Introduction
COVID is challenging us to stretch our understanding of performance, self-care, and best leadership practices.
Your competencies and management style are taken as inspiration or reference of what is possible and expected within your organization's culture.
Today I want to share 3 effective practices to cultivate self-care while growing your leadership and management skills.
I got COVID this Christmas and infected my whole family, as you may have read. My biggest challenges have been rest, focusing, and dealing with guilt and pressure to perform. The practices I share here were my way to navigate those weeks.
3 WAYS TO IMPROVE SELF-CARE AND LEADERSHIP SKILLS
1. A try-fail-improve attitude
As you move towards more strategic roles, you'll be diving into the deep waters of innovation and out-of-the-norm decisions.
Mind your response when facing new challenges.
- Do you have a conservative or an innovative attitude?
- Do you feel comfortable investing time and resources with the hope of coming up with a better alternative?
- Can you deal with expectations and failure?
Failing in front of everyone is tough. Yet normalizing mistakes is the best example you can give if you want an innovative culture.
A try-fail-improve attitude supports learning through failure, reflection, and success (or not).
Finding new solutions requires freedom of thought and action. If the pressure to get it and to get it right is high, only the temerarious will take the risk to go against what is established or expected.
Encourage yourself to be uncomfortable often. Embrace the risks with eyes wide open and take time for self-reflection.
You may want to share some of your findings with your team members. Some others you will rather keep to yourself and discuss privately to deepen your awareness away from everyone's eyes.
2. The Positive Intelligence practice
Positive Intelligence is testing your monkey mind. Your monkey mind jumps in all sorts of directions in the most inconvenient times. It keeps you busy but not necessarily engaged with the right things.
A monkey mind gets triggered by the lack of rest, excessive data input, or insufficient physical activity. You experience it as a difficulty to focus, lack of clarity, or reactive decision making.
External factors can also trigger it.
The current environment of uncertainty can be enough to carry you away from facts into mental scenarios that may or may not become real for you.
When are you giving into the general atmosphere? How can you ponder wisely?
The Positive Intelligence practice teaches you how to divert your mind from what may happen into what is happening so you can focus on the opportunities. When facing challenging situations, ask yourself: what is in it for me in this situation?
3. Profiling your personality traits
Whether the above is general, profiling your personality traits is as deep and personal as it can get. It's the foundation for any other practice, habit, a skill you want to develop or gain.
Again there are levels on how deep you know and accept yourself. Here is where experience, education, or achievements need to be put aside to see yourself.
What triggers you. Your fears and talents. Your potential. Your darkest side. Your behaviors and leadership attributes. The challenges are awaiting you.
Your first and biggest challenge is what falls into your blind spot. The things you're oblivious to. Here is where leadership coaching and deep inquiry can deliver the most.
Self-awareness and self-leadership are the only things you need to exemplify good practice for your team.
Taking responsibility for your personality traits illustrates your leadership skills, management style, and the knowledge, skills, and attitude that one can expect from you.
Conclusions
In these uncertain times, you are expected to work on your development constantly. Self-awareness and self-leadership are, in my opinion, the most important personality traits you need as a manager, director, and leader.
Self-care routines, mental stability, and in-depth inquiry are the best way to continue your growth in your leadership journey.
