Personal initiative as the key to success and mental wellness
Most entrepreneurial countries in the worldAre you aware that all success stems from the personal initiative? Read on to discover why initiative is important!
When people aren't engaged with what they do or feel passive, they lack practical and applicable intrapersonal skills. Such inner skills enable you to lead your own inner processes at ease and thus support taking individual initiative.
Intrapersonal skills are vital success skills that guarantee proven results as ease of leading your inner domain allows you and your team to use your professional skills to the fullest. From such skills both a person and work results win.
WHY DO WE LACK INTRAPERSONAL SKILLS?
Why we lack such inner skills is simple, most of us rely on our subconscious automatic reactions as our schools lack intrapersonal education. We never had systematic lessons on mental sharpness and probably our self-leadership lessons remained superficial. Schools teach us to obey rules and follow habitual patterns instead of using our awareness and initiative.
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 aren't familiar with.
Fear of things outside our usual paths to act causes procrastination.
However, if you want innovation and initiative to be part of your vital business and resultful work environments, it is time for a different approach. The missing assets for your team are here the intrapersonal skills for entrepreneurs and employees.
Intrapersonal skills give a huge advantage to everyone whose livelihood depends on the initiative. Currently, it is up to employers to teach such skills.
In case you desire to get things done and take more initiative, take yourself and your team to the online training 'Getting Things Done', it will allow to instill some practical intrapersonal skills.
Why is intrapersonal initiative important?
Why is initiative important? How does initiative allow you to rise your team to new heights?
The personal initiative that stems from within forms the foundation of all professional and entrepreneurial skills. Personal initiative meaning in this context ability to initiate purposeful action.
Besides taking action, your initiative is also the very underpinning of your individual mental well-being at work. Your awareness allows you to monitor your inner wellness, and thus consciously take the needed vital activities for mental wellness and secure a resilient mindset.
Until you lack aware inner responsibility (ability to respond) for all aspects of your life, you fail to know why and how things happen to you. Noticing how and why things take place gives you applicable practical skills. Here professional skills and intrapersonal skills are both opposites to a subconscious routine that kills innovation.
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 reactive approach (dealing with the problem after it has appeared, such as treatment) and on the other end, there are 'mental superpowers'. The last is an arena of mental well-being and productivity that we have only begun to discover.
Activities that support mental wellness aren't only beneficial for your health, but these activities also lead to opening up your inner superpowers (see the right side of the mental health scale on the graph below). Those are the actual inner powers that support personal initiative and productivity.
Self-leadership – leading by example
We 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 around you becomes clear, well-intended, and targeted.
Five intrapersonal skills examples that benefit leaders and entrepreneurs are:
- Holding focus on the task at hand as long as needed;
- Purposeful and rational thinking;
- Analysis and solution-focused problem solving;
- Accessing creativity and insights, so that you can innovate;
- 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.
The 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. Excellent self-leadership then allows you to lead others and external processes.
When you know how beneficial leading your own inner processes can be, you are keen and interested to share this with your team members. When they also learn awareness-based intrapersonal skills, you can see a rise in employee engagement and productivity.
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 for you and your team 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.
The intrapersonal initiative is the key to improving your team's performance and productivity. And Wellness Orbit e-trainings enable you to open this up by supporting intrapersonal fitness and mental sharpness.
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Intrapersonal development is the foundation of HR training
Every business owner, team leader and HR professional dreams of employees who take initiative, act responsibly and are capable to focus and work productively.
When we understand the importance that personal initiative truly has, we can solve the mental wellness and productivity challenges at one time. Personal initiative, in this context, can be seen as a practical 'tool' (intrapersonal skill).
Using intrapersonal skills means that you and others in your team take full control over our lives. As grown-ups, we need to accept that we, as individuals, are responsible for all our own actions. Including the workplace culture and patterns that we have in place.
It is easy to say that the employer is responsible for everything, but every team in every workplace consists of people. And only if every person in your team is dedicated, can we see improvement in work results and work conditions. No business leader, HR professional or team manager can change things alone.
Intrapersonal skills allow creating leaders and teams who lead the change you desire.
Conclusion
Our initiative gives us the freedom to be good at what we do. It delivers the results that we need when we start any processes that should matter to us – be it related to work, holidays, or family life.
- Do you want to see in your team thriving individuals who love initiative?
- Do you want to guarantee your success in a more easy way than up to now?
- Do you want sustainable results without sacrificing your talents to stress and burnout?
If your answer is YES, you are in the right place and should act now!
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If you would like to discuss a tailored package for your team or take demo training, please get in touch with us: wellnessorbit@consciousinitiative.com.
This blog post is by Kaur Lass