Who we are is how we lead
narrated by Sharon Charlton-Thomson
If you have been following along on LinkedIn you may have noticed our weekly post sharing the books, we return to again and again. I thought it important to reference the first two books mentioned that I listed, because they are full of wisdom of what it takes to be human, and to prove I’ve read them of course.
There is a question that James Hollis, the Jungian analyst and author, often returns to in his writing:
“What is it that wants to live in us, that we have not yet allowed?”
It is not a question most of us make space for. And yet, in almost three decades of coaching leaders, it is the question that sits quietly beneath so many professional crises and derailments. And it is there in the moments when a talented, accomplished person finds themselves stuck in a way that no framework, or competency model, can really explain.
A study by Green Peak Partners called “What Predicts Executive Success?” found that leaders who operate on a ‘results at all costs’ basis have a measurably negative effect on their organisations, while leaders with a stronger capacity for self-awareness deliver superior financial performance. In fact self-awareness was found to be the top predictor of overall leadership success.
The World Economic Forum has noted that, as technology and economic forces accelerate, the ability to know oneself, to sense one’s own patterns, preferences, and inner states, will become one of the most critical and least replaceable human capacities.
These are not soft findings. They point to something that depth coaching has understood for a long time:
that what is unexamined in us does not stay quiet. It shows up in our decisions, in the way we treat people under pressure, in the cultures we create without ever consciously intending to. That awareness is everything.
Who we are is how we lead
Rarely does a senior leader struggle because of a lack of ability. More often, the difficulty is a pattern that has outlived its usefulness, a way of operating that was forged under pressure early in life or early in a career, that worked brilliantly for years, and that has now become a constraint.
The second book we highlighted in our top ten was the wonderful work that the brilliant Thomas Moore offers us, Care of the Soul. He writes that the soul is not a problem to be solved, but a dimension of experience to be honoured. Here he is telling us that the habits and reactions we carry are not flaws, they are, in his terms, part of the soul’s story. The person who learned to stay in control because chaos felt dangerous, the leader who speaks with absolute authority because uncertainty once felt like weakness, the executive who can never quite delegate because being indispensable was the way they earned their place.
These patterns are not random, they are deeply intelligent responses to circumstance. They were needed at one time in our lives and made perfect sense back then. Now, that reason may no longer exist, yet as creatures of habit we persist and the ways of behaving get repeated.
When these patterns remain unexamined, they run the show, quietly shaping our meetings, our relationships, our decision-making, our everything.
What isn’t resolved, repeats
James Hollis calls this way of being and lack of awareness, the provisional life. A life constructed to manage anxiety, to win approval, to be safe, to belong, rather than the life that genuinely belongs to us. Other disciplines may call these parts of self, Adapted Selves or False Selves, which had to be formed in us for us to survive.
Many high performing people, who are outwardly successful by every external measure, are often less aware that they are performing a version of themselves, rather than inhabiting who they really are and who they want to show up as. Until, of course, those behaviours become unsustainable or stop working altogether. Then we have a choice, to hide from them and push through, or to take a very good look at them.
Our lack of taking time to do this work is not our fault. Our fast-moving, high-accountability cultures do not naturally create space for this kind of noticing. As a leader there is always another decision to make, another result to deliver. The pace can be relentless. So who can blame us for repeating, being on auto pilot to get through or for just wanting to switch off at the end of the day and attempt to forget about it all.
To pause and look inward can feel, in some cultures, like indulgence, or even a subtle admission of weakness.
Yet it will be the most courageous and advantageous thing you can do for yourself, for your relationships and your leadership.
These days our capacity for reflection gets crowded out. Not through bad intent, but through relentless pace. And so our inner landscape, for many, remains unexamined, until it storms the gate and shows itself.
Maybe a team becomes guarded, a relationship fractures, a talented person derails, burnout occurs. And no amount of external intervention seems to reach the root of what is actually happening.
The irony is that the very capacity our organisational cultures most need, the ability to remain clear, grounded, and genuinely present under pressure, is precisely what inner work develops. As Daniel Goleman described in his research on emotional intelligence:
self-awareness is not simply what we notice about ourselves; it is how we notice, it is the quality of attention we bring to our own interior, our states, our triggers, our habitual ways of making meaning.
That quality of attention cannot be outsourced; it is cultivated slowly and seriously, from the inside, and it’s hard to do on our own. We need the right environment to safely explore our inner world and the right professional partner to do it with. That is not a blatant plug, its horses for courses. Finding the right person to work with is paramount.
What inner work actually means
Inner work in the coaching room is not therapy, it is certainly not, as the phrase sometimes implies, an invitation to become endlessly introspective or emotionally self-absorbed. It is something closer to what a great athlete does when they work with a coach, not on the mechanics of performance, but on the internal conditions that allow performance to happen, things like:
Presence, Clarity, Courage, Compassion
These conditions, when cultivated and teamed with awareness, allow us to act from genuine choice, rather than compulsion and habit.
In practice, it might mean beginning to notice the moments when a familiar pattern tightens its grip: the meeting where you talk more than you listen, the situation where a particular kind of challenge triggers a disproportionate response. It might mean sitting with discomfort long enough to understand what it is actually telling you, rather than immediately resolving it, or distracting yourself from it. It might mean, as Moore suggests, giving your inner life the care and attention you routinely extend to everything and everyone else.
For leaders, the places where this kind of attention becomes easier might be a long walk, a morning of unscheduled silence, a meditation, and/or a relationship in which it is genuinely safe to stop performing. Meaningful change at a senior level rarely begins with bold new initiatives; it begins with noticing, the kind of noticing that only becomes possible when there is some space between stimulus and response.
Time and time again I have witnessed, in myself and in my clients, that when we cultivate that space, our teams experience it too. The quality of our conversation changes, our decisions are made with more genuine clarity, people feel less managed and more led. Our relationships benefit, and so do we.
Hollis writes that the Unlived Life, the questions we have not dared to ask ourselves, the patterns we have not had the courage to examine, do not disappear. They simply find other forms of expression: in anxiety, in conflict, in fear, sadness, and many forms of overcompensation.
Inner work is not the opposite of performance.
It is, ultimately, its foundation.
For senior leaders navigating genuine complexity, the layered, volatile, human complexity we live in now, it may be the most important investment they will ever make.
If you are interested in this kind of work, please do get in touch. We aren’t salesy, we are honest about our skills, experience and whether we would make a good partner for you. We listen.
Feature Image Credit: Photo by Frederick Shaw on Unsplash
