If you are a leadership coach and you want to nurture your clients with the best motivational quotes, this article is just for you. Quotes are a fantastic way to communicate your mindset, and values, and it’s always a good idea to incorporate them into a coaching program.
Here we will cover over 99 powerful and inspiring quotes from successful leaders of all times:
“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” – John C. Maxwell
.“A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.” – Jim Rohn
“If you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead. Even the highest mountain had animals that step on it.” – Jack Weatherford
“Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flow charts. It is about one life influencing another.” John C. Maxwell
“Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It’s about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others’ success, and then standing back and letting them shine.” – Chris Hadfield
“For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger
“You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.” – Jeff Bezos
“The great leaders are not the strongest, they are the ones who are honest about their weaknesses. The great leaders are not the smartest; they are the ones who admit how much they don’t know. The great leaders can’t do everything; they are the ones who look to others to help them. Great leaders don’t see themselves as great; they see themselves as human.” – Simon Sinek
“Leaders walk a fine line between self-confidence and humility.” – Stanley McChrystal
“When you can’t control what’s happening, challenge yourself to control how you respond to what’s happening. That’s where your power is.”
“Great leaders do not fear challenges, because challenges do not break leaders but sharpen them” – Gift Gugu Mona
“When things go wrong in your command, start searching for the reason in increasingly large circles around your own desk.” – Gen. Bruce Clarke
“Power isn’t control at all – power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own.” – Beth Revis
“The first job of leadership is to love people. Leadership without love is manipulation.” – Rick Warren
“Good leaders organize and align people around what the team needs to do. Great leaders motivate and inspire people with why they’re doing it.” – Marillyn Hewson
“Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people,’ that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” – Peter F. Drucker
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves” – Lao Tzu
“A person always doing his or her best becomes a natural leader, just by example.” – Joe DiMaggio
“Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.” – Bill Bradley
“It’s okay to admit what you don’t know. It’s okay to ask for help. And it’s more than okay to listen to the people you lead – in fact, it’s essential.” – Mary Barra
“You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.” – Henry Ford
“Without initiative, leaders are simply workers in leadership positions.” – Bo Bennett
“Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes.” – Peter Drucker
“A competent leader can get efficient service from poor troops, while on the contrary, an incapable leader can demoralize the best of troops.” – Gen. John J. Pershing
“A man can only lead when others accept him as their leader, and he has only as much authority as his subjects give to him. All of the brilliant ideas in the world cannot save your kingdom if no one will listen to them.” – Brandon Sanderson
“The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.” – Sheryl Sandberg
“There is a difference between being a leader and being a boss. Both are based on authority. A boss demands blind obedience; a leader earns his authority through understanding and trust.” – Klaus Balkenhol
“Wolves don’t lose sleep over the opinions of sheep.”
“Just because you are CEO, don’t think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I’ve never forgotten that.” – Indra Nooyi
“The art of communication is the language of leadership.” – James Humes
“Strategic leaders must not get consumed by the operational and tactical side of their work. They have a duty to find time to shape the future.” – Stephanie S. Mead
“Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.” – Colin Powell
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” – Abraham Lincoln
“Sometimes leadership is planting trees under whose shade you’ll never sit.” – Jennifer Granholm
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.” – John Quincy Adams
“The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability. When the leader demonstrates vulnerability and sensibility and brings people together, the team wins.” – Howard Schultz
“Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems.” – Brian Tracy
“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” – Ralph Nader
“He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader.” –Aristotle
“Lions cannot afford to hunt mice because they literally will starve to death, even if they catch them. Lions and all large carnivores have to hunt game large enough to justify the investment, so they have to hunt antelope and zebra. Why is this important? Because most senior executives are really big on chipmunks.” – Newt Gingrich
“Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you’re in control, they’re in control.” – Tom Landry
“Your circle should want to see you win. Your circle should clap loudly when you have good news. If not, get a new circle.”
