Your Happiness Depends on Your Own: Relations Between Self-leadership, Happiness and Depression

Abstract

Self-leadership is a self-influencing process through which people achieve the effectiveness necessary to reach their own goals. Goal attainment leads to a sense of achievement, thus influencing our personal well-being, while failing to achieve personal goals leads to feelings of helplessness associated with depression and withdrawal. Considering the influence of self leadership on one person’s expectations about his/her own effectiveness the authors examined the relationship between self-leadership skills and their impact on personal happiness and depressiveness. A sample of 448 students completed an online questionnaire, consisting of the German version of the Revised Self-leadership Questionnaire, the Optimism Pessimism Scale, the Oxford Happiness Inventory and the Health Questionnaire for Patients. The results showed both a positive relationship between self-leadership and happiness, and a negative relation between self-leadership and depressiveness. In addition regression analysis with self-leadership as predictor confirmed the described relationships among variables. The authors discuss the role of goal attainment by self-leadership skills as a path to increased happiness.