We are used to leading others, but I wonder how often we think of leading ourselves.

Self-leadership is a term we don’t hear often. When we think of leadership, we imagine someone in a position of power, making decisions and charting a course for everyone else to follow.

In its simplest form, self-leadership is the practice of actively influencing your thoughts, feelings, and actions in order to align them with your objectives, taking responsibility for yourself and what it is you need to do.

Self-leadership can be understood as a three-step process.

• Initiation: As simple as getting started, choosing your goal and identifying what it is you need to change or improve to get to it.
• Maintenance: Develop self-influencing behaviours by maintaining a repetition of specific thoughts, actions, or events.
• Growth: Your self-influencing behaviours will eventually become habits, which then feed back into themselves in a positive feedback loop.

As is the case with leadership, however, self-leadership comes with its own set of requirements and prerequisites.

• Understanding Yourself: Where leadership is about understanding others, self-leadership is about understanding your own strengths, weaknesses, triggers, values, and motivations. Who are you? What works for you and what doesn’t? What energises and empowers you? What deflates you?
• Self-Regulation: This is about how you manage your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours in different situations. Where one task will inspire and excite you, another will deflate you – but regardless of how you feel about a given task, you still have to do it.
• Self-Motivation: Cultivating intrinsic motivation to achieve your goals can be difficult and is often best taken in small measures. For example, many will listen to energising or exciting music to better start their days.
• Self-Monitoring: Ensure you stay on track by holding yourself accountable. You can only self-regulate if you are paying attention to yourself. Make sure you aren’t just doing the things that intrinsically motivate you.

Effective self-leadership forms the foundation from which you can lead others, setting the bar and showing others what is expected of them, but it is also key to making sure that you give your best every day.

View the video related to this blog.