Why Self-Leadership Is Your Key To Career Success

Today's business environment requires a more diverse and dynamic skillset from employees than ever before. Employees must collaborate with more people, navigate matrixed structures, address rapid change, and perform in uncertain situations. A quick look at the World Economic Forum’s list of the Top 10 Job Skills For 2025 reveals this new reality. The top 9 skills are all focused on enabling employees to navigate important, complex, and relational situations that regularly occur in the work environment.

1. Analytical thinking and innovation
2. Active learning and learning strategies
3. Complex problem-solving
4. Critical thinking and analysis
5. Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility
6. Creativity, originality, and initiative
7. Leadership and social influence
8. Reasoning, problem-solving, and idea generation
9. Emotional intelligence
10. Technology design and programming

The most successful people at work and in life share a pattern of foundational Self-Leadership behaviors that allow them to demonstrate self-awareness, emotional intelligence, inclusion, mindfulness, empathy, social intelligence, and learning agility during their most challenging and complex situations. Research shows that those who demonstrate advanced Self-Leadership skills:

• Perform higher in boundary-spanning jobs that require sensitivity to social cues
• Are more effective at resolving interpersonal conflicts
• Are more likely to be seen as a leader
• Receive more promotions

What is Self-Leadership?

No doubt you have heard or read how important it is for employees to demonstrate self-awareness, emotional intelligence, inclusion, mindfulness, empathy, social intelligence, and learning agility in the workplace. Self-Leadership is a fundamental skill set that enables a person to demonstrate the behaviors that reflect these concepts. Additionally, Self-Leadership is the foundation that enables leaders to effectively express all their other knowledge, skills, abilities, passions, and values.

Understanding how to develop advanced Self-Leadership skills has never been more essential for employees to experience career success. The challenge is that mastering these concepts can become overwhelming when looking at all the research on the topics of self-awareness, emotional intelligence, inclusion, mindfulness, empathy, social intelligence, and learning agility. Each of these disciplines has a depth and breadth of literature while also containing commonalities and overlapping principles. Most people do not have the time or desire to become experts in all these concepts.

How To Develop Self-Leadership Skills

The SOAR Self-Leadership Model provides a practical roadmap for demonstrating self-awareness, emotional intelligence, mindfulness, social intelligence, and agility when engaging your important and complex situations that require strong relationships for success. The SOAR model takes the fewest, most important knowledge and skills from each of these concepts and places them into a person-centric, replicable, and research-backed roadmap for developing your Self-Leadership abilities. The four phases of the model are Self, Outlook, Action, and Reflection (SOAR).

For better or worse, you bring Self to every important, complex, and relational situation you encounter at work and in life. This interaction immediately impacts your Outlook, how you perceive the situation, which drives the Actions you select that lead to a positive, negative, or neutral outcome. After the fact, you spend time in Reflection that accelerates continuous growth and greater awareness of Self. That is the model.

This model enables you to reflect critically on your behavior, identify ways your thoughts or actions might be contributing to the problem, and then make appropriate changes to how you choose to act. You can assess how well you are demonstrating Self-Leadership by asking yourself if your actions and values are aligned, and if they are helping you progress towards your long-term goals.

Self-Leadership Checklist

Below are the four phases of the SOAR Self-Leadership Model. Read the definitions and the behaviors for each of these phases to assess how well you are developing your Self-Leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Self

Understanding the unique you that has evolved based on your one-of-a-kind combination of personality, physical traits, intelligence, habits, beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses.

1. I am clear about my overarching purpose
2. I can name the personal values I believe in the most
3. I align my actions to my purpose and personal values
4. I can describe the environment that brings out my Best Self
5. I can describe the environment that brings out my Worst Self
6. I understand my strengths and how to leverage them
7. I understand my weaknesses and how to mitigate them
8. I prioritize self-care to address my most basic needs
9. I am aware of when my most fundamental needs are not being met

Outlook

An awareness of how your biases and emotions impact how you view important and complex situations that require strong relationships for success.

1. I try to understand others’ situations before making judgments
2. I am aware of how my perception biases can distort how I view situations and people
3. I am aware of my emotions and can accurately describe my feelings.
4. I know what situations trigger my negative emotions
5. I understand how my negative feelings can affect my behaviors
6. When feeling negative emotions, I always pause to gain balance before taking action
7. I use my breathing to calm my emotions
8. I seek diverse perspectives when encountering complex situations
9. I stay true to my Best Self when engaging with difficult situations

Action

Conversations that enable you to successfully advance your most important, complex, and relational situations.

During my harder conversations:

1. I set intentions that align with my goals and values
2. I try to create clarity and alignment on the core issue
3. I am capable of managing others' defensiveness reactions
4. I actively try to understand others’ perspectives
5. I ask follow-up questions to increase my understanding
6. I allow for silence after asking a question
7. I am prepared to share my perspectives on the issue
8. I engage others in creating solutions
9. I develop clear agreements for shared action

Reflection

The process of critically evaluating your behaviors, perspectives, habits, and communication from previous actions to gain insights to adapt for future challenges.

1. I regularly practice reflection to learn from my actions
2. I set development goals for ongoing improvement
3. I prioritize time for learning
4. I deliberately practice developing new skills
5. I share my growth goals with trusted peers
6. I have a social network that supports my learning and growth
7. I create strategies for overcoming recurring challenges to my development
8. I actively seek feedback from others
9. I listen to constructive feedback without being defensive

More than ever, you need to develop your Self-Leadership abilities so that you can continually evolve your lens, frameworks, and actions to navigate new challenges and opportunities. In an ever-changing environment when your typical habits, behaviors, and thinking are not enough, the SOAR model serves as a framework to help you assess and develop your Self-Leadership skills.