What is Personal Effectiveness & Self-Management?

December 19, 2014

An element of Whole-Hearted Living is personal effectiveness and self-management. Many of us know what personal effectiveness and self-management are, however have we mastered it? (without being perfect of course!). So, just so we are on the same page –

Personal effectiveness means making use of all the resources (both personal and professional) you have at your disposal (i.e. your talents, strengths, skills, energy and time) to enable you to master your life and achieve both work and life goals.

How you manage yourself (i.e self-management) impacts on your personal effectiveness. According to CASEL, self management is “…the ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviours effectively in different situations.” This includes –

managing stress,
controlling impulses,
organisational skills,
self-discipline,
motivating oneself and being responsible, and
being personally accountable and setting and working toward achieving personal and professional goals.

How Can We Increase our Personal Effectiveness?

In order to increase or change our personal effectiveness or performance, we need to take time out to reflect to see where we currently are. Once we know this, we can then take action and monitor our behaviours to see if we are getting the results we would like.

Some ideas on how you can increase your personal effectiveness include –

identifying what you really want, giving yourself permission to follow your dreams and look at any distorted thinking around your wants/dreams
identifying your values and reflecting if you are currently living in alignment with them,
identifying where your time is going and seeing if that is linking in with your values (we have a simple time audit here),
identifying your priorities in life and putting first things first, and
asking for feedback from people who you trust and feel comfortable with (i.e. a coach or mentor) as we don’t know what we don’t know.

If you are ready to take yourself on the adventure of getting to know yourself (your true self), why not join the Toolkit? A place where I share tools, inspiration and ideas to live a courageous and openhearted life.