Developing a Commitment to the Self

If you accept that there is more learning and growth ahead along the road of your life, the first question is: How do you learn more about yourself? This is essential in order to then act on that knowledge to intentionally set personal growth into motion.

The following are powerful techniques:

Understand your story

Take the time to notice

Use the Johari Window

Learn your type and archetypes

Use the Action-Reflection Loop

Know your strengths and weaknesses

Discover your personal mission, vision, and values.

Let’s explore each of these to see how they can help you. Some will likely have more impact than others, depending on what’s happened so far in your life and development, and what you sense is ahead.

Understand your story

One effective practice coaches use to help clients come to a new and often transformational understanding of themselves is helping them understand “the story.” Your story, in this context, means truly comprehending—often for the first time—what you tell yourself about who you are. The story is an often unconsciously chosen narrative that explains reality to you, and often justifies your actions. It is the product of deep assumptions about the self. An erroneous, self-limiting belief is an example of a bad story.

PRINCIPLE

Your “story” is who you tell yourself you are. As a leader, it is essential you understand as objectively as possible your story, and craft the one that works best.

Some examples of self-defining, identity-oriented stories include “I have a very busy job, a great family, no time, and a stressful boss.” Or, “I am a great team member and I work well with others, but I have no life and I have questions about whether I’m doing the right thing.”

Underneath these stories are deeper, nested stories that have powerful effects on how we engage the world and ourselves. “I am very competent.” Or, “I have questions sometimes about my competence.” A pivotal part of the story for a leader might be “You can’t trust people,” or “I have to do things myself.” Contrast that with a story about trusting others and believing that delegation is essential, and good. The story becomes action.

The story is the product of internal scripts or “lines of code,” reflecting the deep assumptions about who we are and what we are about. It is often forged early, usually in our adolescent years, and events can reinforce or challenge it. Children start to shape their story about themselves watching adults in action. Anything from a victim mentality to a sense of unlimited opportunities comes out of absorbing the messages and the narratives children see playing out around them.

The story is also the product of intrapersonal and interpersonal sense-making. It’s how we explain what is happening in and around us. The story can have elements that are very helpful and functional. That is, as a metaphorical map it accurately describes the world and the interactions we have experienced so far. Or, the story can include erroneous, incomplete, self-justifying, rationalizing, and self-deluding elements.

However accurate or productive the story, it has a powerful role in forging identity, a sense of reality and meaning, and from there, behavior, communication, and functioning in the world. You do everything for a reason—it has to make sense on some level to you. The story is the central sense-making mechanism within you.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

—LEO TOLSTOY

When your views of yourself and the world become dysfunctional or confused, when you consistently experience problems—particularly recurring problems—it may be time to look at your story. In other words, the focus might be turned from external events to your interpretation of those events in the context of your story.

When the story isn’t working well for you as a leader anymore, when inner or outer conflict, doubt, anxiety, and self-questioning rise above a certain level, it is an invitation to ask yourself the pivotal, and often pause-inducing question posed by Dr. Neil Stroul, an executive leadership coach in the Washington, D.C., area: “Do you have your story, or does your story have you?”

This powerful question points to the difference between being aware of the story and being its unwitting victim.

You can often find the story in recurring problems, patterns, or systemic frustrations. Be careful, because to many people, the story conceals and protects itself through your projecting of the problem onto others. For example, when I couldn’t prevail with impersonal, cold logic, the issue was others’ lack of rationality. Only when I traced the problem back to how I was framing the interaction did I realize I had a bad line of code called “people don’t matter” in my story.

The gift of the question about the story is that it invites leaders to consider whether they are really the sum of all their experiences, perceptions, values, opinions, and beliefs (particularly beliefs about the self), or whether there are other possibilities. Discovering that the story is often somewhat arbitrarily and unconsciously constructed, and that it is actually just one story among many, opens the door to deeper awareness of self. It means you can not only look at situations in new ways, but more fundamentally, also look at yourself in new ways. There’s still much work to do on the journey, but a hugely important step has been taken. This is an enormous pivot point in adult development.

“One key to successful leadership is continuous personal change. Personal change is a reflection of our inner growth and empowerment.”

