Our intention is to support you in developing your leadership. One of the many gifts you have in life is the gift of leadership, applying leadership to your life, and offering leadership out into your world. You, like everyone, have more leadership potential in you to develop. The choice is yours.
Leadership in Challenging Times
Despite the challenges of these times, I have found that I maintain my well being, my health, and balance, fairly consistently. And then there are those days when I am simply not okay. On those days, I feel fragile or grumpy, sad including overwhelmingly sad, and depleted. These changing emotions are normal in challenging times. In my leadership of my life, one way to help myself on these down days is to be in genuine contact with myself. When I am in genuine contact with myself, I acknowledge exactly how I am experiencing myself. I don’t shy away from the emotions I am having. I simply acknowledge them without judging them. Practicing accepting myself where I am at, as a whole person, creates opportunities to move forward into better feeling more easily.
Self-Love, Confidence & Leadership
Another way I help myself is with intentional self care so that I can boost myself into a state of self love, self worth, and confidence again. When I am in self love, the confidence I gain is confidence in myself. That increased personal confidence gives me energy and momentum to do what I feel moved to do with my leadership of my life and my chosen work.
As my confidence in myself goes up, my confidence in the world around me goes up too. I like that feeling of confidence in the world!
I am aware of the relationship I am experiencing of my own confidence in myself and my confidence in the world around me. On those days when I don’t seem to pull my self love, self worth, and self confidence together easily, I find myself in confusing, incoherent, and fearful emotions about the world, about news, about the current situation as portrayed by various media. When I regain my confidence in myself, I am confident in the world and that health and balance is continually being regenerated.
This relationship between my confidence in myself and my confidence in the world reminds me that when I am feeling uncertain about the world, I can focus inward. Checking in on and strengthening my own confidence through self-care is a much easier approach to making the world feel like a better place than trying to change the world is!
What Is Greater? Your Self Love or your Self Critic?
For some time I have followed what we teach to those in leadership “to get positive outcomes, don’t get out of bed until your self love is greater than your self critic or you are likely to make a mess”. I believe that self love, self worth and self confidence are essential for leadership.
In our developing leadership training using Genuine Contact modules, we teach the importance of going out into the world from a place of self love rather than self critic. It might be only a 51% to 49% difference. You will tap into more of your leadership potential, ready for action.
A way to get started in this learning is to check in with yourself right now. Is your self-love greater than your self-critic today? If so, it is a good day to move forward in actions that feel important to you. If not, what can you do to strengthen your sense of self-love today?
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Manju Bala
its really inspiring