4 Ways To Balance Leadership Roles And Personal Identity

When I started to blog, I found myself losing myself. I wanted so badly to be successful that I gave up a lot of my identity. I stopped watching television and movies, I changed the way I dressed, and I even left behind hobbies I enjoyed.

What happened here?

I lost my personal identity. I let my role as a leadership blogger supersede my personal identity. And it sucked.

Woman sitting in front of an Apple MacBook laptop

Photo by Mapbox on Unsplash

While I saw success blogging and sharing my leadership insights, I felt adrift. I felt like I was missing something. I was. I was missing myself.

Talking to other leaders, this happens often. New leaders have their own unique style that gets pushed to the background so they can fit in with the current slate of leaders. The same leaders that come and go.

Here’s the crazy part. One thing remains the same: YOU

Emotional Intelligence: The Key To Effective Leadership

When employees leave an organization, it’s typically not the organization they leave. It’s terrible managers or leaders. They’ve become fed up with how they’re treated and their leadership’s lack of emotional intelligence.

It’s why I left one of my jobs.

Emotional Intelligence: The Key To Effective Leadership

My manager became disengaged from his employees. He lacked an emotional awareness of what was happening in the lives of his employees and how those situations impacted the lives of his employees. He also failed to show up with emotional intelligence, trying to scare employees into staying with the organization.

Eventually, he was left with a gutted team, and the employees were left with negative memories of their interaction with him.

His lack of emotional intelligence killed his team. But it doesn’t have to kill yours.

Mental Health America defines Emotional Intelligence as the following:

The Power Of Emotional Intelligence In Leadership

Are you aware of your emotions? Do you know how to control them? More importantly, do you know how to express your feelings?

Then there’s a good chance you’re an emotionally intelligent leader. If you couldn’t answer the questions above in the affirmative, don’t worry. You can learn how to become more emotionally intelligent. Figuring out our emotions and how to deal with them can feel a lot like solving a Rubik’s Cube.

You can work on emotional intelligence, like many of our interpersonal skills. Just because you’ve been bad at relating to others, expressing yourself, and controlling your emotions doesn’t mean you can’t.

The Power Of Emotional Intelligence In Leadership

Why Emotional Intelligence Is Important

If you’ve ever worked for a leader who lacked emotional intelligence, you know how difficult it can be. The leader flies off the handle at the most minor issue. Maybe the boss kept all of his feelings bottled up. You never knew who he was going to be on a given day.

What Is Effective Leadership?

Every leader wants to be effective in their leadership. Not every leader is effective. One of the reasons behind that is not knowing what effective leadership looks like.

What is Effective Leadership?

What is effective leadership? Effective leadership is the ability of an individual or group to guide, inspire, and influence others toward the achievement of a common goal. They also nurture the professional and personal growth of the people they lead. 

Effective leadership involves excellent communication skills, thinking strategically, being able to adapt, and making informed decisions.

All of those things are things you can work on personally. That’s the thing to keep in mind while you read this article and become an effective leader. You can do it!

Self-Awareness: The Key To Effective Leadership

Self-Awareness: The Key To Effective Leadership

We’ve all experienced a leader who wasn’t self-aware. When a leader is self-aware, they have the ability to focus on themselves and see how their own actions, thought, and emotions do or do not align with their internal standards.

We see this when a leader has set a corporate mantra of integrity, positivity, and appreciation, but his actions do not align. This leader berates his employees, doesn’t see anything good happening, and cooks the books.

Yeah, he’s not self-aware.

Yet, self-awareness is key to effective leadership. Without self-awareness, your employees will think you’re inept and not worth following.

Developing Self-Awareness

To become an effective leader, you have to develop self-awareness. Thankfully, this is a skill that can be taught and developed.