Leading self ( Owning responsibility)

As we discussed, leading self is all about strengthening your inner world.

The Third  factor to improve strengthening inner world is “personal  responsibility.”

When you search the meaning of responsibility in dictionary or Google, you get the answer as a duty to do something or the ability to respond to the situation. Those are outward focused.
From a leadership perspective, my view is personal responsibility is a feeling of ownership about something. That could be your life, your family, your team, your organization, your work or about the world. It is more of Inward oriented.
Most of the personal problems are due to lack of ownership feeling at an individual level only.

How does personal responsibility enhance your internal strength?

When you have a feeling of ownership about something when a problem occurs, you try to find solutions, and in this process, you are giving yourself towards solutions and internally you are feeling safe, comfort and peace.
Alternatively, When you do not own something, when the problem happens, you tend to blame or complain about the situation, and in this process, either the problem aggravates, or you are undergoing stress within yourself.


For example, 
When you own your work, if somebody points out some problem, you try to correct the problem. In case if you are not owning, you try to defend or put the problem on somebody.

If you own your team or organization, you try to educate your team member when you find fault with their performance. Else, you blame them or complain.

If you feel you are responsible for your family harmony, you try to bring solutions for relationship conflicts; else you complicate further by arguing and complaining.


The question to ask yourself is how much ownership you are taking for all life aspects and you can see the correlation of your internal strength!

Let us discuss further.

Leading self (Being grateful for everything)

As we discussed, leading self is all about strengthening your inner world. The second factor to improve strengthening inner world is “ being grateful for everything.” Being grateful means internally feeling gifted or blessed to have this life and being thankful for everything. Generally, we use to crib about the things which we have not yet attained or achieved or what we missed in the past. In this process, we forget the profound truth that up to this moment, many factors are working in favor of us to exist. As life is so uncertain that, we need to imbibe the feeling of being blessed for every aspect that made us to this moment. Those aspects could be your education, work, family, friends, personality and so on. When you feel gifted and being in a grateful state, you gain the following benefits 1. Becoming humble which takes you to the next level of your evolution to divine 2. Sincere desire to make an impact by giving and you start attracting the right things 3. Internally feeling secure and confident. How to be grateful? 1.    Count your blessings, and good things happened in your life 2.    Count your worries or challenges 3.    Compare the blessings vs. challenges, and I am sure everyone will have more blessings than challenges. Having suggested a rational way of being grateful, you need to be more reflective to feel the gratefulness at emotional way. It is possible through awareness and self-introspection. Whatever way you develop your inner world with a feeling of gratefulness, that is ok as long as you are in a grateful state as this improves your LEADERSHIP qualities in the external world.

Leading Self (Improving self-image through actions)

Having discussed the two approaches to improve self-confidence, now let us consider the third approach to improve your self-image and confidence.

Through action and small success:

One of the most powerful methods to improve your self-confidence is to take action by yourself and experience the small victory. That achievement experience will inculcate positive reinforcement in your mind and each cell of your body. The positive reinforcement in your mind improves your self-confidence.

For example,

One of the professional challenges for most of us is public speaking or making a presentation to strangers. Even though you are competent enough in your subject, the fear inside you may make you feel low about yourself or you display low confidence. How to overcome low self-image and improve self-confidence on public speaking?

You need to take action of speaking in a small group and experience it. When you achieve the small success through your actions, your mind registers that event and positive experience. When you are doing it again in a relatively larger audience, your mind pushes you with positive reinforcement of earlier success, and again you will do well. When you repeat those positive experiences many times, your self-image and self-confidence will go up on public speaking.

similarly, whenever you feel low about yourself in any aspects of life, you need to take action and experience it.

Hence, you need to take ACTION and achieve small success to improve your confidence which is more effective than any other methods like a self-help book, observation or listening.

Leading self (Improving self-confidence)

Improving self-image by enhancing the perspectives
 

As discussed last week, there are 3 methods by which we can improve our self-image inturn the self-confidence

1. Self-introspection
2. Enhancing perspectives
3. Through self-actions

Enhancing perspectives:

We are forming beliefs about self and the world through our windows and what we are seeing through it. Typically the windows are our family, friends, working environment and the location we live. When we widen our windows and vision, we see a new world of possibilities.
 
