1.Know yourself
You can’t lead someone you can’t recognize. Hence, start finding yourself and knowing who you really are. You can achieve it by spending quite time alone, reflecting with your past experiences, lessons and realizations.
After recognizing who you really are, what’s your true value, and what your weaknesses and strengths are, improve yourself personally so that you’ll be prepared to accomplish your goals. To lead yourself, you have to train it to acquire the needed values, attitudes, habits, skills and disciplines to do the tasks you will assign to yourself. You cannot lead yourself to do a job it is not capable of.
Define the ultimate thing that you want to achieve. To effectively lead yourself, you have to align your objectives to your dreams. Remember that it’s our big dreams that keep us hoping and going in the midst of troubles and problems. So if you want yourself to follow your orders, your orders should not be conflicting with your dreams or with your mission and vision in life.
Create a strategic plan to clarify, specify and support your dreams. Your plan will be your specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and trackable set of objectives and procedures to achieving life’s successes. Remember that if you wish to lead yourself, you have to show it a clear and actionable plan to follow effectively and efficiently.
Get yourself out of mental, emotional and spiritual troubles so that it will follow you smoothly. To attain inner peace, forget your past that is troubling you, forgive your sinners, and just forward in your life.
Find the things you love to do and start doing them naturally and joyfully. Inspiration is based on one’s passion. An inspired person is one who have discovered the things he love and do them passionately or cheerfully. To lead yourself, find your inspiration and lead yourself to it accordingly.
Motivation is different from inspiration as the former is the creation of force to do things you are supposed to do even if you don’t love doing them. Take note that successful leadership is not only about influencing people to accomplish the things they love to do, but it is also about influencing them to do the things they must do, whether they like it or not. Remember that inspiration is based on passion, while motivation is based on sacrifice. Hence, in leading yourself, you have to learn how to sacrifice your own comfort to consistently motivate yourself.
This is basic and based on common sense. But most of us still forget it. Whether we are leading other people or ourselves, we have to provide them regular breaks for recovering from pain, stresses and tiredness. Naturally, any person will hardly follow you if he is already tired and sick.
Have honesty and honor in everything that you tell and promise to yourself because if you are fond of breaking your own promises, even yourself won’t trust anything you say and think.
If you think and believe that you have the qualities to be trusted, don’t doubt yourself! Be confident on the things that you can realistically achieve. Of course you cannot lead yourself to execute your life’s tasks if you don’t trust it.
Keep yourself humble and continue learning, realizing and improving. Leadership is about constant transformation to something better. Therefore, continue your personal, professional and even spiritual development.
Finally, to complete your self-leadership… love yourself. Loving is the deepest, hardest and long-lasting act of leadership. If you can do it, you can achieve a powerful leadership upon yourself. Remember that truly leading other people is loving them. Thus, you have to learn how to love yourself as you love others.
