Developing Personal Leadership

By Manfred van Doorn en Isodoor Jonker, 2024

Personal leadership involves taking full responsibility for your own life, your choices, and your actions. Discover the powerful world of personal leadership and how to elevate it within yourself.

Online training Personal Leadership

What is personal leadership?

“Improve the world, start with yourself.” This statement aptly reflects that personal leadership means taking responsibility for your own development. By improving your own functioning, you are better able to have a positive influence on your surroundings.
Self-reflection and self-awareness are essential first steps: understanding your qualities, your motivations, your contributions, your blind spots, your defence mechanisms, what brings you out of balance and how to restore that balance.

Next steps involve adjusting your attitude and your habits. Join us on an adventurous journey through twelve phases, with each phase offering you the opportunity to develop new personal skills.

What does personal leadership & personal development involve?

To develop allround and balanced personal leadership we focus on many different competencies. The Double Healix Leadership Model organises them in the twelve groups:

Flexibility and intuitiveness
The ability to adapt smoothly to changing situations and act quickly and instinctively without needing or sticking to detailed plans. This starts with an underlying trust in any process, but it is also evident in the ability to tap into one’s own generative intuition (often gained from past experiences).

Decisiveness and assertiveness
The ability to be proactive and act forcefully in pursuing goals and solving problems. This includes taking initiative, showing determination, and assertively communicating viewpoints and needs without hesitation or restraint.

Perseverance and optimism
The ability to tackle difficult tasks and challenges with perseverance and a positive attitude. This includes building new habits, sticking to goals even in tough times, continuing to seek solutions and opportunities, and being aware of the power of positive thoughts and improved routines.

Curiosity and creativity
Having a curious and open attitude towards learning and experimenting, as well as the ability to come up with original and innovative solutions. This includes seeking new knowledge and skills, flexibly dealing with change, and stimulating diversity, creativity and imagination.

Result-orientedness and ambition
Focused on achieving measurable results and pursuing personal and professional improvement with determination and dedication. This includes setting clear goals, prioritising, using hard deadlines and sticking to a plan of action to achieve success.

Radiance and enthusiasm
The ability to inspire and motivate others by exuding an energetic attitude. This includes showing enthusiasm for tasks and projects, igniting the passion of others, and being confident and charismatic in social interactions.

Reliability and orderliness
The ability to plan, stick to commitments and appointments, and have attention to detail. This also involves the ability to turn inward and reflect on oneself. This competency is related to ‘conscientiousness’.

Empathy and patience
The ability to empathise with the emotions and perspectives of others and to show tolerance and understanding, even in challenging situations. This includes listening to others, showing patience and empathy, and respecting different viewpoints.

Realism and analytical skills
The ability to dissect and analyse events and reflect on them critically and realistically. It is associated with competencies such as being able to get to the (uncomfortable) bottom of things, making tough decisions, and stopping harmful processes.

Vision and goal-orientedness
Being clear about your goals and showing determination in pursuing these goals. This includes having an inspirational vision, developing a clear action plan, and sticking to these plans, even during challenges.

Courage and integrity
The ability to translate moral principles and goals into conscientious, inspired actions. This involves often difficult-to-measure principles that consider long-term values versus short-term gains. It requires courageously upholding your principles and ethics, not just talking about them.

Gratefulness and service-orientedness
This is the ability to tune into customers’ or other stakeholders’ needs with sensitivity and service (of course, as long as their interests are just and humane). Being able to take care of others. Also the ability to show gratitude, as well as the ability to forgive.

Why are personal leadership & personal development important?

The world is constantly undergoing changes, economically, technologically, and socially. Today’s complex and uncertain world requires strong, grassroots leaders. There is a need for people who can think independently, take initiative, and lead themselves.
Personal leadership enriches your life both professionally and personally. As described above, personal leadership enables you to take control of your own life, maximise your potential, and be successful in various areas. Moreover, it helps you to interact effectively with others, inspire, and contribute to positive changes around you.

How can I further develop my personal leadership?

