Building the foundation of inclusion through self-leadership literacy

Resumo

Europe has always been, intrinsically, a space which expressed, showcased and witnessed identity as an issue away from its quest as a culture, a citizenship or a nationality. As a matter of fact Identity can be defined as having an awareness, a fulfillment and a leadership of the Self within and beyond one’s diversity and affiliations; Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1974; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and Social Penetration Theory (Altman & Taylor, 1973) in their relevance can be complemented with learning one’s identity through these terms to construct more welcoming, inclusive and peaceful societies. Growing generations need to learn and acquire self-awareness, self-efficacy and self-management, a combined set of competencies leading to a process of self-leadership literacy. An expanded self-leadership methodology is based on having a developed sense of who we are and where we are going, combined with a developed ownership on influencing our communication, emotions and behaviors. A better understanding of one’s mechanism of influence empowers postures of mediation, conflict resolution and dialogue, to the ultimate impact of generating positive narratives. Self-leadership theory has been widely used in management and has brought about tangible results with a direct impact on cohesion and organizational inclusion. Social innovation is also a field domain that started to use components of self-leadership as bringing about inclusive and added-value oriented citizenship awareness. This paper draws on concrete examples taken from the corporate world and a non-profit social innovation platform having applied self-leadership as part of their action-training programs, and last from a personal experience with the UNAOC Fellowship program, to build on the necessity to further explore and investigate self-leadership literacy as a complementary discipline to the UNESCO MIL core competencies that mark the framework of the educational systems promoting MIL as a platform for Intercultural Dialogue.