Widening windows are possible through observation, reading and listening to others.

For example,

When we see a person with no financial support, only with an engineering background, values, passion creates world-class  IT Institution, it enhances the perspective within us and gives us confidence on new possibilities.

When we see a man/women hailed from the middle-class family is heading the corporate giants at the international level, it enhances our perspective and gives us possibility thinking within us.

When we see a person, with the right strategy, passion and faith achieves world recognition, and become president or first citizien of a nation, it enhances our perspective and gives confidence within us about new possibilities.

Personally, when I met Onlysuccess founder Mr.Vidyashankar in 2008 and came to know about his childhood village background, an introvert type but with a deep hunger in making a difference to establish a world-class training organization.That moment instilled a confidence in me to start my organization in 2012 to make an impact on others.

The point is, irrespective of your background, if you enhance your perspectives, it will give you new possibilities, in turn, increase your self-confidence and in turn self-image.

Hence, look around and enhance your perspectives!

let us discuss the 3rd method to improve your confidence in next week.

Leading self (Improving Self confidence)

As discussed last week, our upbringing and environment plays a significant role in the way we think and feel about ourselves. Despite that fact, if we do not enhance our self-identity or image, it would affect the self-confidence and also the quality of life. Hence it becomes essential to improve our self-image.

How to enhance the self-image & boost self-confidence?

From my personal experience, three approaches  will help to improve confidence  
1.Self-introspection 
2.Widening the perspectives
3.Actions and achieving small successes.

1. Self-introspection:

One of the powerful and hard things to improve your self-image is through self-reflection or self-analysis. It is more about analyzing your inner feeling, thought process and finding the reasons or solutions yourself.

It is more powerful than listening to others, reading self-book.

For example,

Imagine that you attend a seminar, and you have valid questions to ask the speaker, but somehow due to inhibition, you do not speak up, and the event was over. In the end, you felt guilty of not raising, being shy and thought yourself inferior, low confident person. That impacts your self-identity as low.

If you want to overcome low self-identity and be strong personality next time, you need to analyze yourself in solitude by answering the following questions.

Precisely what happened yourself during the moment?
What prevented from asking questions?
What could have happened if you stood up against your inhibition?
How would you have felt if you did as per your inner thought?

The above similar dialogue within you will help you to improve your shortcomings, next time, when similar situations arise, you would become stronger.

Even though this approach is powerful, for some people, it is difficult to ask questions inward. But, from my experience, when you ask yourself and get answer yourself, that is the most impact moment to improve your self-confidence.

If you read some competent people, they use to do the self-introspection of their thought process, behaviors and actions on a DAILY BASIS.

Just it requires practice & time, and let us discuss other approaches in next week. 

Leading self (Impact of self-image)

As discussed last week, One of the factors for strengthening your inner world or “leading self” is self-image.

Self-image or identity is how you feel or think yourself most of the time. That is self-image of yourself.
For example,
if you feel or think like a capable most of the time, then you are identifying yourself as a capable person.
if you think yourself as unlucky most of the time, then you are identifying yourself as an Unlucky person.

How is self-image being formed within you?

The self-image is formed within in the following ways  

1.Your upbringing and background 
2.Your actions
3. The society or network also label you in a particular fashion most of the time, and you will even start believing yourself, then, that will become your self-identity or image.

How will this self-image affect you?

The feeling or thinking you have most of the time will get manifested or demonstrated outside as your personality either as CONFIDENT, ENERGETIC, ACTION-ORIENTED person or Low confident, dull, passive person.

 One of the surveys reveals that 85 % of the world population suffers from low self-image. The consequence of low self-image affects the relationship, communication, performance at work, parenting quality, living up to potential and so on. So the quality of life depends on the quality of self-image.

Let us discuss the method to improve the self-image next week.

Learn to Lead - Leading Self

As discussed, the first step in personal development process Is leading self or personal leadership.
Personal leadership precedes everything. If we do not learn to lead self, we will be finding difficult to manage others, organizational roles and responsibilities, and even family life.

What does “leading self” mean?

Leading self-means being aware of yourself, your emotions, beliefs, values and how you are effectively managing yourself. It is more of strengthening your inner world. The quality of your inner world would reflect externally as your outlook, appearance, tone, and style of carrying out your activities.

