Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude

by Raymond M. Kethledge

To engage in disciplined action first requires disciplined thought, and disciplined thought requires people who have the discipline to create quiet time for reflection. The net result is not doing more, but doing less. Stop-doing lists reflect greater discipline than ever-expanding to-do lists of frenetic activity.

The key, as the authors illustrate with their marvelous collection of case studies, is to develop two practices. First, systematically build pockets of solitude into your life. We all have no more than twenty-four hours in a day, and they will be chewed up unless you deliberately structure time for solitude, inserting some “white space” in your calendar. White space does not mean vacation; it simply means nothing scheduled.

The second discipline is to recognize unexpected opportunities for solitude and seize them. It might come in the form of an unexpected life change that pulls you out of the fray, or it might come in a more pedestrian form. What do you do when stuck in traffic or with an unexpected flight delay? What do you do when you’ve been gifted an unexpected twenty minutes before a meeting?

Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done, in the keen insight of General Eisenhower. And the X factor that distinguishes truly great leaders is not personality but a paradoxical combination of humility and will in service to a cause bigger than the personal ambitions of that leader.

To lead others, you must first lead yourself. That, ultimately, is the theme of this book. Leadership, as Dwight Eisenhower defined it, is “the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.”

It is not an objective concept but a subjective one. It is, simply, a subjective state of mind, in which the mind, isolated from input from other minds, works through a problem on its own.

Instead, leadership solitude is productive solitude, which means to use solitude purposely, with a particular end in mind. Productive solitude involves working your mind—not passively, but actively, as you would a large muscle—as you break down and sort and synthesize what is already there. When that process of work and isolation is successful—and when done honestly, it usually is—the result is an insight, or even a broader vision, that brings mind and soul together in clear-eyed, inspired conviction.

Solitude yields the clarity to know when the easy path is the wrong one. And solitude, through its fusion of mind and soul, produces within the leader the stronger alloy of conviction, which in turn braces her with the moral courage not to conform, and to bear the consequences that result.

All of which suggests that the foundations of leadership are in jeopardy today. For if an essential element of solitude is mental isolation, its antithesis is accessibility; and the minds of our leaders today are accessible as never before.

Serious thinking, inspired thinking, can seldom arise from texts sent while eating lunch or driving a car. Responding to these inputs generates as much thought, and as much inspiration, as swatting so many flies. They deaden both the mind and soul.

Compounding the difficulty, now more than ever, is what ergonomists call information overload, where a leader is overrun with inputs—via e-mails, meetings, and phone calls—that only distract and clutter his thinking.

Other benefits are more spiritual, but no less important because of it. The best work is inspired work. A reflective leader will ask not only what decision she should make, but whether and how her actions advance some larger purpose.

The most inspiring leaders are ones who find a clarity of meaning that transcends the tasks at hand. And that meaning emerges through reflection.

“A critical element of effective leadership is not to let the immediate take precedence over the important,”

transcendental meditation. He says, “I don’t know how TM works, but it does. TM allows you to slow down, to reflect. As a relaxation process, and a process for introspection, it couldn’t be better.”

After each meeting, I record in Google Notes what we talked about during the meeting. Once per quarter I go back and review my notes from my meetings with each person. Sometimes I’ll connect things I hadn’t seen before. Or I’ll notice progress. Or I’ll realize things I’ve done wrong, things I should apologize for.”

Nate Fick uses time alone for both analysis and intuition. “You have to structure in time for solitude,” says Fick, author of the bestselling memoir One Bullet Away. “Otherwise you’re just reacting to other people’s thoughts, rather than driving the direction yourself.”

“Solitude can give you silver bullets as a leader. But there’s this idea that leaders have to be flaming extroverts. There’s also an action bias: ‘Do something!’ Sometimes it’s more important to stop and get your wits together.”

Sarah Dillard uses what she calls the “big version” of solitude to reconnect with her core values. “I make my best decisions in nature,”

For Eisenhower, the most rigorous way to think about a subject was to write about it. And so, on the subjects most important to his work, he made a practice of writing to himself.

Of course, subconscious inductive reasoning based on circumstances one has encountered earlier in life has its limits, and thus so does intuition. But when analysis conflicts with intuition, intuition is usually right.

