Author: Lauren Farina-Prieto, LCSW
"Anyone pretending to be anything other than who they really are will never reach their fullest potential." - Oprah Winfrey
Self-Leadership Explained (What Does it Mean to "Be Yourself"?)
Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, I recall after-school specials and government-sponsored ads cheerfully urging me to “be myself.” I had zero idea what they were talking about. I often wondered, “who is Myself?” Here were the things I was trying to be at the time: “good,” smart, obedient, pretty, skinny, cool. Was that Myself? Being those things helped me to feel protected from shame. But, I was on high alert most of the time, looking for evidence from others that Myself was good enough. It was a lot of work. I diligently managed myself in an exchange for what I perceived to be love, acceptance, and a sense of validation from my friends and my family alike. But, I was often worried that if I slipped up in managing myself, I would lose all of that.
Then, one day, in sixth grade, amid a discussion with peers about music, in which they shared their taste for Chicago radio’s Q101 and bands like Green Day and Pearl Jam, something came over me - courage, maybe? Confidence? I didn’t know; I had little experience with both. But, I heard myself actually say, out loud, “Guys, I like Oldies.” It was a confession -- the truth. I braced myself for the worst. And then, one kind friend said, “Oldies are great!” Others agreed. I felt like a million bucks. For the first time, maybe ever, I had told the truth about myself, and to my surprise, I wasn’t tortured as a result. Was this...Myself? It wouldn’t be for several years until I learned to nurture the voice that came over me that particular day in sixth grade, but it was a feeling that I’ll never forget. It was my first glimpse into what I now know to be a state which we refer to as self-leadership.
Self-leadership involves living in alignment with one’s true values. It means prioritizing authenticity over external validation and subjective expectations, and it is the key to true self-actualization. Self-leadership has become a topic of great interest for out team at Invited, because we see many of our high-performing clients develop rigid rules, structures and expectations to help navigate the world. In contrast to self-leadership, we call strict adherence to these structures self-management. Self-management can include subscribing to inflexible gender roles, beauty ideals, social norms, perfectionism, hustle culture, strict diet and exercise routines, or political tribalism. Such structures serve to protect us from anticipated harm, be it in the form of judgment, rejection, abandonment, or shame, but our dependence on them can come at a great cost.
Like a cozy security blanket, rigid ideologies seem to help us to know right from wrong. This black and white thinking is very comforting in its simplicity, but it is rarely accurate, or helpful. When we heavily rely on anything outside of ourselves, be it veganism, a certain parenting approach, the "Law of Attraction," or bipartisan politics, for a sense of safety, we have, in effect, given our power away. It's important to note that there is nothing wrong with using these structures as guidelines; it is our dependence on and identification with them that can lead us astray. We are no longer leading with our values, our needs and our desires; we are leading with the extrinsic rules that we’ve substituted instead. We are performing an act, and playing a role. This teaches us that we cannot trust ourselves, our appetites, our values or our spirituality, and it can leave us feeling anxious, disengaged, or worse.
The Perils of Performing
In his book, The Body Says No, Dr. Gabor Mate, M.D. presents the link between the denial and suppression of one's needs and the risk of chronic illness. Dr. David Servon-Schreiber, M.D. corroborates this finding in his book, Anticancer: A New Way of Life. Leading a life that is inauthentic, misaligned, and out of touch with our values and needs creates pain, distress and physical and emotional dis-ease. For the majority of our clients, no matter what problem or diagnosis they present, the medicine is nearly always cultivating a sense of self-leadership. That means paying attention to what is true for them and living an authentic life in accordance with that truth, as opposed to performing for others.
Consider the research on emotion, intuition and “gut feelings,” as outlined by Psychologist Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., in his New York Times Bestseller, Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More than IQ. While emotional experiences are often dismissed as irrational and inconvenient, Goleman posits that our emotions are critical messengers that can help guide us to navigate challenges, if we can learn to tune into, and ultimately, trust those feelings. He suggests that the notion of the “gut feeling” is not mystical or magical thinking; rather it is our body’s composite biological response to micro-stimuli perceived on a subconscious level.
