SELF-MANAGED PERSON

It takes self-management to fulfil the responsibilities of empowerment as well as to bask in its privileges.

Self-management is the ability to make your own decisions, to control your own actions and achieve personal goals.

Self-management consists of the personal power to control what happens in our own mental and physical spaces, our ability to control what we do and how we do it; it's our competence and commitment to manage our own lives. In its simplest sense, self-management means satisfying basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. In a broader sense, self-management is the ability to manipulate ourselves and the things or processes in the world in which we live, to satisfy our wants, needs, and requirements, and to fulfil our loftiest ambitions.

Management of any kind implies more than the exercise of power; it implies control. We can control or manage things, processes, and events in our lives even if it appears as if we don't. We choose the processes in which we're engaged, and, even if we feel we can't escape them, we have actually chosen not to try. Choosing to manage what's in our span of control is the first step toward self-management.

It takes a disciplined and systematic approach to develop our personal power. We also need a vision for our lives that focuses our self-management competencies the pursuit of personal, lifelong goals and objectives. Discipline and self-management competencies, if exercised, engender freedom, but self-management implies responsible freedom, taking ownership of our lives, our work, and the consequences for our actions. It requires learning to adapt those competencies to the life we envision for ourselves.

Everyone has the capacity for becoming self-managed, which involves six competencies that can be learned through training and practice: wholeness, self-confidence, self-awareness, drive, self-respect/self-esteem, and respect for others. Wholeness, the bility to see ourselves as whole persons, supports the other five behaviour sets. On the other hand, insofar as we can't learn "wholeness," becoming whole depends on the strength of the other competencies.