Achieving success, whether it is in a personal, social, or professional setting, is often the end goal of most human efforts. Most of the time, acquiring that success requires hard work, perseverance, and dedication. Yet it is often difficult to maintain the continual motivation needed to overcome the frequent obstacles and setbacks that litter the road to success. C. P Neck’s and C. Manz’s book, Mastering Self-Leadership: Empowering Yourself for Personal Excellence, explores strategies and tools to strengthen the key attribute that provides sustenance for an individual’s motivation, self-leadership.

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The tools encompass ideas such as world-altering strategies, natural reward system, and positive thinking. While each is a different, unique technique, they all result in the same outcome: improving one’s self-leadership and motivational skills. Mastering Self-Leadership defines self-leadership as “the process of influencing oneself”. Different factors provide inputs of influence on a person’s mindset; how we respond to these factors determines the magnitude of the effect the influence will exert. Manz and Neck begin by introducing the idea that the external world around us directly affects our day-to-day behavior.

They iterate that our own behavior is the central focus around which we can structure self-leadership. By choosing how we interact with the world can alter our behavior patterns, leading to potentially positive growth in our self-motivation ability. The first broad strategy the authors discuss is that of altering our immediate world; we may use physical reminders to focus us on what we need to do. We can avoid “negative cues”, those things that distract us from our tasks. Next, the authors suggest self-imposed strategies such as self-observation, setting goals, and self-reward.

Reward strategies were the following category. Two types of rewards were discussed: external awards such as praise, and natural rewards, which became author’s focus. Natural rewards allow people to feel competent and in control, leading to a sense of purpose. This sense of purpose is what allows people to natural enjoy an activity, or to be motivated to continue completing a task. As the author’s shifted focus to psychologically driven concepts, such as mental and thought patterns, the strategies shifted from creating a positive environment to overcoming obstacles.

One of the first steps in overcoming an obstacle was to visualize the achievement, to create an “imagined experience”. Envisioning success bolsters a person’s morale and provides a renewed vigor with which to attack the obstacle. Although the text focused on self-leadership, the authors did discuss how self-leadership is directly tied into the success of teams. The same strategies, which improve self-leadership in oneself, can be extrapolated for a team: removal of negative cues, goal-setting, strong team beliefs and team mental imagery are a few examples.

However, in order to ensure the success of the team, there must be a balance of “me and we”, meaning that while individualistic goals must be set and followed, they must coincide with team goals and neither should “outweigh” the other. The importance of fitness to self-image and self-leadership was the penultimate strategy discussed in the text. Studies illustrated the benefits of fitness resulting in improved job performance and professional satisfaction. Lastly, the text discussed the importance of life factors such as happiness, emotional satisfaction, and social responsibility to self-leadership.

Different personality types approach each factor differently, but the strategies discussed throughout the text can be effectively applied in most situations. All of the strategies discussed throughout the text provide different methods with how one can improve upon his/her personal leadership skills. I found that I have been subconsciously using many of the strategies for the better part of my life. I found the many surveys and self-inflections strewn throughout the text very useful in gauging my personal use of the methods, and they caused opinions to form on each method’s usefulness.

The world-altering strategies were those that I found most useful. Too often, I have found myself studying for exams in the comfort of my living room, or den. Here, distractions are too readily present; for example, the television, the kitchen, and roommates are often the main causes of my procrastination from studying. By simply changing one of the rooms upstairs into an office, coupled with spending more time at the library, I have vastly increased the efficiency of my studying abilities. I removed the negative cues from my immediate surroundings.

Two strategies that I believe could also prove useful, if combined, are the natural reward and fitness strategies. Studying while riding the stationary bike, or listening to audio lectures while running would provide an environment in which I improve my fitness, thereby increasing my energy and focus, as well as increasing my proclivity for studying. If I can associate studying with a positive, natural reward such as exercise, I should find studying more enjoyable, thereby increasing my desire to study. Perhaps the least useful strategy in the text, possibly partially due to my pre-existing confidence, was the imagined experience strategy.

I understand the merits of imagining your success and thinking positively; however, I know that most of the time, I already believe myself capable of any task. The “I think I can” motif is already ingrained in my personality; so while I still believe the strategy is sound, it was personally the least useful for myself. Although I believe the world-altering strategy to be highly useful, I found one weakness in it that exists in the very nature of the concept. For the method to succeed, one has to have sufficient willpower not to fall back into the previous habits.

Even after removing the negative cues, I often found myself tempted to “check the score of the game” or “text my roommates”. Resisting these temptations is not always easy, even without the negative cues present; without a steely resolve, it would be very easy to revert to an environment filled with the previously removed negative cues. One of the strengths of the psychological, imagined experienced approach is the trickle effect positive thinking can have on a person. Envisioning success and imagining oneself achieve his/her goals should make a person happier and more motivated.

If one is happier in his/her professional or student life, the happiness will spread to other aspects, such as personal and social, of life. This trickle down occurrence could multiply the effects of the psychological approach, rapidly increasing confidence and boosting morale, empowering oneself to self-lead and focus on actually achieving his/her goals. As stated above, the world-altering strategies have already made a marked impact on my studying efficiency. Not only am I a quicker study, I find myself grasping a more thorough understanding of the material.

One distinct past experience in which I wish I could’ve applied the strategies outlined in the text occurred during my high school years. I was the number one seed for the varsity tennis team, and as such, played doubles with my good friend, the number two seed on the team. We were both excellent singles players who could not seem to translate our games to the doubles matches. Despite our close friendship, our on-court chemistry was lacking, as we rarely anticipated the others actions or trusted the other to take care of the point. We each championed the “me” approach, each believing that we knew how to construct and win the oint the best. Our communication was subpar, and we lost many more matches than we should have. Therefore, when we reached the state tournament, we had zero confidence in our ability to play well and win in the tournament. We did not even harbor the idea that we could win, and therefore did not even bother to “imagine a victory”. As neither of us had any belief of our victory, we could not project a sense of confidence and belief to each other, or our coaches or team. Also, as both of us thought the other was incapable of the level of needed play, we tried to overcompensate with our own play.

We could not balance the “me” with the “we”. If I had taken into account more of the self-leadership strategies from the text, I strongly believe we would’ve find our chemistry and played well together. The skills were always present, but the poor communication, lack of belief, and singular play led us to poor motivational levels. We gave in to our despair, and therefore removed all chances of winning. If I had found a way to increase our awareness of our strengths and weaknesses, set positive goals, or incorporated an open discussion of our views and thoughts, I believe we could’ve begun to find the rapport necessary to win.

Mastering Self-Leadership: Empowering Yourself for Personal Excellence outlines specific strategies through which and individual can bolster self-leadership skills. Simple actions, such as imagining success or removing negative cues, can sharply improve motivational levels that are necessary for success. Goals are a necessity in life, but achieving them can be difficult. With the tools discussed in this text, I believe one can develop abilities that will be instrumental in achieving success, regardless of the profession, experience, or life journey.

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