Leadership Shouldn't Cost You Your Personality
Written by Derek Mulhern, PCC
As leaders, we get good at showing up. For our supervisors, direct reports, boards, etc. The list can go on. What we might not notice is how much of ourselves we quietly set aside.
Like it's done before, that lesson hit me in the head last week while I was on vacation. Driving down the interstate at 50 mph, I was shocked by how unbothered I was.
That trip revealed more to me about the person leadership can bury if we're not paying attention.
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The Flat Tire
I spent last week on vacation with Brian.
We celebrated Pride in Seattle. Ate excellent food. Drove through the Willamette Valley wine country.
And then, somewhere along the drive, we got a flat tire.
Under normal circumstances, that probably would have frustrated me more than I'd like to admit.
Instead, we pulled over.
Changed the tire.
Got back in the car and continued our journey.
Driving 50 mph on the interstate extended our journey by an extra hour.
But that was it.
No frustration. No spiral.
No feeling that the day had been ruined.
I handled what was in front of me and moved on.
The Version of Me Before Vacation
At one point, I realized how different that felt from the version of me that had boarded the plane a few days earlier.
Before vacation, it felt like I had SO MUCH to do.
Emails to attend to.
Problems to be solved.
I was even trying to strategically optimize my downtime.
Was I relaxing enough?
Should I be getting ahead on work?
Was I making the most of my time?
Somewhere along the way, I had stopped simply being chill.
When Responsibility Becomes Identity
This is one of those things leaders don't often say out loud.
Sometimes responsibility quietly becomes our identity.
We become the person who always carries a little more.
Solving more problems and answering more emails.
Always thinking one step ahead.
And after a while, we forget there was another version of us.
Finding That Person Again
On vacation, I found him again.
He was sillier.
More connected.
More loving.
He lingered over breakfast with Brian instead of rushing to the next thing.
He laughed more.
He trusted that the work would still be there tomorrow.
What surprised me most wasn't that work continued without me.
It was that my inbox didn't fill up nearly as much as I expected.
It made me wonder how much of our urgency we create simply because we're available to create it.
Bringing It Home
When I came home on Monday morning and opened my laptop, I could feel the old version of me waiting.
The responsible one.
The productive one.
The one who believes everything depends on him.
But this time, something had changed.
Brian and I still had breakfast together.
We still had lunch together.
I was trusting that the work would get done instead of believing I had to hold all of it at once.
I'm still learning.
I'm not naive enough not to think I won't fall back into my old patterns sometimes.
But I keep coming back to one thing.
Your leadership shouldn't cost you your personality.
What Leadership Really Is
Because your leadership isn't your inbox.
It isn't your calendar.
It isn't how many problems you solve before.
Your leadership is you.
It's how people experience you.
It's the feeling you leave with your team after a conversation.
It's whether the people you love recognize the same person on a Tuesday afternoon that they do on a Saturday morning.
The Leader I'm Working to Become
Some of the most effective leaders I've worked with aren't remembered because got the most work done.
They're remembered because they brought a version of themselves that made other people feel more capable, more connected, and more human.
That's the kind of leader I am working to become.
Not just on vacation.
Every day.
