Self-leadership as the first rung on the leadership ladder for patent and trade mark attorneys

If I asked you what leadership was all about, I would be willing to bet that most of you would say it is about how we influence other (typically, less experienced) people at any of an individual, team or organisational level. But a key part of being a capable leader of other people, is about learning, developing and continually practicing self-leadership. It’s possible to lead others by skipping this bottom rung, but not doing so can provide significant rewards both personally and professionally.

I know, “Self-leadership” sounds a bit out there, or some weird corporate jargon but it’s actually derived from organisational psychology and is grounded in real research on real people and businesses.

Fundamentally, self-leadership is the application of leadership principles inward. It is the practice of intentionally observing, understanding, and managing your own thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviours, to get the best outcomes for yourself. It is worth noting that there is a distinction must be made between self-management and self-leadership, with self-management being a term more people are familiar with.

Self-Management: This is the execution of tasks that you have on your plate. It is the how of your daily tasks, so how you go about clearing your work tasks, managing your time, or meeting a deadline. In the context of work, the choice of activity and your underlying motivations for undertaking them are largely externally regulated (tasks are required of you, how they are completed is regulated for you, and deadlines are set for you).

Self-Leadership: This is an internal influence on self that encompasses the what, why, and how of your actions. It involves aligning your daily tasks and working practice with intrinsic values, making decisions for yourself, and maintaining internal direction and motivation, even when external structures are absent or chaotic.

Studies in psychology show that very few people ever reach complete emotional and mental maturity. For most people, it's normal to look outside themselves, to someone more senior than them or to an organisation, for decisions and guidance on what to think or do, and how. True emotional and mental maturity means you stop doing that and completely trust your own inner judgment instead, something that is incredibly rare (it’s estimated less than three per cent of adults consistently operate with this level of internal integration).

On this basis, cultivating even a small amount of self-leadership, makes you rare in any profession, let alone the IP sector, and can boost your own wellbeing and your leadership of others.

The double-win of self-leadership

Let’s be honest, in busy organisations where time is commoditised (like in IP firms), there is a common thought process that giving time to prioritising an internal personal state will inevitably come at the expense of commercial output. The data, however, points to the exact opposite conclusion. Empirical studies in organisational behaviour demonstrate that autonomous, self-leading professionals are consistently more productive and effective, irrespective of their specific role. (1,2)

Many IP attorneys experience high levels of stress because their professional lives are driven by what psychologist Abraham Maslow termed "deficiency needs".(3) In the context of IP firms this is the continuous pursuit of external validation, partnership status, and financial security. When your career is fuelled entirely by these external metrics, your psychological locus of control rests outside of yourself, making you highly vulnerable to anxiety, resentment, and eventual burnout.

Self-leadership switches the mindset from being externally focused to an internal perspective. When you take cognitive ownership of your career path, you begin to view the different aspects of daily work; the technical aspects of patent and trade mark practice, the management of others within a team, and running a business, as opportunities to exercise personal strengths as well as learn and refine skills. A working approach that leans heavily on aligning work with personal values, and utilising strengths gives you more enjoyment and results in better (and more quantities of work).

A shift towards individuals taking more control of their day to day lives, and leading themselves towards better outcomes creates a decentralised model of intelligence within the IP firm. Rather than functioning like a rigid machine that stalls the moment a senior partner can’t make a decision or stops providing explicit instructions, a self-leading set of attorneys can operate more like a distributed system, where individual attorneys are fully capable of navigating ambiguity, making high-level judgements, and moving work forward independently, because they have taken the time to learn and develop their self-leadership skills.

How to cultivate self-leadership

Cultivating self-leadership takes work, especially for those of us who haven’t really spent any time reflecting on how we think, feel or behave. It requires developing cognitive, emotional and and behavioural competencies.

For patent and trade mark attorneys, the development work can be grouped into three areas, self-awareness, shifting the internal locus of control, and centring the self.

1: Self-awareness

Self-awareness is the baseline requirement for all self-regulation, and is fundamental to both self-management and self-leadership. This means developing the capacity to observe your internal state objectively during high-stress and high-emotion moments.

