Leadership Starts With the Person in the Mirror

I think most of us probably believe we're fairly self-aware, and I understand why. We've lived with ourselves our entire lives. We know what we like, what irritates us, where we're generally strong, and where we struggle. If someone asked us to describe our personality or leadership style, most of us could probably come up with a reasonably confident answer. What I've become more interested in over the years is whether the person we would describe is the same person everyone else is experiencing. That's a much harder question. If I tell you that I'm direct (I'm not), for example, I may see that as one of my strengths. But if the people around me experience that directness as dismissiveness, then my intention only tells part of the story. I can believe that I'm giving someone autonomy when what they're actually experiencing is a lack of direction, or I can think I'm displaying confidence while someone else is watching my ego slowly take over the room. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that self-awareness isn't simply knowing a list of strengths and weaknesses. It's understanding how those characteristics actually show up, particularly when we're under pressure. That last part matters to me because I've spent a significant portion of my adult life in environments where pressure was unavoidable. In the fire service, you don't get to decide that you're going to work on your communication style once everything becomes calm again. The difficult moment is often exactly when the people around you need the best version of your communication, judgment, and leadership. Unfortunately, pressure also has a way of revealing the parts of ourselves we haven't spent enough time understanding. Maybe you become impatient. Maybe you get quiet. Maybe you start trying to control everything because uncertainty makes you uncomfortable, or you become defensive when someone questions a decision because you've attached being a good leader to always being right. None of those tendencies necessarily make someone a bad person or even a bad leader, but not recognizing them can make us considerably less effective. That's why I keep coming back to the relationship between self-awareness and influence. We spend a lot of time talking about leadership as the ability to influence other people, and I think that's a useful definition. But I've started wondering how effectively we can understand what makes another person tick when we haven't done much work to understand what makes us tick first. If I don't understand my own motivations, I'm likely to assume yours look something like mine. If recognition motivates me, I may assume you want recognition. If I value autonomy, I may give you autonomy when what you actually need is more coaching. If I thrive under pressure, I might look at someone who responds differently and decide they need to toughen up rather than becoming curious about what environment allows them to perform at their best. Without self-awareness, we have a tendency to lead people through the lens of ourselves. I know I've done that. Some of the most useful things I've learned about myself didn't come from moments when everything was going well. They came when something didn't work, when I received feedback I didn't particularly enjoy, or when an outcome forced me to ask a question I probably should have asked earlier: What part of this belongs to me? That question has followed me through leadership, career changes, relationships, entrepreneurship, and a lot of the work I'm doing now. It isn't always comfortable, but I think there's something freeing about becoming less interested in defending the person you think you are and more interested in understanding the person you're actually becoming. And I don't think that process ever really ends. In some ways, experience can make self-awareness more difficult because success slowly builds a story around us. We accumulate accomplishments, titles, and evidence that what we're doing must be working. Eventually, more people begin coming to us for answers than challenging the answers we're giving, and if we're not careful, experience can become an excuse to stop examining ourselves. I don't want that. I want to continue understanding where I'm strong and where someone else should probably take the lead. I want to recognize when confidence is becoming ego, when experience is turning into rigidity, and when the way I intend to communicate isn't the way I'm being experienced. That's not because I expect to eventually become perfectly self-aware. I don't think that's realistic. It's because the more accurately I understand myself, the less likely I am to make everyone around me adapt to the parts of myself I've never bothered to examine. I've spent a lot of time talking about leadership over the years, but increasingly I think some of the most important leadership work happens before anyone else is involved. Before I try to understand your motivations, I should probably understand mine. Before I ask you to change, I should be willing to examine where I need to change. And before I spend too much time thinking about how I'm going to influence everyone else in the room, I should probably make sure I've learned how to influence the person I bring into that room with me. That's what leading yourself first has come to mean to me. 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