How to Manage Yourself: 3 Tips to Help Your Personal Expansion

There is one skill/mindset that if you properly build it, will make your life 10x easier. It’s called “self-management”.

Unfortunately, this skill is a lot more elusive and harder to develop than others simple because many people weren’t taught that it exists. Or if they were taught it, it was in bits and pieces, leaving the individual to fill in the blanks themselves. In the up and down day-to-day of life, it’s so easy to let things slip and conscious, intentional self-management is one of them.

This article is going to be diving into the nuances of self-management and how to develop it. We’ll also be looking at:

• The different types of self-management
• The relationship between self-awareness and self-management
• How to improve your self-management skills and manage yourself better

[toc]

What Does Self-Management Mean?

“Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes — but no plans.” – Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself

Management consultant Peter Drucker said that the future belongs to those who can adeptly balance present realities with future possibilities. This was true back in his day but is more true even now.

With so many choices and options in today’s world, we need to have the discernment to select and choose things we want to invest our life in while ignoring all of the other possibilities out there. On top of that, we need to be able to accept the fact that there will be things that we will miss out on in pursuit of what’s important to us.

Anything you can think of that helps you accomplish things while maintaining the engine that accomplishes it (you) falls under the umbrella of self-management, which is virtually everything.

Why is Self-Management Important?

A person and a man that can’t manage themselves is completely lost. The cornerstone of self-management is deciding what you do or don’t want from life itself. If you can’t do that, then you’ll just end up with a bunch of things that land in your lap “by default”. Think of people who “fall into” jobs and stay with them out of fear or laziness and people who “fall into” relationships with people who were at one point a good fit, but not so much anymore.

Self-management is commonly referred to as “responsibility” but it’s a deeper form of “responsibility”.

Throughout your life, it is possible to not develop any sort of real self-management skills. You can learn the basics of survival such as learning how to eat and going to the bathroom but knowing how to structure your week, how to calm yourself down when you’re anxious, how to overcome your fears – that is not guaranteed.

And if you haven’t developed the ability or don’t develop the ability to manage yourself, you’ll just always find yourself on the back foot in life, never making any real sort of progress.

The Relationship Between Self-Management and Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to observe (without judgment) your thoughts, feelings, and emotions in an attempt to place them in an optimal state relative to any given situation.

In order to actually use self-management and its respective skills to the fullest, you need to know things such as:

• Some of your strengths, weaknesses, and inclinations
• Your goals and aspirations in life
• Your likes and dislikes
• Etc.

This in turn will help you figure out questions such as:

• What should my daily schedule be?
• Where should I go to college?
• What profession should I go into?
• Where should I live?
• Should I get married? And to whom?
• Should I have kids?
• When should I take a break/vacation and how long?

The list of questions goes on and on and on. Self-awareness will help you find a good answer to these questions.

3 Types of Self-Management (and How They Impact Your Life)

As a whole, self-management can be seen as a discipline made of many parts, some of which are:

• Time management
• Prioritization
• Motivation
• Goal setting
• Focus
• Self-care

We’ll go into three of these, just so you have an example of how self-management impacts your day to day life.

Time Management

The world runs on time. In reality, there’s no real such thing as “time” but it helps us to get things done and organize groups of people under a common framework. So understanding and utilizing “clock time” the right way is important.

There’s 24 hours in a day, so knowing how you want to use those hours and split that day up is important.

What percentage of the day goes to important but non-urgent work? What percentage of the day is spent on putting out “forest fires”? What percentage of the day goes towards “managing” addictions, such as Internet addiction?

Your ability to manage your time and most importantly manage yourself will determine these.

If you want to learn more about time management in-depth, check out the article on the Tower Technique.

Motivation

Motivation is the “spark” to action. In order to start (not finish) something, you need to have a reason why to do to it. That reason can come from external sources (such as other people) or they can be generated internally, which is also called “intrinsic motivation”.

