Connecting With Yourself Can Have A Positive Impact On How You Lead. Here's How. Self-love can help us show up more authentically in our personal and professional lives, leading to greater influence and impact.

Have you ever felt the need for increased impact in your life? Have you felt the need to be able to create an impact in your personal life, perhaps on your children, or professionally, say on stage speaking at a major event? Impact drives action and change. While we all want more of it, we don't necessarily know how to increase our impact-ability.

For a leader, leadership impact is the very fuel that keeps their teams or organizations going. Their ability to create an impact with their ideas, words, and actions is the lifeblood of an organization. Indeed, the lack of leadership impact is detrimental to both the leader as well as the people they lead. Without leadership impact, a leader experiences slow growth, non-alignment, and feels little to no control over what is happening in the business.

Does this sound like you? If yes, let me share with you my journey of transformation from a depressed, purposeless soul to a managing director who turned a multi-million-dollar business into an aligned, profitable venture- just by practicing and encouraging others to practice self-love.

Self-love defines your relationship with yourself. It isn't about putting yourself first, or about praising yourself, or holding yourself on a pedestal. It is about journeying inwards, forming a rock-solid relationship with yourself. You see, most of us go through our lives without ever really getting to know ourselves. We don't spend time "dating" ourselves, i.e. learning about what we like and dislike, identifying our values, and understanding ourselves. This is perhaps the norm of a strong relationship with someone else in your life. But we rarely carry out this process of "falling in love" with ourselves.

However, the truth is that everything in your life begins with you. Research now shows that self-love is the key to creating healthy relationships. Self-love is about valuing and respecting yourself, and creating healthy boundaries in your relationships to promote mutual respect and support. It's all about treating yourself the way you would treat someone in your life that you love: with understanding, kindness, and compassion.

Therefore, before you can create impact, you need to take the time to fall in love with yourself. Coming from this strong internal foundation, leadership, influence, and impact will become effortless. No matter how important or busy you are, taking the time to deepen your relationship with yourself is one of the most powerful internal shifts you can make towards living a full-potential life.

Becoming self-aware and spending time solidifying your values and your vision for the kind of person and leader you want to be will help you bring alignment between your thoughts, words, and actions. A misalignment here is one of the biggest reasons some people achieve great outward success, but still feel empty on the inside. But as I've discovered in my life (and over and over with my clients too), the power to achieve your full potential, to influence, impact, and serve people in your life is actually a function of what is going on within you first, and then, as an extension of that, your external practices and behaviors.

In my case, I went from living an empty, purposeless existence, just "surviving" day by day, to thriving as an author, coach, entrepreneur, and a mother. That shift was by no means a quick switch. It took years of putting into practice the very habits that I am sharing here. But the foundation, the very base of that shift in my life, was my ability to love myself.

The more I dove into the subject of self-love, the more I learned that the greatest leaders in the world all understand and practice self-love actively in their lives, even though they might be calling it something else. They are connected inwards, they are self-aware, and they lead from a place of clarity and groundedness that can only come from self-love.

Self-love is thus a powerful force that can help us elevate our lives, and increase our influence in both personal and professional settings. It also gives us greater confidence. When we love and accept ourselves, we become more confident in who we are, and what we have to offer. This confidence radiates outwards and can attract others to us, increasing our personal and professional influence.

Self-love also helps us set clearer boundaries, which can increase our influence by helping us communicate our needs and values more effectively. When we know and respect our own boundaries, others are more likely to respect them as well. Self-love thus transforms the relationships we have with others. When we love ourselves, we are better equipped to love and connect with others, and this can lead to stronger, more authentic relationships.

Self-love can also help us develop greater resilience in the face of challenges and setbacks. When we believe in ourselves and our worth, we are better able to bounce back from difficulties and continue moving towards our goals. Last but not least, self-love can fuel greater creativity and innovation in our personal and professional lives. By tapping into our unique perspectives and talents, we can bring fresh ideas and perspectives to the table and increase our influence. But it doesn't stop there. Once you establish the practice, inculcate a culture of self-love in your company. When you employ it as a business leader, you gain more clarity, and remove the mental clutter or emotional baggage that impedes your happiness and progress.

The same applies to workers putting in their heart and soul for the company. Encouraging self-love is a simple step that will enable you to produce more leaders within your organization, who are ready to take charge, and become changemakers for good. Train your team, and provide them with the support and guidance to employ practices like meditation, focused learning, gratitude, journaling, and repetition, and you'll see how this transforms the whole organization into unrecognizable success.

Overall, self-love can help us show up more authentically in our personal and professional lives, leading to greater influence and impact. By making that relationship with yourself a priority, you can cultivate the inner resources you need to achieve your goals, and live your best life.

Related: Seeing Red: Redefining Anger In The Workplace