The first person you lead is yourself

At the time of writing this article, I have two coaches. I'm considering hiring a third.

I mention that because I've been coaching and training on this word — leadership — for nearly twenty years, and people are sometimes surprised that a leadership coach would hire a coach for themselves. The assumption underneath the surprise is that leadership is something you acquire and then have.

It isn't. It's something you have to keep doing, and the first person you do it to is yourself.

I learned that the hard way, working under a leader who was controlling and critical. I gave in to the pressure. I hit the minimum benchmark and called it done, more times than I want to admit. It wasn't that I lacked ability. It was that I had stopped leading the one person I actually had authority over.

Here's what I've come to believe since. Most of what we recognize as leadership is observable and external: a title that confers positional authority, communicating expectations to direct reports, owning strategic decisions, running the meeting. These are the visible artifacts.

But the most fundamental aspects of leadership are a set of beliefs, mindsets, values and actions that take place internally. I often tell clients — and myself — that the first person you lead is yourself. If you lack the ability to understand, manage and continuously improve yourself, how would you expect to inspire others to be any different?

We can't give away what we don't have.

Self-leadership is the only reliable way to manage personal change, achieve goals, live a meaningful life and, especially, lead other people well.

Start with purpose, not a to-do list

This isn't achieved by drafting a self-improvement checklist. You have to find the purpose first, so you know why you're doing what you're doing — that's what supplies direction and motivation when things get unclear, which they will. Then articulate the beliefs and values that serve that purpose, so your actions and decisions feel aligned rather than arbitrary. Finally, hold a holistic view of your own growth: the work you do on yourself directly determines your capacity to lead and influence others.

The reason the checklist fails is that it optimizes behavior without touching the thing generating the behavior. You can hold yourself to a rule about responding within a day, and the rule will survive an ordinary week and collapse in a hard one — because rules are what you fall back on when you have not resolved what you actually want. Purpose is not decoration on top of the plan. It is the thing that decides for you at the moment the plan runs out.

A useful test: think of a decision you have made twice in the last year and regretted the same way both times. Repeated regret in the same direction is rarely a discipline problem. It is usually a signal that two of your values are in conflict and you have not chosen between them, so the choice keeps getting made by whichever pressure is loudest that day.

Mindset is your first leadership tool

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck's work on mindset reveals how much our mental frameworks determine outcomes. Individuals with a growth mindset — the belief that abilities develop through dedication and effort — achieve higher levels of success and resilience.

The common misreading of growth mindset is that it means thinking positive thoughts. It doesn't. It means holding accurate, generous beliefs about ourselves, other people and our situation. The change we want to see around us has to happen within us first. A transformed person transforms their environment.

Dweck herself has written about what she calls a false growth mindset — the version that gets adopted as vocabulary rather than practice. It shows up as praising effort regardless of whether the effort was well-directed, or as claiming a growth mindset while still avoiding the situations where you might visibly not be good at something. The real article is uncomfortable, because it requires you to stay in the position of being a beginner long enough to stop being one.

In a leadership context this has a specific and awkward implication. The higher you go, the fewer places there are where being a novice is socially safe — and the more your development depends on finding them anyway.

Self-awareness, and the three reasons it works

Emotional intelligence is having a moment, and for good reason. EQ is about going in to go out — improving the internal in order to improve the external. It expands your understanding of your own emotions, thoughts, strengths, weaknesses, drives and values, and crucially, their effect on other people.

It is worth being precise about how rare the real thing is. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich's research found that while the overwhelming majority of people believe they are self-aware, only a small fraction meet the criteria on measurement — and that experience and seniority do not reliably improve the number. Power tends to reduce the flow of corrective information, and the people best placed to tell you something useful are the people with the most to lose by doing so.

So here's a question worth sitting with. When was the last time somebody told you something about yourself that you didn't already know? If you can't remember, that's the finding.

Emotional intelligence

Daniel Goleman argues self-awareness is the cornerstone of EQ. It lets leaders recognize their emotional triggers, understand how their state shapes team dynamics, make intentional rather than reactive decisions, and build genuine empathy by first mapping their own emotional landscape. Goleman's analysis of competency models across a range of organizations found that emotional intelligence accounted for the large majority of what separated star performers from average ones in senior roles — while technical skill and raw intellect functioned mainly as entry requirements rather than differentiators.

