Research & Insights – Self Mastery
Why Self Mastery is the First Step to Leadership Mastery
Understanding self and learning to honour your personal preferences are essential for Courageous Leaders to gain and establish Self Mastery. In our Courageous Leaders programs there are four facets of leadership mastery: Self, Relationship, Business and Technical. Together, they create Leadership Mastery.
Honouring Personal Preference
Everyone has a ‘natural’ way of living, being, thinking and feeling about things; and it is important you are aware of this so you can be at your best. Throughout Courageous Leaders programs, we raise awareness of and work with the concept of individual learning preferences in order to optimise learning potential.
The Impact of Self Mastery on Culture
In order to achieve the business results we require and create business longevity and sustainability, organisations rely on their leaders to be courageous. Without courageous leaders, behavioural change within organisations is always going to be a mere ‘tinkering at the edges’.
Self Mastery and Personal Brand
Great leaders throughout history have demonstrated that self knowledge and awareness are essential to being an effective leader of others. So what do Self Mastery and personal brand have in common?
Thought of the Quarter
The journey inward is one that requires courage and vulnerability and certainly in the context of the Courageous Leaders space, is an essential one. When you make the shift from viewing the world from a separate, ‘you and me as individuals’ perspective and see you and your team or communities as an integrated whole, you realise the absolute necessity of understanding yourself.
You see that by knowing what runs inside you and determines how you show up (or don’t!) in your life, you have the key to seeing why you experience what you do on the outside. “As within, so without” which in simple terms means whatever you are thinking about both consciously and subconsciously will be brought about into your reality.
The courageousness and inevitable feelings of vulnerability are key components of this journey and in fact if they are absent, I invite you to to look at whether what end result you are going for is really all that important to you. A Courageous Leader learns not to avoid vulnerability and actually learns to actively work on the edge in a ‘comfortably uncomfortable’ place knowing that is where ‘the juice’ lies.
A recent talk by Ms Brene Brown at TED.com shows the power found in true vulnerabilty around understanding yourself and is well worth a viewing.
Through my experience in choosing this style of leadership, I have found that my authentic style, unique to me, naturally emerges and shines through. The requirement to measure myself against others and compare my way of leading loses relevance. The urgent need to prove that I’m anything other than I am disappears and I turn up making decisions and choices that have clarity and certainty. – David Walker