#4 What’s your personal motivation for attending to self-leadership?
Self-Leadership Series 1 – #4 What’s your personal motivation for attending to self-leadership?
This post invites the reader to reflect on their current experience of life and the deeper motivation that might drive the decision to bring greater attention to self-leadership.
There are many life circumstances and experiences that can precipitate us making a conscious choice to bring greater attention to self-leadership. Perhaps some of these may also apply to you?
- Are you stuck in a rut of reacting to the expectations and demands of others?
- Do you regularly feel overwhelmed with everything work and life demand of you?
- Have you lost connection with what truly matters?
- Do you feel ‘foggy’ in the head and unable to make good decisions and choices?
- Are you falling short of having the level of impact that you want to have as a leader?
- Are you unable to give your time, energy and focus to the things that matter most in your life?
- Do you feel stuck on the ‘doing’ treadmill, not knowing where to begin to make change?
- Do you lack the capacity and ability you need to take your leadership and personal effectiveness to the next level?
While it may not necessarily feel like it, all of these can be symptoms and signs that there is an opportunity for to change your own reality through attending to self- leadership.
These circumstances and experiences, once acknowledged, can be the catalyst that helps us to take positive action on our self-leadership journey. I know this works because I’ve seen it happen on many occasions in the self-leadership work I’ve been privileged to support within a wide range of leaders. One described her personal change journey better than I would be able to:
I was feeling hopeless, helpless, full of misery. This affected my emotional and physical wellbeing. One day my inner self started shouting at me, ‘You need to change; you cannot keep living like this’. Through making a clear decision to no longer accept the status quo, I made a commitment to myself to activate a new level of self-leadership. This enabled me to open to new possibilities and start to make different choices in my life that step by step took me towards a different reality. I am glad I sought support and chose this path … Change is difficult in the beginning, but the end result is beautiful and worth it.
It is also possible that despite our level of dissatisfaction with whatever situation we find ourselves in that it still isn’t enough to convince ourselves to get started!
Enter – Personal Motivation. Taking time to connect with the deeper ‘why’ that is motivating us to create change can be the difference between inertia and action.
What’s your personal motivation for attending to your own self-leadership?
There are four common personal motivations that when leveraged can drive people from inertia to action on their self-leadership journey. Which one/s resonate for you?
Do you wish to:
- Experience greater levels of personal satisfaction, wellbeing and fulfilment?
- Uplift your capability and effectiveness in leading self /others towards creating outcomes that matter?
- Be the best role model that you can be for your children /younger generations/ employees/ colleagues/friends?
- Make your unique and valuable contribution to making the world a better place and recognising that the most powerful way of attending to this is to activate and commit to self-leadership?
Your personal motivation for creating change may also come from acknowledging a little voice inside of you that is telling you that something needs to change such as it did for my client above – perhaps it’s to do with a need to attend to your wellbeing or an unhealthy situation that you find yourself in or having a courageous conversation that you know you need to have?
These are just a few examples. Your specific motivation might be different from all of these and that’s perfect too.
We will be motivated by different things at different times based on the situation and context in which we are operating. Whatever that context is for you- it is worth getting clear on your personal motivation for attending to self-leadership. It can after all, hold the key to moving from inertia to action.
The next post in this series will explore the question: What is self-leadership?
This post is an excerpt from my draft book Activating Self Leadership.
