There are fewer gatekeepers, permission-givers, and clear paths to success than at any other time in history. You can’t rely on anyone else to tap you on the should and say, “Step forward. This is your time.”
If you won’t do it for yourself, no one is going to do it for you.
Yet, the options can be overwhelming. While there are fewer gatekeepers and permission-givers, there are many more ways to create your own livelihood. There are almost an infinite number of ways to take your idea to market, communicate with the people who need it most, and partner with others to reach your goals.
Self-leadership is your path out of the overwhelm. It’s your personalized approach to realizing your ideas in a business that brings you the wealth, peace, and ease you really want.
Self-leadership isn’t just about what you want to do—it’s about how you want to do it. You get to decide where you’re headed and how you’re going to get there. Self-leadership is the key to creating a framework that has you relying more on yourself than on gurus or can’t lose formulas.
Self-leadership also isn’t about being more productive—it’s about being more effective. You don’t have to do or produce more. Instead, you need to make what you’re doing or producing really count. The best way to do that is to work what’s true for you and how you really want to connect with people into everything you do. Position your work in a way that’s aligned with the way you show up naturally and you’ll find traction and efficacy less fleeting.
- Prefer not to connect with large groups of people? Focus on careful, intentional, one-to-one relationship-building.
- Don’t like the hassle of big launches and look-at-me marketing? Choose to nurture a high-touch business based on a strong referral engine.
- Love connecting with an audience from the stage? Figure out ways to get in front of event organizers and build your platform.
The choice–and the power–is yours.
Effective self-leaders are able to avoid self-defeating beliefs, leverage their points of power, and collaborate with others—resulting in goal achievement, independence, and the ability to lead others more effectively.
— Ken Blanchard
To become a better self-leader and decision-maker for your business, you need to hone 3 key skills: perception, discernment, and focus. In the old economy, most of us outsourced these skills. We relied on others to tell us what was going on in our world, we sought plans and formulas from people who knew better than us, and we waited for management to tell us what to put our attention on.
Now, there are both fewer ways to outsource these skills and many more opportunities to take control for yourself. But now that you have control, what are you going to do with it? You can control yourself into a hole in the ground or you can lead yourself where you want to go. You can get bogged down in busywork or you can devise creative plans and watch them work. You can force yourself to struggle through the conventional way or decide to blaze your own path.
You can use perception, discernment, and focus to find your own way. When you hone your perception, you see, hear, feel, and sense more of what is going on around you. You have more information to work with. You’ll feel better prepared and more out-in-front of the market. When you refine your skill of discernment, you use the information at your disposal to get closer to your own goals. You see opportunities for creativity instead of simple choices. When you sharpen your focus, you only spend time doing work that counts. You know what’s going to push the needle and you concentrate on those things.
Using those skills, you can rely less on outside direction and more on your own self-leadership. You can take advantage of all the opportunities the New Economy affords you without getting stuck in the weeds. Tapping into your own self-leadership makes you more powerful, quietly. When you’re more effective, more focused, more perceptive and aligned with the market, you exude authority. And that’s intoxicating.
If you’re in the position of needing to convince others to trust you, to cultivate a sense of community and belonging, and to present yourself as powerful—and we all are, invest yourself in becoming a keen self-leader.
