3 Self-Leadership Abilities To Help You Navigate Constant Change

Change is hard! Today’s business environment requires employees to navigate constant change driven by rapid technological advancements, globalization, hybrid working arrangements, matrixed teams and changing workforce demographics. This increased pace of change has significantly shortened the focus, time and planning that organizations can invest in preparing for effective change implementation. These workplace shifts have made learning and agility essential competencies for employee and organizational success.

Advanced Self-Leadership abilities are essential to navigate the changes and transitions necessary for sustained career success. Self-leadership is the foundational ability that enables us to demonstrate self-awareness, emotional intelligence, empathy, mindfulness, social intelligence and agility during our most important and complex situations that require healthy relationships for success.

Learning to take effective actions toward our most important goals amid complex and rapidly changing conditions has become a critical skill set for employees. Below are three Self-Leadership abilities that will help us bring our best selves to a constantly evolving work environment.

1) Increased Capacity For Agility And Development

Change requires the agility to leave behind old mindsets and habits that no longer serve us and to develop new behaviors that allow us to succeed in our evolving work environment. A primary challenge employees face when navigating change is turning new knowledge, skills and perspectives into desired habits during the speed and complexity of their busy workday. The Applied Learning Cycle helps us accelerate our ability adjust, adapt and evolve within an ever-changing environment.

4 Steps Of The Applied Learning Cycle

• Growth Goal: Setting a meaningful growth goal provides the benefits of clarity, focus, motivation and accountability. A goal is a magnet for maximizing your effort to achieve an intended behavior change.
• Practice: As adults, most of our most important lessons were not acquired through participating in a training program. Our most impactful lessons, growth and learning come to us through experience. This is why you must be willing to practice integrating new knowledge, skills and behaviors if you want to evolve and learn continuously.
• Feedback: Honest feedback helps you address blind spots and evolve your behaviors to achieve your desired goal. To truly receive honest feedback, you must be deliberate about creating a safe environment by actively giving permission and expressing openness and desire to receive feedback.

• Reflection: Research shows that regular reflection increases one’s capacity to demonstrate emotional intelligence, social skills, and learning agility. Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model is one of the simplest because it centers around asking the three simple questions shown in the image.

2) Advanced Emotional Competence

Effective self-leadership during difficult transitions requires us to be aware when our emotions negatively impact how we perceive situations, make decisions, solve problems, and collaborate with others. The goal is to develop our ability to manage our emotions effectively so that they inform us but don’t define us.

4 Steps For Developing Emotional Competence

• Learn To Pause: Pausing when feeling negative emotions allows you to regain your balance and perspective before choosing your best actions that align with your values and goals. Pausing allows you to catch up with your negative emotions before you react.
• Breathe To Calm Emotions: We intuitively understand that our breath can calm our minds and emotions. Most of us have told others or told ourselves to “take a deep breath” when encountering difficult situations. Since breathing happens automatically, many of us don’t give breathwork as much attention as it deserves and have yet to learn to harness its full potential to calm our minds and emotions.

• Name It To Tame It: The simple act of naming your emotion helps your brain move it from the areas of your brain that are equipped to address the physical threats to the more rational parts that serve you in problem-solving, relationships and creativity. As neuroscientists like to say, naming an emotion helps you tame it. The more specific we are in naming our emotions, the more prepared we will be to take the right steps forward.

• What Can You Control: Stephen Covey’s Circle of Influence provides a practical framework for challenging feelings of helplessness by identifying attitudes and activities within our control or influence. The point is to create awareness by defining the worries to let go of because they are beyond our influence while at the same time identifying the areas where our efforts will have a real impact. The most successful among us know that their fate is determined not by the challenges they face along their journey but by how they respond to them.

3) Focus On Self-Care

We must learn that taking time away from work, stress and anxiety improves our performance, accuracy, health and well-being—a wise investment. When we don’t prioritize self-care to maintain mental, emotional and physical well-being, we are disadvantaged in our abilities to perceive situations accurately, build relationships, make decisions and manage stress.

The good news is that even during extended periods of challenge, there are things we can do to develop and grow our well-being and guard against burnout.

4 Best Practices For Self-Care

• Invest In Relationships: Geographically dispersed employees and hybrid working arrangements that rely primarily on virtual communication can make it challenging to maintain strong workplace relationships. Combine this with the fact that most employees regularly experience challenging project deadlines, continuous change, and unexpected setbacks. The natural tendency during challenging times is to put one’s head down and push through while placing meaningful social relationships on the back burner. This becomes problematic, as countless research studies have found that social relationships are the best guarantee of heightened well-being, lowered stress, increased physical health, and better long-term performance.
• Take Time To Recharge: Research shows that when we recharge and renew, we get more done in less time, at a higher level of quality, and in a more sustainable way. Since our energy is limited, we need to find ways to recharge their batteries.?Some proven practices for recharging include taking short breaks throughout the day, focusing on gratitude, getting up and taking a walk, and focusing on work that exercises an area of strength.
• Develop A Healthy Stress Mindset: We must learn to view stressful situations as challenges rather than threats. Too much stress is detrimental to well-being and resilience, but the right amount can be used as a motivational tool to get more done. Stress can improve cognitive ability and increase productivity and memory. Good stress tends to trigger the “challenge” response, which prompts us to step up, focus and execute.
• Internal Locus Of Control: If we believe we have control over what happens in a specific situation, we have what psychologists call an internal locus of control. If we think that they have no control over what happens and that external variables are to blame, then we have what is known as an external locus of control. Research shows that individuals who have an internal locus of control are more likely to take responsibility for their actions, have a strong self-belief about being able to succeed, work hard to achieve what they want, and achieve greater success in the workplace.

Self-Leadership Is The Key

Having the right knowledge, skills and abilities is the price of entry for getting the job. But the key differentiator that allows us to exceed expectations during ongoing change and transition is Self-Leadership. The ability to effectively lead ourselves will enable us to maintain a laser-like focus on accomplishing our most important results within a constantly changing environment and ongoing uncertainties. To learn more about Self-Leadership, read my LinkedIn newsletter article, Your Self-Leadership Resource Guide (Assessment, Tools, and Resources) .

NOTE: Tony Gambill previously published this article with Forbes Leadership Strategy on 06/05/24.

Learn more about my bio, content, and services at www.clearviewleaders.com

Read more of my articles on Self-Leadership and Leading Others at my Forbes Leadership Strategy Homepage

Learn more about my book on Self-Leadership at gettingitrightbook.net

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:?Tony Gambill is the President of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping organizations, executives, and managers bring practical skills to Self-Leadership and Leading Others. He is the author of, Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life .