DOXA Blog - Self-Leadership and Success

Self-Leadership and Success

Think of your life as a diversified organization. You are in the business of living. Your business consists of a career and managing the associated workloads, opportunities, and challenges. Your business also consists of managing a home and its maintenance. The people living within your home? Yes, your business includes managing their needs, from the school and recreational needs of children to the social and emotional needs of spouses.

When you think about it, you are the CEO of a rather diversified enterprise. Any such business requires capable leadership. Interestingly, however, we rarely think about self-leadership. We focus so intently on the tasks of each of our enterprises that we rarely stand back and survey how we're managing them--and ourselves. When it comes to our lives, we can be great workers and not such greater managers

Positive and Negative Leadership

Organizational psychology is filled with studies about effective leadership. Personality psychology has a growing literature on the positive dimensions of personal functioning. A look at the intersection of these two fields is instructive.

Positive Leadership summarizes a wealth of evidence suggesting that effective leaders attend to the mood of their employees; build their strengths; cultivate strong working relationships; and instil a sense of purpose and hope.

On a contrary, we also want to understand why an organization's best employees quit. Noting that employees quit their bosses, not their jobs, this points out that ineffective leaders’ overload employees with responsibilities, micro-manage, lose touch with employees, fail to care, communicate poorly, and fail to inspire.

The bottom line is that employees are more engaged in their work and more productive when their managers are more positively engaged with them. Incredibly, managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores, according to Gallup Research.

So what does this mean for self-management? An important implication is that our engagement with our own lives--our most basic life satisfaction--may be a direct function of how we manage the business of life.

Self-Management Begins with Self-Talk

Think of the stream of conscious thought as a conversation: It is our way of talking to ourselves. Self-talk shapes our relationship to ourselves; it is also our way of managing ourselves.

This perspective leads to an interesting question: Would you want your boss to talk to you the way you speak to yourself?

All too often, our self-talk is filled with frustration ("How can I possibly get this done?"); disgust ("I can't wait to get through this!"); pessimism ("Nothing works out!"); and apathy ("Whatever!"). Think of the self-talk of the perfectionist: Nothing is ever good enough and any falling short of (lofty) goals is failure. Some of the most damaging self-talk I've heard is from perfectionists: "I'm such an idiot!" and "I can't do anything right!".

Of course, none of us would want to hear such things from a supervisor. Exposed to that verbal abuse and negativity daily, we would quickly disengage from the workplace and start to look for new employment. But what if we are our own bosses and that is how we talk to ourselves? The result is not so different: we disengage.

Would we really need so many motivational speakers if we didn't spend so much time demotivating ourselves? Research suggests that the most important ingredient in effective psychotherapy is the quality of the helping relationship. Maybe, just maybe, what we find in a good therapist is someone who will talk to us more constructively than we speak to ourselves. Internalizing a more positive, constructive voice enables us to more positively and constructively manage ourselves.

Self-Management and The Body

Let’s takes a look at how our bodies react when we observe others involved in positive activity. During such periods of "moral elevation", we activate both our fight-or-flight responses and our self-soothing responses. This occurs, according to the researchers interviewed, when we need to attend closely to prosocial activities, such as in parenting. We think of moral elevation as a sentiment, but it is quite grounded in our patterns of physiological response.

In our self-management, we create situations that are either prosocial or antisocial, and that result in moral elevation or deflation. We feel those outcomes in our bodies. When we talk to ourselves in ways that leave us disengaged, the loss of energy and optimism is palpable. Conversely, when we challenge ourselves constructively and immerse ourselves in meaningful activity, we become spiritually and emotionally charged.

Consider how moral elevation and deflation may manifest themselves in our daily experience:

Across the board, positive self-management is energizing; self-management grounded in negative self-talk robs us of energy. In many ways, the state of our bodies reflects our mind state.

Leading The Self

Your life is a venture, and you are the leader of that venture. It is only our immersion in day-to-day tasks and demands that allows us to lose sight of that reality.

Imagine if you had to run a restaurant all by yourself. You cook all the dishes, greet and seat the customers, clean the tables, wash the dishes and equipment, source the ingredients for tomorrow's dishes, and handle all payments.

Even if such multitasking were possible, think of everything else that would need to be done. Who would take care of advertising the business, developing marketing strategies, ensuring compliance with health and other regulations, and keeping the books?

We are like the solo restaurant owner, running from kitchen to dining floor, keeping up with orders--and failing to develop the business as a result. It is easy to get so caught up in the demands of life that we stop acting as leaders of our lives. Our focus becomes reactive, rather than proactive.

Awareness: Everything begins with awareness. We cannot shift things if we are not aware. So, the first stage is being self-aware about what you know, don’t know and where you want to go. When we consciously work on self-awareness, we not only become aware of our surroundings but we also start focusing on building our ability.
Ability: When you become aware, you now have the ability to start building core skills, knowledge and tactics to elevate the things that you are doing. You have to look for gaps in skillsets and strengths to nurture, cultivate and develop those skills.
Application: Next, we have to start taking action and actually make things happen. The action is not taken to get end results directly. It is to get feedback which allows us to take better steps until the final result is achieved. So, without allowing procrastination disguised as perfection to stop us, we need to take action.
Accountability: You need to take responsibility for all the actions and outcomes. There is no benefit in pointing figures at others. By taking accountability, you will learn and grow.
Acceptance: You must accept the fact that nothing will go as planned. All the great plans and strategies we create never work out in their original form. So, allow yourself to be flexible in the process. Never wallow in pity. Instead accept the facts, make changes based on the information and keep taking action.
Assertiveness: The final stage where no matter the obstacles, you need to stay true and committed to your purpose and mission. Never give up and find ways to move around. Take concerted actions and execute until you figure out the core functions of the business.