At work, you’re the calm one who supports your team. You give credit. You handle the crisis without raising your voice. People come to you because they trust that you’ll be steady when everything else isn’t.
Then you go home, look in the mirror, and the calm leader disappears.
What’s left is a Tyrant.
The Voice Nobody Else Hears
That voice isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s barely a whisper, a small thread of doubt sewn into a moment of genuine hope.
Are you sure you deserve this? Have you prepared enough? Have you anticipated every question that could come up?
And then, before you can answer: Of course not. So don’t try.
Other times it waits. It lets you get moving, lets you build some momentum, and then a small inconvenience shows up. A minor setback. Something that, on a good day, you’d handle without a second thought. But you were already teetering. And that small thing becomes a wall.
You’d never do that to someone you were leading. You’d never whisper doubt into their best moment. You’d never turn a bump in the road into evidence that they were never going to make it.
So why do you do it to yourself?
The Purpose You Didn’t Choose
Here’s something worth sitting with: how much of the person you’re working so hard to be was actually chosen by you?
For most high-achievers, the answer is less than they’d like to admit.
Somewhere in the early years, a version of purpose got assigned. Not chosen, assigned. By circumstance, by the people around you, by what survival required. If you were anything like many of the people I work with, your teenage years weren’t spent figuring out who you wanted to be. They were spent managing what was happening around you and to you. Figuring out where you fit into the hierarchy which many seemed to understand and yet you didn’t. You learned to make sure you were the “just right” amount of whatever, for the situation, because you played a peacekeeper role at home.
That version of purpose follows you into adulthood. You’re chasing a finish line someone else drew, which may no longer even exist as an option for you. But when you get close to it, that same oppressive voice reminds you that you never really deserved to be in the race.
The heavy lifting, the real excavation of what you actually want, tends to show up in your late thirties and forties. Not because you failed to do it sooner. Because surviving took up the time.
Can you imagine if you had found spaces where people said what they meant, their actions followed what they said, and you were allowed to do the same?
The Mask Isn’t as Sealed as You Think
Here’s the part that tends to land hard with leaders: the way you talk to yourself is felt by the people around you.
When you skip celebrating your own wins, when you achieve something real and immediately move the goalposts instead of sitting in it for even a moment, your team notices. When your default mode is scanning for problems, the people you lead feel that underneath whatever steadiness you’re projecting.
You can’t sustainably lead others well while leading yourself poorly. The mask is good. It’s not that good.
The kindness you extend to your team, the patience, the belief in their potential. You are not exempt from those things. You never were.
Start Here
You already know the voice I’m describing. You’ve heard it. You may have aimed it at yourself for years without questioning where it came from or whether it was ever yours to carry.
Here’s the thing about self-authorship: it doesn’t start with a grand declaration. It starts with a single honest question you answer for yourself, on your own terms, without asking permission first.
Here’s where to start.
Think of a moment from your childhood when things went sideways. Not the biggest moment, just one that stayed with you. Remember how the adults around you responded. Now add the context you didn’t have then: what they were carrying, what they didn’t know, what the circumstances were.
Then ask: what would I do differently?
Write it down. Not in your head. On paper, where you have to commit to the words.
That answer belongs to you. Not to the voice that’s been running the internal commentary. Not to whoever handed you the story about what kind of person gets to succeed. To you.
That’s self-authorship. And that’s the beginning of leading yourself the way you’ve been leading everyone else.
If you’re ready to go further, to get clear on what you want and what’s been standing in the way, that’s the work I do. No scripts, no formulas, just an honest conversation about where you are and where you want to go.
LaSchwann Killens is an ICF-trained life and executive coach and the founder of VALADD Coaching. He works with people who are ready to stop waiting for permission and start making decisions that are actually theirs.