Self-leadership and Your Future Self

Imagine being on a big waterslide at a theme park. Your descent to the bottom is inevitable, due to gravity, the flow of water, and the design of the slide. What is within your control is how you view the experience. Is it fun, or frightening? Are you learning and experimenting, or rigid and inflexible?

Now imagine your brain as a cascade of neurons firing rapidly. The pattern of connections is influenced by your genetics, your conditioning, and your physiology.

Just like the waterslide, in each moment of life, your brain is giving you an experience. This experience is yours to choose how to enjoy but ultimately governed by physics.

Self Awareness Matters

As you pay attention to your experience, your awareness increases, and with awareness comes ideas.

Ideas matter. Ideas are not just the result of experience, they become part of the cascade of neurological connections that generate your experience.  Ideas are what make us uniquely human, and without them, there is no commerce, art, literature, or science.

One idea that can change your life is that you can intentionally influence your thinking, feelings, and actions toward your objectives, this is the definition of self-leadership (Bryant & Kazan 2012). With self-leadership, you can evaluate your ideas with critical thinking. Are your ideas rational? Are they effective? Do they improve the experience of life for you and for your fellow humans?

Your Future Self

With the latest discoveries in psychology, physics, and neuroscience, I am excited to navigate the mind-bending paradox between the evidence that we have no free will and the importance of being the author of our own experience.

In an age of AI and machine learning it has never been more important to understand what it means to be human and what we can do to be the best version of ourselves.

My friend and colleague, Dr. Paul Englert, has just published, 'Futureselves, Free Will, the Self, and the Science of Living Well.' Futureselves are the visions that we have for ourselves in the future, and these visions are central to our understanding of human behavior.

Being Human Whilst Delivering Accelerated Results

My latest work, The New Leadership Playbook, is about being human whilst delivering accelerated results and is a practical guide to goal achievement by tapping into the core of leadership, the conversation. Whether one-to-one or one-to-many, the effective leader empowers people and delivers results through a vision of the future.

As a motivational leadership speaker, this concept is key to my keynote presentations.