The Inner Life of a Leader
The Inner Life of a Leader: What will see us through?
During this time in our collective history that seems rife with conflict, uncertainty, fear, hatred, and war, what will see us through as leaders? Undoubtedly that same list of realities could have been written about other times in history and thank goodness we do have stories about what other leaders have done that can give us hope. Yet this is now, and we are facing into the realities of our own chaos. We need to find within ourselves the qualities that will sustain us. So, the question remains and still hovers; what will see us through as leaders? As citizens? As role models?
I’d like to suggest that our inner lives, our deeper qualities, reflections and choices as leaders, are what will determine how we not only survive but perhaps even thrive during these times. Let’s look at that assertion more closely. I’m offering three ways to attend to our inner lives, including how our level of personal power relates to our inner lives. In addition, I will include the personal quality that is necessary to sustain that level of personal power.
The three practices and their power components are:
Embracing our gifts and our shadows: Claiming personal power through humility
Growing through Hitting the Wall: Deepening our personal power through courage
Developing a Solid Inner Core: Sharing or releasing our personal power through radical trust
Embracing our Gifts and Shadows: Claiming our personal power through humility
Embracing our personal gifts, our leadership gifts, brings us deep satisfaction in our roles as leaders. It is vital to know and respect our gifts. Equally vital is to name and own our shadow behaviors, our hidden selves, the parts of ourselves we may not fully see, since they invite us to a deeper level of self-awareness, self-appreciation and healthier relationships.
Awareness of our gifts and shadows invites us to genuine humility so we can apply that knowledge to our leadership but also use our gifts for the greater good.
Learning about our gifts is essential to our self-worth and our self-esteem. There are myriads of ways to understand our skills, knowledge, and uniqueness better. One of my favorite ways of naming our gifts is the Enneagram, a nine-faceted way of describing our motivations in the world. The book I would recommend is Christopher Heuertz’s The Sacred Enneagram. When we claim our gifts, we can steward our personal power more effectively. A gentle way to see if we have been able to name our gifts is to list our five best qualities and add statements about them that show that we own them and can use them in our lives as leaders. It also helps to name the kind of leadership we represent, such as servant leader, idea leader, nurturing, process, spiritual, artistic, knowledge, convening, or social cause leader.
I will name one of my leadership gifts, just as an example. I think I have the leadership gift of discernment. It allows me to decipher which of various directions would be most life-giving and would most allow for collaboration. My kind of leadership, I believe, is idea leadership. I receive ideas (sometimes in mysterious ways) and use them to write essays and develop models that can be applied to life and work. These ways of leading have enhanced my sense of internal personal power in ways that I would not have imagined.
At this point of awareness, our primary work is to show gratitude for our gifts and to claim or embrace our personal power.
The second part of our awareness is to be conscious of our shadows. These are the parts of ourselves that we may not be able to fully see, but they have helped us survive in our world, as children and as adults. Now they are no longer useful. Carl Jung writes about our shadows as prime parts of ourselves, necessary to learn from to grow. These are harder to name and yet it is necessary to understand them. We needn’t seek to destroy them, but to learn from them, to gain the wisdom we need as leaders. Naming them is not a witch hunt but a genuine search for the deeper wisdom of our hidden selves.
One of my shadows, one that helped me through my childhood, was over-achiever which emerged in adulthood as intellectual arrogance. I was raised in an alcoholic family and my brother was often in trouble, so I took on the role of achiever to cover up the dysfunction at home. This was largely unconscious, yet it was rewarding in my world. My over-achiever shadow turned into arrogance as I became an adult. Underneath it all I think was a need to feel better about myself. Then later, in spiritual direction, I found out that arrogance was really a sign of insecurity. Ouch. I reflected on this and decided that my arrogance was covering a fear of learning from and a need to be better than the people I thought I was there to serve. From that point on whenever I felt my arrogance rising, I asked the question, “Who or what am I afraid to learn from here?” That unleashed a new level of awareness and a bucketful of wisdom which I received from others, especially those on the margins. Arrogance became my teacher. It was complex but quite a freeing experience.
