You Are The Leader of Your Own Life

In 2015, Dan Quiggle, former aide to Ronald Reagan, was the featured speaker at the E.A. Morris Free Enterprise Gala during our FELC session at Wingate University. Dan spoke to students about the meaning of principled leadership and emotional intelligence, receiving the highest possible ratings from our participants. Dan has been speaking on these issues throughout North America and internationally for the past 20 years, sharing his messages of business success and motivation with America’s top corporations and associations, including Genworth Financial, Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, and Coldwell Banker. He has spoken in large and small settings for corporations and educational institutions and has been featured on the Fox News Channel, as well as in The Wall Street Journal. Dan is also the author of the critically acclaimed book, Lead Like Reagan and host of the podcast Garage to Goliath | Leaders Building Legacies. 

We recently completed six short videos of Dan speaking on principled leadership, which are also shown to students at the Free Enterprise Leadership Challenge summer program. View the introductory videos for each section below and visit our YouTube channel for the rest of the series.

Legacy Leadership Part 1: Prosperity is Within You

The most inspiring, empowering, and optimistic message you can choose to believe is that you indeed control your own destiny. You are the author of your own story. You are not defined by your circumstances. You are not defined by who your parents are, the neighborhood you live in, or by what has happened to you. You are defined as the person you choose to be, sometimes in spite of what has happened to you, despite the neighborhood you live in, or who your parents are.

Legacy Leadership Part 2: The Leadership Mindset

If everyone one of us has all the ingredients within us to create prosperity, then leadership becomes a matter of training ourselves to use all of those ingredients to bring that prosperity out. See, I’m not convinced leaders are born. Leaders are made. They are trained. And leaders choose to use the prosperity within to motivate and inspire others. And that involves developing a leadership mindset. 

legacy leadership part 3: Leadership and guiding principles

To be an exceptional leader, you have to build a solid moral foundation for yourself and personally commit yourself to a certain set of guiding principles because your guiding principles will shape how you live your life and the decisions you make when no one is watching or when times are tough. 

legacy leadership part 4: building and leading teams

I want to share with you a little secret to creating prosperity in your life. You are only as good as the people you surround yourself with. If you take the top 10 or 15 people that you hang out with on a regular basis and average them, that's about who you're going to be. That's about the type of person you are and the type of character you’ll develop. The people you surround yourself with matter when it comes to you creating prosperity.

legacy leadership part 5: Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

To be successful as individuals, to create prosperity, we need to be lifelong learners. We need to put ourselves in situations that stretches our knowledge base and perspective and be willing to learn from someone who has a much deeper understanding of something than we do.

legacy leadership part 6: leadership through tough times

Here’s the reality, anyone can sail a ship through calm waters. It takes no skill, little training, very little determination, and even less leadership capability to sail a ship when the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, your crew is having a great time, and you can see a vivid reflection of everything around you glistening off the water. It takes a real leader, a skilled captain, someone who has prepared and trained during the good times, to take your ship and your crew through the rough seas.