For example, it can involve recognising the exact moment a looming deadline or a demanding client/colleague triggers a defensive psychological reaction, or it can be understanding when you are particularly enjoying or lost in doing a task. It can be identifying your strengths (things that you are good at and that energise you) or your values (the core things that drive all your actions).

Understanding yourself better, allows you to choose a rational, strategic response rather than reacting impulsively or simply being able to select the things that give you most enjoyment.

2: Shifting the internal locus of control

This involves work on reworking your mindset in two key ways:

Owning your path by embracing the fact that you are fundamentally responsible for your own career progression, daily workload boundaries, and professional development, rather than waiting for or having anyone else to decide or manage it for you.

Challenging assumed constraints by questioning the structural assumptions that dictate how you “should” behave and how the work "must" be done. Many barriers that are believed to exist are not actually organisational rules, but simply assumptions about what is allowed or not.

3: Centring the Self

Effective self-leadership means learning to operate from a psychological centre that is rooted in 8 foundational qualities (the “8 Cs” - calmness, clarity, curiosity, confidence, compassion, courage, creativity and connectedness) and most notably calmness, clarity, and confidence.

When rooted in this centre, and with these 3 qualities especially, you can maintain an internal calmness regardless of disruptive external circumstances, you can think clearly enough to make sense of your situation without bias, and you can project an authentic confidence that reassures clients and colleagues alike.

Introductory practices you can try immediately

While deep self-leadership takes time to mature, after all I said earlier it takes work, there are several simple strategies that you can try using straight away to observe how subtle internal shifts can alter your daily efficiency and enjoyment.

Practice 1: The micro-docketing audit

For three days, use your time-recordal software for an internal purpose. Alongside your time-entries, keep a private note tracking your psychological state. You could use a "+" next to hours where you felt a sense of flow, clarity, or high engagement, and a "-" next to hours defined by friction, avoidance, or anxiety.

This action will help you start to notice how you feel and what you are thinking when going about your daily work, and the recorded data will start to reveal the specific internal triggers that are currently draining your professional energy, and those which make life feel a bit more enjoyable.

Practice 2: High-performance intentionality

Before opening your inbox or reviewing your morning prompt list, dedicate exactly two minutes to planning how you intend to navigate the day psychologically.

Don’t focus on the specific tasks you want or need to be doing. Instead, set a clear intention regarding how you will show up. For example, you may want to focus on maintaining a curious stance when providing difficult feedback to a trainee, or calm composure in an upcoming partner meeting.

Practice 3: Isolating an assumed constraint

Identify one specific, recurring frustration within your current workflow that causes you to lose time or feel like you aren’t in control. Write down the typical reason that the voice in your head says this issue can’t be changed. Then, critically and objectively analyse that reason.

Ask yourself: Is this an absolute boundary, or am I just assuming and passively accepted it as just being like that?

The beginnings of self-leadership

You may be surprised how these three very simple, and short exercises can help you see how taking more control of yourself can help ease some of the difficulties of your day-to-day work.

However, self-leadership is not about hacks, or emotional and dopamine fixes; it is an ongoing discipline of understanding and taking control of oneself.

True professional integration involves understanding how to systematically build lasting emotional resilience, navigate long-standing behavioural conditioning, and unlock cognitive clarity under extreme pressure. All of which, will greatly improve your enjoyment of work and life, and bring benefits to clients, colleagues, family and friends around you.

If that sounds like an interesting journey, then perhaps taking it alongside an experienced coach who can guide you and act as an accountability partner, might be helpful.

References

1: Goldsby, M. G., Goldsby, E. A., Neck, C. B., Neck, C. P., & Mathews, R. (2021). Self-leadership: A four-decade review of the literature and trainings. Administrative Sciences, 11(1), 25. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci11010025

2: Beckmann, M. (2015). Working-time autonomy as a management practice. IZA World of Labor, 230, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.15185/izawol.230

3: ScienceInsights. What are deficiency needs? Definition and Types https://scienceinsights.org/what-are-deficiency-needs-definition-and-types/