You already know how to lead, now it's time to turn it fully on your own life.

If you're one of the many searching for more meaning right now, this is where the search gets practical. Life-leadership is the level up, and it's where everything you want to be starts to take shape.

As a leader, if you walk into the room with defeated energy, your team will respond to that. If you carry yourself defensively, mark my words, you will be met with resistance. If you move with openness and patience, your team responds accordingly.

All leaders reading this will know that. And if you've never led a team, you'll have seen it, because everyone can read the energy of the person at the front of the room.

And to do that - to walk into a room of people with an intentional stance, requires self-leadership. Undoubtedly. If you've got stresses that the team can't see, you better have your tactics in place to pop them to the side and focus on the task at hand. If you're having frustrations about a team member, situation or project - you'll have HAD to do some work to frame up your response in words and body language. There is a sense of being able to see around corners, to play out scenarios and adjust to the situation accordingly. That takes knowing yourself, and trusting your leadership instincts.

The dance between flow and force in professional leadership contexts is constant. And so much of that has to do with yep, you guessed it, how the leader leads themselves.

I was in leadership positions for 10 years in my corporate career. Leadership of teams towards things, and of people towards themselves - are both concepts that I am skilled at, and passionate about.

What is Self-Leadership?

Coaches and those in the personal growth space talk a lot about self-leadership, and rightly so - it's an important concept that can take many forms.

It signals when we finally choose ourselves. When we take the reins of our own life - back, or for the first time. When we can speak our truth, stand up for ourselves, set boundaries, remove a limiting belief or stick to something that is important to us. It has nothing to do with traditional "leadership" of people, or any authoritative approaches to controlling anyone or anything. But we have to lead ourselves first, because that sets the tone for any room we enter - metaphorically and physically.

Outside of professional contexts, this is no different to how we lead ourselves in conversations with family, friends, strangers on the street. I'm sure the parents amongst you experience this at extreme levels with their kids.

Sometimes we can lead ourselves well and other times we're scratchy and we tend to let circumstances or frustrations get the better of us.

We've all walked away from a situation thinking 'I could have handled that better'.

That is self-leadership.

Leading yourself first.

There are a lot of concepts wrapped up in it. Compassion - knowing when to forgive yourself and show yourself kindness when you fall short. Pride - accepting that you navigated a situation with maturity and in an aligned way. Curiosity - when a new situation presents and you find yourself learning the right way through it. Courage - when we have to do something that we're not comfortable with.

I love, love, love the leadership aspect of my professional career for all these opportunities, and I love the situations that arise in my personal life that ask more of me, where I can learn, grow and expand my leadership capabilities to meet the moment and become more me.

Now. Onto the next level on from self-leadership.

Life-Leadership.

Where leading ourselves, for ourselves and in our interactions, extends outward into leading our lives.

If you've been following me for a while you know I love a corporate-life x normal-life crossover opportunity. This is one of them. Think about how you lead your teams - the 1:1 meetings, the performance reviews, the check-points, the confidence building, the career planning and the challenging conversations.

Imagine if we applied that rigour to our lives.

I've written about the performance-review / life-review crossover in "Your work gets reviewed every year. Why doesn't your life?"

The one takeaway: We have almost no systems available for reviewing our lives and to me, that gap is worth closing.

And just briefly, I want to recognise how professional leadership can be extremely draining, and can often leave us little energy for our own life-leadership. If that's you (it has 100% been me) I strongly recommend you seek the right support to lessen how much you're giving to your work and team. I promise you, this is necessary).

Right now, a lot of successful people, who might have mastered self-leadership or certainly have their lives set-up pretty well, are searching for more meaning.

More connection. More fulfilment.

Not from a place of greed, but from a place of depth.

I've called this the Meaning Awakening off the back of noticing it in most of my in-person and online interactions and observations. I also know it because it was me 7.5 years ago - a young professional woman at the top of her career game, experiencing the truest feeling of misalignment I'd ever felt - and I went off looking for what mattered to me. It was the start of a journey and yes, I did find it.

