What Is A leader?
Most words are assumed to have shared meaning across definition, etymology, and lived experience. Most words do.
Leadership is not one of those words.
Leadership is one of the most casually used words in modern culture. We hear it in politics, in business, in self-help circles, on social media, in schools, and across entire industries dedicated to creating, identifying, and developing leaders.
A CEO is called a leader. A politician is called a leader. A manager is called a leader. Someone with confidence is called a leader. Someone with followers is called a leader. Someone who speaks first, takes charge, or stands at the front of the room is called a leader.
Yet beneath the shared language, people are often describing entirely different meanings.
Years ago, I attended a leadership retreat where participants were selected for a group exercise. When I was chosen, there was visible skepticism. I didn’t fit anyone’s image of a leader. During the activity, people kept encouraging me to move to the front and direct the group. I remember thinking that if I positioned myself at the front, I would lose sight of what was happening everywhere else. And, why move? From my vantage point I could see the group knew where they were going and were headed in the right direction.
To many of them, leadership seemed synonymous with visibility, authority, and being the one who gave instructions.
To me, leadership required awareness and clarity before direction.
Neither perspective developed from a dictionary. They developed from instinct and experience.
The deeper I’ve explored leadership and its variations, the more I’ve realized that what people mean when they use the word leader often reveals less about the “leader” and more about the depth to which they’ve integrated their experiences of what it means to lead.
Why It Matters
Why is leadership discernment important?
Beyond personal growth, it marks the transition from our childhood tendency to externalize responsibility onto others to our adult capacity to internalize responsibility for ourselves, our communities, and the systems we participate in.
The consequences of blindness in leadership rarely stop with the individual. They ripple outward through families, organizations, communities, nations, and sometimes generations.
Whether it’s the patriarch in our home, the spiritual authority in our place of worship, the executive in our workplace, or the political figures who govern on our behalf, it’s our responsibility to recognize harm rather than elevate it. And, we cannot effectively stand in harms way while wearing blindfolds.
What if someone like Hitler never gained power? What if more people had recognized the danger before the consequences became undeniable? What if those who could see more clearly were many instead of few?
How different might the world be if we learned to recognize destructive performances of “leadership” before it consolidated power? If we stood in the way of harm rather than rolling out red carpets for it and calling it good?
So let’s break it down as I’ve experienced leadership, experience by experience.
First, the definition and etymology.
The Definition
- the action of leading a group of people or an organization
- the office or position of a leader
The Etymology
Old English lædere “one who leads, one first or most prominent,”
“to guide,” Old English lædan (transitive)
Of roads by c. 1200. The meaning “be in first place” is by late 14c. The intransitive sense, “act the part of a leader,” is from 1570s. The sense in card-playing, “to commence a round or trick,” is from 1670s.
The Experience
Like the process of awakening, our experience of leadership is shaped by the depth to which we’ve actively explored how leadership manifests in both the world around us and the world within us.
Leadership: The Primal & Unexplored (False Light)
Many would describe a leader as simply someone who leads or someone others follow. That’s it. That’s the criteria. People follow; therefore, a leader exists.
Within this experience, leaders may be judged as good or bad, but only in hindsight.
The cycle of personal and historical hindsight perpetuates, while essential insights rarely integrate into foresight.
This experience observes the outcomes of leadership yet struggles to examine the qualities, capacities, and patterns that distinguish effective leadership from the appearance of leadership.
Hope and fear are projected onto a person through narratives, stories about who they are, what they represent, and what they might accomplish. Responsibility, both personal and collective, is externalized onto the leader. Leadership becomes something possessed by another rather than something to be understood, cultivated, and embodied.
This is the earliest and most instinctive experience of leadership.
Leadership: Conditioning Through Abuse (False Light)
People who’ve spent significant time in abusive, controlling, highly dysfunctional, or cult-like environments often come to associate “leadership” with qualities that are the inversion of leadership.
The driving force in these individuals is a search for safety and they seek out someone who can supply that feeling, rather than safety itself.
Responsibility for personal wellbeing, and often for the wellbeing of their communities, is externalized onto one person or a small group. Qualities this group views as leadership:
- Certainty — someone who seems to have all the answers.
- Confidence — even when it exceeds actual competence.
- Authority — someone who appears powerful or unquestionable.
- Decisiveness — someone who quickly tells everyone what to do.
- Protection — someone who promises safety from uncertainty, conflict, or danger.
- Approval — someone whose validation feels important or scarce.
- Strong identity — someone who appears completely sure of who they are and what is right.
- Charisma — someone who creates emotional intensity, inspiration, or admiration.
