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. This book is all about creating those

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.

The second discipline is to recognize unexpected opportunities for solitude and seize them.

leadership solitude is productive solitude, which means to use solitude purposely, with a particular end in mind.

There are benefits to that phenomenon—some of the bites, so to speak, are salutary—but a central point of this book is that, for the leader especially, there ought to be a lot more screened-off areas than there are now.

While at work, she keeps open in the background of her computer a document where, on a rolling basis, she records events that trigger an emotional response.

General McChrystal observes, “Technology has brought changes to leadership. The barrier to entry to contact leaders is so low now, with e-mail. I don’t want to be rude to people. And responding to emails can make you feel like you’re getting a lot done. But when you’re doing that you’re not taking time to think.”

Prince says that “leadership is about consensual interdependence.

“It goes back to consensual interdependence,” Prince says. “The problem was the information they didn’t have. I needed to lead them, not command them.”

A leader should strive for clarity not only about the challenges he faces but about himself, his strengths and weaknesses as a leader. Nate Fick sees “a distinction between self-awareness and self-consciousness.” The latter Fick sees as something to be wary of: a mindset that is focused outward, which can lead to posturing and decisions based on how others will perceive them. But self-awareness, in Fick’s view, is something to develop: an understanding of the forces within oneself that cause one to do or feel certain things as a leader. The mindset is fundamentally introspective.

“Each day there are only a handful of hours that are good for climbing. When I wasn’t climbing, I sat there looking out at the mountains from two thousand feet up. Reflecting on what the climb meant. Solitude is such a powerful force. It’s spiritual to me.”

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 harder question usually concerns how those facts and standards intersect. Sometimes (as in, say, legal reasoning) the relevant facts are known; the real question is what, exactly, the governing standard means. But more often some of the relevant facts remain unknown—because the leader’s information is fragmentary, or the relevant events have not happened yet.

For Eisenhower, the most rigorous way to think about a subject was to write about it.

His son John—himself a West Point graduate who spent weeks by his father’s side during the Normandy campaign—wrote after the war that “throughout his life my father had put many of his thoughts on paper, partly for the information of others but even more to clarify thoughts in his own mind.”

But it’s right that we should be busy—as long as we can retain time to think.”

Frequently Eisenhower’s practice of thinking by writing not only clarified his thoughts, but also stabilized him emotionally.

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.

We’re getting more of everything, but less of what is authentically ourselves.

Chip has continued his practice ever since. “Silence and solitude allows me to ground myself, to be conscious of what’s going on inside me, what I’m feeling,” he says. “Viktor Frankl wrote about how between every stimulus and response, there is a space. Silence and solitude creates a sacred space, an elongated space. The space gives you time to develop a creative response to what you’re feeling. Otherwise there is only reaction.”

“solidarity.” “Community is a group of individuals who have made an inclusive commitment to support each other. Inclusive because they welcome others to join them.” A healthy community can have differences, Chip says, but not division. “Differences are a product of ideas. Division is a product of behavior. A community means we live together with differences, but we can’t be divided.”

A hallmark of creativity is to reject conventional norms when they outpace their purpose, and that is exactly what Lawrence did in his deliberations alone.

“An effective leader is the person who can maintain their balance and reflect, when a lot of people around them are reacting,” says James Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps General. He sees solitude as threatened today. “If I was to sum up the single biggest problem of senior leadership in the information age, it’s a lack of reflection,” he says.

“One source of a leader’s strength comes from having some degree of reflective ability,” General Mattis says. He cites Kipling’s poem “If,” which begins: If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you … “Solitude allows you to reflect while others are reacting,” he says. 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. “If you use solitude to draw on your reading and your past experience, to create some distance from what is happening around you immediately, then it’s well used,” he says. “We need solitude to refocus on prospective decision-making, rather than just reacting to problems as they arise. You have some external stimulus, then you go back to your experience, your education, and you see what needs to be done.”

There are times when even the best leaders lose their emotional balance. Leadership brings with it responsibility, and responsibility, in times of serious adversity, brings emotional turmoil and strain. In this sense responsibility is like a lever, which can upset a leader’s emotional balance when adversity presses down hard on one end. When the adversity is threatening enough or comes without warning, it can unbalance the leader at a single stroke. Even a leader as great as Lincoln was floored more than once in this way. Other times the effect is cumulative, coming after a period of sustained high tension—of pressure on one end and resistance on the other—until finally the leader’s equanimity begins to give way. 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.

Sometimes the quickest way for a leader to restore her emotional balance, or at least begin to, is through catharsis.

Pam describes herself as “hyperextroverted,” while Darryl is a strong introvert. 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.”

Like General Mattis, Conant worries that leaders today do not reflect enough. “I’m astounded by the lack of introspection among leaders,” Conant says. “It’s not that you need to be completely unplugged from the outside world. But you do need to be completely plugged in to what you think. Shakespeare said, ‘To thine own self be true.’ But you can’t be true to yourself if you don’t know yourself in a deeper way. And you can’t know yourself without introspection.” Conant himself struggled on this point early in his career. “For my first ten years, when I was at General Mills, I worried about making others happy, rather than about what I thought was important. Then I was let go.”

“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.”

“I never could have gotten through that leadership challenge if I hadn’t been anchored by my process of reflection,” Conant says. “The time for introspection is before you need it.”

The importance of solitude is one of Brené Brown’s first principles as a leader. Brené is the author of three New York Times number-one bestselling books (Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection) and a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work, where she studies “vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame.” She is also the founder and CEO of the Daring Way and CourageWorks, which teaches individuals and organizations about bravery in leadership. “The biggest mistake I’ve made in my career to date is believing that solitude is a luxury,” she says. “I could chart the ups and down of my quality of life personally and professionally and the amount of time I spend in solitude. It’s a discipline that can make or break my work.” For her, solitude takes a variety of forms. “It’s a span of practices, long periods and short periods. I need both. On international flights, I don’t sit next to anyone I’m traveling with. That gives me twelve hours of time to come up with ideas.” Closer to home, she blocks out time on her calendar to think and write. “It’s nonnegotiable.” She also finds solitude while swimming. “No one can talk to you then.”

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 was one in which Churchill engaged intensively throughout the 1930s—namely, his writing. It was a process borne of practical necessity. During the 1930s, Churchill’s expenses for his residence, Chartwell Manor, and the lifestyle that came with it, were typically near $1 million annually in today’s dollars. Churchill’s parliamentary salary supplied less than 5 percent of that amount; most of the remainder came from Churchill’s literary earnings. Thus, so far as his income was concerned, Churchill’s profession was that of an author.

Churchill’s solitude was central to the Munich speech itself. 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.

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.”

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.

A leader has not only permission, but a responsibility, to seek out periods of solitude. What follows are some ways to find it, and then use it productively.