Learning Leadership ?

Leadership is a pretty over-rated topic at times but had a couple of thoughts about how to go about developing what I would term "leadership on a personal level". This, I feel, is the foundation to being able to develop further in this area. Just a couple of thoughts on what I apply myself:

1. Learn about yourself - This is essentially the most basic yet hard to achieve element. You may scoff and say "Of course I know all about me!" but perhaps not at a deeper level. Knowing enough about yourself includes knowing your weaknesses and when they appear. For example, you may discover that you tend to become subconciously disorganised when nervous or under stress. Or that when interacting with people in stressful situations, you tend to stutter. Being mindful of all these facts will help you to acknowledge these personal weaknesses. That was the hard part, the next step is simply to find logical ways to keep your spirits and confidence
   
2. Learn about the people around you- Learn and understand the strength and weakness of people around you. Its similar to the first point and would help you to be mindful about how to project yourself positively. In teams especially, understanding how each member interacts is crucial. The key and most difficult aspect to this is to be objective and seek to understand everyone as much as possible. At the same time, learning about how people around you work gives tons of opportunities for self-reflection and correction - pick up the best attributes from people and be mindful to avoid negative ones you spot.
   
3. Learn from the best - This can be from mentor figures you may have or just plainly by reading up on the topic from books. Watching great leaders in action bring the double benefit of live learning coupled with a constant inspiration to excel. In terms of reading up, I've found that the best leadership books are the military-themed ones. My logic behind it is that in the military, successes and failures are much better documented and examined because they are matters of life and death. Being able to analyse a military failure, the military force hopes to avoid such a reccurrence. For companies and organisations, this is seldom the case as success stories tend to be played up while failure ones are toned down.