Take a couple of minutes sometime today to write down three or four bullet points that best describe the kind of life you want to have: not what you'd need to do to get there, not how much money you'd like to have, not the kind of house you'd like to live in... three or four key exciting moments that would sum up your "having it all". We'll work further on this in the next Ezine.

Regardless of what topic is being covered in this video series on leadership - today it's the notion that teams of people can somehow lead themselves - we're going to keep coming back to a couple of fundamental truths: that nobody can lead your life but you and that it's not the you that you think you are who can do it... he or she is simply not up to the task - hence my continued emphasis on being true to yourself or a "proper human being".

Normal people are not proper human beings. We - all of us, because we're all "blessed" with an automatic facility for making it through day - cannot claim that repeatedly operaing on autopilot, repeatedly behaving in patterned ways, repeatedly being prone to negative or even ruminative thought, repeatedly looking forward to the weekend or the next holiday is being a proper human being. It is nothing other than going through the motions on autopilot, ever blinded by our own programming, ever removed from the reality of the moment and who we might be.

You are not your personality. You are not your repetitive behaviour. You are neither your perceived weaknesses nor your perceived strengths. You are whatever you wish to set your mind to - the problem is that your mind was set on automatic by the team you reached apparent adulthood. The obvious conclusion that we can all come to is that we don't know ourselves - we think that we do but the person that we think we know is a blurred shadow of what's possible.

You can't discard your personality, you cannot wipe the slate clean - nor would any of us want to. But we can take steps to avoid the excesses of our personality - the inner voices that whisper (or scream) "No You Can't"; the brake that our personality puts on doing new things, peeking outside our comfort zone, doing the brave or courageous. We can work with and around our personality and, as a result, turn up to the here and now, become present, have presence - the hallmark of all great leaders. Doing that will utterly transform your life - it will also positively impact the lives of those around you. You will be able to start leading your own life and the kind of person that can lead others to.

Putting your personality in its proper place - so that you start becoming a fully functioning proper human being - is not something that happens overnight. It's something that we all need to work on day in, day out. But, in working with our minds to attune them to the reality of the here and now, in developing our ability to be mindful rather than mindless, we do get to a point where we have a new way of operating, of succeeding, of living, or leading our own lives.

And, by the way, this is not some kind of motivational article - everything that you've just read has been established and confirmed by modern cognitive psychology and neuroscience... just in case you were wondering!!