Are you lost?

Your team often knows when you’ve lost yourself…before you do.

Because most leadership challenges don’t start with strategy. They start with identity.

When leaders feel overwhelmed, or ‘not themselves,’ it leaks into decisions, team dynamics, behaviour, and pace. And often, everyone else feels it long before they do.

I write not from some higher ground, but from some experience of losing myself.

Years ago, I was trying to copy a boss I admired: bold, sharp, assertive. It wasn’t me, but at the time I thought that’s what ‘confident leadership’ looked like.

If you’ve ever performed a version of leadership that doesn’t feel true, you’ll recognise the discomfort.

After a meeting where I’d performed this a little too well, my colleague pulled me aside, paused and said: ‘We’ve got plenty of big voices in that room. What we’re craving is someone who listens, who creates space for what we’re trying to do. I thought that would’ve been you. How dare you rob us of that.’

It was one of those moments that rearranges you.

Maybe you’ve had a time, where someone sees the real you more clearly than you see yourself. And is kind enough to tell you straight.

Like a work version of ‘there’s something in your teeth’.

I hadn’t realised how far I’d drifted from myself.

Or how much the team could feel it. Trying to lead as someone else wasn’t just exhausting, it was confusing, for everyone.

Because when a leader loses internal clarity, the organisation feels the wobble immediately, in culture, clarity and connection.

That insight was hard to hear but pulled me back toward my natural style - empathetic, collaborative, calm. The version of me that wasn’t just nice to have, but necessary, for me and the team .

Things started to improve from there.

Not because I became confidently perfect (as I’d been pretending). But because I was courageously present.

And I owned my behaviour with my team.

I don’t know about you, but no-one’s ever got grumpy at me for admitting I’m trying to be a better leader.

I’d been so inside my head about who I wasn’t, I’d forgotten to be who I was.

After two decades in transformation and leadership roles, this is the pattern I still see every day:

When you lose yourself, strategy can’t save you.

When you find yourself again, the rest clicks into place.

That’s why the work I care about today is the internal side of leadership, identity, clarity, behaviour, and the honest conversations leaders rarely get space for. It unlocks capability, courage, and better decisions.

It’s space that shifts people, not just plans.

And if part of you is whispering,

‘This might be me,’ pay attention. Drifting from yourself happens.

Granted, sometimes between the third meeting of the day and a deck that didn’t need 28 slides.

The danger isn’t the drift… it’s when you defend it so well you convince yourself it was a bold strategic choice.

But once you notice it, you can choose differently.

Welcome to the club.

Bring snacks. Honesty requires fuel.