Personal initiative as the key to success and mental wellness

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 that enable them to take individual initiative. This means that their life is at a standstill until this changes. 

Nature has organized us in an excellent way so that we can 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. However, if we want innovation and initiative to be part of our work environment we need a different approach.

Personal initiative matters

The personal initiative forms the foundation of all professional and entrepreneurial skills. 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 don’t always know how and why 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, do you notice what needed to be done to get yourself better? Without using our awareness, we tend not to notice such processes in their smaller details as we are often so pre-occupied with our own thinking and feelings that there is no time left for observations in real-time.

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.

Self-leadership - leading by example

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

There has been a huge paradigm shift from management to leadership. We now consider it quite normal that people need leadership. Leadership can be also defined as a personal initiative that is 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 enable your team members to learn awareness-based intrapersonal skills as well.

By understanding yourself better you are able to lead also all kinds of processes that you face at work, be it related to managing activities in time or linking different 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 ‘autopilot mode’ needs reduction, for that they need to have the first-hand experience of what is awareness and how it formulates a solid base for all intrapersonal skills. When people become aware of their situation and have also good mental wellness they can find ways to take more and more personal initiative. This is key to improving your team's performance and productivity.