“Solitude allows you to reflect while others are reacting,”

“As a leader you feel like you constantly have to be there, but I’d seen other platoon leaders burn out,” she says. “A leader sets the tone for what’s permissible. I wanted my subordinates to know that I thought periodic rest was important, so I did that myself. It gave them permission as well.”

The point is that every leader has her emotional limits, and there is no shame in exceeding them. What distinguishes effective leaders from inferior ones, rather, is their ability to restore their emotional balance.

During this crisis he told her, “You need time alone.” Darryl is Navajo, and her father-in-law shared with her a traditional Navajo teaching: “When you’re out of sorts, sit on the earth. Connect with it.”

“We need solitude during points of failure,” she says. “With great leadership drive comes great risks and great successes, really high points and devastating low points. Both are emotional jolts.” Sanyin advocates what she calls “strategic reflection.” The process enhances perspective not so much by measuring adversity against something larger, but by distilling the source of turmoil itself down to a smaller size.

One of her relatives tends to make comments that are literal and direct. “Things like ‘you look tired, you look terrible.’ When I’m practicing solitude, these are things I can choose not to be offended by.”

austerity

largesse.

Excess emotion—emotion beyond a leader’s own limits to control—has to go somewhere. A leader can bottle up the emotion for a while, as Ulysses S. Grant sometimes did. But the leader who thinks he can cram it down indefinitely is only deluding himself; the emotion will either distort his judgment or eventually paralyze him altogether, as it did Hooker.

The solution, then, is to do what successful leaders have done in crises throughout history: make a choice to go somewhere and break down in private.

By cutting the problem down to size intellectually, the leader does the same thing emotionally. Then she can shift her focus away from fear and recrimination, and toward the real tasks of positive leadership: action, goals, and the preparation of plans to meet them. The point reaches back to the first sentence of the introduction to this book: to lead others, you must first lead yourself. The leader who encounters a serious crisis and successfully manages his emotional balance throughout it does precisely that.

We do not know exactly what Lincoln did, hour by hour, during those five days of recovery. But we do know that he did two things, both cathartic, and both alone. One was that he retreated to his bedroom and wept. Robert Todd Lincoln went there, later on the fourteenth, and found his father “in tears, with head bowed upon his arms resting on the table at which he sat.” The other was that Lincoln wrote a letter to Meade. It began on a conciliatory note: “I am very—very grateful to you for the magnificent success you gave the cause of the country at Gettysburg, and I am sorry now to be the author of the slightest pain to you.” But only two sentences later, Lincoln put into words his frustrations of the past ten days: I had been oppressed nearly ever since the battles at Gettysburg, by what appeared to be evidences that yourself, and Gen. Couch, and Gen. Smith, were not seeking a collision with the enemy, but were trying to get him across the river without another battle … The case, summarily stated, is this. You fought and beat the enemy at Gettysburg; and, of course, to say the least, his loss was as great as yours. He retreated; and you did not, as it seemed to me, pressingly pursue him; but a flood in the river detained him, till, by slow degrees, you were again upon him. You had at least twenty thousand veteran troops directly with you, and as many more raw ones within supporting distance, all in addition to those who fought with you at Gettysburg; while it was not possib...

He should strive to maintain a measure of detachment, both from the emotion of others around him and from the crisis itself, observing it clinically, dispassionately. And he must focus his thinking strictly on the decisions he needs to make, rather than on the consequences that might follow if his decisions are wrong.

Some leadership decisions bring consequences that are more than professional. Frequently those consequences take the form of moral criticism, where opponents criticize not only the decision itself, but the person who would dare make it. During the 1930s, for example, Churchill was derided as a warmonger because he advocated increased military spending to counter the Nazi threat.

moral criticism: the leader who closes her door to think is aloof; so is the leader who skips boondoggle conventions in favor of getting actual work done; so is the leader who spends time with family rather than at after-work gatherings for drinks; and the leader who answers some e-mails slowly, and others not at all, is derelict. All of these decisions involve nonconformity with the assumptions, and sometimes the cherished premises, of persons who do conform. And conformists often have a large investment, materially or psychologically, in those premises. Hence the nonconformist can expect some measure of invective in response.