—ROBERT E. QUINN

In a sense, we are victims of experience if that experience is not coupled with continuous reflection and a conscious choice of the story that is the most accurate and works best. People who are committed to the self are aware of and—as we will see—create their own story.

Take the time to notice

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

—R.D. LAING

A simple and powerful technique you can use to understand yourself more objectively is simply to take the time to notice. Not judge, evaluate or interpret—simply notice. This means heightening awareness of actions and reactions, internally and with other people. By temporarily refusing to put a value judgment on what you observe, you bypass the ego-based unconscious defenses and explanations of behavior that often seek to justify and explain away anything potentially negative.

Simply noticing what it is happening means admitting into consciousness a larger and more accurate picture of internal and external reality, so that you can understand more clearly what is happening. By staying grounded in fact, you heighten your awareness of exactly what is going on, but not, at least not yet, what it means.

PRINCIPLE

Simply observing yourself, without judgment, is a gateway to increased self-awareness.

This practice is powerful because internal defenses kick in in a flash, in milliseconds. An easy way to understand this is to hear that some-one you don’t like is critical of your ideas. Without even being aware of it, you probably go immediately to a consideration of all the things wrong with the other person, how unreasonable or unfair he or she is. In this way the ego keeps the kernel (or boulder!) of truth that may be present in the comments at a safe distance.

In this case, staying in the noticing stage might surface awareness of internal discomfort with the critical information, a realization you are angry at the other person, and perhaps a feeling of insecurity. By noticing and starting to understand these reactions, you create the opportunity to truly understand what is happening inside. Perhaps it is the fear of being wrong that has set everything into motion. That’s quite a discovery, and potentially an opening to a new way of thinking. It might be something like “Everyone is wrong sometimes, and I can learn from the situation when that happens.”

Negative emotions can often be the starting point of the journey into self-awareness. They are the doors into self-exploration, but it is not easy to be objective about negative internal experiences and the potential meaning they hold.

For another example, let’s imagine someone who is perplexed by the non-responsiveness of a colleague. Despite the best and well-intentioned efforts to bring him out into the open, the colleague simply doesn’t have much to say. For most people, the interpretation would be that it’s all about the state of the other person, and all that’s wrong with him.

Perhaps. In the noticing stage, the first person may heighten awareness of what’s really happening in the interaction, without going to judgment so quickly. By standing back and noticing, for example, that he or she is doing most of the talking, interrupting, and general steering of the conversation, this person may come to realize that these signals might be causing the other’s lack of response. Further, this person in the noticing stage may now perceive an undercurrent of frustration. This might be exacerbating the monologues and one-sided conversations.

By becoming aware of the whole picture in a nonjudgmental way, the first person may enable new possibilities to emerge, such as reducing his or her air time and asking more open-ended questions.

Sometimes, realizations that surface through noticing more clearly, such as “I thought I was supposed to like this and the reality is that I don’t,” or “I convinced myself I wasn’t angry, just firm, but the fact is I was very angry,” can set into motion a path of inquiry that helps a leader grow. One participant in a professional development event remarked after some exercises to increase self-awareness: “I had no idea how much trouble I was in. I was carrying a lot of anger and sadness.” Whenever it might seem like committing to the self is not that important, consider this comment. Another leader said after a leadership development course, “It just hit me that I have no idea what I’m doing in my role. I’ve just been going along.” This is a great step in self-awareness.

Use the Johari Window

The Johari Window, developed by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, is a powerful tool that can help you learn about the self. It helps configure everything from what you and those around you share as knowledge about you, to what neither knows.

The upper left quadrant means there are things about you that both you and others understand: that you’re excellent at marketing and customer contact, for example, but not so strong in budgeting and strategy, or that you have a hot button around deadlines.

The lower left quadrant means there are some things you know about yourself that you have not shared with others: for example, that you are afraid of conflict, that you are thinking of leaving for another job, or that you sometimes wish you had pursued a different career.

The lower right-hand quadrant is mysterious, and at least at the present time, unknown, both to you or others. Call it future learning that you may or may not share, or that others may realize about you at some point in the future (which they may or may not share with you).