- Parental energy — someone who feels like they can take over responsibility for difficult decisions.
In these environments, people are often conditioned to value obedience over critical thinking, confidence over accuracy, certainty over curiosity, loyalty over integrity, and authority over competence.
As a result, individuals often mistake dominance for leadership, control for competence, charisma for wisdom, conviction for truth, and being feared for being respected.
This experience of leadership is less instinctive and more conditioned.
It’s dangerous.
This is the ecosystem where abusive individuals are uplifted, cults grow, and a tower moment is inevitable. NXIVM, The Manson Family, Peoples Temple, Branch Davidians (known for the Waco, TX standoff), Scientology, and MAGA, with figures like Keith Raniere, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh, David Miscavige, and Donald Trump, are sixty-minute episodes in the making. Same choices, same outcome, different people.
What makes us vulnerable to these individuals? It isn’t necessarily intelligence, financial status, or upbringing, though those can be factors. At the core, if we haven’t deconstructed the abuse climate that raised us, we remain vulnerable to mistaking abusers for, at best, good people and, at worst, leaders. And make no mistake: if you were raised in the US, you’ve been subjected to an abuse climate.
We’re also vulnerable to becoming abusers ourselves, perverting healing teachings — like those of Jesus and Abraham — into harming practices like Nazism, Christian Nationalism and Zionism and presenting harm as holy.
To glimpse authentic leadership, the illusion must begin to crumble.
Leadership: External Qualities: Identified (False Light)
I’ll never forget those in positions of authority who shaped my life for the better, how they showed up, and the impact they had on my trajectory. They were all different in ethnicity, culture, gender, and profession, yet each saw me and my potential, offering me forms of wisdom I’ll carry for the rest of my life.
I’ll also never forget the stop-gap job I held for about two years. When I was promoted into a “leadership” position, one of the first questions asked of everyone was, “What kind of leader are you?” This question is not unusual in corporate environments. I remember being confused. What did they want to hear? I looked around and realized the only person I’d recognized as a leader had just moved on. I don’t remember my answer. What I do remember about this company was authenticity was less important than the performance of it, and knowing the right answer mattered more than having a real one.
In these environments, leadership is often defined by the performance of specific skills. It’s not necessarily about whether those skills come from authentic integration, but rather how well they’re performed within the role.
Some of these skills can be learned, practiced, and performed without integration. For example:
- Communication — how clearly and persuasively can you express thoughts, and how effectively can you inspire or influence others? Unintegrated, this can become persuasion detached from truth, used for narrative control, or influence without grounding in clarity or accuracy.
- Decision-making — how quickly and decisively can you choose a course of action?Unintegrated decisiveness can override discernment, compress complexity into premature certainty, or prioritize speed over understanding, nuance, or risk.
- Delegation — how readily are you able and willing to assign work to others? Unintegrated delegation can become offloading responsibility rather than distributing it, creating misalignment between authority and accountability. It can also bypass awareness of capacity and downstream impact.
- Conflict resolution — how effectively can you reduce tension or restore surface-level agreement? Unintegrated conflict resolution can suppress necessary tension, prioritize harmony over truth, or stabilize dysfunction rather than resolve it.
- Coaching and developing others — how well can you guide, instruct, or shape others’ performance within the scope of expected outcomes? Unintegrated development can become performance optimization rather than genuine growth, shaping behavior without supporting deeper autonomy, understanding, or personal empowerment and leadership growth.
Leadership: Internal Qualities: Identified, Practiced, Integrated (Holy Darkness & First Light)
All the experiences of leaders and leadership we’ve discussed so far prioritize survival over growth, certainty over curiosity, and performance over integration. From primal instincts to conditioned responses to performing as expected, they each look externally to identify the qualities of a leader.
And, they’re the embodiment of a follower, the blind following the blind. Eventually, both are led over a cliff and, to them, it becomes an event “no one could have predicted.”
This next experience we’re going to touch on is the embodiment of the leader. It’s self-exploration made active, self-leadership embodied, and the integration of hindsight into foresight.
While self-awareness and self-governance alone do not guarantee someone can effectively lead others, attempts at leadership without them is fundamentally compromised.
The quality of leadership we recognize externally is constrained by the quality of leadership we’ve cultivated internally.
Leadership Begins With Recognizing What’s Governing You
We’re meant to be the leaders of our internal world, but are we?
Ego
Do you know your ego?
Can you clearly discern the difference between the ego’s voice and your own internal witness?
Can you recognize how ego feels when it’s activated in your body?
We can’t lead or govern what we’re unable or unwilling to see.
