The hardest person you'll ever lead is yourself.
Every leadership book I read in my twenties focused on influencing others. How to motivate teams, how to communicate vision, how to hold people accountable. All useful stuff. But nobody mentioned the prerequisite: that you can't take people somewhere you haven't gone yourself. You can't lead others through uncertainty if uncertainty destabilises you. You can't hold space for someone else's growth if you're avoiding your own.
I learned this the hard way. I was technically competent, good at strategy, reasonable at delegation. But under pressure, patterns would emerge that I couldn't see in myself. Defensiveness when challenged. Impatience when things moved slowly. A tendency to solve problems for people instead of developing their capacity to solve them. My team was shaped by these patterns whether I intended it or not. They were leading based on what I modelled, not what I said.
The shift came when I started treating self-leadership as the actual job. Not the soft, optional add-on to the real work. The real work. Managing my internal state. Catching my reactions before they became responses. Noticing where I was operating from fear versus where I was operating from clarity. This isn't about being perfect. It's about being aware enough to choose instead of react.
There's a reason every enduring leadership tradition starts with self-mastery. Not because it makes you feel better, though it might. Because you cannot give what you don't have. You cannot create environments you haven't cultivated within yourself first. The team you lead will rise exactly as high as the internal leadership you've developed.
I'm still working on this. Probably always will be. But the frame has shifted. When something isn't working with my team, my first question is no longer "what's wrong with them?" It's "what's happening in me that's contributing to this?" Usually, there's something. And that something is where the real leverage lives.