The upper right-hand quadrant can be the most fruitful for you in learning about yourself. It represents what others know about you that you cannot see nor understand. What may be transparent to you is often very apparent to others. This quadrant is called the blind spot. As a leader, you can either make it safe for people to offer observations about this area, or you can make it so threatening that they will never get close. The most committed leaders want to know how they are perceived by others. As a leader, you can simply ask others what their perceptions are of you, your performance, your style, and your approach. This can be specific, such as how you handled yourself in a tense meeting, or more general, by asking how you come across.

PRINCIPLE

Discover your “blind spots” and seek to reduce them.

As people rise through formal leadership positions, it gets harder to get honest feedback from others. Many organizations are using 360-degree assessments to help with this. In a 360 assessment, everyone chimes in on your performance—subordinates, peers, and whoever is above you. Responses to negative 360 data generally fall into two categories: denial/blame, or acceptance.

Denial and blame keep uncomfortable information away, as defense shields rise into place. Acceptance means standing back and accurately observing the messages in the data, particularly when they collide with a self-view, or the story. I once had a client blame others’ withering assessments of her communication skills on the structure of the U.S. government. She hotly insisted—and with multiple interruptions—that if I truly understood the structure of the government, I would understand why others rated her so badly. In this case, the messenger was attacked, too! An important question is how often, if we are honest with ourselves, do we do this, too?

Shocks, big surprises, and puzzling disconnects between what you expect and what happens can be a prime entry point to discovering what you don’t know about yourself, but others do. This is where your metaphorical map of reality breaks. Unfortunately, many people blame, rationalize, explain away, or deny the information, depriving themselves of the learning that takes place when there is a commitment to the self. It doesn’t make the reality of the situation any less true; it just buries it conveniently in the unconscious mind, out of awareness and where it (only temporarily) relieves the psychological pain and pressure.

Where things are not working out, or where failures routinely materialize, can be an excellent starting point for considering what you might not yet know or understand. For example, many leaders are puzzled by a lack of motivation in the workplace. They cannot understand why people don’t do exactly what they would do, with equal energy.

If a leader took time to consider the reason for the lack of motivation, this person might discover some unfortunately very common truths about his or her behavior: micromanagement, mostly negative feedback, and harsh judgments. When this information is conveyed to those responsible, the response is often defensive. “If you only knew how things were around here” is a common refrain, effectively ceding the power of choosing productive communication to the stresses and strains that are found in virtually any workplace. Clearly, this victim mentality and leadership story have serious limitations.

Another example occurs when leaders are genuinely puzzled by people who leave their organization. Such leaders are often baffled about why staff had such a sharp reaction to something they did or said. “They need to get over it,” a leader will sometimes declare, not under-standing that he or she is actually fostering the problem. The leader will remain trapped in this blind spot until the consequences become unbearable, or until the leader connects the dots leading back to his or her actions or words that are causing this recurring problem.

For example, I once spoke with a person who was describing a situation in a manager’s department. Only after literally years of unwanted turnover was the manager finally starting to “get it,” I was told.

“You cannot change what you cannot see.”

— CHALMERS BROTHERS

When this happens, when you “get it,” when new understanding about the self occurs, it may be experienced as an epiphany, a flash of insight, a potentially huge restructuring of consciousness. It will feel clearly and intuitively “right.” It is a realization, a new awareness of what is real. It may be felt as an “Oh my gosh” moment.

In their book Why CEOs Fail, Dotlich and Cairo explain what happens when the opposite occurs: “Companies frequently experience serious setbacks when entire groups of people collude to overlook, deny, or manage around a CEO’s negative personality characteristics. We have witnessed the demise of once great companies such as Enron, Kmart, Global Crossing, and Tyco realizing far too late that one factor in their failure was the fact that no one could tell the emperor the truth.”

None of this is to suggest that what happens is always a leader’s fault. Workplaces are far too complex for such a simple explanation. However, a critical task of leaders is to learn as much as possible about the self and its impact on others, in order to raise the game to the highest possible level.

Learn your type and archetypes

Another powerful way to increase an understanding of the self is by exploring your own psychological type and archetypes.

Type refers to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(r), a widely used personality indicator that can have incredible power in aiding understanding of the self and interactions with others. The theory, based on the work of Carl Jung, is deep and multifaceted, potentially launching lifelong learning.