There are countless ways to learn about and further develop your personal leadership. From reading books, listening to podcasts, attending events, and taking courses. The world currently has a strong need for leadership, resulting in a wide range of available resources. It is important not to follow just one approach but to ensure sufficient diversity in your information gathering.
Double Healix provides training and online courses to support individuals and organisations with issues related to leadership, personal development, team collaboration, organisational leadership, human development, and also the development of mystical consciousness. Our training programs are suitable for socially engaged individuals who want to train their critical thinking and practice approaching the world from different perspectives.

Personal leadership according to the Double Healix philosophy

Double Healix offers several guidelines for personal development. The first guideline is that life is best approached from the perspective of tension fields and paradoxes (which is the meaning of the word ‘Double’). From this perspective, it is logical to also say (alongside ‘improve the world, start with yourself’): improve yourself, start with the world. In other words, you can develop personal leadership by directly engaging in something and learning by doing. You become a better person by contributing to your environment. The world and yourself are so closely connected that you are always working on both simultaneously. You can only truly enrich yourself if you also enrich the world and vice versa.

Navigating and reconciling tension fields

Thinking in oppositions and tension fields is not just a fun trick. It is the core of personal leadership. After all, the world is not as straightforward as we often try to convince ourselves or each other. For example: the often-heard advice ‘never give up’ sounds logical and encouraging, but it is a risky half-truth. Because if you want to develop yourself in a balanced way, you also need to be able to stop many things, especially things that are harmful.

Suppose you set a goal for yourself that you want to achieve. For example, to improve your health. This means you have to give up many unhealthy habits. But it goes further: it may turn out that you made the wrong choice along the way. For example, you thought you would develop better health by running marathons. Halfway through, it turns out that your body is not built for that. ‘Never give up’ is risky advice in that situation. Although perseverance is a good trait that belongs to personal leadership, this also applies to self-reflection and adaptability. It is important to discover what you will and will not give up. It is always ‘double’. It is about learning to recognize these tension fields, deeply experiencing them, and being able to handle them well. If you learn to make the right choices within these tension fields, you are developing personal leadership.

Recognizing patterns

A second guideline related to personal leadership is the fact that you are always on a journey. In that journey, there will be moments when you shouldn’t give up and – often later on – moments when you are forced to give up. Personal leadership can thus best be understood as a process over time, a developmental path. Therefore, it is important to learn to deal with ever-changing circumstances, both within yourself and in the world. These changing circumstances do not occur randomly. Many people have gone before us, allowing us to learn to recognize universal patterns. Each phase of the journey requires different skills, and each phase has its counterpart. Pattern recognition is therefore another important aspect of personal leadership.

The first pattern of the journey is that it has a beginning and an end. The largest line for an individual is from birth to death. Projects also have a timeline from beginning to end, which you can study to improve yourself. If you zoom in a bit, you will see that there are also cyclically recurring processes. In nature, these are the seasons, the months (‘moons’) and days. In our cultural life we encounter cyclical processes in recurring tests, triumphs and losses, and recovery phases. These are all examples of the circle of life. If you manage to use your experiences to mature in these repeating processes, the circle opens up into an upward spiral. The processes return cyclically, but you are able to handle more complexity and depth through your acquired experiences.

Developing yourself on various levels

This brings us to the third guideline to consider when developing your personal leadership. This involves the question: at what level do you want to develop yourself? The first Level in the Double Healix model is about being well in touch with your own body and basic needs. Breathing well, eating healthy food, exercising, receiving sufficient recognition, and experiencing enough pleasant physical contact. This stays applicable throughout your life, even for the most highly developed leader.

The second Level in the Double Healix model is about drives, your personality type, virtues and motivations. Again, these stay with you the rest of your life, and you are able to keep developing them. This is what Ken Wilber calls ‘Transcend and Include.’

Climbing toward the third level really brings us to the first experiences of personal leadership, when we start to develop competencies. Especially the capability to develop competencies that are not in line with your personality trait will make you a competent and welcome leader. Developing a broad competency set will give you the possibility to contribute and have a positive impact in a lot of different situations.

It does not need to stop here though. You can increase your impact on the world by developing relational leadership, required to lead teams, or organisational leadership, even growing towards leading regions or countries. Your competencies and personal leadership skills stay relevant, and increasingly your developed character will be your tool for being effective.

