3 traits of Self-leadership

A colleague of mine Qambar Raza recently shared this great Ted talk with me on self-leadership 👏

🎥 🍿🥤 Great leadership starts with self-leadership | Lars Sudmann

In it Lars describes three behaviour traits to improve your self-leadership:

1. Self awareness
2. Self reflection
3. Self regulation

This is a brilliant way to change any personal trait that you would like to be different.

The key to it is Step 1 by recognising what you do want, how that differs to what you do now and then identifying the incremental steps towards it.

The difficulty comes in Step 2 being honest with yourself everyday about how you are progressing towards your goal and what feedback mechanisms you are using.

Finally Step 3 is recognising that situations outside of your control will still occur where you might default back to your existing behaviour. So instead of trying to repress your response reframe how you look at the situation instead that enables you to look at the situation in a different more positive mindset .

Don’t know where to start yourself improvement journey then start by identifying some of the default behaviours you might exhibit.

What are your default settings?

2 minutes read

I recently read Enlightenment now by Steven Pinker which I highly recommend reading. Among the many ideas within it he talks about some of the bugs that creep into our ways of thinking and reasoning about the world. If you’ve ever read Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman or watched any TED talk about reasoning and decision making you’ll be quite familiar with some of these bugs.

This got me thinking that a lot of these bugs are kind of like our default settings and it needs conscious self-awareness to switch them to something else. The default approach being fast and automatic (System 1 style of thinking from Daniel Kahneman) and more towards conscious self-awareness being the slow and deliberate (System 2 thinking).

While this isn’t an exhaustive list and not everyone is affected by the same defaults to the same extent. I think we can all find examples within ourselves and in other situations where this default approach has influenced our thinking.

I’ve grouped these into

Thinking in generalities
Focusing on self-interests
Believing in magic

These break down further into specific behaviour and thought patterns, see image below

I have also tried to include citations and research evidence, see the grey source boxes in the above image.

I know I have fallen foul to these bugs and I bet there is examples of it throughout this blog. So what can we do?

One approach that I think could help to override these defaults is by developing our self-awareness about them.

Firstly by understanding what they are and what they mean to you. Can you think of any examples of you being affected by this way of thinking, believing and focusing?

Secondly recognise that they do affect you just as much as other people but you probably spot them in others more than yourself. Focusing on evidence that confirms our beliefs while dismissing evidence that contradicts it.

Thirdly slow down and work backwards though your thinking. What facts, observations, correlations and feelings are you using in your analysis of the situation?

This is by no means fool proof and whenever you end up in fast modes of thinking you’re likely to fall prey to one or more of these defaults. So should you even try? I think we should and with plenty of time and practice I believe we can start to alter these defaults.

In the meantime one of the best ways to check yourself is to work in groups. Especially within groups that you believe you can take interpersonal risks* with. This will help with getting feedback in an open and honest way so you can start to make better decisions and more reasoned analysis of situations. This will also help with starting to understand what is influencing your thinking and if it is one of these defaults at play.

I strongly believe in incremental improvement and finding good sources of information about yourself is a great place to start that personal journey of self-improvement.

* You can learn more about interpersonal risks from my why do we need psychological safety in software teams post.

Tips

A lot of these defaults can affect us in such a way that they are interconnected and can be quite difficult to pick part
I’ve found that being able to recall the defaults from memory to be really helpful. This helps when you’re being mindful and looking at your thinking to see if one of these defaults is at play. If you need to keep looking them up it not only slows you down but makes it less likely to happen. The easier something is the more likely you are to do it

What do you do to stop your default thinking taking over?

Have you come across any other defaults that you or others use?

Working for home: Why routine matters

Manage your time

Now you are your own boss all those things in work that keep you honest are no longer there. If you want to sit with Facebook/WhatsApp open all day you can and no one would know. But this is also chance for disaster. If you don’t keep yourself in check then your work /life balance blurs into one big blob and either you’ll feel like all you do is work or nothing at all! One leads to burn out the other to demotivation (and on the extreme side losing your job).

You can also find yourself sitting in front of your screen for even longer periods than when in work. Those pesky in-person meetings, now on zoom, so and so asking your questions, now in slack, heading out for lunch with the work colleagues, just walk to the kitchen and back to your desk, random chats when heading to and from meetings/kitchen/loo all gone, need to chat to someone just fire up a video call. All of a sudden all those “distractions” in work have stopped and now your sitting hunched over your desk looking like Emma.

What do I do?

So what do I do? Well I use a time tracking app just to log my start and end times. This not only keep me in check that I’m working but also stops me over working now that no one else is managing my time for me.

I use Hours tracker for iOS which has a free and a one off £10 paid tier. Which makes it really easy for me to clock in and out. There are also additional features that allow you to automate that process based on location and time, but I just stick with start, stop and total times. There will be alternatives for android too just have a look around the app stores for one that stands out for you.

To make sure I’m getting up and moving regularly throughout the day I’ve started to make use of my smartwatch by using a 50 and 5 minute count down timers. Currently I’ve setup a shortcut as a complication so I can start and stop it easily by tapping on the centre timer link.

I also use my desktop calendar app with regular items coloured coded for easy scanning and todo list extensively as it makes it easier for me to see what I have to do and by when. Making my calendar open to work colleagues too means they can see when I’m free if they want to book things in with me which saves a lot of to and fro when organising meetings.

Why routines matter?

The great thing about doing the above to manage my time is that it builds routine into my daily work. Routines eventually become habits, which eventually become automatic and you spend even less time thinking about them and more time for things you do care about.

The key to success: Willpower

Road to success Photo by Vek Labs on Unsplash

The other potential advantage of offloading the work to these apps is that there is some evidence that doing this can help you be more productive as it can help limit decision fatigue and conserve willpower. This is when you have too many decisions to make which can lower your willpower at which point your more likely to take the course of least resistance. This can be whatever the default options are which have a tendency not to be the best ones for you.

For instance while you’re shopping you tend to be making lots of decisions (what colour, what size, what about this compared to that etc) so by the time you reach the tills your cognitive ability is pretty fatigued. This is generally when your offered upgrades, special offers and impulse buys. To which a lot of us simply say yes and out you go with a few extra things you didn’t even know you wanted.

Therefore doing things that help boost your willpower can be really beneficial such as exercise, other activities that help you stay positive and other routine building habits. Also knowing when your willpower is likely to be low is useful as you can switch up your default options towards things that are better for you e.g keeping fruit/veg snacks refillable water bottle nearby instead of sweets and sugary drinks

What makes willpower so important? Research suggests that it’s statistically the biggest contributor to academic success over intelligence , greater success overall and wealth. Willpower is your ability to do things even though there maybe no immediate or positive feedback but could result in a future gain.

Got any good tips for building routine and habits then let me know in the comments.