Reduced to its simplest expression, the theory holds that some people prefer extraversion over introversion. That is, they are more energized by interaction and communication with the external world, while introverts are more comfortable in their inner mental world. Extra-verted leaders tend to be more outgoing and interact more with others, whereas introverted leaders operate more behind the scenes.

The way we take in information varies, too. Sensors prefer factual, concrete, and detailed content about the here-and-now, whereas intuitives prefer processing in big-picture, thematic, and future-oriented patterns. Sensor leaders usually pay more attention to the facts and figures that are knowable, while intuitive leaders think more about conceptual plans for the future.

Once we have information, the next step is to make judgments, or decisions. Thinkers prefer a rational, logical, principled approach, whereas feelers prefer to make judgments by referencing the human values in a situation. Thinker leaders usually refer to an objective standard to make a decision, while feeler leaders tend to think more about the people involved in the decision.

Once we have information, the next step is to make judgments, or decisions. Thinkers prefer a rational, logical, principled approach, whereas feelers prefer to make judgments by referencing the human values in a situation. Thinker leaders usually refer to an objective standard to make a decision, while feeler leaders tend to think more about the people involved in the decision.

The final dichotomy, judging and perceiving, refers to our outer-world orientation and lifestyle—whether we prefer as judgers to come to closure on decisions in a structured way, or as perceivers to generate more options and stay open longer to new information in a more spontaneous way. Judging leaders often seek to come to a decision and move on, while perceivers take more time to consider alternatives.

Think of meetings where some people did most of the talking and others just listened, and you may have seen the extraversion-introversion dichotomy in action. Overuse of either preference can cause problems. Extraverts can wind up doing a disproportionate share of the talking. Leaders who prefer introversion may be misunderstood because they choose to convey less to the outside world. Either one is an important awareness about how the self is showing up to others. I experienced earlier in my life situations where I sensed I had dominated the air time, and so chose to say less and create more space for others to contribute.

If you have experienced frustration over too many details and therefore “being in the weeds,” or been unable to get your hands around something purely conceptual and wondered whether others were “building grand castles in the air,” you may have seen sensing versus intuition in action.

If you have had trouble making a decision in a group because there was a technically “right” way to decide an issue and another way that more explicitly acknowledged the human beings in the mix, perhaps by not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings, you may have seen thinking versus feeling in operation. In organizational restructurings thinking versus feeling can come to the fore: What’s the right thing for the business? versus How can we take care of people?

And when there was a disagreement on a process, or how long it should take to come to a decision, you may have experienced the tension between judging and perceiving.

No type is better than another. Although leadership positions are overwhelmingly dominated by thinkers and judgers, the key is to understand and respect both your own and others’ preferences, and to become more skilled in flexing your behavior depending on the needs of the situation. It is all too easy to operate only out of your own preferences, dismissing others who have different preferences. When this behavior comes from a leader, it is particularly damaging. Culture often is a reflection of the preferences of leaders, and those who take a different approach can feel like second-class citizens.

This summary of type explains just a few basics. It is important to know that type is much more than a simple additive process with four preferences. These preferences intermingle in myriad ways. You can probably imagine how an extraverted intuitive and an introverted sensor might experience tension in communication, for example; or how a feeling perceiver and thinking judger might have trouble coming to a decision. Type ultimately reveals how we process, what is usually communicated or not, how we tend to engage the world, and what happens under stress, for example.

Carl Jung also pioneered work in the area of archetypes, which can be enlightening in the same way as type. Archetypes are transpersonal, collective, unconscious ways of seeing, interpreting, and then acting in the world. They surface consistently in myths and stories told across cultures.

An example of an archetype is the warrior, someone who is prone to conflict behavior. You probably also know someone who fits the lover archetype, for whom life is an opportunity to nurture, take care of, and help others. The innocent archetype manifests in someone who does not see the sometimes harsh realities of life. And the sage archetype is all about knowing more, being wise and informed.

It has been said that three people with different archetypes can walk into the same meeting and experience it very differently. The warrior scans for who has power and must be overcome, the lover wants to know if anyone needs help, and the sage wonders what he or she can learn from the situation.

PRINCIPLE

Knowing your psychological type and archetypes can dramatically increase your self-understanding.

