A major way to have a positive impact is to develop your character so that it includes sincere humility. David Brooks in his brilliant book, The Road To Character, takes the reader through the lives of Saint Augustine, President Dwight Eisenhower, the novelist George Eliot, and others to show the unique way character is developed by extremely different people. Brooks ends the book with a very actionable list of the elements of the Humility Code, “a coherent image of what to live for and how to live.”
A first action you can take is buy the book and measure your humility by reading the 15 well written elements of the Humility Code.
A second way is to ask those whose opinion you trust, whether you are arrogant or overly proud which is the opposite of the adjective humble, and/or whether you have a modest view of your own importance, a definition of the noun humility.
Those two actions will provide a roadmap for improving how often sincere, not feigned humility surfaces in your day-to-day behavior.
This post is an abridged version of an article published January 23, 2018 and available on this blog under the title The Road to Character and Positive Impact.