5 Keys to Self-Leadership and Why They Matter
By: Cal Walters
The hardest person you and I will ever lead is the person we see in the mirror each day.
It’s hard to lead yourself. I have a hard time leading myself.
At the same time, how well we lead ourselves determines our capacity to impact the world.
Think about it. Who do you respect the most? It’s the people in your life that lead themselves the best.
If you have a boss that doesn't lead himself or herself well, you likely won't respect them. You may still do what they ask you to do, you may want their title or their car, but you won't be inspired by them and you won’t aspire to be like them.
We often see this first with our parents. Whether you want to be like your mom or dad is ultimately a product of how well they lead themselves. Did they teach you a way of living that they don’t live out themselves? As one wise friend recently asked me, “Does their video match their audio?”
Helping leaders grow and lead themselves better is what gets me excited about the work we do at Intentional Leader. I get excited about the incredible impact you can have on those in your circle of influence when you are at your best.
I know that when you learn to lead yourself better, you become a better father, mother, friend, co-worker, organizational leader . . . the list goes on and on.
I also know that when you lead yourself well you will be able to sustain excellence over time. You are less likely to burn out, have a significant moral failure that implodes your career, or get to the end of your life filled with regrets.
On the Intentional Leader blog and podcast, our goal is to bring you inspirational and actionable material that helps you lead yourself. And we will continue to do that. Today, I just want to outline what I consider 5 foundational keys to leading yourself well. We will explore these in more depth with future content.
1. Commit to learning about yourself.
The best leaders I know create consistent moments in their lives to get quiet, journal, ask themselves questions, explore their values, reflect on experiences, and get to know who they are and who they want to become over a lifetime.
2. Don’t lie to yourself about yourself, even if it hurts.
It’s hard to lead yourself when you’re lying to yourself. As Andy Stanley points out on his leadership podcast, you have participated in every bad decision you’ve ever made. The same is true for him and for me. This means we have the capacity to convince ourselves to do things that are ultimately not good for us. A key to avoiding this is to commit to being honest with ourselves even when it hurts. Often this means taking ownership over those moments in life where we made poor decisions. It’s not someone else’s fault. I decided to do that. I decided to have a bad attitude. For more on this important topic, I encourage you to read the amazing book, Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute.
3. Be in community and under authority.
This may seem weird to say in an article about self-leadership, but we need community and accountability to thrive, learn, and grow. One way that we can lead ourselves is by intentionally allowing people we respect to speak into our lives and hold us accountable to our own highest values. This is where a lot of leaders get in trouble as they progress in their careers. They rise through the ranks and become increasingly isolated from people that will hold them accountable. The leaders that sustain excellence over time create their own “board of advisors” early in life and commit to being honest with them, even when it hurts. There is no shortage of cautionary tales about leaders who fail to submit to authority. One I recently examined was the story of Pastor Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Driscoll led Mars Hill Church through more than a decade of unprecedented growth in Seattle, but Mars Hill’s influence basically evaporated overnight largely due to a loss of trust in Driscoll’s leadership and due to his unwillingness to submit to authority.
4. Commit to being better on the inside than you are on the outside.
Self-leadership is all about being a person of integrity. It's about keeping your commitments to others, but more importantly, it's about keeping your commitments to yourself. Leaders get in trouble when they begin to value the way others perceive them over how well they are keeping their own commitments and living a life of internal alignment. This is a similar trap as #3 for leaders who rise in the ranks. As you become more senior, your rank or position gives you a presumption of competence and character. People are less likely to check your work because they assume you know what you’re doing. It becomes easier to cut corners, and if you’re not careful, you can begin to value your image over the reality of the situation. When this happens, leaders are less likely to admit mistakes and more likely to try to cover things up to keep their images intact. The best leaders–and the leaders that sustain excellence over long periods of time–know that integrity on the inside should always trump outward appearances. When you live this way, you can be at peace with yourself.
5. Choose your highest values over your immediate desires.
We all struggle with this, and we will never be perfect, but we can strive to become people who choose our deepest values in life over our immediate, short term desires that don’t support the person we hope to become. You say you value health and fitness because it makes you feel better about yourself, live longer, and have more energy, yet you keep choosing to cheat on your nutrition plan and you keep skipping your workouts. You’re choosing a short term desire over your highest values. Again, we all do this, but those that lead themselves well get better and better at choosing their deepest values over those short term desires. A key to success in doing this is doing the work to identify your values and your why behind each value. Then, share those values with your board of advisors and create consistent moments to be held accountable to those values. This is not easy and it takes a lifetime to get better at this, but it’s so, so important because it determines your potential impact on others and the world.
As you consider these 5 keys to leading yourself, think about the people you respect the most in life. The people you want to be like. Maybe there isn’t one person that you want to be completely like, but you probably know people that do lead themselves really well in a certain area. For example, is there someone that is fit and healthy that you want to be like? Is there someone in your life that exemplifies the type of parent you’d love to be? Maybe the type of organizational leader you want to be? I bet the reason you want to be like them in that area is because they lead themselves well in that area.
If self-leadership were easy, we wouldn’t need to talk about this. Yet, it’s incredibly important and we are honored to be on this journey with you. Please reach out to us at Intentional Leader if you want help in this journey of self-leadership. Let us know your pain points and areas you find it hard to lead yourself.
At the end of our lives, our impact on others will be proportional to how well we lead ourselves. Let’s go make it count today!
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