Intrinsic motivation is the foundation of self-management. Having a compelling reason why that gets you out of the bed in the morning and sustains you throughout your day will help the other elements of your life fall into place.

Think of intrinsic motivation as a generator that powers a house. The generator is powering the house from the inside rather than the house getting power from the utility company that supplies it from outside (extrinsic).

Managing yourself isn’t necessarily easy but if you find an “evergreen” reason why – it will make it a bit easier.

If you want to learn more about the science of motivation, check out the article on Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation.

Focus

Another key part of self-management is knowing what to and what not to pay attention to. When you pay attention to something, you are focusing on it and you are crystallizing it more clearly into your perception of the world.

The act of focusing is one of the skills that separates humans from every other land mammal on earth. Without focus, civilization would have been impossible. Unfortunately, there’s a large amount of things that sap focus from us on a consistent basis, eliminating our productivity as a result.

Focusing on the right the right things will make you happier, more productive, and bring you closer to your goals.

If you want to learn more about the the art of focus, check out the article on Mental Focus.

How to Improve and Develop Self-Management Skills: 3 Tips

There are many ways to develop self-management skills and the following 5 are just a few. Read over them, see which one you can implement the fastest and get to work on developing it. The sooner you get these going in your life, the quicker you’ll see turnarounds in any area that’s important to you.

1. Develop Goal Focus

Goal focus is the concentration of actions and objectives towards achieving impactful goals. Goal focus is different from the way that a large amount of people spend their days, which is virtually in survival mode. Medium-to-long-term vision is virtually absent, the only thing that matters in the moment is some form of instant gratification. Living your life in this manner is recipe for disaster as most of the wanted things in life involve delayed gratification and a consistent chain of events over a long period of time.

Your goals can be anywhere from small multi-day expeditions to sprawling multi-year campaigns. Either way, the act of achieving objectives requires a lot of small steps to be taken in between them.

In order to do that, you have to have clarity. What do you want to achieve? Why do you want to achieve it (motivation)? Most importantly, what are the current limits or barriers that stop you from achieving it?

Implementation: Write down things you want to achieve within the next month, 3 months, and year. Break them up into subtasks and get to work on starting the first subtask by sequence and priority. Let’s say one of your goals is to publish a book. Depending on where you are, it could be anything from typing up a quick manuscript all the way to getting a book on how to write and structure grammar. Knowing where you are in relationship to that (self-awareness) is important and you wouldn’t have that perspective without setting a goal and examining where you are in relation to that.

2. Put Wood on the Fire

As mentioned earlier, self-management includes motivation, both intrinsic and extrinsic. Day in and day out, you will find yourself initiating tasks over and over again. You’ll need some level of motivation to start them.

What’s driving you? What do you want from an external sense? What do you want from an internal sense? More importantly, how can these align? Put the wood on the fire and keep it going.

Implementation: Develop sources of internal and external motivation. Find people who motivate you. Get around them or absorb their words. Find something that gives you a deep sense of meaning. Why does it do that? What is the big payoff?

3. Lifestyle Considerations

Self-management involves lifestyle adjustments. More importantly, it involves creating a lifestyle that fills you on a deep level and contributes to short and long-term goals.

This could be anything from where you live to your morning and evening routine. Your lifestyle will be the overall structure on which everything is built, meaning everything else will follow your lifestyle and your daily routines.

Implementation: Figure out what you want from life. Is it to good at a certain skill, is it to do certain things? Whatever it is, build your lifestyle to point towards that thing.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

Developing and improving self-management comes down to knowing who you are and knowing what you want from life. It’s a crucial skill that you need to help you discern between all of the various choices and opportunities in life.

It’s a combination of knowing what you want to achieve (your goals), your desire to achieve them (your motivation), and the foundation from which you will achieve them (your lifestyle).

Proper self-management helps you say “no” to the good, so you can say “hell yes” to the great.

Do you have any insights on developing self-management? If so, leave them in the comments below.