Hence, leading self-means how you are strengthening your quality of inner world.simple.

If your inner world is positive, vibrant, peaceful, then our external personality will also be more positive, energetic and pleasant to you and others.     
    
How to strengthen the inner world?

Irrespective your upbringing and environment, with little awareness and practice, you can strengthen your inner mindset, and thereby you lead yourself. It is all about keeping your mindset in a positive mode.

Given below the factors contributing to strengthening your inner world.

1. Self-image
2. Personal responsibility
3. Self-discipline
4. Being grateful
5. Faith

When we enhance our perspectives on the above factors, eventually we can strengthen the inner mindset.

Let us discuss each factors next week. 

Steps in Leadership Development Process

As discussed, leadership is all about personal development, and it is not given by others.
How to develop your leadership capabilities?

It consists of 4 steps. 

1.Personal leadership or leading yourself
2.Ensuring cordial Relationship with others or leading others
3.Performance  or delivering results
4.Developing others as a leader 

This step is applicable for everyone at ANY stages of the life cycle. 

For example, if you a "business head," you need to develop your leadership qualities by continuously working on those four steps.

If you are entering into the professional ladder as “ Trainee,” you have to develop your leadership capabilities continuously on those steps

On a personal front, if you are entering from "Bachelor to spouse role or spouse to father /mother," you have to develop your family leadership qualities based on those steps only.


It is a continuous improvement journey throughout life. There is no guarantee that as Manager you exhibited good leadership qualities would help you at General Management level. Each level or position calls for the development of different leadership capabilities.

As mentioned earlier, the leadership capabilities could be your thought process, attitude, words, actions and results and how it lifts your surroundings, your organizations, your teams and your personal and family quality of life.

Also, you observe that the development from one step to another step is sequential.but, in reality, it is parallel development only. We can not wait for PERFECT personal development to get into the next step of RELATIONSHIP building.

The point is you need to be conscious enough to develop yourself, your relationship quality, your performance and your effort in developing others on a continuous basis.

Let us discuss each step and its components in next week.

Learn to Lead (Understanding Leadership)

What is leadership?

Leadership is all about greatness in your thinking, your words, your actions and your results which leads to making a positive impact on your surroundings, organization, and family.

Leadership is a quality of the individual on character and competency which positively helps others.

Misconceptions about leadership :

1.    Leadership is given by others
2.    Leadership is related to a title like a manager or CEO
3.    Leadership is directly related to age and experience or educational qualification
4.    Leadership is for the organizational or political environment.
5.    Leadership is more about charisma

All the above are just a misunderstanding about leadership.

If you make a positive impact even a smile in others, that is leadership.

For example, we respect some people irrespective of their age, experience, position but only for the positive impact they made on us through their intention, words or actions. Whereas we may not like some people, even though they are holding reliable power. You can relate this with your network of people.


Leadership is all about what you do rather than who you are.

To illustrate this definition of leadership, some year back, Times of India had launched ad campaign " Lead India". The video link is given below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-gvE7MGIBw

Having understood the leadership definition as more about personal development, let us discuss the step by step development process next week.

Learn to Lead

If you observe any individual’s phenomenal growth or any organizational growth or any family’s upliftment, the hidden factor among all is“leadership.”

Leadership is not about the resources or positional status; it is more of personal qualities which are uplifting the individual or organization. For example, all organizations are filled with many people with various designations denoting as leaders, even then the organization struggles to make a positive impact or sustained growth. The reason is not due to resources, it is due to a lack of leadership.

As there are misconceptions on leadership and development, a holistic understanding is required on Leadership from the inside out perspective and we will discuss  the following  aspects of leadership
1. What is leadership and how it is different from a leader or manager?
2.Steps involved in developing leadership capability irrespective of your age, qualification or position
3.Insights in each of the steps in leadership development

I am firmly believing that “ Personal Leadership precedes any organizational, family leadership.” If the person is molded with the right leadership qualities, the organization he is associating with will also be flourishing. If the person is molded with right personal leadership qualities, his family upliftment also is ensured. The starting point is " personal leadership".

The fundamental is developing personal leadership capability WITHIN, and hence we will discuss more on Personal Leadership and its insights in the following weeks in detail.