Leadership is not a role or a set of strategies.  Instead, it is a point of view that begins with the inner work of integrating and translating past relationships and experiences into powerful habits of mind.
Barbara Mackoff and Gary Wenet – The Inner Work of Leaders:  (Leadership as a Habit of Mind)

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So, I’m still thinking about my recent revisit of Free Agent Nation by Daniel Pink.  (Read that blog post here).  And, I’m thinking about the personal challenge of being a free agent.  (Yes, I am one of those free agents).  I work for myself, and I serve in a number of collaborations and independent contractor business relationships.  I teach Community College, I speak in multiple gatherings under more than one umbrella, including my own.

But, when I am not speaking, or teaching, I work – alone.  In a home office, with my Pandora Radio on and my iMac and my iPad as my primary tools.  I see no one, I interact with no one, (my wife has become an ever-more important sounding board), and I have to develop my own work approach, my own work schedule.  You know, I am in charge of strategy, execution, marketing, networking, content development, and anything/everything else for my own Me,Inc.

But, in reality, every one of us us, ultimately, functions as a team of one.  I teach that all persuasion is self-persuasion, all motivation is self-motivation.  Well, it is also a self-leadership world.  We really do have to persuade and motivate and encourage and lead ourselves.

Here’s a wonderfully profound, and simple, line from the book The Inner Work of Leaders:

 Every person leads a team of one.

So, the question is, how do you lead yourself?

If you think about leadership in general, you know the elements:  a leader sets the agenda, does a little to a lot of overseeing of execution, coaches and encourages and rewards and criticizes at just the right times in just the right ways.  Leadership done right involves successful building of functional teams, and provides correctives that are needed.

Let me make one very specific, and practical, suggestion:  you need to schedule a weekly meeting with your leader – i.e., with yourself.  That meeting is to go over what you would go over with any leader.  Ask these questions:

• Am I doing what I need do be doing with my time?
• Am I meeting with the people I need to be meeting with?
• Am I spending enough time in marketing, and networking?  (It is common wisdom that you have to do some actual marketing, every …day!).
• Am I successfully working on my short-term challenges, and saving the right amount of time to work on long-term strategy?
• What am I not doing well; and what do I need to do better, and/or to correct, for the greater success of my company?

This list of questions is simply illustrative, and can grow to be pretty long.  But without that weekly meeting with your leader (you!) you will see these questions go unanswered, and then forgotten.

So, are you having that weekly meeting with your leader/yourself?  It may be time to take the job (your job) of leading yourself much more seriously.