To achieve your goals, you need self-leadership. Because self-leadership is your inner success compass, guiding you through life. When you discover what truly matters to you and what you want to align your compass with, you can influence yourself to reach your goals. But what really hides behind the broad term of self-leadership?
The Seven Strategies of Self-Leadership
Setting Goals
Goals are the future visions that are personally important to us. They guide our actions and trigger our inner readiness to overcome obstacles on the path to goal achievement. You first need a clear idea of what you really want.
Your Action Step: Be specific about your goals – Use the SMART principle: Your goals should be specific, measurable, attractive, realistic, and time-bound.
Activating Willpower
Willpower mobilizes mental resources that are expended when facing inner resistance during goal pursuit or unexpectedly confronting external obstacles. With your willpower, you can overcome inner resistance.
Your Action Step: Take the first step towards your goal today. Partial steps require less willpower. So always consider: What is the next small, concrete step?
Controlling Motivation
When are people truly motivated? Motivation arises when inner demands and external circumstances prompt us to act and lead us to realize our goals. People experience intrinsic motivation, for example, when pursuing their hobbies. It becomes more challenging, however, when externally set demands and goals do not align with one’s own needs. It is important to understand and utilize your own motivation.
Your Action Step: Find a motivating aspect in your work. Why is your task meaningful and what brings you joy?
Regulating Emotions
Performance-enhancing emotions accelerate the realization of your intentions. These emotions serve to increase effort in pursuing goals and to direct one’s actions in the desired direction. Our emotions are the fuel for success and failure, for joy and disappointment. They influence our thinking and actions. People set certain goals hoping to experience pleasant, positive emotions through goal achievement. This doesn’t always work perfectly.
Your Action Step: Use embodiment for positive emotions – Research shows that posture, facial expressions, and gestures influence our motivation.
Shaping the Environment
It is important to utilize situational conditions and circumstances of the environment to favor goal attainment rather than hinder it. All design options offered by the environment should be utilized. Decide for yourself how to deal with disliked environmental factors. We can’t always like everything in our environment. That’s okay. However, we must decide how we want to deal with factors we don’t like so that we don’t keep getting annoyed and limiting ourselves through our environment.
Your Action Step: Change it. Leave it. Or Love it. Choose one of the three options: Change it, leave it, or learn to accept it. Clear decisions help shape the environment to reach your goal.
Adapting Behavior
You must recognize whether and when a behavioral change is necessary to implement lasting behavioral adjustments. Changing behavioral habits means leaving the comfort zone and becoming proactive. Sometimes a goal is unattainable because a tried and tested approach does not fit the new situation. Routines save time, but if they prove less effective over time, a conscious analysis is worthwhile.
Your Action Step: Choose a situation in which you exhibit routine behavior but do not achieve success. What demands does the situation place on you? Which reaction do you usually show? What consequence does your reaction lead to? To adapt your behavior to the situation, you can reverse engineer it. Define the desired consequence, consider alternative actions, choose the one that brings you closest to your desired success.
Managing Energy
Managing physical condition, vitality, and fitness means consciously dealing with one’s own body, being physically active, and creating optimal physical conditions for a high-performance psyche.
Your Action Step: Consider what changes you want to make and what you want to maintain in the areas of movement, relaxation, and nutrition. Then choose a specific step to improve physical vitality.
What’s next?
You might be wondering how to implement these steps on your own. We know: It’s not always easy. That’s why we developed the Online Coaching Self-Leadership. In this coaching, you will find out with a self-assessment how your self-leadership looks in these seven areas. The online coaching is not a one-size-fits-all solution but tailored to your individual development potential. You will be accompanied by your coach Debora Karsch throughout the coaching process. Record your thoughts and progress in your self-leadership journal. Learn how to handle self-leadership, finally achieve goals, and turn wishes into reality.
