Six Key Leadership Skills Needed for Digital Nomad Living

As a Leadership and Life Design Coach, I work with clients to identify the leadership skills they need to strengthen in order to reach their goals. What I’ve found over the years is that there are 6 key Leadership Skills that are absolutely essential for whether you are CEO of a company or taking the lead to design your #workfromanywhere life.

The diagram below gives you an overview of the 6 Leadership skills. Over the coming weeks, I will deep dive into each of these skills and how you can cultivate them.

Why these 6 skills?

This is about innovation. Combined, these skills enable you to realize when the status quo isn’t working anymore (self-awareness, curiosity), be able to take the lead and create a vision (creativity), take action (courage), overcome obstacles along the way (resilience, focus), and realize that vision.

Here’s a taste of what each of them has to offer.

Creativity

Creativity is the ability to create or invent something, tap into your imagination, and express something original. These skills come into play not only as you envision the life you want to create, but as you creatively overcome obstacles and solve problems along the way.

Without creativity, we are stuck doing the same things in the same ways. Creativity is critical for innovation and radical change.

Resilience

Resilience is the ability to recover quickly. The better we get at fostering resilience in ourselves, the bigger risks we can take as we build confidence that we’ll always be able to recover and get back on our feet. Life is full of unexpected twists and turns. If you’re going to put yourself out there and really go for it, you will at some point trip and fall. Learning to be resilient means being able to continue moving forward when you get knocked down.

Self Awareness

The ability to see yourself clearly and objectively through reflection and introspection. This may be the most powerful one in the lot. Self-awareness is critical for truly understanding how your actions, thoughts, and emotions align with your true self and inner standards. Honing the skills of self-awareness allows you to design from a place of alignment.

Focus

This one is challenging me right here at the moment as I write! In the overstimulated world we live in, it can be a real challenge to focus when we need to. Working from anywhere means being able to buckle down and get shit done no matter where you are. Focus is a key skill for nomadic life!

Curiosity

If you’re seeking a life with more travel and freedom, you’re likely innately curious. And curiosity also means staying open, being willing to explore new ways of doing things, and other perspectives. This skill is key for both self-exploration and connecting with new people cultures. The more curious we can stay, the more we learn, connect and expand our thinking.

Courage

It takes courage to break free, to step into the unknown, to stand up for yourself, to make others uncomfortable as you make decisions they don’t understand. It takes courage to do things differently, to forge your own path, to color outside the lines.

By cultivating courage we create the ability to do the right thing, to act in integrity with our values even when it’s hard - because when we are able to do that we lead more peaceful and fulfilling lives.

Bringing it All Together

So I invite you to take a look again at the diagram from the start of this post. Which of these leadership skills are you really needing to lean into right now? Where could you stand to build some more muscle?

I’m excited to dive in over the next series of blog posts into each of these leadership skills and provide practical, useful tools and tips for how you can build muscle to strengthen each of these skills to support you as you break free and design the next exciting chapter in your life!