Some archetypes, such as warrior and ruler, show up in leadership more than others. Every individual has a constellation of archetypes that unconsciously shape his or her life, with one being dominant. Understanding what these are, how they influence behavior, and how all archetypes can be accessed when necessary is part of a journey to wholeness and integration. Carol S. Pearson has written in a compelling way about the power of archetypes in her book Awakening the Heroes Within.

These ways of understanding the self, along with other instruments, including assessments of emotional intelligence, conflict styles, and communication behavior, generally are all useful. At the same time, there is no substitute for actual experience as a way to understand the self. This leads us to the Action-Reflection Loop.

Use the Action-Reflection Loop

Among the easiest-to-understand tools to foster learning about the self is the Action-Reflection Loop. This process simply requires a deliberate, intentional period of reflection after an event—a project completion, product launch, program roll-out, difficult meeting, restructuring—anything that seems significant and potentially contains learning for the future.

The Loop gives you a chance to look back and reflect on how things went. What went well? What didn’t? What did you learn? What was missed? What was a surprise? Why? How will things be done differently next time? These questions may lead in a variety of directions, but one base effective leaders consistently touch is: “Was there any learning about myself through the experience that was important?”

Not surprisingly, heightening your powers of noticing will be a great help in this process. You might also find elements of your story, type, or archetypes in such reflection.

Know your strengths and weaknesses

Truly knowing your strengths and weaknesses can be deceptively difficult for two reasons. First, people often explain away weaknesses

through rationalizing or denial. Full acceptance of a weakness can be hard. We are usually conditioned in our culture to appear invulnerable.

However, it may be even more difficult to understand your strengths. This is because strengths are often taken for granted, or assumed. For example, someone very proficient in managing a project may greet recognition of this with a statement like, “It’s easy. Anybody could do it.” Not quite. The fact that it is perceived as easy is a classic marker of a strength.

Weaknesses can be discerned by looking at patterns of difficulty, what seems to take a long time or a disproportionate amount of energy, or what doesn’t work very well despite your best efforts.

Strengths can be revealed by not only what seems effortless to you, but also by what others notice about areas of high performance for you. Again, the patterns are the key element to pay attention to.

PRINCIPLE

Understand and act on knowledge of both your strengths and weaknesses.

With the growth of the field of positive psychology and appreciative approaches, strengths-based work is ever-increasing in popularity and usefulness. Part of committing to one’s self is knowing and understanding strengths and weaknesses and making choices to leverage strengths and mitigate weaknesses.

Discover your personal mission, vision, and values

Discovery of your own personal mission, vision, and values gives power and meaning to your life, generating energy and passion.

Your mission is why you exist, your core purpose or reason for being here. It is a deeply felt need to do something that truly matters in the world. A personal mission statement might be “To heal others” or “To teach.” It expresses what you need to do.

Your vision describes the results of accomplishing your mission—what happens because you lived. It’s how life is different in some meaningful way because you were on the planet. It connects you to a larger outcome, or result. If the existential question is “Why am I here?” then the fulfillment of the vision provides the answer. For example, a mission of healing others leads to a broad vision of health. Teaching others leads to an educated, better-functioning society.

The key is that whatever the mission and vision for you, they seem to draw your attention. You sit up and take notice when they are not happening, and you are excited when you see them occuring. It feels right.

What are your personal mission and vision? What do you need to do, and how do you want the world to be different as a result of your having been here? You may be very clear on that, meaning that the mission and vision reside in conscious awareness, or they may be buried in the unconscious. They are there, waiting to be noticed, but they are vague and unclear at this time.

“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path … this is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.”

—JAMES HILLMAN

If your mission and vision are not clear, everything else is subject to misalignment or a lack of coherence. There is no particular direction, no beacon on which to align sight. This manifests in statements like “I don’t know why I’m doing this work.”

Mission and vision discovery is often described as the single most important pivot point in career management. It is easy to see how leaders must have a clear and strong sense of personal mission and vision, aligned with the organization’s purposes and intentions, in order to create a compelling, authentic, and powerful connection with others who care about the same things.

“The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.”

—THEODORE HESBURGH

Awareness of personal values is also crucial to self-understanding. Simply put, values are what you care about most deeply. They form the basis of your decisions, priorities, and actions. Strangely, the majority of participants in leadership development courses have indicated they have never consciously thought of the values most important to them.

