Leading Your Career Starts With Self-Leadership

You know what's interesting about most leadership development programs? They spend months teaching you how to lead your team, how to influence upwards, manage stakeholders, develop your direct reports, navigate politics, build your leadership presence, and many of them spend almost no time on the one thing that determines whether any of this will actually work leading yourself. So today we're changing all of that. Yes, we're talking about Self-leadership. Hello and welcome to courage. Loading. I'm your host, Alicia Noble, leadership coach and career transition strategist. And I help women navigate the messy middle of career transitions because real change isn't just about what you do next, it's about who you are becoming, the identities you're sharing, the beliefs you rewriting, and the courage it takes to lead yourself through it all. Every story of change begins with a single moment of courage. And this is where I help you find yours. So let's dive in. So what is Self-leadership? Andrew Bryant, one of the leading researchers in the space, defines Self-leadership as the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling, and actions towards your objectives. So this tells us that self-leadership isn't a fixed personality trait some of us are born with and others miss out on. It's a practice, something we can all learn, build, and strengthen over time. As we become more intentional about how we think, what we feel, and what we choose to do in service of what we actually want. Because that's really what self-leadership is the ongoing practice of paying attention to what's happening inside you, influencing how you respond to it and moving in the direction of what you actually want. And it rests on three things working together. First, self-awareness. Knowing What you're thinking, feeling, and why. Then self-regulation, managing your responses instead of running on old defaults and finally intentional action, taking steps that come from a place of clarity and not a place of habitual practice or pressure. Most leadership programs jump straight to that last piece the action, behaviour, or output. And without the self-awareness and the self-regulation coming first, that change never sticks. And here's what I see with a lot of clients who are navigating career transitions. They've done the thinking. They've read loads of books, they've spoken to a lot of people. They can describe the pattern, they can name the belief, and they can even understand intellectually what's holding them back. and yet they still haven't moved. They still haven't made the changes that they know they need to. And this is what we call the knowing doing gap. And it's not a motivation or willpower problem. I like to use the belief iceberg when I work through this with my clients. Because what we see above the waterline, it's our behaviours. These are the things we do. It's our reactions. It's how we show up and it's the patterns that other people see. It's how they experience us. But underneath the waterline, we discover multiple layers, each going progressively deeper. The feelings that drive that behaviour, the beliefs underneath the feelings, the values that drive that beliefs and at the very bottom, identity who we believe we fundamentally are. This is why willpower doesn't work when we're trying to make these changes. Because you cannot change what's above the waterline. Only by looking at what's above the waterline. Self-leadership is the practice of working on the whole iceberg, not just what's visible on the surface. And in a career transition, there's something else going on that makes this even more important. Self-Determination theory tells us that humans have three fundamental psychological needs, and when those needs go unmet for long enough, that's exactly when we start to feel stuck and strangely detached from our own lives. The first of these is autonomy. This is the need to feel that your career is being chosen by you and not happening to you. And if you've spent years following someone else's script, being promoted into roles, taking on what was asked of you and building a career based on what the organization needed from you rather than the one that you wanted. Your need for autonomy is being depleted, and a depleted autonomy need often starts to show up as being disengaged and not interested and not having that same level of drive competence. This is the need for us to feel genuinely capable at what we're doing. Imposter syndrome, the inner critic, and that constant undervaluing of our own skills. The way we talk to ourselves in a negative way. All of these erode our sense of competence. Even when our capability is high and a depleted competence need often shows up when we have an impressive CV and a great track record, but we still don't feel like we're qualified enough to do the next thing. Relatedness. This is the need we have to feel understood and supported in what we're navigating, because quite often people carry career transitions alone. They partner may not fully get it. Their colleagues may not be in the same boat. No one in the immediate world truly understands what they're going through, and trying to navigate this change in isolation is one of the hardest things there is. Self-leadership is not just a mindset shift. It's the active work of meeting those needs intentionally, so that you have the internal conditions that actually help you to make conscious decisions based on what you actually want. So what does Self-leadership look like when we're in the middle of a career transition? I like to think of this as four dimensions. One leading your inner world. This is the mindset work. This is about naming the belief that's running in the background and learning to interrupt it in real time. It's not about waiting for that belief to disappear because it probably won't. But learning to recognize it for what it is and choosing a different response. That's the work. The inner critic almost always gets louder in a transition, not because you're doing something wrong, but because you're doing something that feels high stakes to taking action before you're ready. There's so much research out there that shows us insight doesn't come before action. It comes from action. You cannot think yourself into a new version of yourself. You need to act in this way. Self-leadership in a transition means moving without full certainty, not in a reckless way, but through small, deliberate experiments that give you real data that shows you what works and what doesn't. Three. Building boundaries as infrastructure boundaries are not about pushing people away, but they are the conditions that make change possible. A transition requires significant energy and. If you say yes to everything that lands in front of you, there's going to be nothing left for the real work. The work of becoming who you are choosing to be in this stage. So that boundary is simply a decision about where your energy goes. So if you feel uncomfortable with boundaries, reframe boundary as simply being a decision about where your energy goes. For designing your outer world deliberately, who you have around you matters more than many of us like to acknowledge. Think about this as your constellation. I sometimes also refer to it as your personal board of directors. The most important thing is having the right people around you fulfilling the right roles. So think of this as the sponsor who helps to open doors. The mentor who helps you to navigate situations, or the challenger who prevents you from playing small. And the person who holds up the mirror to reflect back to you honestly. And it's also about the peers who walk alongside you. Most people find gaps when they map this, not because they lack good people around them, but because they've never been intentional about who they need around them. For this chapter, Self-leadership means asking those questions and then acting on what you see. So as we pull all of this together, what's the one action you can take forward from today? I want you to pick one of the four dimensions of Self-leadership that we talked about leading your inner world, taking action before you're ready. Building boundaries or designing your outer world. And identify one thing that you can do differently today, whether that's addressing a gap or whether that's strengthening an area that already exists. Maybe it's naming a belief that's running the show and writing it down to see whether it's actually true, and then becoming more aware every time that shows up. Maybe it's taking the smallest possible action before you feel ready or putting in place that boundary you've been avoiding and that's holding you back. Or maybe it's reaching out to one person that can fill a gap in your constellation. Just choose one thing because Self-leadership starts with that simple, intentional practice. The ongoing practice of intentionally influencing how you think, how you feel, and what you do in the direction of what you actually want. If today's episode resonated with you, please follow and subscribe. And if you have a moment to leave a review, I'd greatly appreciate that it helps more people find this conversation when they need it most. So until next time, this is courage. Loading. I'm Alicia Noble, and remember, every story of change begins with a single moment of courage. So what's yours going to be?