3 Essentials Of Self Leadership
We have heard maxims such as ‘One is too small a number to achieve greatness’. ‘You can go fast alone but you can’t go far.’
They often seem true. More often than not there is a team behind all significant ‘individual’ accomplishments. The question to ask then is how would you put a team together? Why would someone be a part of your team?
Though it may sound like a cliché, starting point for any worthwhile undertaking is a dream, a vision. A vision with a date becomes a goal.
Achieving a worthwhile goal is a process and developing leadership abilities is a must. First person we should learn to lead is ourselves. Self-leadership doesn’t happen by accident. It takes effort, requiring daily practice and attention to make progress.
This kind of self-leadership is important especially when the world is going through so much of turmoil. This is the time when nation’s economy is going down but the stock markets are going up. There seem to be protests at some places and peace/harmony in others. When we are inundated with conflicting information, it is absolutely important to have our vision as our true north and lead our life in harmony with our core values.
Self leaders are constantly working on themselves, on their self-awareness, reflecting on their life and correcting their course. Let us look at it a bit more detail. I intend to elaborate each of the below points in my future posts.
- Self Awareness: According to Wikipidea, self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. It has many dimensions to it – awareness of your own emotions, energy levels, health, the way you are dealing with your time, money, your interaction with other people and so on.
- Self Reflection: Socrates said “An unexamined life is not worth living”. In this age where people are being held hostage by their mobile phones, taking time out for self-reflection requires deliberate practice. Self-reflection is taking time to think about your own thoughts, values, emotions, attitudes & desires. It is understanding why you do what you do. It requires pressing the ‘pause’ button in your life.
- Self Regulation: It refers to the extent to which people can influence, modify or control their own thought, action, behavior according to goals and standards (personal or social).
How would I get started? Like any worthwhile endeavor, we don’t wait for all traffic lights in our path to go green. We get started and figure out along the way. A good starting point can be investing 40% of the time in leading oneself. If we continue this journey of self-mastery, over a period of time we develop so much clarity in our life that things seem to be totally in our control even in the midst of complete chaos.
We continue to grow, that is how we get permission to lead. When we start leading our life inside out and when every thought resonates with our vision, inspiring a few people towards our vision is just a natural consequence of our actions.