The very point of these criticisms is to enforce conformity, and thus to prevent the leader from making these decisions in the first place. Moral courage is what enables a leader to make them nonetheless. It requires not only clarity, but conviction. And to have conviction, and thus moral courage, the leader must get her soul involved.

“Every morning, for thirty minutes, I sit in the garden or in a comfortable chair with a cup of coffee, reflecting,” he says. “I think about five things: my family, my work, my community, my faith, and my personal well-being. I think about how I’m doing with each of these things, what’s working, what isn’t, what I need to change.”

Yet Conant refused to conform to a prevailing norm that he thought unacceptable. “One of my core beliefs is that we can’t expect an employee to value the organization until we’ve tangibly shown that the organization values the employee.”

Conant says. “The time for introspection is before you need it.”

Dena Braeger echoes Conant’s point about awareness of one’s first principles, or what she calls “priorities.” “People are so quick to bow to the idea of ‘staying connected,’” she says. “They aren’t conscious of the priorities they’re setting with regard to their time. Time is an unrenewable resource. You can’t get it back. All these things we’ve done to exchange information, to access information at our fingertips, have actually taken away our time for restoring the soul. You’re giving away your soul’s ability to be moved. If we’d spend more time in solitude, we’d value ourselves more.” Dena has ample courage to disregard the norm of constant connectivity. “Solitude is soul-restorative. In solitude, I realize again what’s most important to me. I can hear my own voice again. Afterward, when I face choices, I know who I am, what my choices will be. I won’t be afraid to make them.”

‘As long as you can go to bed each night and lay your head on the pillow feeling like you did something meaningful, that’s all that matters.’

Like many people, Brené has faced social pressure not to engage in solitude. “The decision to engage in solitude is a vulnerable and courageous act. There’s a perception that making time for solitude is a sign of self-indulgence or weakness. Or people make smart-ass comments about it, like ‘Are you going to meet the Dalai Lama?’”

What these newer leaders don’t realize, Brené says, is that “solitude is not the reward for great leadership. It’s the path to great leadership.”

‘This is irresponsible. You have this added responsibility to care for Jass.’” But Jimmy’s reflection on his experiences as a parent made him see the situation a different way. “They were just projecting their fears onto me. Jass made my entrepreneurial side bolder. Having a special-needs kid blows your world away. Then you recraft it with what’s left. I never would’ve thought I could handle this, but I’m parenting him well, I’m loving him well. What’s next? I learned that you can do more than you ever thought you could, and I took that lesson to my career.”

The process of writing a complex document—for most writers, the most solitary of tasks—forces one to think much harder about its subject than does editing a document written by someone else.

What he seeks, usually, is not still more clarity about the reasons for his actions, but simply reassurance—reassurance that what he is doing is right, that he is doing his best, that he is a good person notwithstanding what the moral critics say.

“The real danger to both sides—for the Church and the other side, call it what you will—is the man who does not … listen to his deepest convictions, to his inner truth, but who wants only to fit, to float in conformity … The future of Poland will depend on how many people are mature enough to be nonconformist.” —POPE JOHN PAUL II, JUNE 1979

Yet for many leaders humility is difficult to come by. Like most people, leaders are prone to self-admiration. And a leader might hear every day—sometimes directly, sometimes in ways more oblique—that his ideas are insightful, his jokes funny, even that he is virtuous. Sometimes the praise is sincere, sometimes not; but in either case the leader who takes it seriously will allow himself to be convinced, though he might not say it aloud, that his admirers indeed have a point. And then he will begin to set himself above his followers. Honest reflection can deflate these pretensions. A leader who is connected with her first principles can reflect on the ways she has fallen short of meeting them.

Wojtyla was also deeply impressed by the dignity of the men with whom he labored in the Zakrzowek quarry. These men were largely uneducated and bore terrible burdens of their own, but they treated the young Wojtyla with sympathy, encouraging him where they could and allowing him to warm himself in a small hut with an iron stove. From these men Wojtyla learned that even the worst drudgery, when borne without self-pity, can be a source of dignity. Wojtyla reflected on the experience two decades later, in a poem called “The Quarry.” He wrote: “The whole greatness of this work dwells inside a man.”