A quick way to name our shadow is described by William Miller in a book called Making Friends with Your Shadow. First you make a list of people you don’t like, in a column on the left side of a sheet of paper. List as many people as you need to! Then list on the right side, in a column, the names of those on your list whom you find most despicable and why. Are you ready?? The characteristics you find despicable are part of your shadow. Wow. This gets difficult to process but with help you start to see that while you may not actively represent their behavior towards others, you may be inflicting that behavior towards yourself. Or you may be like those you find despicable but in softer versions. Or, if you have done some inner work, they may represent how you would be in the world if you had not done that work. Naming our shadows is almost always embarrassing, revealing, and disconcerting so usually we choose not to indulge this practice. But the quality of humility it brings to leaders is essential for creating a trusting atmosphere. This journey to humility is worth it in the long run. As in my example of arrogance, it has helped me to be more honest, vulnerable, and aware, and it has helped me to learn from people I needed to listen to. The most valuable teachers for me have been prison inmates, abused women, and homeless people.
The process of healing from our shadows requires that we embrace them and learn from their wisdom. It can be quite a counter cultural experience.
Growing through Hitting the Wall: Deepening our personal power through courage.
We all hit different walls in our lives, times in which what we are doing to succeed doesn’t work. Or we burn out from excess succeeding. Or relationships we counted on fall apart and feel impossible to heal. Or maybe a job ends abruptly. Or illness strikes. Walls change things in our lives. These walls invite us to dive deeper and to find our inner resources, to find our way again. One of the most pervasive changes in life has to do with hitting what I call the Wall (capital W), that place in which everything changes, and we can no longer function in the ways that we thought we had to, to avoid disaster. Our egos are shattered. We need to redefine who we are and why we are here on earth. It may be the most important and the most “excruciatingly wonderful” time of our lives. It always invites us to courage--deep courage. Many who come up to the Wall through any means, decide that it is too hard to go through the Wall. That decision will work to ensure our survival (and I understand the decision to stay in a safer zone), yet it keeps us from growing further. What we choose to do or change at the Wall determines the trajectory of our lives from that point forward.
What are the repercussions for our leadership of going through the Wall? As the Wall relates to the inner life of a leader, it usually is the turning point of our lives. It is not hitting the Wall that changes us, but how we evolve in going through the Wall that matters most to who we become as leaders. This requires conscious use of external resources to do the healing work. These resources may include counselors, mentors, community, books, friends, or podcasts.
Going through the Wall helps us deepen our levels of personal power. This kind of power allows for vulnerability and compassion as strength not weakness.
My own Wall experience as it relates to my leadership was coming to a stopping point in my workshops, travel, and public speaking. I just couldn’t do it anymore. My body rebelled and I had to stop. I had come to the end of myself. It was quite terrifying because I was single and depended on my speaking for my income. My work was my identity. It was a time of major redefinition. It took me years to find what was calling me next, and I had to count on unique sources of smaller income. The process ended up bringing me a new life as an artist, a deeper commitment to transformation, and a simpler and more satisfying way of leading. I learned to lead from the middle and then from behind.
What helps most to navigate this Wall experience of transformation and deepen our sense of personal power is courage and a strong community—nearby or far away—to support us.
Developing a Solid Inner Core: Sharing or releasing our personal power through radical trust.
The most crucial aspect of the inner life of a leader, in my experience, is the presence of a solid unshakable core. That is a grounded personal center that will hold, no matter what is happening around us. This center core feeds us, sustains us, heals us, holds us safe.
Our core may include faithful colleagues and friends who can be with us in our highs (without jealousy) and in our lows (without judgment). Our core may consist of a life-giving principle or practice we’ve grown to trust and live by. Our core will be exceptionally unflappable if it is grounded in a spiritual source beyond ourselves and our ego. It is helpful if we connect with this sacred source daily, since we live out our leadership mostly in our daily behavior, details, and decisions. Although I’ve said our inner core is unshakable, at rare times it may feel like our core is shaking or is vulnerable. At those times our closest people may need to help hold our core or remind us of it—or even hold it for us. One of the greatest honors of being human is to help one another navigate through times that are overwhelming.
The quality that we need for sustaining our inner life and especially in shaky times, is radical trust.
We need radical trust in a greater good, a higher power, a core set of principles, and the capacity for a broader vision and grounded hope. As we trust more, our personal power can be shared or even released without fear of our own diminishment.
My solid core revolves around my intimacy with the Holy and with daily soul care and self- care. I also cultivate close friends who I know I can count on to hold me in love. My solid core sustains me—and it determines everything. Who I am in the world emanates from that core. All the rest is commentary.
