How can self-acceptance help your leadership?

Ben Brearley explores the benefits of self-acceptance in a position of leadership

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Thoughtful Leader

Over my leadership career, and my time working with other leaders, I’ve come to realise that self-acceptance is a very important part of being able to lead effectively.

It’s hard to find self-acceptance in challenging workplaces

Many workplaces I’ve experienced have significant cultural challenges that place pressure on leaders and teams – unrealistic targets, tight deadlines, too many priorities, acceptance of poor performance and behaviour. 

I’ve coached several leaders who needed a complete rebuild of their confidence. The view they had of themselves was shaped by the pressures surrounding them, to the point that they thought they were terrible at their jobs and that they were ‘broken’. The reality was quite different; these were good leaders, trying to survive in a dysfunctional environment. They’d had success and performed well before, they just needed to remember that.

How finding self-acceptance will help your leadership

Being able to accept yourself is not always easy, but once you achieve it, you’ll experience several benefits. Firstly, you’ll accept your own style and learn how to work with it. You will understand your potential weaknesses, so that you can start to work on them where you need to. You’ll also accept your strengths, enabling you to bring them to the fore more consistently. You’ll be able to work with your team and other stakeholders in ways that enable you to do better work, more often; you may also feel more resilient. This doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes, but you will stop beating yourself up when you do. You will start to learn from failure, rather than using it as a reason to make yourself feel bad.

All these points help you to be a better role model for the people around you. Without self-acceptance, you’ll second-guess yourself; you’ll start to believe you are the problem, instead of identifying issues with the environment around you which will often encourage leaders to try to work harder, instead of understanding their limitations. The result might be a broken, burned out, leader.

So, how do we find self-acceptance?

Gain self-acceptance by understanding more about yourself

Self-awareness is key. If you don’t know your strengths or shortcomings, it’s hard to cater for them or use them effectively. Knowing your strengths has an obvious benefit – you can use them more often. Understanding your weaknesses is important too, because you can improve them, or try to reduce the impact they have on your leadership.

One way to raise awareness is via feedback. Feedback is useful when it comes from a respected source, from somebody who will be honest, and who is interested in helping you improve. They also need to work or interact with you often enough to be able to provide reasonable insight. Remember that self-acceptance means accepting your shortcomings and your strengths, not just focusing on your problems.

Gain self-acceptance by mixing with the right crowd

The people you associate with the most will have an impact on the way you feel about yourself. This goes for both inside and outside of work. Ideally, you want to be associating with people who:

• support what you’re trying to do;
• can provide constructive feedback;
• generally have a positive attitude;
• are trying to improve themselves too;
• practice supportive leadership.

You want to reduce the time you spend with people who:

• are judgemental;
• criticise you or others often;
• are unsupportive of your goals or aspirations;
• often display a negative attitude; 
• tend to play the victim.

This can be difficult to achieve, because you may have long-standing relationships with people who fall into the second category. You may need to have some hard conversations to enable you to step away, or at least reduce the time you spend with them. If you are struggling to find the right people for your circle you might try joining clubs, groups or finding a coach or mentor who can offset the negative influences you may be experiencing.

When you associate with the right people, they’ll give you a point of reference to better understand whether you need to work on a few things, or whether your environment is simply not setting you up for success.

Work on your self-talk

Self-talk refers to your ‘inner voice’ and how you speak to yourself. Self-talk can have a major impact on your mindset and your mental health, so it’s an important factor to consider when it comes to self-acceptance. We are obviously spending time with ourselves all day, every day; if your self-talk is dragging you down, it’s going to become a problem.

Once you accept yourself, you’ll feel unstoppable

Self-acceptance doesn’t mean being naive, and ignoring your faults – it also doesn’t mean you stop working on yourself so that you keep improving. What it does mean is that you spend less time beating yourself up, and more time feeling better about yourself. 

You’ll still need to take accountability for your issues and failures, but that doesn’t mean feeling like a bad person.