The Greatest Gift You Can Give to Yourself as a Young Leader

I believe every young leader today needs personal coaching more than ever. For me, it was the fastest way to becoming who I wanted to be. Personal coaching helped me learn the most important skill every young leader needs to learn sooner rather than later – Authentic Leadership. I define Authentic Leadership as becoming the best you so you can lead, build and maintain positive relationships with your team and grow your influence.

In this blog post, I am going to share with you why personal coaching is the greatest gift you can give to yourself as a young leader. I will show you how to become your own best coach and start creating the life and team you want and build your influence far more quickly.

Personal coaching allowed me to look inside my heart honestly for the first time in a long time. When I did, my confidence increased. I was more satisfied with my life and my work. I became aware of my values and who I wanted to be. It made me better at making decisions and connected me to a greater life purpose than just building a career. As Carl Jung said “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

I am on a mission to help you awaken. I believe there is a global desire for change and people around the world especially young workers are looking for a greater purpose in their lives, work that is interesting and fulfilling, a voice in key decisions, and positive experiences that are values-driven and inclusive. According to BBC Worklife, April 2023 data from LinkedIn of more than 7,000 global workers showed that “64% of Gen Zers in the UK, France, Germany and Ireland now consider it important to work for companies that are aligned with their values.”

This desire for change is happening at the same time that most people are feeling hopeless and insecure about their future. How do I know this? I talk to people all the time.

Don’t just take my word for it. The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer showed that the majority of people in the developed world were pessimistic about their future and didn’t believe that they and their families will be better off in five years’ time. There was a lack of confidence and hope in the current system. Only 1 in 5 people believed the system was working for them.

Young people today believe that their lives will be worse than their parents. The 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends showed that this was more apparent for the first time in mature markets. I want to change that and I want you to join me in this movement. I believe authentic career development is the key to giving young people hope.

If you are a young leader struggling at work and in your life and you have a desire for more, I want you to consider personal coaching. This is more than just getting help to achieve your personal goals. It’s about learning to take control of your life, the right way. It’s about learning to connect with others on a deeper level and becoming a great leader in your life by leading and influencing yourself first.

The best way to become who you want to be as a young leader is through other people. That means becoming a leader of your own life first and learning to influence others. That means building authentic and meaningful relationships with others. I have learnt more about leadership from personal coaching. It has taught me the power of leading yourself before you lead anyone else. It has taught me the power of developing and transforming yourself before you can develop and transform anyone else. And if you look at every truly successful person, you’ll see that they all possess strong leadership skills.

I believe leadership is not just telling others what to do. I believe leadership is listening and acting transparently. I believe leadership is collaborating with others. I believe leadership is building trust, credibility and consistency with your actions. That’s what great personal coaching allows you to do. It empowers you to lead and influence others by leading and influencing yourself first.

Leadership is more than just having people around you. It’s having people of the same mind or being of one mind with the people around you. It’s about building a high-performance team to help you accomplish your goals. That means being in full accord with your team. You don’t have to agree on everything, but you need to share the same feelings, attitudes, interests, and goals. Great leaders build high-performance teams. They create good feelings even in a crisis. I love how Maya Angelou put it, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

It’s your job as a leader to create the right feelings. It’s much harder to become who you want to be without people around you who share the same feelings, attitudes, interests, goals, or love. I believe the reason it’s hard for most young leaders to become who we want to be and surround ourselves with the right people for our mission is because we haven’t taken the time necessary to discover our own interests, goals or master our own attitudes and feelings. There is a certain level of mastery of yourself that is required before you can become who you want to be. And I believe that mastery only comes through personal coaching.

The greatest leaders always have a personal coach who helps them see things they can’t see themselves. Personal coaches have a unique ability to help you find the best in you even when you don’t know it’s there. They achieve this through listening, guiding and trusting you. I am sure you probably need someone to trust in your life right now.

I believe personal coaching is the greatest gift you can give to yourself as a young leader. Personal coaching will help you become your own best self so you are more equipped to pursue the right goals, lead others and build a great team around you. You need to help yourself first before you can help others. You need to heal yourself first before you can heal others. I believe this is what Jesus meant when he said “Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”

I am not saying you have a log in your eye. I am saying we’re all work in progress. Personal coaching helped me notice things about myself that needed to be improved before I could focus on how to make the people around me better. Sometimes all you need to change the environment around you is to make you better.

At a time when most people are searching for more confidence, engagement, direction, hope, and purpose, I believe personal coaching provides a lasting solution to these problems. I truly believe that confidence, hope and purpose are not outside of you, but inside and all it takes is the courage to look within.

There are a growing number of studies that have shown that coaching has a significant impact on many areas of our lives especially when it comes to becoming who you want to be in your life. In their 2018 academic paper published in the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring that looked at the impact of coaching on undergraduate students, Erin M. Lefdahl-Davis, Levi Huffman, Jackie Stancil, and Alexandra J. Alayan, found out that coaching increased confidence, satisfaction, awareness of values, decision making, and connection to a greater life purpose in these students.

In a 2009 study in the International Coaching Psychology Review by John Franklin and Justin Doran, college students who received coaching increased in resiliency, growth mindset, compassion, and academic performance. They also found that coaching positively affects hope which further increases well-being, optimism, and problem solving. I believe this study is still relevant today as it was in 2009.

I will be honest. I didn’t understand the power of personal coaching until much later in my career journey. It took a lot of pain for me to finally realize that I needed help. I was busy taking care of everyone else and I forgot to take care of myself. I don’t want that for you. Personal coaching is how you lead and take care of you.