Personal initiative as the key to success and mental wellness

Are you aware that all success stems from personal initiative? When people are not engaged with what they do or feel passive, they lack practical and applicable intrapersonal skills. Skills to lead our own inner processes that support taking individual initiative. It means that their life is at a standstill until this changes.

Nature has excellently organized us to survive as physical entities without ever having to use our self-awareness and personal initiative. Our usually dominant ‘autopilot mode’, is a pretty amazing life support system. Living in this comfort zone often means that we avoid everything that we are not familiar with.

Fear of things outside our usual paths to act causes procrastination. However, if we want to see innovation and initiative to be part of work environments, we need a different approach. Your missing assets here are the intrapersonal skills for entrepreneurs, skills for those whose livelihood depends on the initiative.

Why personal initiative matter?

The personal initiative forms the foundation of all professional and entrepreneurial skills. Personal initiative meaning in this context is initiating purposeful action. Besides taking action our own initiative is also the very underpinning of our individual mental well-being at work. Until we do not take responsibility for our life, we do not always know why and how things happen to us, as we fail to see our own role in leading our own life.

For example, do you notice how to maintain your own health? Or do things just ‘happen’ to you? When you get sick, do you notice the reasons when and how it all got started? And when you get well again, are you aware of what activities you need to take to keep yourself healthy and mentally fit? 

Without using our awareness, we tend not to notice such processes in their details, as we are often so preoccupied with our own thoughts and feelings that there is no time left for observations in real-time.

Are you aware of the mental wellness scale?

There are two ends to the mental wellness scale – at the one end there are the problems that demand a re-active approach and on the other end, 'mental superpowers', the last is an arena that we have only begin to discover. So, activities that support mental wellness are not only beneficial for your health, these activities also lead to opening up your inner superpowers (see the right side of the mental health scale on the graph below).
 

Self-leadership – leading by example

We, here at Wellness Orbit, see that intrapersonal skills form the very foundation of self improvement and all leadership skills. Many leaders have said that it is easy to manage things, but not people.

Leadership is above all leading by your own example. In that sense we can say that interpersonal skills and intrapersonal skills are linked, when you know how to lead yourself, leading others becomes easy. When your intrapersonal communication is precise, your communication with others becomes clear, well-intended, and clearly targeted.

Five intrapersonal skills examples that benefit leaders and entrepreneurs are:

1. Holding focus on the task at hand as long as needed;
2. Purposeful and rational thinking;
3. Analysis and solution-focused problem solving;
4. Accessing creativity and insights, so that you can innovate;
5. Differentiating the important from the less principal side factors and setting priorities etc. 

Those are just a few, the actual intrapersonal skills list is long and you can find out more on our homepage section that opens up the definition of and how those inner skills support different areas of your life.

Shift from people management to leadership

There has been a huge paradigm shift from management to leadership. We now consider it quite normal that people need leadership. Leadership can be defined as a personal initiative based on using awareness as one's guidance to look upon situations and notice solutions where others fail to see them.

We see that intrapersonal skills formulate a base for all practical leadership skills. However, first, you need to learn to lead yourself and then secondly enable your team members to learn awareness-based intrapersonal skills as well.

What role do intrapersonal skills play for leaders?

By understanding yourself better, you can lead people and different processes that you face at work, be it related to managing activities in time or linking those processes so that your ambitions stay aligned with an agreed vision and business plan.

If you need people in your team to lead themselves and others, their internal automatisms need reduction. It is easiest to start by enabling them to have a first-hand experience of what is awareness. Once they know that awareness formulates a solid base for all intrapersonal skills.

When people become aware of their situation and obtain good mental wellness, they can find ways to take more and more personal initiative. It is your key to improving your team's performance and productivity. And Wellness Orbit e-trainings enable to open this up by supporting intrapersonal fitness.