Today, I want to talk about the difference between professional and personal leadership.
The reason this feels relevant to you and me—the high-achieving, creative, and ambitious folks that I work with, chat with, and am friends with—is that most of us are leaders whether we have that title or not. I believe that leadership is one of those terms that has been corrupted by stereotypes, and therefore robbed of some of its relevance to us. But the truth is it matters a lot.
Professional leadership is the quality of leading a group of people into some kind of action. It’s often conflated with management, in the context of managing teams or individuals in a work environment.
If you have a team of staff members, or you work at a nonprofit or coporate organization, for example, part of your role involves managing people: supporting them, guiding them, delivering goals and standards of performance, and helping them thrive in the joyful mission of achievement you share.
But then there’s also the quality of leading those people, which I think of as different from management. If management is about assisting people to achieve their goals in a way that works for everyone, leadership is how you get there.
Leadership is the quality that you demonstrate by supporting people, understanding people, and working with them; with leadership, you can create an outcome where success defies not just business metrics but supplies the human quotient and quality of life that your people, your customers, and your society experience as a result of the work you are doing.
Personal leadership is, as you may guess, personal. It’s what applies when you wake up in the morning and start your day and when you wind down at night. It’s the quality by which you navigate your life. It doesn’t have anything to do with managing other people, although, as someone who acts with strong, personal leadership, you will naturally influence other people.
And generally, those of you reading this newsletter do influence others from daily life all the time. People such as your children, your friends, the colleagues you have at work, mastermind groups, or nonprofit gatherings, you are the kind of person who naturally inspires others with the way you conduct yourself.
My favorite part of personal leadership is that it gives you a direct path to improving your quality of life.
Much in the same way that thoughtless or unintentional professional leadership can cause people to become resentful, burned out, or overwhelmed with no checks or balances in sight, personal leadership can also negatively impact the quality of your life if left unexamined, and untended to.
On the flip side, if you become aware of the fact that you are in charge of your life, and you take responsibility for executing personal leadership in a way that makes you proud, you are very likely to experience greater fulfillment and joy in your daily life. After all, much of the misery that we experience (whether we’re struggling to overcome personal challenges or professional setbacks) comes from a feeling of helplessness to change our circumstances. We feel unable to beat the odds stacked against us, unable to rise after we’ve fallen despite our best efforts.
Feeling helpless is a form of victim mentality, and it can suck your life force. This is not to say we are never victims—on the contrary, many people are victims of circumstances or targeted attack at various points in their lives—but to make the very important point that FEELING helpless and robbed of agency feeling after something happens that upsets us, scares us, or guts us will only prolong the pain and make us feel subjected to further misery down the line.
When you take ownership of your days and step into an attitude of leading your life in the direction you wanted to go because you’re strong and capable of doing so, you naturally boost your courage and confidence and increase the likelihood that you will achieve more of what you want and feel better as you do it.
Let me give you a concrete example.
Imagine that when you wake up in the morning, you find yourself dreading the thought of having to go to work. Something is bothering you; maybe it’s a piece of unpleasant news that you have to deliver or a task. You have to complete something you know is going to be difficult for you and the way your unique brain works.
This is a time when you can call on your personal leadership skills to guide you through these unpleasant feelings and get you back to a place where you are willing and ready to get to work, even if you don’t love it.
Personal leadership is about acknowledging the obstacle that you have in front of you instead of pretending it doesn’t exist while being real with yourself about how you feel. Once all your cards are on the table, you boss up and handle it in whatever way you want.
Knowing this, you can decide how you want to lead yourself through the situation. How do you want to approach it so that it doesn’t feel so unpleasant to you? What support can you give yourself to make the process easier? Do you need to phone a friend? Do you need to look yourself in the mirror and say some positive affirmations to remind yourself of what a badass you are?
Or maybe your natural style is to have a sense of humor and not take things too seriously: just remind yourself of that. Like hey, this isn’t going to be the end of the world and if it sucks, I can always laugh about it later.
You consciously decide how you want to feel and how to approach a challenging situation, as well as what support you need to give yourself to make that approach viable for you at this moment.
Then you do the thing, and you do it in a way that comes from intentionality, personal power, and ownership as opposed to victimhood, avoidance, and dragging your feet.
You may not love it, but you will get through it with a feeling of being victorious; you were the leader who made it happen, even though it wasn’t easy.
That’s personal leadership in a nutshell. It’s the quality of approaching your life, and all of its blissful and difficult parts, from a place of curiosity, self-compassion, and the discipline to remember that you are in charge of your decisions, thoughts, and behavior.
All of this means you can choose to do things in a way that works for you no matter what. You may not like your options, but you still get to determine how you will be, what you choose, and the way you will execute on what’s in front of you.
Now it’s your turn to put this into practice.
Think of a situation in your life where you’ve been dragging your feet or avoiding something. Do you see how a subconscious sense of victimhood may be slowing you down or sabotaging you?
I say this with a full understanding that circumstances sometimes are very unfair, and you may be suffering from systems of oppression, or unique and specific prejudices that you don’t deserve.
Even so, you can rise above the muck and love yourself enough that you find a way to move forward while honoring who you are and how you want to be in the world.
If you put yourself at the center of how you are leading and living your life, you become the master and commander of your destiny.
You can choose to handle obstacles in a way that treats you as a precious commodity who deserves love, and who also has the power to do what you need to do to make the world a better place, and to make your life more joyful, if only for today.
So how will you activate your sense of personal leadership today?
What’s one specific challenge area of your life where you could use a little more to get up and go, and a little less overwhelmed and depressed by the odds stacked against you?
How will you lead yourself into the kind of future you want by consciously creating it one step at a time?
Hit reply and let me know.
If you have further questions about how you can activate your personal leadership in a specific question or situation, comment below. I love answering questions from my community, and I would be delighted to support you.
Or if you’re ready to strengthen your leadership and fall back in love with your work and your life, I invite to explore coaching with me.
Learn more about the coaching process here or schedule your free consultation here: https://elizabethhopederby.com/contact
