Leadership is a skill that we have often heard about, through which a person is able to influence people and get them to work as a team to achieve a goal. However, just as important or more important is self-leadership, which we forget more easily. This competence is necessary to achieve control over our lives and decisions, as well as for personal growth and development.
If you want to know more about this quality and how you can train it, keep reading this Psychology-Online article: Self-leadership: what it is, characteristics and how to develop it. With this information you will learn what self-leadership is and how it is applied.
The concept of leadership has been widely used in the workplace to talk about the management of work teams. Leadership is the ability to direct and motivate other people. Therefore, self-leadership will refer to this capacity intended for oneself. Let’s look in depth at what self-leadership is.
Definition of self-leadership
What is self-leadership? He self leadership concept is defined as the influence capacity intentional and conscious about one’s own thoughts, emotions and behaviors with the aim of achieving the personal goals that we have set for ourselves.
Self-leadership capacity is formed by the set of psychological skills that increase the likelihood of achievement of objectives both in the medium and long term, despite the limitation of resources and the uncertainty of the future. Self-leadership involves a series of competencies such as focusing attention on goals, persistence, and discipline for them, even if they do not result in immediate gratification, evaluation and monitoring of actions based on the established objectives, being able to adjust them if are not optimal, as well as planning and prioritizing tasks.
This skill is related to , since it presents a component of emotional management and regulation, as well as intrapersonal intelligence, since it implies awareness and knowledge of our own person and the ability to use this information for our own benefit.
The importance of self-leadership lies in the fact that the person has control of their own life, its consequence is personal empowerment. People with developed self-leadership make their own decisions independently and are able to maintain focus on their objectives, which increases the probability of achieving them, and therefore achieving what they have set out to do and is important to them. All this has an impact on a greater emotional well-beingpersonal growth, as well as greater security and confidence in one’s own person.
Self-leadership has great implications for one’s own competence and well-being, in addition to being highly valued in various areas, especially in the workplace. Training in these skills is possible and putting them into practice allows them to be perfected. Therefore, below we present a series of strategies to enhance your self-leadership:
- Know yourself: Spend some time analyzing your qualities, your . To facilitate this self-assessment, you can think about situations in which you believe you acted competently or appropriately and those in which your actions could be improved, as well as ask people close to you about your abilities or ask yourself questions. Through this exercise you will be able to get an idea about your resources and limitations.
- Self-study: Once you have identified your limitations or points to work on, it is advisable to work on them as much as possible through information and knowledge about these qualities, as well as searching for possible activities or tasks that can increase them. For example, if you think you need to improve your skills, you can sign up for group activities such as team sports, theater, an association, etc. or it is also possible to go to a professional person who provides training in social skills.
- The wheel of life: It is a personal development technique in which you draw a circle and write down ten areas that you would like to change or improve in your life. Once selected, it is necessary to prioritize by assigning a number to each of these points according to the importance given to each one. Using this tool, an analysis of the present and a focus on the future is carried out.
- Set goals: Once the desires or needs are identified, it is necessary to express them in an operational way, so that they stimulate and guide action. To do this, it is advisable to write specific and concrete objectives, which can be measured or evaluated in some way and are realistic, achievable through effort and work. It is also advisable to break down or subdivide the final objective into short, medium and long-term objectives, as it allows for a clearer vision when making an action plan.
- Design a strategy: Based on the information you have about your own resources and qualities and the set objectives, establish a bridge between the two, that is, find the methodology or actions that will bring you closer to your goals, but in a realistic way and based on your virtues and defects. . You can brainstorm and choose from all the options you consider the one that seems most plausible to you.
- Plan: In the development of self-leadership, the creation of plans using visual tools such as lists, diagrams and schedules is very useful. Planning must be carried out based on temporal criteria and the availability of resources, both personal and material. Schedule taking into account those activities that will take you the most time and those that will take the least according to your strengths and weaknesses. It is necessary to set deadlines for carrying out the established actions.
- Focus: To maintain attention, it is more effective to focus on a single activity and then on another, since the brain is able to avoid and filter distractions more.
- Manage changes: In your planning and programming you can include a plan B thinking about possible setbacks that may arise, however, if it is still not possible to control them, try to change your point of view and perceive this change or modification as an opportunity.
- Develop habits: As for perseverance, it is essential to create and commit to certain habits and routines that structure your daily life.
- Get motivated: To maintain motivation, discipline and perseverance, you need to disconnect, socialize, do rewarding activities and reward yourself from time to time after great efforts. In this way you contribute to reinforcing your own behaviors and achieving balance. Setting new and different challenges also helps your self-motivation.
- Be flexible: Self-leadership involves knowing when to rest and when to be flexible with yourself to obtain better performance. It is necessary to be a person who cultivates self-control, who does not punish himself and understands his mistakes, as well as taking his own emotions into account. The latter implies, for example, that if one day we have received bad news and paying attention to our emotions we detect that we are sad, we should temporarily lower the pace of demand and take care of ourselves or carry out those activities in our planning that do not require so much effort, if we we feel capable.
- Make adjustments: Making adjustments starts as much from self-monitoring and evaluation as from the capacity for flexibility. It is essential from time to time to analyze progress and one’s own state of mind and make modifications to the initial planning in a way that benefits our well-being and, therefore, our performance and achievement of objectives.
- Make a final assessment: reflect and extract the learning once you reach the end of the goal. In this assessment, try to focus on the process rather than the result, identify what has worked and what has not worked as well and incorporate this new information in the face of new challenges.
- Go to a professional person: You can consider the option of going to a professional to carry out training in self-leadership in general or in any of its components that you identify as necessary.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.