Self-leadership: What It Is, What Skills It Encompasses And How To Develop It
It is common that, when talking about psychological factors that can make us earn more with less, we talk about the importance of leadership. A good leader is capable of bringing out the best in a team, of taking advantage of each person’s potential and making them enter into a work dynamic in which everyone complements each other. However, we often forget an element as or more important than this. It’s about self-leadership
Ultimately, in order to create a certain order around a project, it is first necessary to organize oneself, make sure that the actions we carry out really fit with our medium and long-term objectives, and that inconsistencies do not appear between what we do. We say what we want to do and what we are really doing. Throughout this article we will see what exactly self-leadership consists of and how we can enhance and develop this quality.
Self-leadership is set of psychological skills that support self-control, the ability to avoid distractions, and monitoring of one’s own actions according to their degree of compatibility with medium and long-term goals, according to the capabilities that oneself is estimated to have.
Thus, it can be said that self-leadership is made up of psychological processes responsible for ensuring that we have the maximum possibilities of reaching medium and long-term goals, taking into account that there will always be a certain degree of uncertainty in what lies ahead for us in the future. future, and that we have limited resources to get what we want. Knowing how to make decisions appropriately and using what we have intelligently are two key elements of self-leadership.
On the other hand, self-leadership is related to self-efficacy and self-concept, since in order to make our projects come to fruition We must be realistic and not aspire to unreasonable objectives; But it is also related to the strategies necessary to know how to channel our efforts well, so that we do not put ourselves at risk. Among these strategies we find, for example, those that allow us to prioritize tasks and focus attention.
Components of self-leadership
Between the elements that make up self-leadership we find the following.
1. Detailed thinking about the goal
These skills are those that allow us to formulate in the most concrete way possible a goal that we want to reach. There are mainly three:
2. Situation assessment and planning skills
These are the skills that allow a good diagnosis of the present moment and that allow us to obtain an x-ray of those relevant elements in order to develop a project in which we must think in the medium or long term. Fundamentally, they are the following:
3. Attention and monitoring skills
These skills are those that have to do with the implementation of the plan and the focusing of cognitive resources on its implementation and monitoring. There are three types of self-leadership skills:
How to improve this mental capacity?
As with many other psychological phenomena, it is possible to train this set of skills and make them perfect with practice. Below you can read several tips and steps to follow to improve self-leadership
1. Create hierarchies of facts when analyzing the present
When creating plans and subdividing objectives, it is important to ensure that everything forms a hierarchy, from the most concrete to the most abstract (or vice versa). In this way it will be much easier to get used to analyzing situations and including everything that is relevant in our “mental map” of the present.
A good way to do this is to perform a SWOT analysis first for a description of the present. In each of its categories it is possible to order elements according to their degree of specificity and importance, placing the most specific ones within broader ones. Thus, for the same hierarchical category it will be easier to detect elements that work in its favor and elements that play against it, which will then help to know if a plan is viable or not, and if so, what aspects must be resolved with it. highest priority and which ones need power to take advantage of them.
2. Get used to creating detailed plans and deadlines
Establishing a time in which specific tasks must have been completed is very good to avoid distractions, prioritize well and organize available resources Make a Gantt chart afterwards, to go from “the photograph” of moment 0 to the visualization of how a plan or project can unfold over time.
This creation of deadlines should go into detail, so that each day there is something specific to do in a specific number of hours. Otherwise, there is a risk of leaving everything until the last minute, which has negative repercussions in every way.
3. Find allies and delegate
In some projects it is possible to collaborate with third parties and delegate tasks, and in all of them it is necessary to first ask yourself if doing this is possible, to at least consider that possibility. In this way, the most strategic actions can be left to oneself, while those that are more technical or procedural can be carried out by another person. In this way a dynamic is generated in which there are no unnecessary interferences between the completion of tasks
This is an aspect of self-leadership that is often left aside, since it is sometimes assumed that knowing how to manage one’s own helm is a task that has to do with introspection and “internal” management of one’s own Self. However, this is a myth, because When it comes to working, the differentiation between oneself and the environment is simply a mirage
Therefore, we must do everything possible to ensure that the environment in which we work offers all the comforts that it is reasonable to obtain. For example, eliminating distractions is a step that is very often forgotten, but it helps a lot.
5. Live a healthy lifestyle
It may seem silly, but following the logic of the previous advice, it is necessary to do everything possible so that our interaction with the environment, whether through diet or exercise, puts us in the best possible disposition to work. Of course, you also need to sleep well
Conclusion: be our own leader to develop exciting projects
The idea underlying everything we have seen is that in order to get the most out of what we have, it is first necessary to know how to manage our own time, resources and efforts. This is not something that is achieved simply by accumulating assets to work with, but rather We must develop several skills that will allow us to maximize our chances of success and that, furthermore, they are generalizable to any initiative that we are going to have. The expressions of self-leadership that we show by creating our own business, for example, will probably also be noticed when we train in a new area of knowledge, or when we become parents.
In short, it is good to know that with less we can do more, if we have the predisposition to adopt that philosophy and the appropriate knowledge about our own capabilities.
