Growing up I always thought of leadership in one way. I thought that in order to be a leader, you needed to be a literal leader of a group. It never occurred to me that leadership can look different for every person. Throughout my years at Minnesota State University, Mankato, I have found out the type of leader I am and in which ways I lead best. This has in turn, helped me to make my own leadership philosophy that I use almost every day. My leadership philosophy is all about showing that you care about what you're doing and who you are doing it with. By showing you're interested and care about what you're doing, you help to gain the trust of those who you are leading. One of the very first experiences I had finding my leadership style, was in my Honors First Year Experience class. In this class, we did multiple activities that helped us start to find who we were as leaders. The activity that helped me the most, was writing my leadership essay. This essay allowed me to take each of the activities we did involving leadership and reflect on what type of leader I was. I turned out to be an authentic and extroverted leader and an upholder. This was completely new information for me because I had never put any thought into my leadership style. By knowing the type of leader, I was, being a leader became a more comfortable experience. I knew that I lead in a certain way, and that, that was okay. One situation where I was really able to use my leadership style was while training new employees at my job. I was able to use my style of leadership combined with what I observed with other staff and train new staff members. Another experience I had using my leadership style was in my research group. I was one of two students working on this specific research project and the other student had one year of experience in the lab. It was important in this situation that I knew my own leadership style, but that I also knew how she led in order to work together efficiently. One of my most recent experiences involved observing a leader in my life and coming up with my own leadership philosophy. I chose to interview my boss for a project in an honors course and through interviewing her and working with her the past two years, I was able to see her leadership style. I observed her leadership style and used that as a “template” for my own leadership philosophy. My philosophy is one that I will use consistently in the future. As a pediatrician, it will be important that I gain the trust of my patients by showing I care about their health and well-being and my leadership philosophy does just that.