Leaders choose to lead - Chevening Scholarships

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kindly read and have your comments. I really appreciate every ones comment.

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.

Fahima, I do not see any singular leadership experience coming directly from you in the first leadership instance that you present. You keep on talking as a member of the group and how your group accomplished a task. You create the image of a subordinate who knows how to work with a team, not the image of team leader who had to inspire her subordinates to follow her instructions in order to complete the task. There is no individual reference to leadership and influencing in that paragraph so it does not work as an effective example on your part.

In the second example, you only claim to have inspired 200 women to improve their lives. How you inspired them is not represented when that is what the reviewer needs to read about. With 200 women to inspire, how did you, as an individual manage to do that? Did you do it alone or did you inspire the 4 girls under you to achieve that goal? If you had to inspire those under you, how did you do that? You need to delve into expanded examples for both leadership activities that you are referring to.

In this essay, you cannot simply imply the existence of your leadership and influencing skills, you have to be detailed as to how that came about. What was the conflict? How did you resolve it? How did you inspire your subordinates to help you achieve your group goals? Show, do not tell. Telling does not prove that ability, showing or narrating how you did it accomplishes that.

No problem about grammer. But examples that you given was not proven. You need to connect happens with your actions clearly.

you need to add more example to make your argument stronger. yet, your essay is pretty good enough.