PersONAL Leadership: Unlocking Your Potential Organization, Necessity, Action, Lessons (2 of 4)

May 21, 2022

Personal Leadership is your ongoing effort to meet your personal goals and responsibilities; it’s your focus, drive, and accountability. Like all leaders, your role is to provide vision, direction, and inspiration for others. But first, you must provide these for yourself.

Last month’s blog discussed Personalize, Evaluate, Responsibility, and Side Tracking. In this second of four blogs in the Personal Leadership: Unlocking Your Potential blog series, we are focusing on four new concepts: Organization, Necessity, Action, and Lessons. 

Each concept includes questions to answer on corresponding downloadable pages. Use them to continue building your personalized framework to unlock your leadership potential. 

O is for Organization: Striving for a healthy balance

Organize your Personal Leadership by prioritizing your emotional well-being. Strive for a healthy personal and professional balance that integrates your wants, needs, and responsibilities. Focus on creating positive experiences that yield desired outcomes and don’t worry about having an equal distribution of your time at home and work. 

Organization promotes clearer thinking and improves time management and consistency. It also increases your ability to set boundaries, be accountable, and meet responsibilities. When you are committed to organizing how you spend your time, you are also developing a greater capacity to be present, achieve your goals, and maintain (and strengthen) your relationships.

Coaching: Simon was happy about being assigned a long-term work project, but he also had concerns about the time it would require of him since he already felt significantly unbalanced with his personal time being far more limited than he wanted. Through coaching, Simon created boundaries around how he spent his time, which helped him feel more energetic, enthusiastic, and satisfied in all areas of his life.   

Get organized by asking yourself the following questions:

·      What does “emotional well-being” mean to me? 

·      What parts of my life feel imbalanced?             

·      Which of my wants, needs and responsibilities are not being met?

·      What, when, and how can I integrate them into my life? 

·      What are my desired outcomes of being more organized?

N is for Necessity: Caring for your emotional and physical health

Necessity relates to Personal Leadership because it focuses on your emotional and physical health. Remember that prioritizing self-care is a necessity because, without it, you are setting yourself up for burnout, exhaustion, and frustration.  

Feeling anxious or nervous is an example of self-care. Self-care is also your willingness to do hard things even when it feels uncomfortable. Don’t quit now, because giving yourself permission to keep going is a necessity for achieving your goals. And when you do, you’ll realize that you can do things you previously thought unattainable. 

Your physical health is just as important as your emotional health and caring for your body is a necessity. Please don’t push your body beyond its limits. Eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly, and get enough sleep every day. Respect your body and don’t put it in harm’s way by ignoring what it needs. 

Coaching: Five years after starting her business, Rayna’s enthusiasm and energy devolved into frustration and fatigue. She didn’t like her micromanaging leadership style and felt like an absentee parent to her young kids. Through coaching, Rayna realized that allowing her team to be independent was a necessity if she wanted to spend less time at work and more time at home with her family. As she implemented these changes, she began feeling emotionally and physically better – she began feeling like her “old self” again. 

When thinking about your emotional and physical well-being as a necessity for Personal Leadership, ask yourself the following questions:

·      What emotional and physical challenges am I currently facing?

·      How are they impacting my ability to achieve my goals? 

·      How can I better care for my overall health?

·      How will I benefit from prioritizing my emotional and physical health?

A is for Action: Implementing your plan 

Action is "the doing" part of Personal Leadership; it's putting your plan into action. Though taking that first step may cause you to feel nervous or anxious, it’s important to not give in to these feelings. Keep going and know that you'll be OK! If you start to doubt yourself, remember all the planning you've done. While these feelings can be unnerving, acknowledge them and move forward by taking action. 

Coaching: Twenty years after graduating college, Regina, a married at-home mother of two teenagers, was accepted into a nursing program. Her lifelong career aspiration of becoming a nurse was discussed in her coaching sessions, as was her growing anxiety about balancing her familial and academic responsibilities. Nearly withdrawing before starting, Regina ultimately put her plan into action and attended. She is now focusing on achieving her goals of completing her coursework and becoming a nurse before her youngest graduates high school in five years.

Ask yourself the following Personal Leadership questions as you get ready to take action: 

·      How do I know my plans are ready for this action step?

·      What am I feeling now?  

·      How do I want to address them?

·      Are there any last-minute changes I want to make before implementing my plans?   

·      What will I do if my emotions get the best of me?

L is for Lessons: Learning from reflections  

Lessons are Personal Leadership outcomes borne out of reflections (including but not limited to the goals you have achieved). These lessons result from a combination of (1) reviewing your processes from start to finish that (hopefully) led to achieving your goals, and (2) what you learned about yourself throughout the entire experience.  

When reflecting on your experiences, you are creating learning opportunities that will help develop strategies for improving what you have already done. Your reflections are personal insights that become lessons for helping navigate future goals with a stronger sense of motivation, skill, confidence, and success.  

Coaching: Joseph, a project manager, initiated coaching because of the anxiety he was experiencing when making team decisions about client projects and deadlines. Over the next several months, Joseph learned strategies that helped his confidence when making decisions, which ultimately improved his team interactions and reduced his fears about meeting client deadlines.  

As you think about the lessons that influence your Personal Leadership, ask yourself the following questions:

• What lessons have I learned about my process for achieving goals?

• How can I improve these processes? 

• What lessons have I learned about myself?

• How might these lessons help me with future goals?

Next month we will focus on the following Personal Leadership concepts: Learning, Experiment, Advancement, Drive, and Embrace.

Download your Personal Leadership Template HERE.