Leadership Starts With Self-Knowledge: Ask Yourself Tough Questions
3 strategies to boost your self-knowledge. Once you understand yourself, the building blocks are in place for you to become a successful leader.
👋 Hello, this is Kyle.
Read time: 4 minutes
Welcome to The Influential Project Manager, a short weekly newsletter where I provide tools & frameworks to help your projects go smoother.
Projects today are infinitely complex, and they can easily overwhelm our perception and reasoning. I hope by reading each week, these ideas add order to the chaos and help you gain more control of your outcomes.
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Today at a Glance:
1 Article: 3 steps you can take on the road to self-knowledge.
1 Quote: believe it can be done.
1 Twitter Thread: Leadership, a thread.
Action Items: Share The Influential Project Manager
The Article - The Road to Self-Knowledge
Leadership starts with a simple premise: only by knowing yourself can you become an effective leader.
Self-Knowledge → Character & Integrity → Leadership
Once you understand yourself, you can start to grow and write your character. That is building integrity, honesty, and commitment.
Once these are developed, the building blocks are in place for you to become a successful leader.
The way to develop these attributes is through self-knowledge. You can't improve what you don't understand.
We can only build this self-knowledge by taking a hard look at ourselves, and giving ourselves the quite time necessary to seek the answers.
Here are 3 steps you can take on the road to self-knowledge:
1. Get to know yourself
You can't improve upon something you don't understand. The more questions you ask yourself, the better you'll know yourself. For example:
What matters most to me?
How do I want to be remembered?
How can I get from here to where I want to be?
What in this situation can I control immediately?
What’s one more way I can worry less about what other people think?
Am I going to allow my life to be controlled by the crush of daily activities, or will I live my life in accordance with my purpose?
Is there an overriding purpose in my life, a purpose that is vivid and precise, a purpose that I am committed to, a purpose that makes sense of everything I do?
It is always helpful for me to think of the wise leaders who have done this in the past. Recall the words of writer, poet, and thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
What is my job on this planet? What is it that needs doing, that I know something about, that probably won’t happen unless I take responsibility for it?
It’s these level of questions and answers that move the needle and set you up to be an effective leader.
Sometimes a particular purpose can be squared with a particular career. It may take nothing more than re-examining your career, asking some questions, and discovering a purpose you have overlooked in the past.
Better questions lead to better answers. Better answers lead to a better life.
Answers to these questions may make you uncomfortable. Not always. But in many cases, to grow, the best answers will be the most difficult for you to address.
2. Learn from failure
Fail more often. Failure can bring some of the toughest questions of all. If you answer them fully and honestly, you may learn more from failure than you do from success.
It is at the most difficult times that become most open to profound learning. Sometimes when we realize we don’t have all the answers, we begin to ask the right questions.
Leaders get paid for results, not for never making a mistake. If you seem to never make a mistake, you are not taking enough risks.
Fail more often and learn from it.
3. Don't run for the sake of running
Make sure you're headed somewhere. Be intentional.
If you're going all out without a clear destination in mind, slow down and ask some more questions.
❌ Ask others tough questions
✅ Ask yourself tough questions
Some questions won’t have immediate answers. Don’t assume defeat if you can’t apply logic and solutions when that happens. An answer to a question you ask now may not come until later.
Learn to live with the great unanswered questions in your life. Seek the answers daily. Some will come to you like a lightning bolt. Others will come to you over time.
Either way, living with the extraordinary questions and answers of your life is one of the most admirable traits of a leader.
The Quote
“If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive, and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done.” - Vince Lombardi
Focus your efforts on the foundation - your belief and character. From there you can accomplish whatever you set your mind to.
It doesn’t become a matter of “if.” It becomes a matter of “when.”
Believe.
Tweet:
A thread on leadership. Are you ready to take the reins?
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Have a great week!
Kyle Nitchen