Self Leadership - Leading You to Lead Yourselves

Valli Schneider
Feb 7, 2020
9 min read

Updated: May 7, 2020

So, as some of you might now, I recently started my PhD and designated my main topic of interest to be leadership (that’s just how it is - I don’t know exactly why myself).

Leadership in the typical Organizational Behavior sense entails a process of mutual influence between at least two people; one higher-power individual (the leader) and one or more lower power or status individuals (the followers). In other words, for leadership to occur, both a leader and at least one follower are required. Now, as you might expect, in the concept of self-leadership you yourself take on both roles - that of the leader and that of the follower, at the same time. It is thus a concept of self-influence, and challenges the fundamental assumptions of leadership.

Of course, leadership is just the term that is now used to describe what kind of influences we try to exert on ourselves - maybe another term might be even more informative or accurate, and then we wouldn’t have the problem with the term. But, as the process of influencing oneself has been coined with “self-leadership” and is now widely used, let’s just accept that in this case, leadership only requires one individual, and move on. Why argue about terms, right?

Self-leadership and its related processes is concerned with strategies, practices and processes for leading oneself toward performance of naturally motivating tasks, but also (and maybe even more importantly) about getting oneself to do work that must be done but is NOT naturally motivating. It comes from social cognitive psychology and is related to self-control and self-management, on which the concept was also based. But self-leadership, compared to management, places an even greater emphasis on cognition, intrinsic rewards, and other internal factors and thus goes beyond a main focus on behavioral strategies.

Personally, I don't even like the pure focus on achieving goals or increasing one's motivation to doing tasks they don't like. I see self-leadership as an overall set of strategies and little tricks that help you think in healthier (because less self-impeding) terms of yourself and those around you, to be able to change the parts about your life you can and want to change, and to change attitudes so the rest becomes easier to accept and maybe even enjoyable. I thus want to highlight that when I talk about self-leadership it's never about pure productivity or "getting things done" - it's more of a process to leading yourself to more self-love, acceptance, confidence and content.

The contemporary scientific perspective on self-leadership, first introduced by Manz in the 1980s, suggests that its process begins in the moment you compare the current state of a perceived situation to a self-set standard of how you would like the situation to be. You then assess the gap between the current and your target state, and then you take specific actions to reduce the difference. After reevaluating how much your behavior reduced the gap, the new status quo is observed - and if you’re still not satisfied, the cycle begins again. Sounds easy! … Yeah, who is science kidding, it’s not. Determinants of the success of this self-leading process include not-so-easy-to-obtain things like self-awareness, willingness to change, motivation, determination, optimism and resilience, and so on.

But this is EXACTLY what self-leadership is all about: how to find the right tools to get you where you want to be, how to become and stay motivated, and how to constructively support behavioural changes through internal rewards and helpful thinking. The different strategies through which you can then attain the self-direction and -motivation necessary to achieve certain goals, or to perform the tasks you want or need to do, can be generally categorised into three groups: behavior-focused strategies, natural reward strategies, and constructive thought pattern strategies.

1. Behavior-focused strategies

Behavior-focused strategies enable you to increase your self-awareness, to then be able to better manage your actions regarding necessary, but unfortunately often unpleasant tasks. The necessary first step of such strategies is called self-observation: You focus your attention on observing how, when and why you engage in certain behaviors. It is important because without observing how you behave in certain situations and why, you cannot begin to put effort into adjusting your actions such as eliminating unproductive behaviors.

It will also allow you to set adjusted goals for how you actually want to act. A large amount of research suggests that the more difficult (to achieve) and the more specific you set the goals for yourself, the more will this process increase your individual performance.

Goals can be complemented by rewards you set for yourself, both tangible ones such as a massage after an exhausting fitness class you attended or a vacation you book for after you complete a major project, or intangible and simple ones such as mentally celebrating yourself for finishing a difficult assignment. Self-punishment of course also plays a role. When framed as constructive and self-correcting feedback to yourself that leads to a change of undesirable behaviours that led you to not achieve certain goals, it can be supportive in the goal-achievement. There’s a dark side to it, too, though: An excessive dose of self-punishment, added to loads of self-criticism and feelings of guilt can cause serious harm as they lower your performance and negatively impact your self-image.

Self-cueing refers to using external cues as means to remind yourself of the constructive thoughts and behaviors you aspire to display. Such cues can be encouraging sticky notes, inspiring screen savers, daily reminders set on your phone, or lists of the target behaviours and your progress towards reaching them. They can help you keep attention on the goals and support you in your goal-attainment. And, attention on the goals and related efforts towards achieving those goals are what actually get you there. An inspiring quote I learned in a Coaching seminar is this:

In life, we get what we focus on. This often is not what we wish for, though.

Thus, if you for example really want to stop snoozing your alarm clock in the morning, but you don’t do anything to increase the chances of that happening, and simply acknowledge to yourself “Ugh, I wish I would stop snoozing my alarm for two hours”, it won’t do anything. Instead, observe what you think in the moments you hit the snooze button, and why you don’t want to get up right away. Set a goal that is specific and difficult to attain, e.g. “By the end of this month, I will snooze my alarm clock for a maximum of 10 minutes every weekday.” If you achieve it, think of something nice to treat yourself with (maybe a new alarm clock?;-)), and make adjustments in case you don’t. Put a note on your alarm (or name your phone alarm) that says “Get up, you have a goal to achieve!”, put your alarm clock far away from your bed so you have to get up to turn it off, or set the alarm later so that you really do have no chance but to get up if you don’t want to be late.

