Lead Yourself First

Ask a room full of people if they'd like to be a leader, and almost every hand goes up. Ask that same room who's willing to do the hard, boring, private work of leading themselves first, and the hands get real quiet. That gap right there is the whole ballgame.

We've got leadership backwards in this country. We think it starts when you get the title, the office, the little sign on the desk. It doesn't. Leadership starts a long time before anybody's following you, in the choices you make when nobody's watching and there's no reward for making the right one.

Do you do what you said you'd do? Do you show up on time for yourself, not just your boss? Can you keep a promise you made to yourself at 6 a.m. when 6 a.m. actually shows up cold and dark? That's self-leadership. And here's the hard truth: nobody's going to follow you very far if they can see you can't even follow yourself.

Why we start young

This is exactly why our youth program, iLead, starts with a year called iChoose. Before we ever ask a young person to lead anybody else, we spend a whole year on the choices. Connecting your values to your actual behavior. Learning that leadership is a decision you make over and over, not a badge you get once. Get that foundation right, and everything built on top of it holds. Skip it, and you get a bossy kid with a title and no character underneath.

The good news

You don't need permission to start. You don't need a promotion, a program, or anybody's blessing. Self-leadership is available to you this afternoon, for free. Pick one small promise to yourself, just one, and keep it today. Then keep it tomorrow. That's not a small thing dressed up to sound big. That is the big thing. Every leader I respect is just a person who got very good at keeping small promises to themselves, until the people around them noticed and started keeping pace.

Lead yourself first. The rest follows. It always has.

Your first seven days

The idea above is simple. Doing it is the hard part. So here is a plan for one week. Each day takes five minutes or less. You do not need an app, a journal, or a fresh notebook you will lose by Thursday.

Day 1: Pick one promise. Choose something small enough that you could keep it on your worst day. "Drink a glass of water before coffee." "Write tomorrow's top task on a sticky note before bed." "Put my phone in another room for the first 15 minutes after work." If it sounds a little too easy, it is probably the right size.

Day 2: Make it an if-then plan. Tie your promise to something that already happens every day. Write it like this: "If I pour my first coffee, then I drink a glass of water first." Researchers call this an if-then plan. Decades of studies by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues show that linking a goal to a clear cue helps people follow through.

Day 3: Keep score. Make a small mark on a calendar each time you keep the promise. Just a check. Seeing a row of checks is a quiet reward, and small, visible progress is one of the strongest motivators people report at work, according to research by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer.

Day 4: Plan for the bad day. Ask yourself: "What is most likely to make me skip this?" Then write a second if-then plan for it. "If I oversleep, then I drink the water on the drive in."

Day 5: Tell one person. Not everybody. One person you trust. Say what your promise is and why it matters to you. You are not asking them to check on you. You are just saying it out loud, which makes it real.

Day 6: Look back. Count your checks. Five out of five is great. Three out of five is still three more than last week. Ask: what made it easy on the good days?

Day 7: Decide what is next. Keep the same promise for another week, or make it a little bigger. Do not add a second promise yet. One kept promise beats three broken ones.

If you miss a day

You will miss a day. Everyone does. A study of 96 people building new daily habits, led by Phillippa Lally at University College London, found that missing one day had little effect on how the habit formed over time. What hurt was missing again and again. So if you miss, do not start over and do not beat yourself up. Just keep the promise tomorrow.

The same study found that building a habit took about 66 days on average, with a wide range from person to person. That is why this plan is one week to start, not one week to finish.

An example week

This is an illustration, not a real person. Maria is a shift supervisor. She tells her team to be on time, but she is often five minutes late to her own start-of-shift huddle. She knows it, and so do they.

Her promise on Day 1: "Be standing at the huddle spot two minutes early." On Day 2 she writes: "If I clock in, then I walk straight to the huddle spot before I check email." On Day 4 she sees her real risk. A last-minute call from the night supervisor always makes her late. So she adds: "If the night supervisor calls, then I say I will call back in ten minutes."

By Day 6 she has five checks out of six. Nobody on her team said a word about it. But on the second Monday, one of her most often-late people showed up early too. Maria never asked. That is self-leadership doing its work: people tend to follow what you do more than what you say.

Where to go next

• If you lead a team and want them to practice keeping commitments together, try the activity in Team Building for Small Groups. It ends with one small promise the whole group keeps for a week.
• If your days are so full that even five minutes feels impossible, read Busy All Day, Better at Nothing?
• For the three words behind how we coach, read Heart, Humor, Help.
• And if you want company while you do this, our free Wednesday workshop is a good place to share how your week went.

Sources

• Maik Bieleke, Lucas Keller, and Peter M. Gollwitzer, If-then planning, European Review of Social Psychology, 2021. A review of about 30 years of research on if-then plans.
• Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, The Power of Small Wins, Harvard Business Review, May 2011. Research on how visible daily progress affects motivation.
• British Psychological Society Research Digest, How long does it take to form a habit?, 2010. A summary of the habit study by Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London: 96 people, an average of 66 days, and the finding that one missed day had little impact.

The seven-day plan and the example week are our own.

About the author. Jay Olivo is an author, keynote speaker, coach, and transformational leader, who by profession is certified by Maxwell Leadership and a Certified Professional Maintenance Manager (CPMM). More about Jay.