Can You Lead Yourself?

Being immersed in the personal and professional development world, I'm flooded with stories, articles and offers of workshops on leadership.

It's like everyone is learning to become a leader or coaching others on how to become leaders!

For some of us, becoming an effective leader is indeed essential to fulfilling our life purpose. For many others, learning leadership skills is a valuable investment to make for the sake of our personal development, because - regardless of professional goals - the very first person that each of us must learn to lead is...

Our own self.

At the core of self-leadership is working on an equilibrium between self-love and self-discipline. We must treat ourselves with both compassion and rigor, so that we can be grounded and feel confident while we challenge our own limits and consistently do what we must do to accomplish our life purpose.

Needless to say, it's a tall order because issues with self-love and self-discipline have deep roots, complex ramifications, interesting ways of hiding and showing up, and therefore will take quite a bit of time and energy to be addressed.

And we must address them before attempting to lead others because there is no effective leadership without self-leadership.

Journaling Questions:

• What triggers the most resistance for you: self-love or self-discipline?

• What is in the way of loving yourself?

• What would it take for you to have more compassion to yourself?

• How self-disciplined are you?

• What is in the way of honoring the commitments you make to yourself?

• What have you tried so far to grow in self-love and/or self-discipline?

• Who could support you on this path, with both rigor and compassion?