Real Leaders Are Ordinary People with Extraordinary Determinations

“Real leaders are ordinary people with extraordinary determinations.”

-John Seaman Garns

Throughout my young life, I have always wondered what it might be like to join the Army. I would lie on my bedroom floor and play with my G.I. Joes wondering if I could handle being a leader. When I turned seventeen, I decided it was time I took some initiative in my life. I went to the recruiter for a range of different reasons: to get out on my own, see the world, earn my freedom, and to defend my country. The most important reason, however, was to see if I had what it took to be a leader. I wanted to become a man who could handle anything thrown at him, and to have a life filled with grandfather stories. It was a huge shock to my parents who had to co-sign the enlistment papers in order for me to join. They had always expected me to go to college because of my good grades and normal behavior. It was the first time I left my house to live outside of their care, and like all mothers, mine cried her eyes out begging me to stay. I was determined to follow my heart though and when I graduated high school in 2005 I was indestructibly ready to take on anything that came my way.

I had led a somewhat sheltered life in that my parents provided a warm loving environment for my siblings and myself. I really had no negative or significant emotional events growing up that directly affected my development. Rather it was the lack of these incidents that gave me a naïve outlook on life and all the responsibilities it entails. This cognitive development prior to my experiences in the military left me with a positive outlook on life and its possibilities yet, wholly unprepared for leading a life on my own, something I was determined to change. Two weeks after being sworn into the United States Army, I found myself standing among the ranks of enlisted recruits just like me from all around the country. Each of them was as raw and as eager as I. We all wanted to become leaders, which most confuse leadership as simply being the first, biggest or most powerful. What set me apart from my peers there, however, was that I understood