What we need most to remain calm in the storms of life (like being the eye of the storm) is the development of a solid core. This center core invites us to share our personal power or even to release it as leaders. That practice takes radical trust in whatever sustains us, and that trust holds our core.
How will we show up as leaders who embrace these practices?
As a summary exercise for leaders, please review these three practices (below) again and ponder which of these three you are most called to work with in an intentional way at this time in your leadership.
Questions to ask as you reflect on your own leadership and these practices may include:
What resources do you need to help you on this phase of your leadership journey?
What resistance do you feel and what are its origins?
What excitement do you feel and what are its origins?
The first practice invites us as leaders to name our gifts and shadows thus learning humility. We claim personal power.
The second practice invites us as leaders to face our fears and head into and through the Wall in our lives by developing courage. We deepen our personal power.
The third practice invites us as leaders to find and maintain our solid core of sustenance and clarity through radical trust. We share or release our personal power.
A new extensive Gallup Leadership survey showed that the two qualities followers want most from their leaders are hope and trust. I’d suggest that the inner life of a leader illustrated here has a high likelihood to develop these qualities in us as leaders.
If you would like to dive more deeply into this leadership adventure, I invite you to read the last chapter of my book Real Power, 4E. The title of that chapter is “Practical Applications of Real Power in a Post-Pandemic World.” It shows how the six stages of personal power in the Real Power model were lived out during the pandemic and then George Floyd’s murder. The chapter ends with a description of ways we can all add to the common good and bring change to the world. It’s called “Wiggle the Web.”
Consider where you most closely fit in the six stages of power described in this chapter and what your stage asks of you to sustain your inner life. As an added incentive, one of my favorite women writers, Evelyn Underhill, said that the most important thing you can do as a leader is to invest in your own deeper work. The main reason for this is that you can’t take people farther than you’ve been yourself. May you bring your best self, your deepest self, not only to yourself but also to your leadership and to the wider world. May it be so.
Janet Hagberg, 2025, in collaboration with Adesuwa Ifedi, Sr. VP of Heifer Africa, who invited me to a conversation with her about the inner life of a leader. Her leadership is a testament to these ideas.
During this time in our collective history that seems rife with conflict, uncertainty, fear, hatred, and war, what will see us through as leaders? Undoubtedly that same list of realities could have been written about other times in history and thank goodness we do have stories about what other leaders have done that can give us hope. Yet this is now, and we are facing into the realities of our own chaos. We need to find within ourselves the qualities that will sustain us. So, the question remains and still hovers; what will see us through as leaders? As citizens? As role models?
I’d like to suggest that our inner lives, our deeper qualities, reflections and choices as leaders, are what will determine how we not only survive but perhaps even thrive during these times. Let’s look at that assertion more closely. I’m offering three ways to attend to our inner lives, including how our level of personal power relates to our inner lives. In addition, I will include the personal quality that is necessary to sustain that level of personal power.
The three practices and their power components are:
Embracing our gifts and our shadows: Claiming personal power through humility
Growing through Hitting the Wall: Deepening our personal power through courage
Developing a Solid Inner Core: Sharing or releasing our personal power through radical trust
Embracing our Gifts and Shadows: Claiming our personal power through humility
Embracing our personal gifts, our leadership gifts, brings us deep satisfaction in our roles as leaders. It is vital to know and respect our gifts. Equally vital is to name and own our shadow behaviors, our hidden selves, the parts of ourselves we may not fully see, since they invite us to a deeper level of self-awareness, self-appreciation and healthier relationships.
Awareness of our gifts and shadows invites us to genuine humility so we can apply that knowledge to our leadership but also use our gifts for the greater good.
Learning about our gifts is essential to our self-worth and our self-esteem. There are myriads of ways to understand our skills, knowledge, and uniqueness better. One of my favorite ways of naming our gifts is the Enneagram, a nine-faceted way of describing our motivations in the world. The book I would recommend is Christopher Heuertz’s The Sacred Enneagram. When we claim our gifts, we can steward our personal power more effectively. A gentle way to see if we have been able to name our gifts is to list our five best qualities and add statements about them that show that we own them and can use them in our lives as leaders. It also helps to name the kind of leadership we represent, such as servant leader, idea leader, nurturing, process, spiritual, artistic, knowledge, convening, or social cause leader.
