I once watched in amazement as hundreds of chattering High School girls blazed a new path across the college campus where they were attending a summer camp.

We had ALL been in the same assembly, given the same instructions  – but much  to my surprise, they were ALL heading in the wrong direction!

You may be familiar with the saying that people are like cattle. They blindly follow the herd wherever it goes. Even if it’s wrong.

(This is known as “herd mentality”.)

I had a hard time believing this, until I witnessed it with my own eyes.

Maybe you have had this experience where distracted or driving in a daze, in the midst of traffic, you realize too late that you’ve missed your exit.

Distracted by conversations, cell phones and various activities we often tend to let the crowd determine the direction we are going in.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we just had a built in GPS for life?

You would simply enter in your life’s goals and the GPS would give you a turn by turn map for the next several years. All of the decisions premade for you.

There would be no fear or trepidation of making a mistake or missing our true calling!

But that would be too safe. Where is the sense of adventure in that?

Have you ever noticed there tends to be two types of people in the world –

Leaders and Followers.

Being a leader doesn’t have to be designated by a title. You may be a leader without even realizing it.

Someone was leading that group of High School girls, unfortunately she was leading them in the wrong direction!

There lies the critical difference in being a successful, intentional leader – you have to have a specific destination in mind.

Most followers are content to go along with the crowd assuming the leader is going to take them where they all want to end up.

That is as crazy as driving down the highway, continuously following the flow of traffic, assuming that you will arrive at your destination.

You may think that’s ridiculous, but there are  lots of  people that live like this on a day to day basis.

How about you?

Are you leading? If you are, do you have a specific destination in mind?

Or, are you a follower? Being a follower is not necessarily a bad thing. The greatest teams consist mostly of really great like minded followers.

But a great follower has faith that the person they chose to follow has the same end goal in mind.

Without that tangible GPS we talked about, we have to rely on our internal one.

So, the key factor here is for everyone to have a desired objective or outcome.

Leaders lead, and followers choose to follow someone that they can join with to forge a path to their desired destination.

Both will probably have a few detours and take some breaks along the road, but often that is the exciting part of the journey.

More importantly, the idea is not to get discouraged when the road does have a detour

and the journey doesn’t seem to be turning out at all like you planned.

Do you ever feel like you are the only one going in a specific direction?

It can be scary – That “going against the flow” feeling.

I felt the same way that day, like maybe I missed something. But I knew the direction and the destination I was supposed to be going toward, so I went that way alone.

Then others behind me saw there was more than one choice. They were able to choose to go with the crowd or towards their desired destination.

You never know who may be watching to see where you choose to go. And more importantly , you may be the confirmation they need to continue on the right path when everyone else seems to be headed in a different direction.

Stay focused on your destination and the team you are traveling with whether you are leading or following.

Life is too short to waste your time following a herd of cattle going in the wrong direction.

You can learn more about leading in my latest podcast –

On YouTube

Or here on Apple Podcasts.