Higher developed personal leadership means climbing a ladder that reaches increasing complexity. If that ladder is a spiral staircase, we arrive at the image of the Healix: the upward, healing spiral of personal leadership. This begins with your own health and ends with contributing to the health of the earth, and perhaps even the cosmos. It is an upward spiral that demands more and more from us, but also gives more and more to us.

Understanding the building blocks at basic levels can help you better understand and manage complexity at higher levels. These building blocks can serve as a checklist for your development:
– Which needs require extra attention from me?
– Which virtues and motivations do I want to strengthen?
– How can I balance my competencies as best as possible?
– What does my team or group need?
– What is happening in our organisation and in our society?
– What is happening in the world? And how can I optimally contribute?
– How can I further experience and develop my spirituality?

Knowledge of the cyclical journey can help you anticipate important phase transitions and level jumps. Consciously managing tension fields helps you to develop a better understanding of your counterparts. Learning to endure oppositions strengthens your personal leadership. See here for more information on the Double Healix Human Development framework.

Personal leadership and teamwork

“Alone you go faster, together you go further.” Personal leadership within teamwork was the essential skill that helped us escape the Stone Age. Now, eight thousand years later, in the information age, it remains the number one skill we need to make significant progress. Team development has a multifaceted impact. It helps the team itself function better and enhances the self-knowledge and social skills of individual members. Over the past two centuries, we have lost many traditional social structures (such as social classes and religious hierarchies), resulting in a form of individualism greatly susceptible to influence from commercial interests. To rebuild strong communities, the coming times will require many new forms of collaboration in teams, communities, or regions. Developing personal leadership within teamwork is thus of great importance.

This means it’s not just about knowing your own qualities, but also those of your group or teammates. This makes it possible to utilise everyone’s skills at the right moment and to seek help when certain qualities are lacking. Moreover, a well-functioning group or team impacts the larger environment or organisation and can make a meaningful contribution to society. Do you also want to achieve more synergy of personal leadership within your team and organisation? Discover our team development training programmes and online team course.

Examples of personal leadership

One of the most effective ways to learn is by observing inspiring examples from feature films and documentaries. It’s no coincidence that role models play such a crucial role in developing knowledge and skills. If you’re looking for inspiration and examples of personal leadership and personal development in practice, follow a live or online training from Double Healix.
The visual and emotional impact of films is significant. Through film examples, we can more easily empathise with certain situations and characters. This enables us to learn in a practical manner, and it is a fun way to generate ideas for handling similar situations. Moreover, films stimulate our imagination and creativity, often opening up new worlds and presenting new ideas.

Live training on personal leadership

Do you want to participate in an effective live training with many illustrative and inspiring short-clips from movies and documentaries? Our training programmes on personal leadership can be followed through open registration or requested in-company. We also have extensive experience in designing and implementing comprehensive Management Development programmes and are happy to brainstorm with you about what is best for your company. Check out all our live training options on personal leadership and personal development.

Why choose a live leadership training by Double Healix?

Highly appreciated live training from experts on personal development and leadership.
Using the most comprehensive model of human development (Double Healix framework).
You will learn to think in terms of opposites and tension fields, better equipping you to handle them.
Learning with inspiring examples from the best feature films and engaging documentaries.
You will be better prepared and equipped for the challenges in your life, developing your character.
Available via open registration or in-company.
Suitable for both personal and professional development.
Extensive experience in designing and implementing custom Management Development programmes.

Online courses on personal leadership

MovieLearning is the e-learning platform of Double Healix, offering inspiring online courses based on film examples. On the MovieLearning platform, you can follow various online courses on personal leadership, ranging from competency development to coaching or female leadership. All e-learning courses help you advance in your personal and professional development, offering hours of valuable knowledge, exercises, and video examples from inspiring films. Discover our online courses on (personal and formal) leadership.

Why choose an e-learning course from MovieLearning?

Highly rated e-learning on personal development and leadership.
Based on the Double Healix model, and written by top-experts on personal leadership.
Learning with inspiring examples from feature films.
Learning to think in terms of opposites and tension fields.
Become stronger and better equipped for the challenges in your life.
Focused on both knowledge acquisition, deep reflections and practical exercises.
High-quality online courses at an affordable price.
Choose between 3 months, 6 months, or one-year access.
For both personal and professional development.