So what’s the answer?

Surely there are plenty of resources “out there.” Tips on how to manage your workload. Apps to assess your strengths and weaknesses. Social media sites for every kind of professional. Training, bootcamps, intensives, retreats, workshops, mentors, and more that all promise to make you a peak performer.

All those things may work, at least to some degree and for a while.  But they may  not work well enough. And not in a way that sticks.

This story is repeated over and over: You try something new and all is good. But then, a few weeks pass, and reality hits.

Old habits return and that initial drive and fire-in-the-belly quickly dies down.

The story is the same around the world and you are not alone: You start out with high hopes, but end up back where you began.

Maybe even feel a little worse because you:

• Feel guilty for not doing everything you think you should the way you should

• Discouraged because your bad habits seem so hard to break

• Beat yourself up for investing time and money in something that you don’t follow through with

The problem is that what you really need not just to survive, but to thrive and grow in your career are skills that few people talk about and fewer schools teach. Those skills are summed up by one single term. But if you go looking for that term in typical undergraduate or graduate school programs, you’ll be hard pressed to find it. And few people learn it at home, either

As one of our students said, “The skills you’re teaching are things that you never learn at home or at school. It’s never talked about. But it’s so important.”

What are those skills?

They come under the heading of self-leadership. People talk about a self-leader as the chief, captain or CEO of one’s own life. That’s great, as long as you recognize that it’s more than just driving toward things like SMART goals because that diminishes the human spirit and does a disservice to our unique human capacity for creativity and imagination. The best leaders also recognize the human side that contributes to the bottom line.