Three self leadership steps that help us avoid burnout
Regardless of what our professional role is, we all benefit from paying attention to our self-leadership skills.
Self-leadership is simply the way we lead ourselves. It is how we apply leadership skills to relating to, guiding and directing our own thoughts and actions, and it is something that you don’t want to ignore.
Although we may think self-leadership is a good thing to cultivate, we may not know how to improve our self-leadership skills. While we may want to improve our inner dialogue and optimise our potential, we may not know how to achieve this.
Positive self-leadership can be a great asset when it comes to burnout prevention. However, during covid, we may have let go of some of our optimal self-leadership strategies.
In this newsletter, I want to share steps we can take to enhance our self-leadership skills. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, focusing on these can drastically improve self-leadership and help avoid burnout.
First, be aware of any negative patterns that you may have developed. It may not seem like much, but simple awareness is a critical first step in improving your self-leadership skills. After all, if you don’t know what to fix, how can you become a better leader of yourself and others? Conducting an honest self-audit can help you uncover patterns of thinking that may have crept in like negativity, being judgemental or impatient.
Second, become more self-directed. By this, I mean being focused on living your life according to your values and aspirations. Many of us are looking for a more balanced and nourishing life, and there are plenty of ways that we can bring these to life. For instance, one effective step is to find ways to deeply relax, whether that is through a breathing or meditation practice, connecting with nature, doing fun things or being more active. I love small things like dancing to one song that I love as I move through my morning routine.
Third, we can become better self-leaders by leading others. It may seem paradoxical, but there is a feedback loop here. Building self-leadership awareness and skills lead to greater organisational success because it empowers your colleagues to regain control of their direction and goals, fulfil their potential, and make a positive impact on others around them. At the same time, we become more confident, silence that inner negative voice in our heads, and become even more effective leaders of others.
I’m not saying that improving our self-leadership skills is easy. It takes focus and attention. As you take the steps to optimise our self-leadership you can ask yourself some of the following questions:
• How would I lead and support my best employee?
• How would I want to help them be the best contributors and bring out their talent?
• How do I want to show up?
• As a leader, what do I want to model for my employees?
• How do my answers guide how I might like to lead myself?
References
The ‘Self-leadership’ approach report can be downloaded on the European Commission official website. European Commission. (2017, March). European Commission. https://ec.europa.eu/
Further insight
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