Self Leadership and
The New Leadership Playbook
Blog by Andrew Bryant

It is not uncommon for personal and professional success to be elusive. People describe being stuck, being overwhelmed, or facing a block when trying to scale themselves and their teams.

When locked into a pattern, it is natural to blame everything from circumstances to other people. Blaming, complaining, and a victim mindset can exact a terrible toll, but then comes an epiphany,

"What if it's me?"

It is a truism that you can't effectively lead others unless you first lead yourself, which is one of the reasons that in 2012 I wrote, 'Self Leadership - How to Become a More Successful, Efficient and Effective Leader from the Inside Out". 

Healthy self-leadership is evidenced by results such as these,

"Self-leadership has produced results I had no idea were possible. I have grown enormously as an executive: my relations with my managers and staff are far more harmonious; I have been able to coach my team through significant personal development."   -  Grant...

Times of Crisis can bring out the best and the worst in people. Charles Dickens begins his Tale of Two Cities with:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

Living in a post-pandemic world with a war in Europe, it certainly feels like the worst of times, so, how do we avoid it becoming, “the winter of despair”?

Behaviors in Times of Crisis

People respond to the stress of crisis in different ways, typical behaviors that let you know that you, or someone you know, is not coping include:

• Disbelief or Denial
• Emotional numbness
• Increased use of alcohol and drugs
• Anger, moodiness, and irritability
• Nightmares and other sleep disturbances
• Panic attacks
• Isolation or withdrawal from others
• Disinterest in previous activities
• Sleeping too much

Primed, Paralyzed, or Prepared

Why are some people more easily triggered by tough times, some just freeze whilst others are calm and rational.

The answer is that your response to external events is...

Self-leadership (a.k.a Personal Mastery) is the answer to how we develop ourselves to survive and thrive in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world. Developing self-leadership enables you to become the ‘Chief’, ‘Captain’, or CEO of your own life and career. Self-leadership is also foundational to the success of organizations.

The Future of Work

Research by the McKinsey Global Institute has looked at the kind of jobs that will be lost, as well as those that will be created, as automation, AI, and robotics take hold. And it has inferred the type of high-level skills that will become increasingly important as a result.

The research identified 56 Deltas ( a mix of skills and attitudes) across 13 skill groups and four categories. Digital fluency is not a surprise, but did you realize how important self-leadership is to the future of work?

Defining Self-leadership

With the importance of self-leadership, we need to define and measure it.

...

Are you in a slump?

Do your batteries feel flat, focus is elusive and you are drawn to your couch like a moth to a flame? Symptoms may vary, but you know you are not operating at your best, and you find yourself asking, "how to get out of this slump?"

But wait!

Having been in slumps myself, there is a surprising benefit to slumps.

The Secret Slump Benefit

As a motivational leadership speaker and author on the topic of self-leadership, there is an expectation that I wouldn't experience a slump. Nothing is further from the truth.  You see, when I hit a slump, I'm like a man who is happy at the bottom of a hole. Why? Because I both know the way out and, know the benefit of being in the hole.

Life can be fast-paced and we can miss the subtle things. A slump is often your body or mind signaling you something. It's only when you accept the slump that you can get the message.

Too often we force ourselves to push through such periods of low energy, but...

A definition of resilience can be found in any dictionary, but for a living breathing definition of resilience, you will discover it etched in the faces of those that have faced difficulties head-on, and refused to be defeated.

You might see resilience looking back at you in the bathroom mirror, or in the face of your spouse as they prepare for another day of work, or in the dogged determination of a co-worker or employee. Resilience can be an in-built quality or a choice, but either way it is not revealed in calm waters but in tough times.

Resilience Definition – Bounce Back or Bounce Forward?

For humans the dictionary defines resilience as:

“the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, toughness.”

For substances it is the ability to spring back into shape, elasticity.

The paradox, for me, is that with these definitions’ resilience is about recovery (getting back what you have lost) or springing back to an original shape, as if nothing had happened....

If you are a manager or leader, you will likely have faced the challenges of motivation.

• How do I motivate myself?
• How do I motivate my team?
• Why do different people require different motivations?

As an Executive Coach and Leadership Motivational speaker, I am versed in the theory and practice of motivation and extensively work with leaders to improve their results. In this post, I share my favorite theory and application using my own research.

Motivation for Leaders

Being human, we have a smart brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, which we use to imagine and predict the future. These imaginations and predictions create expectations. Expectancy Theory (Victor Vroom 1964), is a model about how expectations lead to motivation.

Vroom’s theory says that, if the future seems reasonably likely and attractive to us, we know how to get there, and we believe we will be appropriately rewarded, then we will be motivated to act. In other words, if people expect a positive and...

As a professional speaker and as an executive coach, change and growth are the things that I have been focused on for my entire professional career. Today, as I was on a call with a prospective client, three metaphors came to me. I then shared these examples of using metaphors to create change on a LinkedIn Live, and you can see the video recording above.

In this post, I thought I would go deeper into the definition and power of metaphor for creating change, as well as show you how to use these three metaphor examples and create your own.

Metaphor Definition and Purpose

A 'metaphor' is a word or phrase that is symbolic of something else. The word comes from the Greek, ‘metapherein’ which means ‘to transfer’. In communication we use metaphor to transfer meaning from one thing to create awareness or understanding in another context.

Not only does a metaphor transfer meaning, but it can also ‘re-frame’ the meaning that the listener currently holds....