According to Harvard Business Review, self-management can be learned by anyone:
- Decide where you want to self-manage. Look for circumstances where your typical behaviors don’t work as well as you’d like. These are ripe for self-management improvement.
- Identify what contributes to your lack of self-management. When you fail to self-manage, observe how you feel, what’s motivating you, and how you’re interpreting people and events. Understanding why you make the choices you do is step one in making a change.
- Think about your options and how you might respond. Don’t go into default mode. Think about what you want to do and consider whether there are better alternatives. Do your inclined responses align to the best outcome for everyone? Why do you gravitate toward these habits? Insecurity? Laziness?
- Create a plan. Self-management involves steps for correcting behavior. If you know you procrastinate too much and that is your default behavior, create a plan to deal with it.
- Practice. To change default behaviors, we need to create new neural pathways and this only happens through practice. We can rewire our brains by consciously self-managing until it too becomes a habit.
- Repeat the process. Return to step two and see how you did? What did you learn? Can you do better? You can improve on each self-managed response.