Why is self-leadership so hard sometimes?

It’s not possible to be in self-leadership for every minute of the day. Even the wisest, most Zen person you can imagine, will have moments of getting off balance and losing connection. As one of my mindfulness teachers says, “no big deal, just come back when you can”.

Self-leadership is hard for those of us born into, or affected by, a culture that requires us to abandon our needs to access belonging. This kind of self-abandonment starts when we are little and becomes so habitual that we simply don’t realise we’re even doing it. The struggles you’re experiencing in your life are the nudges to help you come back to yourself.

Your experience is the single most important material you can draw on to understand what you need next. In other words, the reason life is not feeling clear is not because there’s something wrong with you, it’s because there are boulders damning up the flow of life that is already inside you.

So why isn’t everybody struggling in the same way? It’s complex, but when you understand the elements of what goes into self-connection, you’ll start to see that there are many pathways back home. People in self-leadership have incorporated these pathways back for themselves in their lives. If some are finding flow more easily, it’s also down to a different conditioning - a history of not needing to fight quite so hard to have needs met. You don’t necessarily need coaching to cultivate self-leadership. But the coaching approach I use has all the ingredients of self-connection and can speed up the process.

Based on years of research and working with people as a social scientist and coach, I’ve put together this framework for how to self-connect.

Awareness, acceptance and action

Deepening your connection to self is a process. It has three key elements: Awareness, Acceptance and Action.

Awareness is like sunshine; it allows the seeds to germinate. It’s those “aha” moments when you make a new connection like “oh the mental load is not my fault” or “I don’t have to wait for permission to create something for myself like I did in the past”. These can only fully translate to action and become real when they are watered by self-acceptance.

Often, it’s easier – at least on the surface - accepting others pain or faults before our own. We feel self-indulgent, like somehow, we are feeding the giant wellness capitalist machinery by paying deep attention to ourselves. But the truth is that we can only witness others’ pain (including to our natural world) once we have met our own.

When acceptance is felt in our bodies, something in us unclenches. Our nervous system relaxes and this then allows even more awareness of ourselves to grow, becoming a virtuous cycle where we get to be more fully ourselves over time.

Action is tricky. This is when you start changing your behaviour and the flow of your day to align with your needs or longings. This period – often called integration – can take a long time. Longer than you like! 

Doorways to change

So what enables this homecoming to happen? There are three more ingredients you need. Getting out of your head and into your body (somatic practices), solitude (space to meet yourself) and being met by another with understanding and empathy.

Bowerbird coaching contains all these ingredients  - which is why it is good path to self-connection. But it is definitely not the only way and you’ll find complementary practices that build on the work you do in coaching. To curate your own bowerbird nest for  alignment of actions to your needs requires:

  1. Something that gets you in your body

  2. A feeling of being seen, heard and understood

  3. Some space to be with yourself.

It’s as simple and as hard as that! When you are in self-connection, life flows. You encounter less internal resistance and have a clearer sense of your own agency.

Sources

The Bowerbird coaching approach is a synthesis of a huge body of work by many different thinkers, researchers and artists from Western science and Indigenous or Black lineages. The material is sourced from teachers I witnessed being in self-connection and whose work resonated with mine and my clients experiences. Get in touch if you would like the full reference list but if you are curious in the meantime the work I draw on comes from Sarah Peyton, Dan Siegel, Gabrielle Roth, Loch Kelly, Prentis Hemphill, Tricia Hersey, Marshall Rosenburg, Francesa Mason Boring, Pernille Plantener, Byron Kelly, Bessel van der Kolk, Amy Thunig-McGregor, Thomas Hubl, Eleanor Mann and more.

The framework Awareness, acceptance and action comes from Klussman, Kristine & Curtin, Nicola & Langer, Julia & Nichols, Austin. (2022). The importance of awareness, acceptance, and alignment with the self: A framework for understanding self-connection. Europe’s Journal of Psychology. 18. 120-131. 10.5964/ejop.3707.