You won't hear me talk about manifestation too much. Don't get me wrong, I'm a powerful manifestor and I believe in bringing into creation what most aligns with ourselves. But manifestation, like struggle, comes in seasons, and if you can't identify what season you're in and you're trying to manifest from a misaligned place, unfortunately some clever grifters have sold you a falsehood.

But back to life-leadership.

This is a whole-being system approach. Head, heart, soul, higher-self, deepest-self - and body.

It's where the inner world greets the outer world. Where they converge. Where you meet yourself where you are, with compassion, and find excitement and acceptance in what is. Where you chart the course forward from there and not some place you'd rather be. Where you set the compass for who you want to BE and how you want to FEEL, and trust that what you want takes shape from there.

Where you accept that change takes time. And that you're an evolving, delicious, glorious human who runs a full outside life while seeking fulfilment. Where you know that a 12-week course to transform your life is never going to be it. How can it be?

Where you commit to all the chapters, all the seasons that you will have, knowing that you get to lead yourself through them. That you have agency, choice, and that you can navigate the transitions between them, even when there is no promise, no end in sight, just what has fallen away.

When standing on the precipice of change takes your breath away, but your self-trust runs so deeply through your veins that you KNOW you'll be ok. That struggle and success are two sides of the same coin. That whatever unfolds next might not be what you expect it to be, that it could be better because yes, magic exists.

And oh does magic exist.

You can see it in people. Someone comfortable in their own skin and with the conditions of their life, whatever side of the struggle and success coin they're on right now.

That's someone in life-leadership flow.

The Practicalities of Life-Leadership.

Practicing life-leadership starts with inspecting your own life. Religiously. Systemically, because a life is a system, whether we treat it like one or not. It means sitting yourself down the way you would sit down with a team member, asking where things genuinely stand across every part of your life, and having the challenging conversations with yourself that you would never shy away from having with a direct report.

I started doing this intentionally at 28, deciding for the first time to properly lead my own life. Within a matter of months I was promoted into leading a team for the first time. I don't think that's a coincidence.

I help people build a life that feels like their own. To me, that is the ultimate expression of life-leadership. Because once it does feel like yours, or if it always did - genuinely - then you're in a position to lead the whole of it, in a whole new way, forever. It's the kind of stance, a posture, that no one can really take from you - that has a lot of power.

Want to get your finances in order? You know you're going to enlist the right help of the right people to help you get there.

Time to finally get your health on track? You know you're going to commit with the right plan.

Career overhaul due? Yep, you know you're going to move into gear and make those conversations happen.

Overall life admin in desperate need of attention? 100% you're going to start researching and applying what you learn.

Not all at once, this happens step by step, over time. And kind of never stops - it becomes part of your life-leadership rhythm, knowing your knowings, responding to them with love and action, and moving with the natural direction of your life, stepping in to iterate and adjust it as needed, bringing in the people and modalities as required, and allowing the occasional big pivot moment to do its thing.

And equally, when it's time to step back, surrender into the unknown, and let people, places and parts of you crumble, you have the awareness and courage to allow it, releasing the urge to always strive and succeed. Sometimes existing and allowing is just as masterful.

This too is life-leadership.

I use my own creation The Continuum Process to do this - it's the structured, annual practice of self-discovery that helps me connect my head with my heart. I have done it for 15 years and now, my life feels very much like mine. That to me, is the ultimate success, everything else is icing on the cake.

I lead myself and my life with a whole-heart. I walk, write and gather to access baseline fulfilment and allow magic to do its thing when the chapter, season and timing converges. I support myself through struggle and I point myself in a direction and go for it when the conditions allow it.

I have a personal life mission of wanting to hug the world (metaphorically, although physically if you're comfortable with it). That guides - leads - how I engage with anyone that enters my world. This won't change, but I suspect it will deepen and evolve and I love that.

So self-leadership is unbelievably important.

And when it evolves into life-leadership, well that's when everything you want to BE starts to take shape. How lucky it is to be alive, and how privileged we are to be able to shape - to lead - our lives. Let's not waste that gift.

What does life-leadership look like to you?

Onwards we go,

Alice