Lead Yourself First

Ask a room full of people if they'd like to be a leader, and almost every hand goes up. Ask that same room who's willing to do the hard, boring, private work of leading themselves first, and the hands get real quiet. That gap right there is the whole ballgame.

We've got leadership backwards in this country. We think it starts when you get the title, the office, the little sign on the desk. It doesn't. Leadership starts a long time before anybody's following you — in the choices you make when nobody's watching and there's no reward for making the right one.

Do you do what you said you'd do? Do you show up on time for yourself, not just your boss? Can you keep a promise you made to yourself at 6 a.m. when 6 a.m. actually shows up cold and dark? That's self-leadership. And here's the hard truth: nobody's going to follow you very far if they can see you can't even follow yourself.

Why we start young

This is exactly why our youth program, iLead, starts with a year called iChoose. Before we ever ask a young person to lead anybody else, we spend a whole year on the choices. Connecting your values to your actual behavior. Learning that leadership is a decision you make over and over, not a badge you get once. Get that foundation right, and everything built on top of it holds. Skip it, and you get a bossy kid with a title and no character underneath.

The good news

You don't need permission to start. You don't need a promotion, a program, or anybody's blessing. Self-leadership is available to you this afternoon, for free. Pick one small promise to yourself — one — and keep it today. Then keep it tomorrow. That's not a small thing dressed up to sound big. That is the big thing. Every leader I respect is just a person who got very good at keeping small promises to themselves, until the people around them noticed and started keeping pace.

Lead yourself first. The rest follows. It always has.