THE ULA BLOG

EXPLORING THE TOOLS THAT UNLEASH HUMAN POTENTIAL

The Art of Self-Communication – Project Managing Your Life Goals

We’ve discussed what it means on an intimately personal level to embrace self-discovery, overcome limitations, forge connections, and become a WayMaker⁴; to challenge assumptions, build habits, and follow your change plan⁵; and to harness mental toughness and adaptability to thrive in adversity with Stoicism, the Quiet Ego, and Positive Disruptance⁶. Now, we’re deep into the construction of our ideal self – when communication becomes foundational and mastering communication becomes pivotal.

How many times have you felt unnecessary friction, been wronged, or missed opportunities because of “bad” communication? In a recent poll, 99% of participants indicated it is important that a business communicates effectively². I searched how to define “effective communication” and would sum up the 1.5 million results as both “… able to clearly convey a message…” and to “… listen in a way that gains the full meaning of what’s being said…”^1,7. So, why don’t businesses just do that?

It turns out communication is extremely complicated. Here are four required elements for “effective” communication to be achieved⁹.

The speaker must know the message they want to share and identify their intended audience.
The speaker must formulate a sentence that communicates the message accurately and thoroughly to the intended audience.
The audience (listener) must receive the sentence as accurately and thoroughly as the speaker intended.
The audience (listener) must interpret the message with the same meaning the speaker wanted to share.

If change is a foundational element of our transformative thought journey, communicating our plan is how we bring it to life.

Self-Communication in Personal Change

In conventional change (at work), we look to leaders for awareness and communication of the plan; well, as WayMakers, we’re all in charge of our plan. That means we need self-awareness and self-communication to set a path through change, and then navigate ourselves through. So, we must comprehend the plan and communicate it effectively with ourselves to stay on track. This isn’t easier than communicating with other people because we take mental shortcuts; we tell ourselves this is our idea, we know what’s going on, and exchange thorough contemplation for “I know what I’m doing.”

How might you prioritize or manage your time as you balance life’s obligations with dedication to self-improvement? Do you deserve or need as much consideration as you put into other things?

Leadership as a Social Construct

Contrary to popular belief, “leadership” has nothing to do with titles or the professional hierarchy and everything to do with influence and relationships⁸. Truth be told, you can lead anyone up, down, or sideways in an organization, if your relationship with them affords you a supportive influence. For this reason, recent research has suggested that formal leadership (through titles and heirarchies) exists only because people want to be relieved of decision-making in favor of being told what to do³. Leadership wouldn’t be necessary if we took charge of ourselves and determined our own paths toward success. But, isn’t that what we’ve done here, as WayMakers? Through relentless pursuit of who and what we want to become, when and why we want to become it?

Think about the consequences of leadership – why we want it. We attribute things like personal transformation, development, fulfillment, productivity, meaning, etc., to “good” leadership. If someone’s leadership style doesn’t fit our needs, we discard what we don’t want, or even worse, label them a “bad leader” and discard them entirely. Truthfully, no one is a bad leader, they just aren’t the right relationship for you, your context, or your goals.

If you were to abandon the idea of needing external leadership, can you lead yourself? Do you know what’s right for you, in your context, for your goals? How do you know?

What does leadership even mean to you? How can you nurture and apply leadership qualities to facilitate your own personal change?

Do you believe the pursuit of goals aligned with your values is able to yield fulfillment? More so than in pursuing conventional success? How does this change your leadership priorities?

How do you prevent non-essential distractions from affecting your leadership? What about your followership?

Blowing Off Non-Essentials

Despite how heavily we desire personal improvement, we must be ruthless in identifying and denying non-essential tasks, maintaining alignment of our actions with our core values, and focusing on depth for proficiency instead of breadth, to “do it all”. For this reason, I disagree with the saying “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”. Would you rather be able to do a little bit of a lot or a lot of a little? More concretely, is your desire to be mediocre at everything you do, or to be exceptional at what you choose? If your goal is to be exceptionally well-rounded, then sure, please try a little bit of everything. But typically, when you ask someone what their dream is, it’s a specific skill or task, not to do everything. I’m not criticizing your goals, only encouraging you to evaluate where on this spectrum you land. If you’re going to lead yourself, knowing how to prioritize in a manner that pursues the right objective is critical.

How do you determine the limits or breadth of your desired expertise, selecting activities and priorities?

Does your vision and strategy account for multiple personal development plans for each line of improvement? How do you nest them within each other?

How many lines of improvement are too many? How much bandwidth do you assign to each? How many communities do you need to support all of them?

Helpful tip: After iterations of achieving your goal and initiating new change plans, you’ll find that over time you’ll become well-rounded but exceptional in each area you’ve pursued intentionally.

The Big Picture

Stick with me as I roll this up into a metaphor to close us out. If our life is a construction plan (it is), with our current self as the foundation, and our ideal self as the completed building, our change plan is the infrastructure, our milestones are the construction phases, and we as WayMakers are the project managers. That means we can view challenges as construction delays that slow progress, but don’t halt it; our community as the crew to build more effectively and more quickly; our resources as materials and tools for safe and accurate construction, and most importantly – our self-reflection as quality control. Taking command of your own life has placed you at the helm; you are responsible for leading this construction project, navigating the distractions, and focusing on production.

You are responsible for your success or failure. Use your community for support, but the support they provide can only be as good your communication of the plan. They need to know what you need, which means you need to know what you need, which means spending time in reflection. You have to at least have an idea of how to answer:

How does the complexity of communication – with others and within ourselves – affect our ability to acquire and apply knowledge?

In what ways do self-awareness and self-communication affect our capacity to learn and adapt to change? How do we learn from encountering non-essential distractions and communicating how we navigate them?

As we experience life and changes, how can we implement an increased understanding of the world around us into our plans for success? How does this knowledge affect how we lead ourselves to make informed decisions aligned with our goals?