Before You Lead Others, Lead Yourself: The Importance of Self Leadership

“Exceptional leaders distinguish themselves because of superior self-leadership.” Daniel Goleman, ‘Emotional Intelligence’

What is self-leadership?

It is far more complex and nuanced than being ‘in control.’ Think of self-leadership more about being in the driving seat of our own lives: owning our own thoughts, feelings and actions, plus being in charge of our own direction of travel.

Self-leadership is about how we observe and manage ourselves; how we compassionately and deliberately reflect and evolve. It is about how we prioritise taking care of ourselves, how self-aware we are, and the extent to which our behaviour is consistently congruent with our values.

Good self-leadership is incompatible with playing the victim or being a people pleaser. It also means rejecting perfectionism and other forms of self-sabotage. How we handle disappointment, failure and challenges with honesty and compassion, and without self-rejection, catastrophising or blame shifting are all part of self-leadership.

It includes taking responsibility for doing the own inner work necessary to move past childhood or other issues, so that the past does not impact how we show up in the present in our relationships and working life. This means investing time, energy and emotional capacity in to therapy and/or coaching.

Another aspect of self-leadership is all thing to do with self-validation and self-worth, inner stability and self-trust. Knowing your value, and fostering the skills to handle your inner world even when thing get sticky and curve balls hit, means feeling calm and confident in your ability to cope no matter what. In this way, self-leadership is a core pillar to our resilience and adaptability.

It also means taking responsibility for how we spend our time and energy, how we balance our lives, who we spend time with, the media we consume and so on.

The Value of Self-Leadership for Leaders

The most effective leaders walk their talk. They do not ask of others what they are not doing themselves. Self-leadership brings self-respect, and this is an important component of being able to command the respect of others too, as well as role modelling to everyone around you many excellent, desirable personal traits.

One of these is trust, which is such an important trait for effective leaders to foster with everyone around them. Our people need to trust us to work calmly and effectively, to buy into the vision we ask them to contribute towards: with trust comes results, good culture and team spirit. If we cannot trust ourselves, how will others trust us? Self-leadership equals self-trust.

Strong self-leadership inspires, informs and empowers others around us to lead themselves too. If we assume that a good leader is empowering others to succeed rather than instructing and micromanaging, it ties in with wanting their team to be independent, responsible, self-aware and growing too.

A rising tide lifts all boats, and who wouldn’t want their leaders to have excellent self-leadership skills, in order for this to lift everyone around them and below them.

Developing Your Self-Leadership Skills

Balanced self-awareness is the first vital step in developing your self-leadership skills. Compassionate self-appraisal will take you far when you marry it with a growth mindset; be willing and humble enough to take steps to grow in the areas where you notice that you would like to show up differently.

The ability to ask for help and embrace the value of others on our journey can be a vital, courageous step that accelerates your self-leadership too. It could be from colleagues, family and friends for a 360 view. It could be working with a coach, therapist or mentor to support you to move beyond limiting patterns of feelings, thoughts or behaviour.

Great self-leadership happens deliberately when you choose it and move towards it, and I invite you to do that right away!

Harriet Waley-Cohen ticks many diversity boxes that provide her with extensive lived experience of being ‘different’: she is a Jewish, queer, full-time single mother to one neurodivergent teenager, and another who is gender nonconforming. She has plenty of personal experience around psychological health and physical disability issues too; Harriet is over 20 years in recovery from addictions and complex trauma, overcame serious injury and a pain condition following a car accident in 2016, as well as surviving breast cancer in 2018.

As a speaker, facilitator, trainer and coach, with a background in psychology, a decade in investments and a further decade coaching senior women on confidence and leadership - she specialises in working with companies in traditionally male dominated industries including banking, financial services and tech. She supports her clients to recruit and retain the best female talent at all levels; to shift their culture to one of outstanding allyship and to get a genuine ROI on their gender-focused DEI initiatives.

She offers a range of services from one off workshops designed to start a different kind of conversation about DEI, to a series of workshops, programs and consultancy that help companies break through the diversity glass ceiling. She also runs in house confidence and leadership programs for senior and “rising star” women and takes on a handful of 1-2-1 coaching clients each year for bespoke support.

https://www.harrietwaleycohen.com/