Personal Leadership for high-performance is the ability to use 5 different elements of personal power to guide the direction of our life and career in a way that is fulfilling, rewarding, and aligned with our values.
The 5 elements of personal leadership that drive this high-performance and that you’ll need to achieve this are: self-discipline & self-care, mental game and willpower management, stress management, core-values and goals definition, and productivity and high-performance habits.
Watch the video for more details.
In today’s post, we will look into the 5 elements of personal power, why they give you this power, and how to develop them so that you can transform your life and the way you feel about it.
Why Does Personal Leadership Matter?
How we lead life to achieve things matters more than achieving them. It equates to the level of our self-satisfaction. And I will share a story so that you can really understand why.
When I was younger and started my career, I would often skip lunch and stay up late working on my tasks and projects, especially when I got energized with the progress I was making.
It made much more sense to me to take advantage of the good momentum than stop and then re-gain than momentum later on.
That worked for a while. After all, our bodies and minds can take on so much when we are younger. However, we are not young forever. And our bodies cannot take on things without their limits.
So at some point, I drove myself to burnout. Literally.
But even before that happened, I did not notice another thing happening way before. It was already a symptom of what was coming. And that was the fact that I would take advantage of the momentum that day, only to find myself sick or exhausted the next day or week and not performing well then.
What happens when you super perform one week and underperform the next?
That’s right. You are viewed as inconsistent. And often, in the corporate world, when you are inconsistent, you are considered unreliable. No one wants an unreliable employee. No matter if they delivered one brilliant project last week.
People like to know what to expect from individuals. And when your personal leadership for high-performance is messed up, and you become unreliable, other more reliable employees will be favored first, no matter how smart or talented you are.
The bottom line is: consistency is key in high-performance. Any performance.
Think about this:
- You hire a cleaning service to go every other week clean your office. One week things are spotless; the other, things are stinky horrible.
- You hire an Ad agency. One ad works like crazy, and the other ad does not work at all.
- You go to a new hairdresser. One day your cut is celebrity-style and perfect, and the other time looks like you came out from a zombie movie.
Consistency is key in high-performance.
Think about examples in your life when you were the other end and received inconsistent services and products. Did you like it? How did you feel about that company or that person? Did you feel scared of selecting them again next time right?
Well, those who lead without personal leadership in their midsets will face that very same fate at some point in their careers. And the reason is simple: it’s because no solid personal leadership leads to inconsistent performance.
So, personal leadership matters because:
- It will help you be consistent and give off a perception of reliability to all your stakeholders
- Your body will perform better over time because it will know what to expect and will build up accordingly
- You will feel more energized and confident about your output and consistency because your progress will always be steady and reliable
- You will achieve your goals and manage people’s expectations more effectively, which will help you create solid bonds of trust and working relationships
- It will help you grow in your career at a steady pace because everyone will want you on the winning team since they know exactly what to expect
Personal leadership is the foundation for all other types of leadership that you will need to develop as a global executive and leader. You can learn more about the 4 Success Pillars Of Global Leadership in one of our previous posts.
What’s important for you to understand is that the philosophy you use to lead yourself to success greatly impacts what you can achieve and how fast you can do it.
I used to think that skipping meals and working hard was proof of how disciplined I was to get the job done. In that type of mindset, getting the job done had precedence over being consistent. This means I would get this job done but would probably delay the next.
So your philosophy, your priorities, must be sharp and clear. And we will talk more about that in the element of Core-Values and Goals.
Personal Leadership is the process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with them.
The 5 Elements Of Personal Leadership For High-Performance
Let’s have a look now at the 5 elements of personal power and why they give you so much power.
Element 1 – Mental Game And Willpower Management
Mental game and willpower management is the ability to be psychologically strong, with a resilient mind, perform at a high level, and use your willpower properly despite dealing with adversity and stress.
Those who compete in arts, sports, and strategy games know how important this is. If you ask them, they will tell you that the winner will always be those who have the most vigorous mental game – given similar skill levels – and use their willpower wisely.
Learning how to keep your mental game assertive and positive is crucial for success in ANY area of life. As I said before, your mindset and the way you look at things will drive your success.
