Who's Leading YOUR Life?

Most of us think of leadership in organizations like a business, where some people are responsible for leading others toward achieving an outcome. Yet, the most essential leadership is the leadership we provide ourselves to achieve our life’s goals. A definition of leadership is the ability to guide, influence, and inspire others towards achieving a common goal or objective.

The massive flaw in this definition is that it is limited to leading others when the most critical leadership is our ability to lead ourselves. Even when we are responsible for leading others, I contend that you cannot effectively lead others if you can’t effectively lead yourself first. Self-leadership is a prerequisite to leading others.

Self-leadership is no different in practice than leading others. Leadership is the process of achieving a goal. My model has four simple but powerful steps in the leadership cycle: create a clear and compelling vision or goal, develop an effective strategy that moves you toward goal achievement, do the work the strategy requires, measure for feedback on progress to adjust the vision and strategy as needed, and keep doing the work and repeating the cycle until the vision is achieved.

This process is precisely the same whether you are leading a team of people at work or whether you are working on finishing your first marathon. When we modify the typical definition of leadership above to be specifically about self-leadership, only one word is changed (“others” becomes “yourself”), and one word, “common,” is dropped: leadership is the ability to guide, influence, and inspire yourself towards achieving a goal or objective.

Every goal needs this leadership process to be achieved, whether it is a professional or personal goal, whether you are leading others or leading yourself. The more explicitly, skillfully, and effectively you engage the leadership process, the more effectively and efficiently your goals will be achieved When we are children, we rely on our parents to lead us. Most parents provide this leadership passively and mindlessly, without clear goals and strategies and few quality feedback loops. Our parents didn’t think of themselves as our leaders, just parents.

When we became adults, no one gave us the memo telling us that we were now responsible for providing our own leadership to achieve our goals in life, much less what that leadership process was and how to get really good at it.

Popular culture teaches us that only people designated as leaders by other designated leaders are leaders, and the rest of us are just followers waiting for someone to lead us. What disempowering hogwash we have mindlessly bought into! We are ALL responsible for leading ourselves on our own life’s journey toward the goals that are the most meaningful to us. Step up – have the courage to lead the changes you seek in your life. No one else is going to do it for you

If you want to achieve sustainable positive change to enjoy a happier, more successful life, there is a safe and supportive environment to explore your transformation: askalthea.org. It’s free to join and explore but requires curiosity and a little courage. You are so worth it! 

I also offer Mindset Transformation Coaching for those seeking to accelerate personal growth.