The Uncomfortable Truth of Leadership and Self-Awareness.
Facing yourself is more brutal than any confrontation with a boss, a partner, or a team. People rarely do it, preferring to lose themselves in productivity hacks, in the latest leadership books, in the wisdom of whoever is trending on LinkedIn. It feels safer than cutting through excuses, than confronting habits long justified, than seeing the gap between who they claim to be and who they are. But real leadership doesn’t start with theory or frameworks.
It starts with philosophy. And if you don’t define it for yourself, someone else will.
Borrowed Beliefs Don’t Build Leaders
Alright, let’s get down to business. You know what happens when leaders run on borrowed beliefs? They stall out. They recite stale jargon, echo empty slogans, and wade through corporate mantras like they actually mean something. It might look good on paper; it might even fool a few folks for a while. But nothing holds up when the pressure’s on. It’s when the market flips or an unexpected crisis hits that everyone sees the truth: leaders don’t default to someone else’s philosophy; they default to their own. And if they don’t have one? Watch the spinelessness unfold — the confusion, the inconsistency, the avoidance. Teams catch the scent of it immediately. Self-awareness isn’t a luxury; it’s survival. You’ve got to know what lights your fire, what you’ll defend at all costs. That’s your philosophy right there. And without it, leadership crumbles.
Why Communication Is 95% of Leadership
There’s a story I like to tell, and it goes a little like this: 95% of success is communication. Is that number precise? Not really. But let me be blunt — it’s as close to everything as it gets. Look around you: When people talk about a successful workplace, they’re talking about strong communication skills 85% of the time. When projects fail, it’s often silence or poor communication that’s blamed — a staggering 70% of the time. Companies that claim a bigger slice of the pie tend to think communication is the main ingredient. So maybe it’s not literally 95%, but spend a week in any organization and you’ll see communication is more than just another cog in the machine.
Still, here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most people are terrible at it. They mistake “Reply All” for connection. They confuse a slick presentation for being understood. They tick the “Sent” box and think they’re done. Real communication, the kind that builds companies and careers, starts with another kind of conversation — one with yourself. If you’re not candid and clear inside your own head, every word that comes out of your mouth will be suspect. Your words lose their weight. Your intent gets lost in translation. People stop trusting you. Want to lead? Want to influence? Start by telling yourself the truth.
The Four Anchors of a Self-Aware Philosophy
Years ago, I sat in a conference room, watching a speaker gesture at a slide titled “Our Core Values.” I remember thinking how neatly they fit on the screen, and how rarely they fit in real life. Values are tidy in theory, but messy in practice. To matter, they need self-awareness to anchor them. Without it, they drift away, leaving only slogans behind.
1. Communication
In my early career, I confused communication with noise: emails sent, meetings held, words spilled like water from a broken pipe. I thought success was loud. But when projects floundered, I learned the truth — communication isn’t noise; it’s clarity. It’s the hard honesty of speaking truthfully to others because you’ve first spoken truthfully to yourself. Self-awareness is the quiet voice that cuts through the clamor.
2. Performance Excellence
I mistook exhaustion for excellence. I believed long hours and late nights were the markers of achievement, the more drained I felt, the more “excellent” I was. But true excellence isn’t self-destruction. It’s the balance of knowing when to push and when to pause. It’s the discipline to sustain for the long run, rather than sprinting for short bursts. Self-awareness taught me to see the difference.
3. Growth & Adaptability
I once worked under a leader who claimed to have all the answers, until those answers stopped working. The team stalled, rigid and unmoving, while he clung to old truths. Growth demands the admission that we don’t have it all figured out. Adaptability requires the courage to change course when yesterday’s solutions no longer apply. It takes self-awareness to navigate uncertainty with humility and agility.
4. Talent Development
In one of my first leadership roles, I dove into developing my team with the vigor of a new convert. I scheduled trainings, set goals — yet nothing stuck. They saw right through me. I was trying to develop them without first developing myself. Self-aware leaders, I later learned, build cultures of growth because they model it personally. Your team can only go as far as you are willing to go yourself.
These values, like anchors, keep me grounded. They are the difference between drifting on the surface and diving deep. They are not words on a screen, but truths lived daily, imperfectly, and sometimes painfully. And they only matter if we have the self-awareness to make them real.
The Mirror Test of Leadership
Here’s a test: When your team frustrates you, stop and ask, How am I causing this problem?
It’s uncomfortable. But it’s almost always true. Your team mirrors you — your clarity, your confusion, your energy, your avoidance. If you’re a mess, they’ll be a mess. If you’re rock solid, they’ll be rock solid.
Research in organizational psychology backs this up: self-aware leaders make better decisions, inspire higher performance, and create more resilient cultures. But you don’t need research to prove it — you can feel it in any workplace. Teams feed off their leaders.
So the question isn’t: Can you manage others? The question is: Can you manage yourself?
The Challenge You Can’t Outsource
Here’s the hard truth: no one will do this work for you. Not your coach, not your boss, not even your mentor. They can guide, challenge, provoke, but they can’t build your philosophy. That’s up to you. If you want to lead others, start by leading yourself. Ask the questions that make most leaders flinch:
- Which values do I live instead of list?
- What am I blind to because I want to be?
- What patterns do I insist on repeating?
- What kind of leader would I admire, and why am I not more like that?
These are tough questions, but just as vital. Answering them might sting, yet it will clarify more than any guru or seminar ever could.
You can’t lead others until you’ve led yourself. You can’t lead yourself without self-awareness. And you can’t be self-aware without having the courage to communicate honestly with the one person you can’t escape — yourself. Start there.
Life is lived.
-Willy