This way, you focus your attention and efforts on changing the behavior, instead of just wishing for it to come true one day. I am mad at myself that I don’t do 15 minutes of stretching every night before bed. But honestly - my Yoga mat is rolled up in the corner, I have no reminders anywhere, and my habit is to go to bed right after (or with) dinner, after which I’m surely not starting a quick yoga workout. So, wishful thinking? Yes. Focus and attention on changing it? Nope. Should I really wonder why it hasn’t happened yet? Nope.

As a quick summary: The behavior-focused strategies described above that can help increase your effectiveness and goal-achievement include self observation, self-goal setting, self-reward or self-punishment, and self-cueing. If used consistently they can encourage positive, desirable behaviors that lead to successful outcomes, while suppressing negative, undesirable behaviors that lead to unsuccessful outcomes. You get what you work for - not what you wish for!

2. Natural reward strategies

We can use natural reward strategies to create specific situations in which we are intrinsically motivated to do the task, or automatically rewarded by some enjoyable parts of the activity which might otherwise not be so enjoyable. There are two main strategies. The first one is about adding more pleasant and intrinsically motivating aspects into the task, which make the whole task at least somewhat rewarding. One perfect example which comes to my mind immediately is that I would much, much rather go to a nice Café to study and do my homework, instead of to the office.

In the office, not only do I have to do other-imposed work, but I also need to be quiet, sit in a rather uncomfortable chair and I need to walk 3 floors to get a cappuccino. In a Café, I feel like I am a bit more social, I get to know the London Café scene, I get fresh cappos without having to get up, and I can take quick people-watching breaks. Who wouldn’t be more intrinsically motivated to wake up to go to a Café instead of to the office?!

The other strategy we can use is not so much about changing the activity at hand, but is more about altering the perception of potentially unpleasant tasks - we focus our attention on the aspects of the task that are inherently rewarding, away from the unpleasant aspects of it.

This might for example be, again for me personally, that I remind myself that by reading the papers for class I might actually learn something that I could turn into a Blog - such as right now! Both strategies have a high chance of increasing the feeling of self-determination and enjoyment of the tasks, which increase intrinsic motivation to do them. They might also increase the feeling of how competent you are doing the task, because we are inherently better at something if we like to do it versus if we find it unpleasant.

To summarize, by focusing on more positive aspects of situations or tasks you are not immediately and naturally motivated to like, natural reward strategies allow you to focus on the good aspects of it and thus make the assignment at hand more intrinsically motivating. This way they can create feelings of competence and self-determination, which in turn stimulate performance-enhancing behaviors for the task.

3. Constructive thought pattern strategies.

As the name implies, constructive thought pattern strategies are used to make it easier to form constructive thought patterns, i.e. habitual and routine ways of thinking which can improve our performance. The strategies include for example recognising and altering (or replacing) fruitless beliefs and assumptions, e.g. by practicing positive self-talk. The first step is to examine your own thought patterns, whereby you identify such beliefs and patterns of thinking that seem like they stand in your way of performance, or are simply irrational - and to confront them face on. You need to recognize any negative self-talk that is destructive and should be replaced with more positive “mental chatter”. Listen to your inner dialogues, and stop it when you realize that it becomes self-demeaning and hurtful. Already by carefully analyzing your thoughts you can suppress pessimistic self-talk and consciously replace it with more positive words and beliefs.

This also goes for mental imagery, which means the symbolic or concrete imagination of an experience before the actual muscular stimulation of it. Golfers for example often mentally see themselves hitting the ball in just the right way so that it goes where they want it to go - they have to master the positive and goal-envisioning imagery tactics. By mentally envisioning the successful delivery of an activity before it actually takes place in real life, the likelihood of an actual successful performance will increase. Some other scholars confirmed this with a meta-analysis (a study design used to assess the results of previous research on a certain topic), consisting of 35 empirical studies, and found the predicted positive effect for mental imagery on tasks performed individually.

The self-leadership concept can be related to other motivational and self-influencing constructs, for example optimism, happiness, consciousness and other personality traits, self-monitoring or emotional intelligence. I will discuss these, or some of them, in separate posts, though.

This blog post was intended to give you an introduction to the topic of self-leadership, and explain the three major strategies you can, and probably to some extent already do automatically use to lead yourself on the way to a certain goal, such as successful performance on a task. These constructs can answer questions such as, “How can we keep up our focus on self-leadership during hardships and challenging times?”, “How can self-leadership help me in becoming more happy?”, “Does my personality, e.g. my self-monitoring predisposition, make me a natural self-leader or do my traits make it less easy, and I need to learn and practice to develop self-leadership skills?”, or “How does an ability to regulate my emotions (i.e. emotional intelligence) interact with an ability to regulate my thoughts (i.e. self-leadership)?”.

I’m very excited to explore these issues more with you!:-)