Personal and Career Development

A Workbook on Self-Leadership

Claudio A. Rivera, Elza Priede

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781637420287
• eBook ISBN: 9781637420294
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Leadership

This workbook will help readers identify their strengths, interests, and priorities to take ownership of their life and career decisions.

The authors provide a framework to reflect on several questions that are becoming increasingly important among the 21st-century leaders?how to create an authentic leadership style, define one's values, and align vision–values career. Readers are given an extensive number of tools for defining their purpose, creating a plan, and are being encouraged to take it into action.

Coaches, mentors–trainers who help others achieve their aspirations will benefit from the contents of this book. It is also very valuable for first-time and mid-level managers, recent graduates, and newly established entrepreneurs looking for tools to create a roadmap for their life and career planning.

PART I

Ownership of Your Life

CHAPTER 1

Self-Leadership and Purpose

Introduction

AMA LLULLA, AMA QILLA, AMA SUWA—one of the authors met this sentence engraved in stone at the entrance of a country house in La Paz, Bolivia. This is an old Quechua saying, which means, “Don’t lie, don’t be lazy, and don’t steal.” It defined the basic principles to be successful in the ancestral societies of South America. In a sense, this phrase is a good example of the unwritten rules to succeed in any society, market, sector. In military terms, we can call them: rules of engagement. Personal success in career and life depends largely on how wisely we live according to these rules while we stay authentic to ourselves. This is called practical wisdom. It is the capacity to apply daily the universal, accepted, written/unwritten laws of a specific society at a specific time.

Practical wisdom is the most important skill for succeeding in career and life. The wise person identifies the right principles for acting while he or she does not build rigid structures of behavior. The world out there is full of winds, and we cannot foresee where they will push us to; however, we should have clarity of mind and will to be firm in the middle of turbulence.

During school and college times, teachers and instructors are largely committed to assisting the students in their task of acquiring technical knowledge and practical skills. In the end, graduates become specialists, who know the basics of being a manager, of participating in a decisionmaking process. However, these capacities hardly guarantee their ability to lead organizations, other people and, what is even more important, to lead themselves and their families. As said before, practical wisdom is the most important skill; unfortunately, there is plenty of evidence that it is not the most frequent among graduates.

This first chapter will explain the relevance of this book and its topics. We will outline the main characteristics of the current context, which impact substantially career choices and which are the differences with the reality of previous generations.

What Is Self-Leadership

Each one of us faces at a moment our moment of truth when we evaluate all our most important and long-standing decisions. Nobody can really predict when this milestone comes, as it depends on many subjective and circumstantial factors. The role of personal development courses and books like this one is to somehow artificially trigger this moment.

You have probably seen the advertisement that introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer 1984 won’t be like “1984.” Apple introduced itself as the game-changer, the rebel, the one who comes to reinstate the rules. Our aforementioned moments of truth are somehow a reaction to our usual long-term compliance with the rules of the game. We move fast in our careers, and the tendency is to go with the flow. The question is: am I true to myself? And that is exactly the question we are posting in this first part of the book.

Self-leadership starts with the clear articulation of who we are. There are three concepts or pillars that constitute the blocks to define our authentic self: self-awareness, the scale of values, and vision (see figure 1.1). We will work around them during this and the next chapters of Part I.

We finish this subsection of self-leadership with a definition. According to Dr. Rivera, “leadership is the art of achieving outstanding results through others, serving others and becoming the best of you.” Drawing from this definition, we could elaborate that self-leadership is the art of achieving outstanding results in ourselves with the following nuances:

1. Leadership is an art, and it means that we need to exercise both knowledge and practical capacity.

2. A leader gets outstanding results, that is, even more than what people could on average achieve.

3. Leaders work through others: lone leaders simply do not exist; also, regarding self-leadership—we need others to develop ourselves.

Figure 1.1 The three main pillars of self-leadership

Source: The authors

4. The way of leading is serving because an egoistic or selfish leader is a caricature, and not a real leader. Servant leadership is a vision of leadership proposed by (Greenleaf 1970), which has been gaining increasing support during the last decades.

5. The aim is to become the best of you, because remarkable leaders are so not, for what they have, but for what they become. Everything we do has an impact on our values, emotional intelligence, and temperament.

Particularly Practical Advice and Principles for Making Good Use of This Book

There are a few things you must keep in mind. We suggest at this point to take a notebook for the first time and write these tips in a visible place.

(a) You are in charge of learning! In this book, you are not just a receptor, but also the main crafter of the learning.

(b) You will benefit from sharing their reflections. It could be enough if you keep entries in the notebook and share them with people close to who you trust.

(c) If it is true that poetry makes people happy, money pays for that. Intently we have tried to keep this book as dry and concise as possible. We want you to be reflective beyond emotions when making such important decisions.

(d) There is enough evidence that leadership could be developed, and we endorse it. Otherwise, what is the meaning of leadership training? Your conviction toward your capacity to improve leadership skills is fundamental for feeding the effort that this takes.

(e) Leadership development topics are generally considered soft. There is enough evidence that the personal and corporate leadership level impacts the personal and corporate bottom line.

(f) Leadership is not about fighting weaknesses but fostering strengths. The underlying methodology of this workbook endorses the principles of positive psychology. A great writer would say...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Description
• Contents
• Summary of the Chapters
• Introduction
• Part I Ownership of Your Life
• Part II Ownership of Your Career
• Part III Ownership of Your Daily Agenda
• Appendix 1: The Syllabus of the Personal and Career Development Course on Which the Workbook is Based
• Appendix 2: My Personal and Career Journey “Leader’s Journal”
• Appendix 3: The Keirsey Temperament Sorter
• Appendix 4: Geert Hofstede’s Work on Cultural Differences
• Appendix 5: Publication Transcendental Love Journal
• Appendix 6: Best Self-Portrait Best Practices
• Appendix 7: Guiding Questionnaire for Personal Reflection
• References
• About the Authors
• Index
• Backcover