Take all its place

Taking our place means deciding to take responsibility. It means having the courage to take on a role in confronting our aspirations with our changing professional realities. Self-leadership goes further. It's taking your place, but also taking your place.

The personal development movement has a tendency to instill in us that each of us has our “true self.” It is up to us to identify it and to live it in the same way at all times in our lives. It's simplistic. We can be different at work and at home. And in our professional environment, it is rare that we have exactly the same attitudes towards our superiors, our customers, our colleagues or our collaborators. There is nothing wrong with that, quite the opposite. Each of our interactions shapes who we are. We learn from different situations and develop different expressions of ourselves. The problem is not role-playing, but wearing a mask. What happens if one of these roles doesn't work for us. In this case, we lose ourselves in an identity that is not ours, conforming to external ideals and expectations. Taking our full place means remaining the main actor in our roles.

Could it be by focusing on activities that challenge us while mobilizing our skills, the famous state of “flow”? Or by leaving our comfort zone to develop new ones? These metaphors are misleading if we think of them as an injunction to make the most of our existing or potential skills. We are not just productive machines. We have desires. It means doing something that is important to us. Taking your full place implies pursuing a success that corresponds to our aspirations, whether in terms of contributing to society or social success for example. These determinants are very personal and require awareness. Beyond aspiration, they also refer to the concept of ambition.

Being ambitious is necessary to take your full place. Of course, ambition can have a negative connotation associated with selfishness and the pursuit of power. For a leader, for example, the ambition must be focused on the collective. A true leader does not lock himself in his ego, he is open to his aspirations as well as to his environment in order to put forward a vision that can be followed. For everyone, it is the same. Taking our full place means sharing through our actions not only our skills or our personality, but also what we want to contribute to.

Ultimately, self-leadership is a personal quest that involves constantly balancing our individual aspirations, collective ambitions, values, and resources by taking responsibility for our environment. It is the answer that each of us can give to our need to build the meaning of our action.

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