Cultivating Self-Leadership

I challenge each of you to take just a moment and reflect on those you admire. If you were to create your own personal Mt. Rushmore, who are those individuals you aspire to be? When you do this, you will likely find that these individuals are your personal heroes for a variety of reasons. They offer examples of what you can become. These leadership heroes likely offer you a personal roadmap to your own personal growth and self-leadership. These personal role models likely lead themselves well in a variety of ways. When we look at the leaders who are successful, we find individuals who exhibit the qualities of self-leadership: self-awareness, self-discipline, high emotional intelligence, superior relationship management, and personal responsibility. In today’s blog post, let’s take a closer look at each of these areas and how you can begin to apply them to your own personal and professional goals.

1. Self-Awareness: Every successful leader possesses this quality above all others. They know themselves (both the positive and negative) and know what they want to accomplish. In many ways, this is the first and hardest step to becoming what I call a "Significant Leader". Being self-aware means that you know what you want and what you don’t want. It is the foundation to creating self-discipline, because you won’t be swayed from your goals or persuaded to pursue activities which do not align with your goals. Once you know yourself, it becomes easier to set the parameters that create self-discipline. Spending time taking a personality assessment, writing down what you value, and creating your “why” statement are great ways to develop self-awareness.
2. Self-Discipline: First and foremost, self-leadership is about focus and discipline. By planning your day ahead of time, you begin to establish blocks of time that allow you to fully focus on a task or meeting at hand. Creating these blocks of time allow you to set up parameters on your availability to everyone and focus on who and what are most important. Creating self-discipline isn’t easy, but if you follow some formulas set out by famous authors such as Stephen Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) or David Allen (Getting Things Done), they offer excellent tips on how to set your goals and set your priorities for maximum effect.
3. High Emotional Intelligence: If you think back to your Mt. Rushmore people, you will likely realize that many of them have or had high emotional intelligence. If you haven’t read Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking books on the topic, I highly recommend Primal Leadership. It’s easy to read and understand how the five components of emotional intelligence are usually highly developed in self-leaders. In a nutshell, emotional intelligence is the ability to use one’s emotions in a way that positively influences. Self-leaders focus on developing and growing their emotional intelligence.
4. Relationship Management: Because self-leaders have cultivated and grown their emotional intelligence, they are often seen as empathetic and approachable. This is the key to becoming masterful as a leader – your ability to manage yourself in such a way that you can connect well with everyone. When you connect with others on a personal level, you create a synergy that enables you and others to grow exponentially.
5. Take Personal Responsibility: Self-leaders take personal responsibility for their actions and those of their team. When things don’t go well, self-leaders take responsibility and don’t blame others. They look in the mirror first. When things go well, they are confident in themselves to give credit to their team knowing that by seeing their team succeed, it reflects well on them as a leader. After all, leaders who lead themselves first tend to create self-motivated teams.

I hope these five tips offered to help you cultivate your own self-leadership are helpful. Our goal at LHLN is to help everyone become the best leader possible - both personally and professionally. You will notice that at the base of each of these five tips are books by authors far more researched and knowledgeable. In class, I often say that to be a leader, you must be a reader. Reading and writing about what you read is key to developing the qualities that you need to lead yourself. While I live leadership development daily, I want to hear from you, our readers. What are you doing to cultivate your own leadership? How are you self-leading? You can let us know by sending an email to: [email protected]

Interested in learning more about leadership? Check out our classes and resources on our website: www.lhln.org

Have a great rest of the week!

- Dean