Self-leadership = Success

To accomplish your career goals, you need more than guidance from a good leader — you also need to embrace your own inner leader. Self-leadership is all about influencing yourself to achieve your objectives and both employees and leaders can benefit from enhancing their skills in this area.

To do so, you must have a solid understanding of who you are as a person, what your values and mindset are, and how you can align your own personal goals with those of your organisation. Here’s why this kind of motivation mindset matters:

It improves emotional intelligence

To put it simply, when you can motivate yourself and really get to know what “makes you tick,” you will start noticing the same kinds of things in your co-workers, managers and more, according to a paper by Dr. Michelle Browning of National University. Improved emotional intelligence and self-awareness are byproducts of better understanding your own mental state and how to achieve your internal goals.

That, in turn, will make you more effective in your everyday work and interactions. And when an entire office makes these improvements at the same time, it’s easy to see how that helps the whole organisation.

Self-leadership will set you up for short- and long-term success in your career.

It helps you understand end goals — and how to get there

A big part of self-leadership is looking at where you are now, in your professional career, and where you want to be by the end of the year, five years from now and so on. Then, you must come up with a plan for how to get there, as leadership expert Tony Gambill recently wrote in Forbes. No one knows better than you what you may need to achieve these goals, and what might hold you back from doing so. When you can communicate these things to co-workers or managers, it helps them set you up for success as well.

If your workplace makes this a central part of its operating principles, it also creates a culture in which everyone supports one another and finds the best way to accommodate everyone’s needs on an ongoing basis.

It can be self-perpetuating

Once you know the basics of self-management, motivation is no longer something you need to worry about. As Thrive Global noted, this means you can motivate yourself to complete any number of tasks and reach various goals with greater ease. Doing so allows you to keep hitting goals time after time, because your self-awareness will generate both accountability for your current goals, and a clear idea of what you will want to do next (and after that, and so on) for years to come.

This kind of growth mindset is going to be critical for everyone in your company, and training them to get the most out of their efforts is therefore a good idea for your organisation as a whole. At ICML, our self-leadership course can be tailored to your organisation’s exact needs, for big groups or individual sessions, in-person or virtual, and more. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we can help your employees find the self-motivated success they need.