leaders not only realize others' dreams but influence and aspire people around them to realize their own dreams. I recognized my abilities to lead, however, it needs more theoretical and practical skills growth. I believe Chevening let me to become familiar with the society and environment where not only I build new leadership skills also will be influenced by them and share them back with people in Afghanistan.

Scholarship / Vision, innovation and dedication levels are vital to determine if a leader can reach his/her goals [4]

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I am going to submit this essay to leadership question of chevening scholarship. I would appreciate every one's comment for improvement. I need specially native speaker's comments. Also the maximum word count is 500 and my essay is 611 words long,u may find some sentences usefulness so please identify them. Thank you so much.

Leadership and influence question - Chevening Scholarship

Chevening is looking for individuals that will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.

(Minimum word count: 50 words, maximum word count: 500 words)

While some people are naturally endowed with more leadership abilities than other, people can learn to become leaders by improving particular skills. I believe the combination of natural leadership skills and nurture through leadership development defines our leadership style. Therefore, the three features: vision, innovation and dedication are essential to a leader achieves his/her goals.

First, for being a successful leader having vision is important, because leaders choose to lead. With clear vision they aspire and motivate others to act towards achieving their goal. When I was living in dormitory, I had been noticed many challenges and scarcities on dormitory management and students' affairs. Students had bribed director to act against policy and make the environment unsafe for other girls, however, lots of out of policy restricts were implemented on some other girls. Such as having small parties within their rooms. Also the students did not receive services base on their specific entitlement. In order to provide equality and justice to all, through a transparent election I had become Deputy Head of Dormitory Girls Association. I had suggested that through both individual awareness of policy and monitoring system of management we could make safe and free corruption environment. I could persuade every individual in the dormitory to fight for equality and implementation of policy. Furthermore, the members of association established an appropriate daily base monitoring system on management and these result to avoid their unfair behavior. That was where I discovered my potential and energy to help guide others on suitable path. At last, both students and their families were satisfied of our efforts. Even this was small change but beg success to me.

In addition, to the person becoming a leader, to keep long lasting effect may be difficult. Innovation is the feature that every successful leader should have. People appreciate and being attracted to follow innovative thinkers. After university, I could hire as six months' intern in ASEWO. Their condition for extension was to being provided with an innovative project idea. I let the challenges to help in my growth. Thus, after two months of efforts, I come up with the idea of doing a research on divorce damages on women. I prepared the questionnaire to conduct the research. This was being appreciated by directorate and I have hired as program officer for next 2 years. As a result, I became the proactive employee and implemented an Access to Justice Awareness project for women and minorities to eastern provinces.

Further, a person deserve leading should have dedication and perseverance to the work. As dedication is the basis for successful accomplishment of two previous characteristics. For instance, during first three months of the project I was not as much good as I expected as we had collected the workshop materials from formal law and it was not easy to understand for illiterate women. I worked uninterrupted and searched until the best result come out and we linked every subject with basic Islamic Studies. The result was great and within every workshop we trained 30 girls and women in each class. This was the startup of my professional career with great learning of new leadership skills.

To summarize, being a successful leader in not only in our nature, also, it needs nurture development skills beside. Leaders not only realize others' dreams but influence and aspire people around them to realize their own dreams. I recognized my abilities to lead, however, it needs more professional skills growth. I believe Chevening let me to become familiar with the society and environment where not only I build new leadership skills but will being influenced by them and share them back with people in Afghanistan.