My favorite color is green. Not a forest green or a kelly green. Green like an olive sitting in the shiny depths of a gin martini. They don’t make many pens with this rich shade of ink, though. So I make do with the green that comes along with the black, blue, and red choices of a trusty four-color pen.
What does this have to do with anything? Specifically, what bearing does it have on the subject of self-leadership? And what exactly is self-leadership anyway?
All good questions! I’ll get to that. First, let me tell you a little story.
When I worked in human resources, I received a lot of calls asking me to help someone “get organized.” This was always a welcome call. Who doesn’t like being recognized for being good at something? I certainly did (and do!). But after one call from a peer asking if I could help a member of her team with her organization skills, I found myself pausing. A little voice intruded and told me, “What works for you won’t work for her.”
I won’t lie: This was a hit to my ego. But it changed everything. And by everything, I mean how I answered these requests and, most importantly, how I interacted with the people seeking my help. I grew to understand that getting more done isn’t a matter of being organized. It’s the result of being effective.
Spoiler alert: Being organized doesn’t matter
There is an entire, beautiful-to-look-at industry dedicated to organization.
Who doesn’t love a beautiful color-coding system, or artfully coordinated binders with matching labels? Why is it that we find organization so attractive? And why do so many of the systems, tools, and other products fail so many people?
It’s because we’ve confused the appearance of getting things done with the ability to get things done. The fact is, organization is pretty, but effectiveness is queen.
Let’s talk about the core concepts that drive effectiveness. My hope is that these will all strike you as common sense, just made clearer by being presented in a new way. First things first, organization and effectiveness are not the same thing. Organization is about methods. Effectiveness is about the ability to accomplish what is needed. Ultimately, it’s accurately connecting what you do to the results you want. This is true when it comes to big goals and to little daily tasks. The connection between your work and the results relies on self-knowledge. You are the instrument and genius driving what you do. Just like a driver needs to know her car or an accountant needs to know her numbers, you need to know yourself, your preferences, your abilities, and even your weaknesses. In addition to self-knowledge, being effective depends on knowing the work and what it requires. Your preferences are important, but they cannot completely supersede the job. If you want to achieve results, to be effective, you need to learn how to balance preferences and demands.
Self-Leadership for Women Begins With Self-Knowledge
If effectiveness is the goal and organization doesn’t matter, then what does? Knowing yourself.
This is why it matters that I know my favorite color. Or that I need a very little bit of background noise to help me concentrate. Or that most of my best work begins with a pen and a blank page. Knowing these things equips me to approach tasks and projects in ways that work for me. Take that trusty four-color pen. Not only does it represent my preference for handwritten notes, it is the tool I use for writing effective notes. General note-taking happens in black ink. Red is used sparingly to signal critical information or tasks. Blue denotes what other people have committed to do. And green—my favorite—is the color I use to capture my own thoughts, takeaways, and to-dos. This preference-driven color-coding allows me to glance at a page and immediately know whether I have something that needs to be done.
My note-taking practice is more than a productivity hack. It is the direct application of what I know about myself to the effort of getting things done. This is the real power in self-knowledge. It can transform what you bring as an individual—every aspect of you—into the most effective version of yourself. This is why your favorites matter. They are the seeds of self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge is more than self-awareness. It moves beyond paying attention to oneself to identifying and cataloging what you discover and learn. This is not for the purpose of ego stroking or separating the self from the world around you. Instead, you build this knowledge as a kind of reference, what you could call a user’s manual, that equips you to navigate your relationships, responsibilities, and reality to the best of your ability. Beyond the care and keeping of you, the effort involved in creating self-knowledge serves a purpose: performance.
Like any high-performance machine, it’s vital to deeply understand how you work. This understanding fuels what I call self-leadership. Leading yourself reflects how you interact with your world. This involves the actual navigation of your relationships, responsibilities, and reality.
Navigating the 3 R’s
Relationships entail your behavior towards others, how you show up, how you treat other people, the boundaries you maintain for yourself, and the choices that you make when it comes to all interpersonal interactions. Self-leadership within relationships means relying on what you know about yourself to craft your responses to the people around you. It often involves knowing when to say no, and knowing how to say it in a way that will preserve the relationship.
Responsibilities include work, home, community—anywhere or anything that requires your effort, time, and talents. Self-leadership in this space involves both the quality and quantity of your work, the decisions you make about your time and attention, and even the work you choose not to do. It often presents as productivity, or an ability to get stuff done. When you lead yourself well, you’re able to get the right stuff done, on time, as planned.
Reality is, simply, your circumstances, both those within and beyond your control. When you choose something, how do you behave in the resulting moments? When something happens that you did not choose, how do you respond? This applies to both small moments and significant events. Self-leadership allows you to face reality with confidence, mindfulness, and minimal disruption.
This all sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Is there any way it really starts with knowing your favorite color? How can you turn a collection of facts about yourself into deep self-knowledge? How does self-knowledge genuinely translate into self-leadership? Where can you start?
Here’s where to start
Start with reflection.
If you want to know yourself, then you need to think about yourself. Again, this is not for the sake of inflating your ego. But this is something many women struggle with because the world has told us to make ourselves little and we matter most when we think only about others.
I know deep reflection that focuses only on yourself will be radical for some, if not downright miserable for others. Here’s the thing: knowing yourself is also healing. It gives you information and language to understand your responses and motivations. Over time, it builds confidence in your abilities, while also making space for compassion for your weaknesses. The most effective, powerful, capable version of yourself is waiting for you to see her in moments of quiet reflection.
Let it comfort you to know that you don’t have to start with deep, philosophical or personal questions. You can begin in small ways to seek to know yourself better. This is actually why I like to start with something easy, like a favorite color. It’s a gentle entry point and immediately lets you think about a subject that brings you joy.
So, here are a few simple, gentle reflection questions to consider in the coming days or weeks:
What is your favorite color?
What associations does it have for you? Be as descriptive as possible in your answer.
When/what time of day are you most productive?
What contributes to your sense of accomplishment during those moments? Think about the physical environment, the people who may be present, or other factors like sleep, food, time of day, or the like. Picture yourself in that productive moment and try to capture as many details about what you experience as possible.
When plans change at the last minute, what is your first response?
Do you think or feel something specific? Name it. Describe what specific thoughts go through your head or what exactly you feel in your body. Reflect on a recent occurrence and use it as a way to narrate what you experienced.
Your reflection can take the shape of journaling or sitting quietly with a cup of tea. Allow yourself to do what works for you. In fact, this choice is another way to build self-knowledge.
What comes next?
Naturally, at some point, people who are effective and able to lead themselves move beyond reflection. Being effective means you take action. Beyond knowing what you need or want to do and even more than creating a plan, you have to commit to doing.
In the coming months, I’ll return here to share how we can make this transition from thinking about ourselves to doing what needs to be done. We’ll look at ways to assess priorities, to build the connection between those priorities and your preferences, and how to direct your knowledge and abilities to being truly effective.
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