Self-Leadership and Personal Growth

• Leadership is governing oneself, meaning a person must lead themselves before leading others.
• A leader must consciously influence their own thoughts and behavior to achieve personal and organizational goals.
• Self-leadership includes foresight, good decision-making, and dedication to achieving goals.
• Self-awareness is an important factor for great self-leaders.
• Self-awareness is the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don't align with your internal standards.
• Self-regulation involves controlling one's behavior, emotions, and thoughts in the pursuit of long-term goals.
• Self-motivation is the ability to drive oneself to take initiative and action to pursue goals and complete tasks.

Significance of Self-Leadership

• Self-leadership is the first stage of leadership and is important for all employees, be they managers or subordinates.
• Self-leadership enables superior officers to plan and set objectives without much supervision and influences them to follow their plans.
• Self-leadership enables lower-level employees to be effective and efficient regardless of the governance style they encounter.
• Self-leadership makes individuals proactive, disciplined, and independent decision-makers, preventing them from feeling out of control and overwhelmed.
• Achievement of organizational goals depends on the self-leadership of both superiors and subordinates.

Development of Self-Leadership

• Everyone is a potential leader, and leadership is developed through learning and training.
• Clarity of purpose involves having a vision and being capable of setting it.
• A personal purpose or vision is the base of self-leadership.
• Without clear objectives, individuals risk following others' plans and getting stuck.
• Taking reasonable risks is essential, involving challenging oneself with courageous tasks and reasonably calculated risks relevant to one's purpose.
• Taking time to reflect on one's life involves objective self-assessment and comparison of the past, present, and future goals to understand flaws.
• Intolerance of anything includes not putting one's vision at risk with suggestions or ideas that do not align with the person’s vision.
• Intolerance includes not tolerating negative aspects of one's nature like laziness or fear.

Influence

• If you are influencing and providing direction and guidance to others, then you are leading.
• Leaders are born with special skills, talents or right circumstances, the truth is everyone are prospective leader.
• A good leader's skills, talents, character, and attitude matters.
• A leader must influence others for good and should also be influenced by others.
• Good leaders should also have skill, wisdom and compassion.
• Those who do not take a stand can easily be persuaded and influenced by others.
• You either influence or be influenced.

3 Ways to Influence

• Logical appeals: Tap into people's reasoning.
• Emotional appeals: Connect your message to emotions and values.
• Cooperative appeals: Involve collaboration and teamwork.

Secrets to Influential Leadership

• Know the people you work with

• Ask questions and listen for answers

• Seek and accept feedback

• Respect and Influence are important for leadership.