PRINCIPLE

Discover and act on your own personal mission, vision, and values.

The concept of values may seem abstract, but your values have great power in your own life. For example, seeing unfair treatment at work may remind you of a value you hold around equity or fairness. Values are often what you will fight for, so their power should not be overlooked. Instead, the quest is to understand what they truly are. A commitment to your self-identified values is a powerful force to be reckoned with.

There is a distinction here between espoused values and lived values. In the same way as we have differentiated between stated commitments and real commitments, espoused values tend to come out sounding honorable and even righteous. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you regard those values as the high ground you aspire to. The more important piece is in discerning what values you actually hold now, and these are best detected through observing yourself and seeing what actually motivates your day-to-day actions. In particular, you can watch how you spend time, money, and attention as a reliable indicator of your real, lived values.

For example, many hard-charging executives, when asked about their values, will talk about the importance of their families, who may rarely see them.

There are many ways to engage in self-discovery, each with unique learning and benefits. Some will be more powerful and fruitful for you than others. The key is to engage. Work with the practices that directly benefit you. When you do this, you are committing to grow your self.

Making the Commitment to the Self

It may seem that after doing all the hard work described above, the commitment to the self, awareness, and growth is complete. But there is another crucial step. It is explained through the example of the very real possibility of buying a rigorous physical fitness manual and then lying comfortably on your sofa to read it.

“Awareness without action is worthless,” it is sometimes said. The concept is that learning or insight not converted into behavior or other change isn’t actually that valuable. An essential part of the commitment to the self is to use whatever is learned through the processes already outlined. The next step in making the commitment to the self is to understand what you can act on in order to make progress.

Below are some practices that can help you enhance your own commitment to your growth, in three basic categories:

Before you start

Author the story

Set specific goals based on what you’ve learned

Moving out

Capitalize on strengths and minimize weaknesses

Act on your mission, vision, and values

Know that it may feel awkward at first

Use affirmations

Keep a journal

Sustaining progress

Keep moving

Accept a nonlinear path

Tell others what you’re doing, and get feedback

Review at some interval

Celebrate

Author the story

Once you know your story, the opportunity exists to deliberately change it in a way that makes life better. This means surfacing new possibilities and options for you, interpreting events clearly and accurately, and engaging work and life in a new way. Choosing to work to achieve something you want but were afraid to try is a classic example of creating a better story. Letting go of things that hold you down or restrain progress is another. As your story expands and improves, you will discover the chief limiting factor in life is yourself. There is another term for the conversion of an old or limiting story to a better one: effectiveness.

What is the story you want to author? What does it look like? How is it different from the present? What steps will bring you closer to that story? You may have glimpsed this through dreams or images when you were most relaxed and tuned in to your self.

Set specific goals based on what you’ve learned

Whether you have learned through the practice of noticing, the Johari Window, your type or archetypes, the Action-Reflection Loop, an assessment—or any other method—at some point you have to choose what you will do with that information. Self-discovery and growth should be in a direction you care about, not one randomly chosen. This caring provides much of the motivation.

It is best to be specific in your intentions to change. Rather than just having a vague idea that you need to work on a broadly defined area, it is more effective and practical to clearly define something to change that you can observe or measure in some way. For example, if you learned that you tend to do most of the talking in meetings, you can set a goal of taking no more than some set percentage of the air time. If you found that you tend to tell much more than ask, you can choose a simple metric of asking at least as many questions as statements made. If you found you were unconsciously tense in a negotiation, you could adopt a relaxation practice beforehand.

The problem with general intentions is they often remain that, while focused, behavior-based change is more achievable and manageable. Also, avoid the temptation to set huge, sweeping, immediate objectives—in effect, attempting to reinvent yourself overnight. It doesn’t work that way. It takes time.

Capitalize on strengths and minimize weaknesses

Once you are aware of your strengths and weaknesses, resist the temptation to get too busy on the weaknesses. A substantial body of evidence now indicates that strength-based development takes you much further than trying to reduce weaknesses. According to this thinking, you cannot maximize your own greatness by reducing what’s bad.

