July 12, 2011
When I first learned NLP I heard the statement that “if you can’t run your own brain, someone else will.” Later as I applied that statement to wealth creation and came up with the following line: “If you can’t manage your mind, what makes you think you can manage your money?” The premise here is that if you can’t manage your mind, or beliefs, or representations, and so on, how can you manage your state from which comes your speech and behavior? And of course, the implication is, You can’t. All of this points to self-management, does it not? And as with so many things, the best management, the highest management of all is inside-out management.
Recently when I was in Bali for the Meta-Coach Training, I ran on the beach each morning, and as I did I began noticing day after day the ways that someone had been managing the beach against the wear and tear of the ocean. Later on one day I mentioned that and as I did I called it Beach Management and later, Ocean Management. What I noticed was that they were building rocky walls that were like fingers out into the ocean. This seemed to manage how the waves would then hit the beaches and to do so in a way that the erosion from the waves coming in and out, and taking sand and property with it would not undermine the sidewalk or foundations of buildings. There were places were that had occurred, and now someone was managingthat by directing the waves to come in and out in different ways.
And while there, I saw a crew of men begin to build a new dike to re-direct the waves and to rebuild where a lot of erosion had occurred. They were managing the ocean. Well, not really, just some waves on one particular beach.
Management— What is it? And what does it involve? To manage is to take something (whatever the content is) and work with it. Managing involves noticing what one is working with, how much there is (make an inventory of it), identifying the assets in that inventory of factors, parts, products, people, etc. as well as the liabilities. As a manager, you will want to learn the processes involved in the content and how to work with those processes. In an organization, you manage the system, the processes, the budget, the hiring, the people and so on. And you do so as you work with hiring, setting criteria, communicating the vision, mission, and values of the company, planning, monitoring, developing people through training and coaching, etc. To manage you will need to set up ways of monitoring things, measuring things, determining quality, reporting, solve problems, communicate upward, downward, and laterally.
There’s a lot to management! So also with self-management! What’s involved in that? How are you as a self-manager? Do you like your management style? Are you warm and nurturing? Are you firm and on target? Do you get things done or do you let them go and not follow up on things? The content of self-management is yourself. It is you in all of your dimensions of mind, emotion, health, fitness, energy, communicating, relating, time, scheduling, activities, promises, habits and rituals, money, resources, strengths, weaknesses, debts, and much more. There’s a lot to manage in yourself if you are going to be an effective self-manager.
In Neuro-Semantics we view self-management as the ultimate management or highest form of management. That’s because if you can manage yourself—if you can get yourself to do what you know to do so that you can follow-through, if you can get yourself to keep on learning, integrating, etc. then as an effective self-leader you can succeed with yourself in reaching your objectives.
Self-management, of course, comes after self-leadership. First you have to learn how to lead yourself— and that means creating a meaningful vision and then setting out a mission that will become your purpose and intention. Self-leadership requires you to be able to know yourself and inspire yourself. You lead yourself by creating a vision of the future that you want to create.
How about you? And what is leadership? It is bringing out the best in people; it is setting a direction and vision that creates a strong and sustainable sense of inspiration; it is seeing a possible future, identifying the current reality and setting out a pathway for solving the problems in the path to that future.
Then comes self-management. And as it is said about companies, so it is with people. Most people are over-managed and under-led. So to be an effective self-manager, it is not a case of micro-managing everything you do, it is rather the case of setting out intentions and meaning-frames that will self-organize your mind-body-emotion system. It is creating processes that will then require some monitoring and upgrading and quality controlling, but not micro-managing. Ultimately, you can benchmark your effectiveness as a leader and manager of yourself by looking at how well you are unleashing your potentials and actualizing your highest and best. If you are increasingly living a self-actualizing life (using the 15 criteria from Maslow’s modeling of self-actualizing people), then you are doing a great job of leading and managing yourself. If not, then take time to visit a self–actualization coach (a Meta-Coach) to facilitate you in being a great self-leader and self-manager.
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
