The Path of Self-Cultivation Wisdom in the Tao Te Ching to Solve the Core Dilemma of Self-Leadership

Abstract

As the core ability of individual self-regulation and goal achievement, self-leadership has become increasingly prominent in the current era of remote work and the acceleration of work pace - existing research focuses on strategy optimization, but ignores the internal contradictions faced by individuals in "continuous self-drive", such as the tension between self-restraint and burnout, the imbalance between goal persistence and flexible adjustment, and the separation of individual effectiveness and team coordination. The Tao Te Ching takes "self-defeating and strong" as the core of self-cultivation, and its ideas such as "weakness over strength", "opposition to the movement of the way", and "good like water" do not simply provide strategic tools, but provide philosophical guidance for solving the deep dilemma of self-leadership from the three-dimensional dimension of "cognitive reconstruction, behavior adjustment, and relationship remodeling". By deconstructing the essential contradiction of the self-leadership dilemma, this study systematically explores the adaptation logic of the self-cultivation wisdom of the Tao Te Ching: resolving the tension of "excessive self-control - resource depletion" with "weakness over strength", balancing the imbalance of "goal persistence - flexible adjustment" with "the movement of the opposite way", and bridging the separation of "individual effectiveness - team coordination" with "good like water". Combined with empirical research in the field of self-leadership (e.g., Müller & Niessen, 2018; Zhang et al., 2024), an integrated framework of "the essence of the dilemma-the core of wisdom-practice transformation" is constructed, providing a new perspective for individuals to break through the bottleneck of self-leadership and localize the support system for organizational design, and at the same time expand the oriental philosophical dimension of self-leadership theory.