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss
“A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.” – Arnold H. Glasow
“In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.” – Tina Fey
“A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.” – Zig Ziglar
“Restore connection’ is not just for devices, it is for people too. If we cannot disconnect, we cannot lead.” – Arianna Huffington
“One of the criticisms I’ve faced over the years is that I’m not aggressive enough or assertive enough or maybe somehow, because I’m empathetic, it means I’m weak. I totally rebel against that. I refuse to believe that you cannot be both compassionate and strong.” – Jacinda Ardern
“I learned to always take on things I’d never done before. Growth and comfort do not coexist.” – Ginni Rometty
“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or conclude you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.” – Colin Powell
“Good plans shape good decisions. That’s why good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true.” – Lester R. Bittel
“Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.” – Tom Peters
“Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.” – Steve Jobs
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.” – President John Quincy Adams
“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” – Henry Ford
“Leadership should be focused on extending the ladder of opportunity for everyone.” – Justin Trudeau
“Integrity, insight, and inclusiveness, are the three essential qualities of leadership” – Sadhguru
“I think one of the keys to leadership is recognizing that everybody has gifts and talents. A good leader will learn how to harness those gifts toward the same goal.” – Ben Carson.
“Leadership is diving for a loose ball, getting the crowd involved, getting other players involved. It’s being able to take it as well as dish it out. That’s the only way you’re going to get respect from the players.” – Larry Bird
“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.” – John Kenneth Galbraith
“You don’t lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.” – Ken Kesey
“The leader has to be practical, and a realist yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.” – Eric Hoffer
“A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.” – Max Lucado
“You cannot be effective if those who work for you are not. So building their effectiveness ought to be a priority.” – Richard N. Haass
“Leadership is something you earn, something you’re chosen for. You can’t come in yelling, ‘I’m your leader!’ If it happens, it’s because the other guys respect you.” – Ben Roethlisberger
“Average leaders raise the bar on themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar.” – Orrin Woodward
“Whether we’re talking about leadership, teamwork, or client service, there is no more powerful attribute than the ability to be genuinely honest about one’s weaknesses, mistakes, and needs for help.” – Patrick Lencioni
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” – John F. Kennedy
“I think baking cookies is equal to Queen Victoria running an empire. There’s no difference in how seriously you take the job.” – Martha Stewart
“Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.” – Vince Lombardi
“Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.” – Gen. Colin Powell
“The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.” – Warren Bennis
“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” – Jack Welch
“The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.” – John C. Maxwell
“The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.”- Brandon Sanderson
“Many people believe that decentralization means loss of control. That’s simply not true. You can improve control if you look at control as the control of events and not people. Then, the more people you have controlling events – the more people you have that care about controlling the events, the more people you have proactively working to create favorable events – the more control you have within the organization, by definition.” – Wilbur L. Creech
“The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor but without folly.” – Jim Rohn
“My jobs as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact.” – Larry Page
“Average leaders raise the bar on themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar.” – Orrin Woodward
“Great leaders do not desire to lead but to serve.” – Myles Munroe
“Leadership is the abilitnagey to guide others without force into a direction or decision that leaves them still feeling empowered and accomplished.” – Lisa Cash Hanson
“Leadership Is the ability to get extraordinary achievement from ordinary people” – Brian Tracy
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles, but today it means getting along with people.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
“One of the most important things for any leader is to never let anyone else define who you are. And you define who you are. I never think of myself as being a woman CEO of this company. I think of myself as a steward of a great institution.” – Ginni Rometty
“If you don’t believe in yourself, why is anyone else going to believe in you.” – Tom Brady
“Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration — of oneself and of others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes. Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine.” – Lance Secretan
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.” – Zig Ziglar
“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter does not understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.” – Albert Einstein
“The leader is one who, out of the clutter, brings simplicity… Out of discord, harmony… And out of difficult, opportunity.” – Albert Einstein
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” – Abraham Lincoln
“Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.” – Stephen Covey
“Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” – Albert Schweitzer
Final Words:
Thank you for reading our article about the best coaching quotes that every leadership coach should use to motivate and inspire students. Check out the 99+ life coaching quotes for even more great and powerful citations, or have a look at the other great articles about coaching:
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- 13+ Killer Coaching Questions That Empower Clients
Paul Lian is a researcher, writer, and founder of WayToChanges.com. With over eight years of experience in blogging, digital marketing, copywriting, and digital products, he has built multiple six-figure income streams. Through his blog, Paul shares his best expertise, strategies, and tools to help readers achieve financial freedom and success in their own digital ventures.