Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude

by Raymond M. Kethledge

personal leadership—leading oneself—is the foundation of leading others. And personal leadership comes through solitude.

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.

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.

Another problem concerns not the means by which we communicate today, but the manner. It is commonplace now to yell rather than speak, to talk over each other rather than listen, to answer criticism without pausing to consider whether it has merit. Our culture has become more strident than sublime, with a coarseness that has worn away the delicate alloy of beauty and decency that used to be called grace.

A leader should strive for clarity not only about the challenges he faces but about himself, his strengths and weaknesses as a leader.

“to process your life story. You need to reflect on the crucibles of your life and how you dealt with them. Those experiences can teach you about your character, and things you can try to improve.”

The hardest-earned kind of clarity is analytical clarity. Unlike intuitive clarity—which arises more from mental quietude than from strenuous effort—analytical clarity arises from rigorous syllogistic thought. And that kind of thinking—because of its difficulty, and its glacial pace—is best done, and perhaps only done, in solitude.

the object of the exercise is the same: identification of the key variable upon which the leader’s decision depends. That variable, depending on which way it breaks, is the one that determines whether the benefits of a particular leadership decision exceed its costs. Identification of that variable is what provides analytical clarity: what began as a mass of undifferentiated information is now a landscape of logical premises that lead to one critical point.

“The first step on the road to experiencing true awareness is the cessation of noise from within.” —JANE GOODALL, Reason for Hope

Intuition and analytical clarity both involve processing information, but with intuition the processing is already done for you. The challenge with intuition is to access it. Usually our minds are caught up in a cycle of stimulus and response, sometimes about things worth thinking about, other times about trivialities. This cycle creates a mental dialogue of its own, which during times of constant inputs or stress is more like a din. So long as the dialogue continues, our attention is consumed by it.

The mechanics of intuition and analytical thinking are opposites of one another. Analysis requires focus, which is to say that one’s attention is concentrated on a single point. But intuition works best from a panoramic view, where one takes in all the surrounding circumstances—including details, like office décor, that at first might seem irrelevant. For those details give rise to patterns, which, when processed by the subconscious mind, give rise to intuition.

because intuition is based on more information—in many cases vastly more—than analysis is, intuition provides an important check on analytical thinking.

Intuition is thus not only a check upon analytical thought, but a complement to it. When analysis leads nowhere, intuition can often provide an answer.

“the grand invitation is to embrace the reality of your life and to figure out what to do with it.”

“A lack of silence and solitude leads to anxiety, which leads to demonization based on differences, which leads to conflict, which leads to violence. We need to reverse the flow. We need to invite people to think about their feelings, to address them, and then come up with a creative response that builds relationships and trust.”

A hallmark of creativity is to reject conventional norms when they outpace their purpose,

A leader takes on forces larger than himself. When a leader has clarity and conviction about how to deal with those forces, he feels himself a match for them. The result is a sense of equanimity, of emotional balance; and it is precisely that balance, when joined with clarity of thought, that allows a leader to exercise his best judgment.

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

The leader who neglects to step out of the sweep of events, to contemplate from whence they came and where they might go, finds himself merely “blown from one thing to another.” But the leader who steps outside events is a leader who can change them.

Productive solitude allows a leader to reflect upon these realities of leadership, and thereby to reconcile himself with what has already happened and what may happen yet.

A vindictive superior would have sealed the letter and promptly sent it to a subordinate who had caused him such distress. But Lincoln simply filed it away, writing upon the envelope, “never sent or signed.” His purpose in writing it, he likely knew all along, was not to communicate with Meade—any more than weeping in his room was.

Lincoln’s wisdom was to step outside the day’s events and let his emotions run their course, in the privacy of his bedroom. He then continued that process by expressing his frustrations—fully, precisely, and unflinchingly—in the unsent letter to Meade. When Lincoln emerged from that process, he controlled his emotions more than they controlled him.

Anger can distort a leader’s judgment as much as fear can. Indeed for leaders, as for anyone else, fear converts into anger quite easily.

Leadership, like fertilizer, contains elements that can be volatile or nurturing, depending on how one handles them. An unreflective leader is prone to volatility: he does not realize that his own anxieties are part of the fuel for his anger about some external event, and thus his response—berating employees, torching a meeting—is disproportionate to the event itself. A leader of this type finds himself apologizing frequently if he is decent, or embittering his followers if he is not.

“In contrast to the aggressive, destructive quality of hatred,” U Pandita writes, “metta wishes the welfare and happiness of others.” “Engaged Buddhism is active compassion or active metta,” Suu Kyi says. “It means not just sitting there passively saying, ‘I feel sorry for them.’ It means doing something about the situation by bringing whatever relief you can to those who need it most, by caring for them, by doing what you can to help others.” A closely related concept is karunna, or “active compassion.” Together, these concepts allow one not to hate one’s oppressors but instead to feel sympathy for them, by cultivating an awareness of the forces—notably fear—that cause them to act as they do.

What Suu Kyi had found in isolation was not anger or fear, but “the real change that comes from inside, through learning the value of compassion, justice and love.”

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.” Every three or four months, Conant does what he calls a “deeper dive.” “It’s usually when I’m traveling, on a plane or train coming home. I’ll go through each of these five things, and get reconnected with my values and my different roles in life. It’s a wonderful way of keeping me centered on what I truly believe.” Once a year, Conant also revises what he calls his “Personal Mission Statement.”

Introspection helps ensure that my decisions are aligned with my principles. It’s life-changing.

‘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,

“To me, leadership means choosing courage over comfort,” Brené says. “Part of that means choosing solitude over busyness.”

To have moral courage, a leader must be willing to sacrifice. Sometimes the sacrifices are modest: a diminished reputation in some quarters, questions about one’s priorities in others, awkwardness in relations that before were agreeable. Other times the sacrifices are more serious: ostracism where once there was popularity, widespread anger among certain groups, criticism of not only one’s judgment but one’s character. Still other times the sacrifices are severe: the loss of a job, severance of important relationships, threats of physical harm. Consequences like these—even the modest ones—will turn many people away from doing what they know is right. Yet there are times when such consequences are worth bearing, because the alternatives—misplaced priorities, harm to the organization, compromised integrity—are worse. A leader connected with her first principles can recognize those times and thus see that the stakes are larger than popularity or relationships or career success.

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.

Solitude has been instrumental to the effectiveness of leaders throughout history, but now they (along with everyone else) are losing it with hardly any awareness of the fact. Before the Information Age—which one could also call the Input Age—leaders naturally found solitude anytime they were physically alone, or when walking from one place to another, or while standing in line. Like a great wave that saturates everything in its path, however, handheld devices deliver immeasurable quantities of information and entertainment that now have virtually everyone instead staring down at their phones. Society did not make a considered choice to surrender the bulk of its time for reflection in favor of time spent reading tweets or texts.

Identify your first principles and stay connected with them. A leader’s first principles are the wellspring of all the benefits that solitude provides: clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage. A leader out of touch with his first principles will eventually run short of all these things. With a lack of direction internally, he will become directed externally. He will find himself governed by optics.

Find a higher purpose for your leadership, and share it with your followers. The most inspiring leaders are ones who find some transcendent meaning in the enterprise they lead. That meaning might spring from shared first principles, as it could for any organization that shares them in earnest. It might spring from a sense of shared injustice, or the realization that suffering confers dignity, or an awareness that honest labor does as well. Or it might spring from the devotion that a group’s members share for one another. A transcendent meaning is one that by definition stands apart from the specific goals at hand. To find it, therefore, usually requires reflection.