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Michelle Peluso is CEO of Travelocity and Executive Vice President of Sabre Holdings.  In this excerpt from her keynote address, Peluso offers five practical steps each of us can take to become true business leaders.

We are a generation of women who have almost unlimited freedom and opportunity.  And for that, I m proud to be a woman in business and I’m so humbled by, and grateful to, the women who came before me and had the tenacity to fight for opportunities for all of us.

But, with that gratitude also comes a real sense of obligations.  All the individual success in the world matters very little if we, as women of today, aren’t as intent and as ferocious as our grandmothers and mothers were in making the world better for tomorrow’s female leaders.

So, where do we go from here?  How do we all become the leader we have it in us to be? Well, five simple lessons have helped shape my life.

1. Do what you are passionate about.
Learn to nurture and listen to YOUR voice, not all of the “other” voices.  There have been too many times in my life when I’ve met women who are doing something because it’s “a good job” or their parents wanted them to take over the family business or they felt they could make a lot of money in a particular field.

I can almost guarantee that if you are doing something because it is what others expect, you won’t be particularly successful or happy. True passion and REAL leadership come from doing something you love.  Discover what YOUR passion is.  It’s just so important on the path of leadership and happiness.

2. Be tenacious.
Whether you have started your own company or you are working your way up the ladder, you must be tenacious.  But, optimism is necessary and perseverance is critical.  You have to be ferocious about figuring out what the obstacles are and then knocking them down systematically.  You have to go from why it isn’t happening to how is could happen. That transition from “why’ thinking to “how” thinking is critical to entrepreneurship and to leadership more broadly.

3. Build other people up.
I’ve learned how critical it is to surround yourself with exceptional people and then throughout your career, to focus on building other people up.  None of us makes it to the top alone.  We get there only when connecting with one another, leaning on others and pushing each other along.  We get there only when we are part of a great team.

4. Take risks.
Taking risks is an easy concept to float, but it’s much harder to execute both for organizations and for individuals.  At the organizational level, many leaders mandate, ”Let’s create the next big innovation. Let’s take risks.” But then they overlook that, fundamentally, creating and taking risks implies greater failure.

Yes, there will be failures along the way, and that’s OK.  Creating a culture that takes risks is about creating a culture that rewards the lessons learned from failure as much as celebrating the home runs.  It’s the hard things that shape us and make us aware o our potential.  Be bold enough to overcome your fear of failure.  Sitting on the sidelines is no way to spend your life.

5. Tap into the power of grace.
Over the course of your career and your life, you will stumble.  It’s precisely at these times that you need grace.  Grace is about staying humble, about admitting your mistakes – to yourself and to others.  It’s about learning from the down times so that you are a different person the next time around.  And, perhaps most of all, it’s about forgiveness, forgiving yourself for not being perfect or not being able to be all things to all people.

Whatever you do, however big your dream, find grace and keep it with you on your journey.

You can read more articles like these at Women's Leadership Exchange