For example, if, upon interviewing for a job, you get an inexplicable sinking feeling, it’s likely that you have subconsciously perceived clues that this is not the right role for you. Maybe the hiring manager seemed disingenuous in ways you can’t put your finger on. Maybe the team seemed low-energy at times, or maybe something was off with the receptionist’s smile. You might not have noticed these things on a cognitive level, and so you might not know to trust yourself and your instincts. You might instead look at the pay, the title, and the status associated with it, and decide to override your gut feeling. You perform the role of a "successful person," in hopes that it will secure a sense of safety and self-worth. In this scenario, it’s likely that you’ve just signed on for job dissatisfaction, burnout, and perhaps depression. Self-management strikes again.
In his book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence, Gavin de Becker outlines the multitude of cases he’s worked on as a criminal profiler, in which nearly all the victims could, in retrospect, pinpoint a time, either before or even during the crime, that they just knew what was going to happen. Many of the victims overrode this sense of knowing, often in an effort to perform as kind, reasonable, or accommodating people. Rather than being self-lead, in alignment with their needs and intuitions, the victims (many of them women) opted instead to manage themselves in accordance with perceived social norms and rules around how they “should” act. Both Goleman’s and de Becker’s work point us towards an understanding that honoring our instincts, in a state of self-leadership, is the true path to safety and well-being.
The Qualities of the Self
In Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, the client is believed to have all of the resources necessary for healing when they are leading with their authentic self. In order to distinguish between the states of self-management and self-leadership, Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS, has identified eight qualities of the self. They are:
Calm
Confidence
Courage
Compassion
Curiosity
Clarity
Creativity
Connectedness
Ask yourself, when was the last time you felt calm, confident, courageous, and so on. Were you cuddling with your children? Interviewing for a job that you just knew was meant for you? Announcing to your sixth grade classmates that you loved Motown? Guess what – that was your authentic self. Now, try to remember how your body felt at that moment. Was it energized? Did you get goosebumps? Was there an overall sense of YES to this moment? This feeling is what we call the felt sense. When else did you feel it? Was it when you met your partner? Gave a stellar presentation at work? Set a boundary in a toxic relationship? This is what self-leadership feels like.
Contrast the felt sense you just experienced with the feeling in your body when you attempt to manage, control, perform or strictly adhere to outside rules or expectations. How does it feel to measure your words, very carefully, so that no one thinks ill of you, or to obsessively count macros, or to re-read an email twenty times before pressing send? Likely, when in a state of self-management, you feel panicked, hypervigilant and self-conscious, because to manage oneself requires a high degree of vigilance and nervous system activation. It is an inherently stressful state. Whether you are in self-leadership or in self-management, tuning in to your felt sense can serve as an important clue.
Takeaways and Final Thoughts
To cultivate self-leadership, start paying attention to moments when you experience calm, confidence, courage, curiosity, creativity, compassion, and connectedness. I recommend the following nightly journal prompts:
1. When did I feel the most like myself today (self-leadership)?
2. When did I feel the most misaligned (self-management)?
Take note of how your body feels different in a state of self-leadership versus a state of self-management, and use that felt sense, rather than any external structure, as your guide to navigate through life.
Self-leadership involves a willingness to forgo the sense of safety from reliance on externally-imposed rules and expectations, which can erode our well-being over time. Research suggests that dependence on external structures has the opposite effect of making us vulnerable to misguided life choices, physical illness, violent crime and emotional distress. Self-leadership, on the other hand, offers to liberate us from the shackles of self-management and its ill effects. It relieves us from the burden of meticulously performing characters that aren't ours, always striving for the sense of self-worth that feels out of reach at worst, and fleeting at best. The more we grow in self-leadership, the more agency we cultivate to make choices in the interest of growth, expansion, peace and well-being. It is only then that true self-actualization is ever really possible. As Cory Muscara, author and professor of Positive Psychology at U.Penn so aptly writes, "Your job is just to listen, ruthlessly, for what is most true for you right now. And then, now. And then, now. There is nothing more than can be done than this. And there is nothing more that you can expect from yourself than this. Follow the breadcrumbs. It will take you the whole way."
Lauren Farina-Prieto, LCSW is a clinician and founder of Invited Psychotherapy and Coaching, a private practice outside of Chicago, specializing in helping high performers embody their highest potential.
References
De Becker, G. (1997). The gift of fear: survival signals that protect us from violence. Boston, Little, Brown.
Goleman, D. (2007). Emotional Intelligence (10th ed.). Bantam Books.
Maté, G. (2011). When the body says no: exploring the stress-disease connection. Hoboken, N.J., J. Wiley.
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