Prepare Your Leadership: Self-Regulation & Self-Reflection

Happy Monday, everyone. Good morning. Or good afternoon, depending on where you're at. So, yeah, I'll kind of give it a few minutes here, wait for some folks to join. Good morning. Happy Monday. Just as we gather, you know, take a moment to reflect on the significance of Memorial Day. Welcome. Speak, wonder today. It's a day to honor and remember all the men and women who sacrificed much for this country, ensuring our freedoms. So while we enjoy this time today, let's also pause and express gratitude, maybe bring that up into three things of three.

Gratitude for their service and the legacy that they all left behind. So we can get kind of started on our three things of three. First, always being what are three things that you're feeling right now or experiencing right now? Could be thoughts that are you carrying with you? Could be emotions, could be feelings. What are three things that you're carrying with you? What are three things that's maybe coming up? Just acknowledge them. Give them some, some acknowledgement, some understanding. Accept that they're there.

What are three intentions that you have for the rest of your day going forward? That may look like the to do list, checking things off, and it may look like maybe using those emotions, shifting those emotions. And then the last thing is, what are three things you are grateful for? So what are three things? Maybe from the last weekend or going forward, maybe as we, as we remember Memorial Day, what are three things that you are grateful for? So as you kind of go through that and think through that, I'll jump into what some research that I'm bringing you today.

We're kind of keeping on the same theme of self leadership and diving into all the different aspects of, of it. So remember that self leadership is the purpose, purposeful leadership of self toward personal goals and standard. So a lot of, a lot of times leadership is talking about someone in a role of power or maybe just behaviors that someone exhibits through a team. This is looking at how do we lead ourselves? And that's an important area as we need to lead ourselves first before we can lead others.

So it focuses on taking ownership of your actions and decisions rather than just simply following, you know, the rules and expectations that are, you know, just trying to fit in. It's really following, following your taking ownership of all that. So it's grounded in what's called social cognitive theory, which is all about personal agency, meaning that we have the power to control our actions and responses to our environment. So it's different. It's similar, but it's different to something you may heard of called self management.

Self management Focuses on, you know, just fitting in, doing what's supposed to be right. In the workplace. This is often called emotional labor. So like that customer service, doing what you're told and how you, how you're supposed to interact with other people. Well, self leadership involves actively choosing and owning your own personal goals and standards and working towards that. So there's three core areas of self leadership, which is constructive thought strategies, which is just learning, you know, with the positive thinking can lead to positive future actions.

Then there's behavior focused strategies, which is self regulation, self reflection, which we'll talk about today to help set personal standards and evaluate those actions to improve performance. And then there's natural reward strategies. So this helps in planning actions that incorporate positive feelings and rewards in tasks. So self regulation and self reflection. So self regulation is the ability to control your behavior by setting standards and checking your progress. Self regulation often it says, it states behavior often because we can't always control our thoughts, but we can manage our thoughts, we can shift our thinking.

So it's all about, you know, how do we manage how we react to thoughts and events. And this regulation is then being able to control our behavior as we react to that. So it's controlling your behavior by setting the standards and checking in with progress. So this is important for setting and maintaining goals. So are you able to set a goal? We find that setting a goal is often pretty easy, but it's working towards that and really regulating ourselves towards that. And then self reflection is involved in this and it's looking back on your actions to see if they met your standards.

You know, helping you adjust and learn from past experiences while you're trying to attain those goals. So there's four key areas that relate to this. First is self observation. So becoming more aware of our behavior by tracking when and why we do certain things. So in this situation I tend to respond like this or you know, like for me, I try to go to the gym every day and my self observation is that if I don't go to the gym in the morning, I'm probably not going to go in the afternoon. So that's one.

So that's helping identify an unproductive behavior of skipping the gym in the morning, I know that I'm not going to do it in the afternoon. So it really ties into the second area which is self goal setting. So then my goal, my self goal setting would be to go to the gym in the morning. So setting challenging but specific goals based on your self reflection. So this helps raise that performance levels by identifying the targets for improvement. So I know my target now is to go in the morning because if I don't, I'm not gonna go in the afternoon.

Then self punishment is the third area which is correcting your behavior when it doesn't meet your standards. So if I didn't go to the gym in the morning, you know, that's acknowledging that I didn't meet my standards right there and becoming aware of that and somehow signifying to myself that I didn't meet my standards. This involves self reflection, thinking about what went went wrong and then self regulation, adjusting behavior, and then the next is self reward. So it's giving yourself incentives for achieving your goals.

So maybe that's, if I go to the gym, I get to, I don't know, have a, have a, you know, better treat for lunch or something. So it's having a reward to look forward to by meeting our goals. So instead of. So we found that self reward is actually more effective than self punishment. So if we reward ourselves for doing the good behavior that often is going to lead to more of that repeated behavior than if we punish ourselves for not making it. So kind of makes sense. If you just do the behavior and reward yourself, that's going to lead to more positive emotions and that's going to make you want to do it more.

So these four areas are self observation, so watching yourself, a lot of that self awareness of knowing what helps you lead to goals and self goal setting, setting those goals. Self punishment and self reward is all about, you know, punishing and rewarding yourself on either not achieving the goal or giving or achieving the goal. So what? Research has found that this is predominantly driven by our levels of conscientiousness and this is mainly driven by our impulse control. So how well can we regulate ourselves to continue pushing towards a goal?

And this has a large impact on in the workplace task performance. So how well do we accomplish our tasks during the day? Not a lot of, you know, not as much of the social aspects of our job, but mainly the, you know, stuff in your job description. A lot of the times are we able to hit those well and this is, these behavior focused strategies are often driven by that or often improve task performance. So that's all I kind of got for you is a self observation, self goal setting, self punishment and self reward and how that all ties in to, to self leadership.

So if we can start building that stuff inside ourselves and acknowledging that and having that awareness that's going to help us lead to better teams as if we can become self observant. We can be become better observers of our team. What's working well, what's not working well, that's going to help with goal setting with the team and then self punishment and self reward with the team as well. So being able to do that first in yourself will help you lead teams and build confidence in doing that with teams later on.

Speak Wonder I see you tired, thoughtful and curious and grateful for memories, your dog and good books. I'm glad. Hopefully today you get time to spend your time with your dog, read some good books and continuing our enjoy your time off as we pause and remember all those who have sacrificed today. So I hope you have a great rest of your Monday. I'll see you next Monday. So thanks for joining. Bye.