Most people get stuck here.
Identity is an important part of how we function in the world. But when identity becomes fixed, when we must see ourselves as we believe ourselves to be and reject information that contradicts that image, growth becomes impossible.
We become internal authoritarians, internal tyrants prioritizing the familiarity of rigidity over the necessary discomfort of truth. There’s no freedom of speech for the diverse and essential information required for growth.
Desires
Do you know your driving desires?
Are they healing desires or harming desires? Do you govern them, or do they govern you?
If they govern you, if you’re a poor leader within your own internal world, your kingdom is already on a path toward ruin. You simply haven’t caught up to the consequences yet.
Cognitive Dissonance
Can you lead yourself through your own cognitive dissonance?
There are politicians, executives, and public figures surrounded by teams of intelligent people who still cannot lead themselves through it.
We’re not going to get it right one hundred percent of the time. This isn’t about perfection. It’s about conscious effort.
What does cognitive dissonance look like? What does it feel like? Find examples in your own life. Find examples in the world around you.
Learn to recognize it.
If you’re blind to it, it will lead you. And if it leads you, you’re already heading in the wrong direction.
The Evil Inclination
That small voice inside that is indifferent to harm, justifies harm, or takes pleasure in harm exists in all of us, no matter how faint it may be.
It’s essential we become aware of it and learn to govern it.
When we deny its existence, it leads us, not realizing until the damage is done.
Prisons are filled with people who believed they’re kind, compassionate, and incapable of causing serious harm. Yet along the way to their current destination (prison), they justified, ignored, or participated in the actions that brought them there.
We like to think we’re governing our lives, our choices, and our futures.
Yet the majority of us are being led by impulses, desires, biases, and inclinations operating below our awareness.
Before we can lead others, we must first learn and practice discovering what’s been leading us and learn how to lead it instead.
Thought Leader & Expertise
Another way to think about this is through the lens of “thought leadership,” something I see constantly in marketing.
When building a brand, it’s pretty common for people to position themselves as a “thought leader.” Meanwhile, they’re often saying and doing the exact same things as everyone else, just wrapped in a different color palette, a different font, and a more polished presentation.
Can you discern the difference between a thought leader and good marketing?
Or take expertise.
What’s your profession? Your line of work? A hobby or subject you’ve spent years immersed in?
Have you ever interviewed a candidate, trained a new hire, or found yourself in conversation with someone presenting themselves as knowledgeable on a topic you know exceptionally well?
To most people, they sound convincing.
But because you’re authentically versed in the subject, you can see right through it. You can see the gaps. You can see the assumptions. You can see what they don’t know, and often, what they don’t know they don’t know.
The deeper your experience, the easier discernment becomes.
Leadership is no different.
If you’ve spent years learning to govern your ego and someone shows up being dragged around by theirs, you’re not likely, no matter their title or how many followers they have, to fall in line behind them. You see and know the dangers of being a devoted follower of someone else’s ego.
You know what they don’t know they don’t know.
And one of the things you know is that this is not a leader. Most certainly, they don’t have the capacity to lead someone like you.
The Revelation
What begins to reveal from this exploration is that leadership has far less to do with position, visibility, authority, or performance than most of us have been taught to believe.
At its foundation, leadership begins with self-awareness and self-governance.
It requires an honest relationship with ourselves, our strengths, our limitations, our biases, our desires, our blind spots, and the impact we have on others. Leadership asks us to explore what we don’t know, practice being what we believe we are, and remain willing to learn where our understanding falls short.
From this foundation character develops.
Accountability. Courage. Humility. Reliability. Fairness. Integrity.
Not as values we claim, but as values repeatedly expressed through our actions when doing so is inconvenient, costly, or unseen.
As this awareness in practice deepens we begin to see both ourselves and the systems around us more clearly. We see strategically, the system wheels turning, a natural byproduct of integrated awareness operating within complexity.
The clearer our perception becomes, the more capable we become at recognizing patterns, anticipating consequences, and navigating interconnected systems with wisdom rather than reaction.
Leadership, then, is not something granted to us by external forces; a title, a position, or the approval of others.
It’s the ongoing practice of governing ourselves well enough that our presence becomes beneficial to ourselves, and the people, communities, systems entrusted to our care.
Slowly, gradually, we become leaders hiding in plain sight.
Not first in the boardroom, the voting booth, the pulpit, or the public square.
First within. Then out.
If we don’t understand the experience of authentic and integrated leadership within ourselves, we never develop the discernment to recognize it – or its absence – in others.
We risk blindly uplifting harm instead of standing in its way.
First we lead in. Then we lead out.
