I always believe that a person should first be a leader of himself before he can become a leader of others. Self mastery is the key to becoming a great leader. It is important that you have a mastery of yourself. Self assessment and self knowing are some of the steps to self mastery. This is what I call Leadership thru Self Mastery.
Self mastery is knowing your own motivation. These are the things that inspire you to do your best. If you know your motivation it will be easy for you to reach your goals, all you need to do is to focus on your motivation and everything else will follow. Motivation should come from your own self. You don't expect someone to motivate you. It is important that you are able to motivate, coach and know yourself first before you can effectively lead other people.
Self mastery is knowing your skills and talents. You know the things that you can do to accomplish a task. You know your strategy to achieve your goals because you know what you can do.
Self mastery is also knowing your communication and leadership style. If you know your own style, you can easily adapt to different personality. You know what to do in situations wherein people interaction is needed.
Hence, it is vital that we assess ourselves first and learn how to analyse our own strengths and challenges before we aspire to become a leader of others. It is like making ourselves our own guinea pig. Try some of these suggestions in using this theory in your leadership training. These are the same activities that I have used when I conducted the Leadership thru Self Mastery training for my team. You can expect an impressive result in the motivation and performance of your team members.
Perform these activities with your team:
Activity 1
Self Evaluation and Action Planning
- Let them identify their strengths and challenges
- Let them identify action plans that will enable them to further hone their strengths and address their challenges
- Ask them what are the results that they are expecting based on their action plans?
Activity 2
Who is your Idol?
Ask them to answer these questions:
- Among the famous leaders who do you look up to? What are his/her characteristics that you would like to have?
- What are the characteristics that you both have?
- What are the challenges that you both have?
- What is your “IDOL” doing to address these challenges?
- Describe a situation that you encountered in the past and how your “Idol” handled it. If you were the Leader, would you have handled it differently? How and Why?
Activity 3
Self Mastery vs. Leadership
Self-Mastery
- Ask them to analyse their current performance (i.e. quarterly performance, comparison of 2 months performance)
- Ask them to identify their current strengths and challenges
- What are their action plans?
- What are the results that they expect?
- Ask them to coach their self. (Using 3rd party - example: Hi! (say your name) I have identified that your strengths are….)
Leadership
- Choose a Partner
- Ask them to analyse their partner's performance (i.e. quarterly performance, comparison of 2 months performance)
- Let them identify their partner's strengths and challenges
- What are their action plans for their partner?
- What are the results that they expect?
- Ask them to coach your partner
Notice that most people who can easily coach their “self” can effectively coach other people. They are able to come up with good and attainable action plans for their partner because they know which action plans work for them and they can easily identify action plans that will just result to failure. Hence, the results of the action plans are impressive, realistic and fast.
This is a good preparation for aspiring leaders to first be a self-leader.
