What is Self Leadership: Andrew Bryant

Mastering Self is True Strength The practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling and actions towards your objectives

Andrew Bryant is passionate about waking people up to their best possible selves, whether that is the C-Suite of a company or disadvantaged teenagers.

Episode 100 (Andrew is living in Portugal. He has ties to England, Australia, Singapore and Brazil)

In this conversation with Andrew Bryant we explore:

• The three pillars of self leadership
• The enduring significance of Aristotle's Logos, Pathos and Ethos
• The difference between who you are and what you do
• The underpinning of self esteem to self confidence
• The importance of self validation
• The value of experiencing failure and crisis

 Andrew Bryant is author of four books, including Self Leadership and his latest, The New Leadership Playbook, Being Human Whist Delivering Accelerated Results.

Learn more about this book and his offers at www.TheNewLeadershipPlaybook.com

 

 

Learn more about Andrew's programs on developing Self Leadership at

www.SelfLeadership.com 

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Excerpts from this conversation with Andrew Bryant

The three pillars of self leadership:

1. Self awareness
2. Self regulation
3. Self learning

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07:15

That's curious, sometimes labelling the activity is enough to provide the insight to fix it. 

 

07:29

Can be. I love the metaphor of dragons, and the mythical creatures, but we all have our own dragons, you know, whether that's a negative self talk, or a lack of self belief or self worth.

And an interesting thing is that we feed our own dragons don't we?

We talk negatively about ourselves or other people. And those dragons get bigger and bigger and bigger, fatter, and fatter and fatter.

And at some point in coaching and recognizing that in a narrative way, you got to just stop feeding that dragon, you got to put it on a die, you've got to stop this.

And then the dragon gets smaller and smaller. But the trick is to never let the dragon go away completely.

Because those dragons serve as a purpose that the negative self talk that the pessimism, it actually protects us from hubris. It protects us from doing really stupid things.

I've got a good friendly relationship with my own dragons.

These are some things that if I feed them, you know, will get me in a lot of trouble. Thankfully, I'm at an age where I've tamed those dragons and I have people around me that can hold me accountable.

They go, hey, you know, Andrew, you've gone a bit too far this way. Ah, yes. playing that one out.

So that's where this you move from self awareness into self regulation or self management, which is the second pillar of self leadership is okay, I know that, you know, I can be a victim of hubris or arrogance or ridiculousness or whatever your particular Dragon is.

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Well, it was breaking the dragon down. So dragons are a construct, right? They are anything in our brain is a construct. I mean, we, we, as human beings are meaning making machines, we we construct meaning out of anything that happens, right?

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15:23

Hmm. And it sounds like part of self-leadership is self-validation, being willing to, to validate oneself without depending on that external validation, which is nice once in a while. It's always nice to hear somebody say something and mean it. Yeah, but we need to be comfortable with ourselves.

 

15:46

Yeah, a lot of time people, particularly for executives, they're looking for executive presence, the ability to project gravitas and confidence and poise under pressure.

And so they're looking for that confidence that a lot of people say to me, Andrew, I really need to develop my confidence.

And sometimes it is confidence they need, but to what you're speaking is the self esteem that is underneath the confidence. Confidence is I've done in the past, I'm doing it now. And therefore I can project into the future that I'm unlikely to be able to be successful doing that again.

But self esteem is the self value underneath that. Because the word esteem is an old word for value, isn't it? So it's self value. And it's it's actually a verb, not a noun, we don't have self esteem as a fixed quantity, it's a daily process, like taking a shower, you know, it works for a few hours. And then you're going to need another one, we need to self value on a regular basis to know what our value proposition is.

And so some people who say I lacked confidence actually are not they don't know their own value. One of the exercises I do in my my workshops, whether that's in person or online, is I get people to say, Hi, my name is fill in blank, my value to my organization is, and you know, people really struggle with this.

They talk about their role and the things they do. Yeah, all of those things are great, but we could find somebody else to fill that role to do that job.

What is your value? What is it that you uniquely bring to your position? And a lot of people struggle with that. But when they get it Oh, actually, I'm valuable, and then they usually realize they're being undervalued.

And then it's when we use the self leadership to move into the executive presence, and then into the influence capital, you know, how do I get paid? And or how do I generate a business for, for the value that I'm providing?

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And the third one is have fun.

I mean, just don't be a leader all the time. Go spend time with your family, go to spend time with friends and do something for your community.

But and this is where I the in the introduction where I worked with at risk teenagers in Singapore with a charity where they gave some of my time where I could I could teach the self esteem self confidence, communication and leadership skills to teenagers that helped me grow as a human being some Much more than the stuff I was getting paid for.

And I find that the best leaders are doing something outside of the day to day nine to five stuff that they're being paid for. And it makes them grow as human beings. And I'm very proud to to some of the philanthropy that has been set up by some of my clients who go,

Okay, well, I'm been making millions of dollars my company, but why could I not set up a not for profit and make a difference there?

They are so much more energized by that and it prevents them reaching burnout.

Because anytime you do something for somebody else, what you get back is tenfold

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Your Intended Message is the podcast about how you can boost your career and business success by honing your communication skills. We’ll examine the aspects of how we communicate one-to-one, one to few and one to many – plus that important conversation, one to self.

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George is a specialist in communication skills. Especially presentation. He’s fascinated by the links between communication and influencing behaviours. He delivers training and coaching programs to help leaders and promising professionals deliver the intended message for greater success.

 

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