I will name one of my leadership gifts, just as an example. I think I have the leadership gift of discernment. It allows me to decipher which of various directions would be most life-giving and would most allow for collaboration. My kind of leadership, I believe, is idea leadership. I receive ideas (sometimes in mysterious ways) and use them to write essays and develop models that can be applied to life and work. These ways of leading have enhanced my sense of internal personal power in ways that I would not have imagined.
At this point of awareness, our primary work is to show gratitude for our gifts and to claim or embrace our personal power.
The second part of our awareness is to be conscious of our shadows. These are the parts of ourselves that we may not be able to fully see, but they have helped us survive in our world, as children and as adults. Now they are no longer useful. Carl Jung writes about our shadows as prime parts of ourselves, necessary to learn from to grow. These are harder to name and yet it is necessary to understand them. We needn’t seek to destroy them, but to learn from them, to gain the wisdom we need as leaders. Naming them is not a witch hunt but a genuine search for the deeper wisdom of our hidden selves.
One of my shadows, one that helped me through my childhood, was over-achiever which emerged in adulthood as intellectual arrogance. I was raised in an alcoholic family and my brother was often in trouble, so I took on the role of achiever to cover up the dysfunction at home. This was largely unconscious, yet it was rewarding in my world. My over-achiever shadow turned into arrogance as I became an adult. Underneath it all I think was a need to feel better about myself. Then later, in spiritual direction, I found out that arrogance was really a sign of insecurity. Ouch. I reflected on this and decided that my arrogance was covering a fear of learning from and a need to be better than the people I thought I was there to serve. From that point on whenever I felt my arrogance rising, I asked the question, “Who or what am I afraid to learn from here?” That unleashed a new level of awareness and a bucketful of wisdom which I received from others, especially those on the margins. Arrogance became my teacher. It was complex but quite a freeing experience.
A quick way to name our shadow is described by William Miller in a book called Making Friends with Your Shadow. First you make a list of people you don’t like, in a column on the left side of a sheet of paper. List as many people as you need to! Then list on the right side, in a column, the names of those on your list whom you find most despicable and why. Are you ready?? The characteristics you find despicable are part of your shadow. Wow. This gets difficult to process but with help you start to see that while you may not actively represent their behavior towards others, you may be inflicting that behavior towards yourself. Or you may be like those you find despicable but in softer versions. Or, if you have done some inner work, they may represent how you would be in the world if you had not done that work. Naming our shadows is almost always embarrassing, revealing, and disconcerting so usually we choose not to indulge this practice. But the quality of humility it brings to leaders is essential for creating a trusting atmosphere. This journey to humility is worth it in the long run. As in my example of arrogance, it has helped me to be more honest, vulnerable, and aware, and it has helped me to learn from people I needed to listen to. The most valuable teachers for me have been prison inmates, abused women, and homeless people.
The process of healing from our shadows requires that we embrace them and learn from their wisdom. It can be quite a counter cultural experience.
Growing through Hitting the Wall: Deepening our personal power through courage.
We all hit different walls in our lives, times in which what we are doing to succeed doesn’t work. Or we burn out from excess succeeding. Or relationships we counted on fall apart and feel impossible to heal. Or maybe a job ends abruptly. Or illness strikes. Walls change things in our lives. These walls invite us to dive deeper and to find our inner resources, to find our way again. One of the most pervasive changes in life has to do with hitting what I call the Wall (capital W), that place in which everything changes, and we can no longer function in the ways that we thought we had to, to avoid disaster. Our egos are shattered. We need to redefine who we are and why we are here on earth. It may be the most important and the most “excruciatingly wonderful” time of our lives. It always invites us to courage--deep courage. Many who come up to the Wall through any means, decide that it is too hard to go through the Wall. That decision will work to ensure our survival (and I understand the decision to stay in a safer zone), yet it keeps us from growing further. What we choose to do or change at the Wall determines the trajectory of our lives from that point forward.
What are the repercussions for our leadership of going through the Wall? As the Wall relates to the inner life of a leader, it usually is the turning point of our lives. It is not hitting the Wall that changes us, but how we evolve in going through the Wall that matters most to who we become as leaders. This requires conscious use of external resources to do the healing work. These resources may include counselors, mentors, community, books, friends, or podcasts.