Without changing our pattern of thought, we will not be able to solve the problem we created with our current pattern of thought.
And managing willpower has a similar effect. To explain this, let’s say every one of us has a “tank” with willpower liquid. We start the day with this tank full. During the day, we deplete the tank by using its juice for various things. Every single thing you do and decide uses a bit of this liquid. And that’s why by the end of the day, there is hardly any liquid left.
Willpower works like this. You are sharp and able to do or resist stuff in the morning, better than at night. And that’s because, by the end of the day, your tank is depleted.
Think about this: is it easier to resist that sweet you know you should not eat right in the morning, or at night when you are watching Netflix?
Willpower management has everything to do with the mental game. How strong you are mentally and how you make decisions aligned with your goal will define how you use your willpower, or that “tank.”
If you want to improve your willpower management, consider hiring me as your executive coach.
Element 2 – Self-Discipline and Self-Care
Piggy-backing on the last element, how you take care of your wellbeing also matters in performance and personal power. The element of Self-Discipline & Care is the ability to take care of ourselves.
It is usually very overlooked, especially in western cultures.
We rarely understand that taking good care of ourselves is part of our jobs in any profession. If we are unwell or sick, we won’t perform any job well.
So yes, it is a crucial aspect of our jobs. It actually should be in our job descriptions! And that is where self-discipline is important. Self-discipline is the ability to control one’s feelings and overcome one’s weaknesses, the ability to pursue what one thinks is right despite temptations. Without self-discipline, self-care becomes almost impossible. These 2 go hand in hand.
And self-discipline is part of your personal leadership philosophy. What your philosophy prioritizes will show up in your self-discipline.
Your personal philosophy is the greatest determining factor in how your life works out.
For example, let’s say your personal leadership philosophy states that you develop routines that maximize output (at the cost of consistency) like in the example I gave from my early career.
Discipline would show up in one way quite differently if your philosophy prioritized a balance to optimize health and performance instead. In other words, high output (i.e. getting the job done) is important, but keeping good health is also essential.
So as you can see, what you focus on and drive your attention to will affect how you stay disciplined about things.
Staying up until 2 a.m. watching Netflix could be seen as a discipline to fun and recreation. But at the cost of your restful sleep if you wake up early.
The core aspect of this element is how you build routines and how you stay disciplined around them to align with your personal leadership philosophy.
Element 3 – Stress Management
We live in stressful times.
The element of stress management is our ability to reduce, mitigate or completely eliminate stress in one’s life to function optimally.
Although many would argue that this should be within the self-care department, I like to put this specific topic as a separate bullet because often, we let stress amount to greater levels before we do anything about it.
And it can be too late. Therefore, stress management must be within the global leader competencies as a top-of-mind skill.
As with the other elements, it must be part of your philosophy of personal leadership.
Element 4 – Core Values, Vision, and Goals
Here is the core of your personal leadership philosophy and the foundation for everything that you do. If you don’t have a clear picture of your core values, vision for the future, and well-defined goals for life and career, you are just wasting time. You are just floating astray.
This element is our ability to define core values and success-vision and create strategies to lead step-by-step all of the way to that success.
Thinking about values and vision is more than just pulling some nice words that we regard as important. This is an entire strategy cycle, from definition to planning to execution and tracking.
It is easier to create solid, achievable strategies when you have a well-defined set of values and a vision of what you want to achieve.
And when you have good strategies, execution becomes much more effortless (and you can inject some fun in it too, by the way, because you are already planning ahead).
Younger professionals usually think creating value and vision is fluff. It’s not.
I’d dare say that without this, you can have the greatest mental game in the world, the best productivity strategies, the finest self-care routines, and still, you’ll achieve infinitely less than your full potential. Because clarity of values and vision matters. Otherwise, you are floating astray.
Element 5 – Productivity & Performance Strategies
When people think about productivity, they usually think about tools and Apps. And although tools are important, the strategy you will use to tackle all your tasks, prioritize them and work on them is more important than the tool.
So think about this: in the previous elements, you defined your goals and priorities, defined routines that will energize you, also developed a mindset and willpower for success, and then curbed the stress that live shoots at you. What’s missing now?