Cognitive flexibility

Two words rarely placed together in leadership conversations, and they open a whole realm of presence and effectiveness. Cognitive flexibility is what lets leaders adapt quickly to changing circumstances, pivot strategy, see a situation from several perspectives at once, and reduce the biases quietly narrowing their decisions. Improving even one of those would meaningfully change your impact.

The practical marker is how you behave when you receive information that contradicts a position you have already stated publicly. Cognitive flexibility is not open-mindedness in the abstract. It is the specific capacity to update after you have committed, which is expensive precisely because it costs something socially.

Think of a position you've committed to publicly in the last year. What would have to be true for you to change your mind about it — and would anyone on your team feel able to show you?

Self-regulation

Self-regulation is emotional intelligence in action — the capacity to manage and redirect disruptive emotions and impulses. Leaders who develop it maintain composure under pressure, create psychologically safe environments, model emotional stability, and make more calculated decisions when the stakes are high.

Note what this is not. It is not suppression, and teams read the difference immediately. A leader who is visibly containing something produces more anxiety than one who names it plainly — because unexplained tension gets interpreted, and people almost always interpret it as being about them. Regulation is choosing the response, not hiding the state.

Your team can already tell the difference between you managing a reaction and you hiding one. Which do they see more of?

What it looks like when this is missing

Weak self-leadership rarely announces itself. It shows up indirectly, and usually as a pattern other people have noticed before you have:

• Your team can predict your mood better than your priorities. When people manage around your state rather than toward the goal, the state has become the more reliable signal.
• Decisions get revisited whenever the last person who spoke was persuasive. Not open-mindedness — an absence of settled criteria.
• You are busiest on the things you are best at. Competence is comfortable, and drifting toward it is how senior people quietly stop doing their actual job.
• Feedback has gone quiet. This is the one to take seriously. It almost never means there is nothing to say.

Three practical strategies

1. Habit formation

Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit shows how small consistent changes create significant transformation. Understanding the habit loop — cue, routine, reward — lets you systematically redesign behavior instead of relying on willpower.

The leverage point is the cue, not the resolve. Most leadership habits people want to change are triggered by a specific recurring context — the meeting that always runs long, the message that always arrives at the end of the day. Change what happens immediately after the cue and the behavior moves. Attack the behavior directly and you are fighting yourself once per occurrence, indefinitely.

2. The 90-second emotional reset

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor's research suggests the physiological lifetime of an emotion is roughly 90 seconds. When a strong emotion arrives, use that window:

• Take slow, deep breaths
• Mentally label the emotion — "I'm feeling anger," "this is anxiety"
• Observe the physical sensations without judgment
• Let it move through you rather than acting from it

The technique creates a gap between stimulus and response. That gap is where you get to choose instead of being hijacked.

What extends an emotion past 90 seconds is the story you attach to it — the rehearsal of what it meant and who was responsible. The labeling step is doing real work here: naming a state tends to reduce its intensity, while narrating it tends to sustain it.

3. Continuous learning

Seek knowledge in the areas you want to grow, take appropriate risks, reflect on experience, and treat challenges as development rather than verdicts. A small linguistic move helps: when you notice yourself saying "I don't know," replace it with "I'm not sure right now, but I'll look into it and come back to you."

The reason that phrasing matters is not confidence management. It is that "I don't know" closes a loop and the replacement opens one — and a leader who visibly goes and finds out gives everyone else permission to admit the limits of what they know, which is the precondition for the team learning anything at all.

The principle of internal abundance

There is real truth in the idea that you cannot give away what you don't have. If you're frustrated and hopeless, you will struggle to have influence. If the people who report to you need to improve their focus, but your own inner world feels disorganized and chaotic, how do you expect your team to improve in this area?

Which reframes self-care. Rather than an indulgence, it is a condition of sustained capacity — the research on psychological recovery consistently finds that the ability to detach from work and genuinely recuperate predicts how well people function when they return to it. For a leader, that capacity is not personal maintenance. It is the resource everyone else is drawing on.

Leadership is an inside-out journey, and the most profound transformation begins with a recognition that sounds almost too simple: the first person you lead is yourself.

Doing that work with a thinking partner is what leadership coaching is for. If you're carrying an organization through a transformation at the same time, our change leadership programs assume you have both jobs at once.

I'll leave you with this. I said at the start that I have two coaches and I'm thinking about a third. That isn't because I've fallen behind. It's because I'd rather be the kind of leader who is still being led.

So, who's leading you?