Going through the Wall helps us deepen our levels of personal power. This kind of power allows for vulnerability and compassion as strength not weakness.
My own Wall experience as it relates to my leadership was coming to a stopping point in my workshops, travel, and public speaking. I just couldn’t do it anymore. My body rebelled and I had to stop. I had come to the end of myself. It was quite terrifying because I was single and depended on my speaking for my income. My work was my identity. It was a time of major redefinition. It took me years to find what was calling me next, and I had to count on unique sources of smaller income. The process ended up bringing me a new life as an artist, a deeper commitment to transformation, and a simpler and more satisfying way of leading. I learned to lead from the middle and then from behind.
What helps most to navigate this Wall experience of transformation and deepen our sense of personal power is courage and a strong community—nearby or far away—to support us.
Developing a Solid Inner Core: Sharing or releasing our personal power through radical trust.
The most crucial aspect of the inner life of a leader, in my experience, is the presence of a solid unshakable core. That is a grounded personal center that will hold, no matter what is happening around us. This center core feeds us, sustains us, heals us, holds us safe.
Our core may include faithful colleagues and friends who can be with us in our highs (without jealousy) and in our lows (without judgment). Our core may consist of a life-giving principle or practice we’ve grown to trust and live by. Our core will be exceptionally unflappable if it is grounded in a spiritual source beyond ourselves and our ego. It is helpful if we connect with this sacred source daily, since we live out our leadership mostly in our daily behavior, details, and decisions. Although I’ve said our inner core is unshakable, at rare times it may feel like our core is shaking or is vulnerable. At those times our closest people may need to help hold our core or remind us of it—or even hold it for us. One of the greatest honors of being human is to help one another navigate through times that are overwhelming.
The quality that we need for sustaining our inner life and especially in shaky times, is radical trust.
We need radical trust in a greater good, a higher power, a core set of principles, and the capacity for a broader vision and grounded hope. As we trust more, our personal power can be shared or even released without fear of our own diminishment.
My solid core revolves around my intimacy with the Holy and with daily soul care and self- care. I also cultivate close friends who I know I can count on to hold me in love. My solid core sustains me—and it determines everything. Who I am in the world emanates from that core. All the rest is commentary.
What we need most to remain calm in the storms of life (like being the eye of the storm) is the development of a solid core. This center core invites us to share our personal power or even to release it as leaders. That practice takes radical trust in whatever sustains us, and that trust holds our core.
How will we show up as leaders who embrace these practices?
As a summary exercise for leaders, please review these three practices (below) again and ponder which of these three you are most called to work with in an intentional way at this time in your leadership.
Questions to ask as you reflect on your own leadership and these practices may include:
What resources do you need to help you on this phase of your leadership journey?
What resistance do you feel and what are its origins?
What excitement do you feel and what are its origins?
The first practice invites us as leaders to name our gifts and shadows thus learning humility. We claim personal power.
The second practice invites us as leaders to face our fears and head into and through the Wall in our lives by developing courage. We deepen our personal power.
The third practice invites us as leaders to find and maintain our solid core of sustenance and clarity through radical trust. We share or release our personal power.
A new extensive Gallup Leadership survey showed that the two qualities followers want most from their leaders are hope and trust. I’d suggest that the inner life of a leader illustrated here has a high likelihood to develop these qualities in us as leaders.
If you would like to dive more deeply into this leadership adventure, I invite you to read the last chapter of my book Real Power, 4E. The title of that chapter is “Practical Applications of Real Power in a Post-Pandemic World.” It shows how the six stages of personal power in the Real Power model were lived out during the pandemic and then George Floyd’s murder. The chapter ends with a description of ways we can all add to the common good and bring change to the world. It’s called “Wiggle the Web.”
Consider where you most closely fit in the six stages of power described in this chapter and what your stage asks of you to sustain your inner life. As an added incentive, one of my favorite women writers, Evelyn Underhill, said that the most important thing you can do as a leader is to invest in your own deeper work. The main reason for this is that you can’t take people farther than you’ve been yourself. May you bring your best self, your deepest self, not only to yourself but also to your leadership and to the wider world. May it be so.
Janet Hagberg, 2025, in collaboration with Adesuwa Ifedi, Sr. VP of Heifer Africa, who invited me to a conversation with her about the inner life of a leader. Her leadership is a testament to these ideas.