Kate's Nuggets

The Mindset of Conscious Self-Leadership
Episode 1

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Hello, today I am going to be talking about the mindset of conscious self-leadership.

There are three important components of the mindset of conscious self-leadership. The first is mindset. The second is consciousness, and the third is self-leadership.

So let me start with mindset. The word mindset gets a lot of play these days. What does it actually mean?

Your mindset is the assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes that you carry habitually that shape how you interpret the world. It's the tenor of your mind. It's the way that it foundationally approaches the world, interpreting everything that comes to it.

Now, if it's habitual, how do you change it?

First, you change it slowly, and second, you change it through practice, repetitive practice of challenging your current mindset and practicing a new mindset.

The reason that mindset is important when you're thinking about self-leadership is that if you think of yourself as responding to the circumstances around you and as at the mercy of the circumstances around you, you are not leading, you are being reactive.

Leadership is what happens when you act with and from courage in service of goals that you can't accomplish by yourself.

If you believe that you are reacting to circumstances all the time, you are trapped by how other people define your ability to act in service of those goals.

Whereas if you think of yourself as consciously leading from whatever is happening around you, more possibilities become apparent.

So what is it to be conscious? To be conscious is to pay attention, to notice, to see things clearly, to pause and slow down. It's about focus and attention.

Being conscious of what comes in gives you the opportunity to become conscious about what goes out. You can choose how you behave. You can choose what you say. You can choose how you interpret things.

You can choose.

That is the power of consciousness.

What about self-leadership?

If leadership is what happens when you act with courage in service of goals that you can't accomplish by yourself, what on earth does it mean to be talking about self-leadership? Because inherently yourself is yourself, or is it that simple?

I am sure that you have had the experience of being in a situation and having a war inside your own head, between a part of you that wants to do something, and a part of you that absolutely doesn't want to do the same thing.

You are like every human being.

Internally in your conscious experience, in the experience of your consciousness, you are a system of competing parts on a purely biological level. Each of these parts is a pattern of neurons that fires together, and your experience of consciousness is like a movie, and each part is like a still shot. That's part of the movie.

These still shots are one pattern of neurons that lights up, then another, then another, then another. Each of those patterns is a part. Some of those repeat, and so they feel like they are regular parts of who you are, and some of them show up once in a while and you're like, oh, this feels weird and different.

Your core self is the part of you that witnesses the movie, that watches all of these parts coming across the stream of consciousness and interprets the story. Your core self is the part of you that witnesses, observes, and chooses and sets the big picture goals of your life, the goals that with their success produce a sense of happiness and flourishing and fulfillment to you.

So leading yourself is integrating all of these parts of yourself and acting with courage in service of the goals of your core self.

How do you develop a mindset of conscious self-leadership?

You do it by practicing this way. When something happens in your life, think for a moment. What does my core self want to make happen now that this thing has happened?

Ask yourself, what is it to be a leader in this moment? That's all.

What might happen if you change this mindset?

What I have experienced and most of my clients have experienced is that when you make this shift into thinking of yourself as the leader of your life, and of all the parts of yourself in every moment, possibilities open up, ease becomes more common, and goals get accomplished faster.

This is what I yearn for for you.

So for today, here is what I encourage you to practice. Whenever something comes up, especially the things that feel uncomfortable, ask yourself, what does my core self want to create from this?

And then take a first step in that direction and see what happens.

End Theme and Credits:
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To dig deeper into the topics I cover on the podcast, follow me at instagram.com/SignalFireKate or at facebook.com/katearmscoach.
To take this work deeper and learn how I can support you personally as your coach, email me at kate@signalfirecoaching.com to schedule a free consultation.
Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.