Introduction

There is a person with whom you spend more time than any other, a person who has more influence over you, and more ability to interfere with or to support your growth than anyone else. This ever-present companion is your own self.

I am not going to talk about the leadership of others. Instead, I am going to emphasise something more fundamental and more powerful—self-leadership. It is about the leadership that we exercise over ourselves. In fact, I am going to argue that if we ever hope to be effective leaders of others, we must first be effective leaders of ourselves. To better understand the process of self-leadership and how we can improve our capability in this area, we should first explore the meaning of the word “leadership.”

There are a seemingly endless number of definitions and descriptions of leadership—largely as a result of the vast number of persons who have researched and written on the subject (and their equally vast and differing viewpoints). All of these descriptions have some merit. However, in focusing on the idea of self-leadership, perhaps the most useful definition of leadership is simply “a process of influence.”

My favorite leadership proverb is:

“He who thinks he is leading and has no one following him is only taking a walk.”

Leadership = Influence

This short definition is actually quite broad and meaningful. It recognizes not only the importance of human influence in the determination of what we are and what we do, but also the complex nature of leadership (that is, influence is not an isolated event, but a process involving many parts). The existing literature on leadership is almost universally focused on influence exercised by one or more persons over others (in other words, influence exercised by “leaders” on “followers”).

Herein lies the problem – most people define leadership as the ability to achieve a position – not to get followers. Therefore they go after position, rank or title and then think once they in the position that they have become a leader! This type if thinking creates two common problems:

1. Those who possess the “status” of a leader often experience the frustration of few followers, and
2. Those who lack the proper titles may never get the opportunity to develop their’ leadership skills.

In taking an initial step towards understanding and improving our own self-leadership, we must first recognize that leadership is not just an outward process; we can and do lead ourselves. Indeed, as the opening quotation suggests, our greatest potential source of leadership and influence comes not from an external leader, but from within ourselves!