For example, if you have strengths around connecting with others, motivating them and creating a shared vision of something exciting, but are weak in budgeting or IT systems, you will not make your maximum contribution by learning more about budgeting or becoming a pseudo techie. Instead, the key is to be able to basically get by with required skills in the latter areas, and shift the focus as much as possible to where you can achieve significant results with people. This might mean reaching more people, helping them to accomplish more, and being a force in bringing people together. The message to operate out of strengths can be liberating for many people who obsess on their weaknesses.

Act on your mission, vision, and values

Paying attention to what energizes you and catches your attention is the key to uncovering your mission, vision, and values. You can also deliberately ask yourself what you want your life to have been about. Some leadership development programs ask participants to write the obituary they want to ultimately have.

An effective leader’s work needs to square with his or her biggest aims for outcomes and purpose, and it can be a hard choice for someone to take a new path in that direction. The point is that leadership effectiveness is compromised when working in an area that is not truly right for you. This is the hard calculation people who have been operating inconsistently with their vision and mission must make. No one else can make this distinction for you.

“Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it is also that difficult.”

—WARREN G. BENNIS

Once you understand what values you actually hold, and what values you would like to live according to, you essentially have a template to guide future actions. One step, conversation, or action at a time, you can learn whether you are acting based on the values you want to hold or based on your values in operation right now. Benjamin Franklin was famous for keeping a matrix in which he evaluated himself daily on how he was doing against what he wanted most. If there is virtually no gap between the values you are operating from and the values you most want to hold, then congratulations are in order. You have achieved a kind of congruence. For most of us, there is always room for improvement. A commitment to the self requires improvement.

Know that it may feel awkward at first

Trying anything new can feel awkward. A new conversation, action, or behavior may not feel the smoothest or most elegant. Don’t go for perfect. That’s a daunting standard. For example, speaking up and making a clear request of others when you previously kept mum will feel strange. Practice helps here, but don’t expect it to feel as comfortable as old behaviors (such as avoiding making the request). The encouraging thing is that once you’ve done it, you’ll feel more able to do it a little better, and a little less awkwardly, next time. An extra-verted leader may deliberately hold back a bit more, creating space for others to contribute. It will take some restraint, but it can be done!

Use affirmations

There is considerable research now behind the notion that talking about a goal in the present tense, as though it were already true, cognitively helps create the change you want. Nobody knows this more than high-performance athletes, who practice it religiously. Saying to yourself, “I am good at running the meeting when differences emerge,” or “I am a great listener,” has an uncanny way of reprogramming your mind to do just that.

Keep a journal

By recording what you’ve learned, what you did with that learning, and what the results were, you create a powerful reminder of how much progress you’ve made. This can be helpful when you hit the occasional dry patches, or when the going gets tougher. Also, simply writing down what has worked creates additional motivation to keep applying what you’ve learned.

Keep moving

Nothing succeeds like success, and momentum can be a source of strength. As you start to change what you think will be beneficial, particularly early wins will embolden you to keep going. For once you see that you can create change in the direction you want, it may very well strike you that the limiting factor all along has been you. This insight helps fuel or propel further development. For example, you may choose to engage in a new way someone with whom you have had conflict. As the other person responds positively to your insight-based change, you may be able to create a virtuous spiral, or to extend the practice to others.

Accept a nonlinear path

Staying in the game is particularly important as you encounter periods where change gets harder, or isn’t working, and inevitable frustrations occur. What is being described here is not a straight, smooth line. Accept that setbacks will occur. Like most growth curves, there are periods of fertile activity, and then dormancy. That’s the nature of it. Recall efforts that have paid off, and resolve to persist.

Tell others what you’re doing, and get feedback

This has multiple benefits for pressing insight into action. First, by talking about it you make it more real than if it’s just an idea. Second, people now expect you to do something different, so that adds to the motivation. Third, once you try something new, they can give you feedback on how it looked to them. Of course, it is best to share this information with people you trust, who are interested in your development, and who want to help. You can simply say, for example, “I realized I was making a lot of decisions without talking to others, and have been working on soliciting ideas more. Have you seen anything different in my communication?”

Review at some interval

While it is important to review your progress in real time (as in noticing), it is also a good idea to set aside time at some interval, perhaps a year or half-year or even every month, to assess the longer arc of what you’re working on. It can be surprising how much change can occur over some period of time, and this practice is designed to help you fully comprehend what you’ve done.