Leaders are everyday people and fall prey to the many personal challenges in life others face. They get divorced, they experience financial instability, they lose loved ones, they suffer from a chronic illness.
Unlike normal challenges, these setbacks take place over a long period of time, sometimes taking months or years to recover from. During that time, it is relatively easy to allow the setback to become part of one’s self-identity.
By internalizing the misfortune and incorporating it into their understanding of themselves, leaders begin to meld who they are with what they went through. They begin to see themselves as a product of the difficulty and not as the whole person they were before the experience.
Not surprisingly, when negative life challenges become linked to self-identity, people begin to describe themselves to others in terms of what they can and can’t do because of their negative experience. In essence, they accommodate the setback, allowing it to create a slew of ready-made excuses for why they overreact or avoid many situations.
Frequent statements like “I clearly don’t understand what makes relationships work,” or “I have to be very careful about what I eat now,” and “My thinking is suspect when it comes to personal finances,” long after recovery suggest the misfortune may now control much of how they think about themselves.
This is about more than learning from the challenge. When a setback becomes fused with self-identity, people project to the world and to themselves that the challenge is a permanent stain that they must learn to live with.
Leaders who co-mingle misfortune and self-identity undermine their own credibility to lead others. The positivity and confidence needed to influence others and to make quality decisions suffers from the self-fulfilling hesitancy to confront reality without the baggage of an always-present negative history.
Those who observe the leader typically hope the misfortune will eventually fade and the leader will stop coloring their world with it. Over time, they accept that this is who the leader has chosen to become and accept the good and the bad they have to offer.
But it shouldn’t be this way. Nothing happens to anyone that they can’t actively engage to change. With personal resolve or with the help of others, people can learn to overcome and discard the negative challenges they have faced and reject them before they become a part of their identity going forward. Simply recognizing the difference between the struggle and whether a leader is allowing it to negatively shape their identity years later can create an epiphany that shakes things loose.
Everyone experiences major setbacks during life. Whether we allow those challenges to define us in the future is a choice.
People who depend on leaders for their objectivity, compassion, and wisdom deserve the best version, the one without historical baggage. While all of us are made up of our experiences and learnings, good and bad, allowing negative challenges to have too much influence in the future is a grave mistake. Good leaders don’t give power to the past over the future.