That’s right: action! You have to do stuff to accomplish things. And you can “do stuff” in a smarter way… or not. This element is about creating the right strategies to optimize what you do, so that you can make progress towards the goals you defined in a previous element.
For that, before you even think about tools and strategy, you have first to get your relationship with time straight. That’s usually the core of all failures in performance and productivity.
Before you even think about tools and strategy, you have first to get your relationship with time straight.
Why do we stay up late until 2 a.m. watching Netflix when we know it will make us feel awful the next day when we wake up at 6 a.m.? Willpower management has to do with it, of course, but even if your “tank” is full and you could manage to avoid the temptation, you won’t be successful if your relationship with time is not clear.
When my clients want to start working with a better relationship with their time, my number one recommendation is always having them ask themselves the following question when performing anything in life: “how will this task right now help me achieve my goals.”
Maybe watching Netflix until 2 a.m. will help you somehow achieve your goals. Perhaps you are watching a training or a documentary important for a project.
Staying up late is not the problem. The problem is why you are staying up late.
So think about that going forward and use this powerful question to help you improve your relationship with time.
Winning Tactics To Develop Personal Leadership Drivers
Here are some ideas for you to start exploring your personal power and developing your personal leadership philosophy:
1-Define your Core-Values.
We have an entire blog post to help you define your Core-Values. They are the driving force of your mindset and behavior. So they must always be crystal clear. Your values will be the basis of your philosophy. If you want to go a step further, you can create a full statement for your personal leadership philosophy.
2-Define your Goals for life and career
Use SMART Goals to define goals both for your career and life. All your goals must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and relevant, and time-bound (yeah, give it a deadline, will you?). If you have a long-term goal instead, check out our guide to achieve long-term goals.
3-Define your vision for the future.
The more specific you are about defining a vision for your future, the better. There are a million techniques to do this: you can use a vision board, or do a visualization exercise, or meditate every day on a set of factors that you want to happen. Do what works best for you. Check our article to help you define and plan your visions and goals.
4-Create a set of routines to support your health and energy levels
Tied with element 2 – Self Discipline and Care: make sure to create a routine that is aligned with your Core-Values, will help you achieve your goals, and that is feasible to be consistent with.
I can’t stress enough how being consistent is critical. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- create a morning and night routine
- create a health routine
- create a learning & development routine
5-Curb your stress
Brainstorm what your sources of stress are and what you can do about each one of them. Some of them you will be able to exterminate. But some you will only be able to reduce or mitigate. What’s important is to manage your level of stress. Stress highjacks our rational brain and makes us do crazy stuff. So get to it, and map out your stressors and manage them.
6-Work on your mental game
The stories you tell yourself matter. They are the lens through which you see the world. So making sure you have a good mental health and that your mental game is geared toward success is critical. Hire mental wellness or executive coach if you think you don’t even know where to start.
7- Create solid strategies to manage your willpower
Managing your “tank” of willpower throughout the day is essential for successfully managing willpower. You will have to map out what drains your willpower quickly and what types of strategies do you need to get some extra willpower when it’s depleted, but you still need it.
Here are some proven chargers when you need that extra willpower:
- Meditation
- breathing exercises
- power naps
These are some things shown to give a slight “quick charge” to our willpower tanks. Explore what works for you and what do you need to do to manage your willpower effectively.
8-Work on your relationship with time
As I said, the relationship with time is even more important than productivity tools when we want to be productive. Use the key question “how will this task right now help me achieve my goals?” to help you quickly assess your relationship with time at every moment. Create the habit of asking this and checking in with yourself to see if you are doing things that help you achieve your goals or detract from them.
9-Create strategies to be more productive within the time you have
If you have the right mindset and relationship with time, it’s a matter of creating strategies to do more work, in less time, with less effort, and… if possible, please… some fun too! There are millions of apps, tools, and strategies out there. You can use our free course to get you started on becoming a high performing individual.
There you go, global leader. Now you know what personal leadership is, what it consists of, why does it matter, and what to focus on to nail it!
If you are interested in personal leadership and want to learn more indepth about it, check out our Global Executive Leadership Program. In it, we go over all 4 pillars of success, including personal leadership. We have 2 entire modules out of 9 solely dedicated to personal leadership.
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