9 Practices of the Personal Leader

Personal Leadership is a choice. Think about it – we are called to lead because we want to.  Either we are attracted to the act of being a role model or we actively want to create an environment to which others want to belong and participate.

Personal Leadership is also a lifestyle.  It becomes a lifestyle when we start engaging in the practices it takes to perform with excellence as a personal leader.

How we show up day to day, day in – day out,  is how we will be measured.  We will score higher on the rating card when our inside world – our thoughts, beliefs, feelings comes into congruence with our outside world – the way we are in the world, the things we do and say.

Here are 9 of the practices of living the lifestyle of a personal leader:

1. Being open and responsive. Being open and responsive to new ideas, to being willing and ready to change, to being willing to learn, being curious.
2. Ready to think big about who we are and what we offer the world.  To think bigger about who we are as individuals means leaving behind any negative self talk we may have carried, even if we have lugged it around for years. It means leaving behind criticism from others, and fears we might leave someone behind if we became fully the human as magnificent as we already are.  It also means leaving behind the illusion that is overwhelm – fearing  being the leader we dream of being, would be too much to handle.
3. No more lone ranger. Being willing to have supportive relationships and structures.  Doing things on our own – or rather thinking we can do everything on our own is a recipe for being inefficient.  Once we open ourselves up to asking for help, enrolling others or support structures to sustain us on our journey – we open ourselves to having greater energy to do the things that are most meaningful.
4. Operate at the highest level of integrity. Having integrity is a choice.  A choice to be consistent in doing what we say we will, what we say we will do,  how each of us think – right to the point of it being finished.   When we are out of integrity – it wears at our soul.  When we are in our integrity – it is attractive to both ourselves in the sense of how we feel – but also to others.  Integrity is inspiring.
5. Ability to self inspire and to inspire others. Personal Leaders gather inspiration from the environment around them – and they share their meaningful dreams with people around them.
6. Being Courageous and Authentic: It takes both courage and authenticity to be a personal leader.  Practicing the courage to go beyond the limits of  our individual current beliefs and thinking – to be willing to be open to other perspectives and ideals – and then the authenticity to share what we are thinking, feeling, in a congruent way with those around us is the practice needed to expand our capacity for courage and authenticity.
7. Being responsive to our mind – body awareness.  Knowing how we  feel and think about something is a key practice in personal leadership development.  Practicing feeling things fully and learning to recognize signals from our bodies are practices that can benefit an individual tremendously.  Things like developing  intuition, or the ability to learn from our emotions.
8. Telling the Truth. Telling the truth is one of those things we wish everyone else did and yearn for, and can sometimes see like a hard hill to climb.  Telling the truth may mean sharing our thoughts and feelings, it may mean being vulnerable or risk having someone be emotional around us.
9. Having full self expression of  our personal values. Our personal values – those things that are most important to us is an individual thing.  Some values we learn from our environment (like from our families)  some we come to appreciate through our own life experience.  The practice of a personal leader around values is to share them with those that we interact with, and to honour them ourselves in everything we do.

Tagged as: Leadership development, Personal Leadership