We don’t often talk about love at work, but we should. I do not mean romantic love. A mentor of mine, Dr. Ken Ginsburg, a pediatrician and one of the nation’s leading experts on positive youth development, describes this kind of love as loving kindness—human respect for each other and the desire to lift each other up. If we could practice this with each other at work, the world would be a different place. Loving someone means seeing who they truly are and celebrating who they are.
And the only way we can do this effectively is if we love ourselves first. It’s a cliche to say you can’t truly love others until you love yourself, and it’s still true. But many super successful people I’ve worked with are actually their own worst enemies; even worse, they think that being an enemy is motivating and helps them succeed! It may do that for a while, but eventually it stops working. You can’t understand or care for others in a sustainable way if you are your own worst enemy. And you can’t love yourself until you understand yourself. Self-understanding encompasses your wiring, your personality, your temperament, your formative experiences, the relationships that shaped you, and the patterns you’ve inherited and the ones you’ve built.
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Self-understanding is a leadership superpower
Self-understanding is a superpower. It’s a gift you give yourself.
A leader with true self understanding is powerful. They are confident, because they know what they are good at and what they can offer the world. They don’t apologize for their vulnerabilities or for asking for what they need. Crucially, they can offer the same generosity and understanding to other people without sacrificing their own boundaries or wellbeing. When you love and honor yourself, you can give without burning out. You don’t need to turn yourself into a pretzel to meet other people’s needs anymore.
So devote the time you need to understand yourself. Understand your neurotype, your history, your mental and emotional health. Understand your incredible gifts and the questions you can’t stop asking and the problems you must solve. Understand what you need to do your best work. Then build a work life that lets you operate from those strengths instead of around them.
In the next few columns, I’m going to share some case studies of leaders who built self-understanding. But before we can start to understand ourselves, we need to do a little bit of unlearning. As my father used to say, “no one comes from a radish.” We don’t show up at work as blank slates. We bring our uniqueness, of course, but also our “stuff.” And for most of us, we bring a history of hiding pieces of who we are, habits we picked up over the years to survive, and shame.
It’s graduation season, and I’m thinking of my own. I graduated from Brown University feeling like a failure. I know how that sounds. But it’s true. During college, I battled depression and panic attacks, and did little to distinguish myself. I watched my peers seem to glide through the institution while I dragged myself through it. The message I had absorbed—and deeply internalized—was simple: I didn’t stand out. Maybe I didn’t belong with all those smart and accomplished people. Something was wrong with me.
It took years of actual work, out in the world, to discover that I was not broken. I was just in the wrong container. Once I was out of school and working, something clicked. I could think. I could connect. I could contribute in ways that mattered. But by then, I had already spent years carrying a story about myself that wasn’t true, and that story was hard to put down.
Consider the context of leadership. Specifically, the strange fact that so many of us arrive in leadership roles dragging behind us a set of beliefs about our own capabilities that were formed under tough conditions—when we were young, when we were being measured against standards that may not have fit us, when we had very little power to rewrite the narrative. We learned who we were in environments that often got it wrong. And then we built careers on top of those mislearnings, often without noticing. When we’re ready to change, we gain self-understanding and slowly shift our old stories and patterns. I call this the Great Unlearning. And I think it’s one of the most important—and least discussed—aspects of becoming a genuinely effective leader.
What do we need to unlearn?
I study leaders with different brains, who are neurodivergent or have mental illness, and this pattern is especially true for us (although based on my experience, everyone has weak spots and “shame traps.”) In 2025, writer and education expert Paul Tough reported on a study that followed adults in their mid-20s who had been diagnosed with ADHD as children. Researchers focused on their work and educational settings, and a striking pattern emerged. Many participants described their ADHD symptoms as context-dependent. In some environments, they struggled to focus and felt overwhelmed. In others, they functioned well—sometimes exceptionally. Traits framed as deficits at school, like high energy or rapid shifts in attention, turned out to be strengths in work environments they had chosen for themselves. Some even reported that their ADHD symptoms had essentially disappeared. A few were questioning whether they’d ever had ADHD at all—or whether they’d simply been in the wrong environment as children. That’s self-understanding.
Another common unlearning centers around how we behave on teams, much of which has roots in our own families of origin. You may have followed the funny but heartbreaking memes about being the “Eldest child of a single mother,” the highly competent person who takes on too much, too young, and who is also consumed with anxiety and worry that things will fall apart if she lets up, just for a second. This shows up at work in what’s called “overfunctioning,” and we’ve all worked for an overfunctioner. They need control of everything. Nothing gets done without their advice or assistance (aka meddling.) And, many of their colleagues slip into a similar learned role, called underfunctioning. These two strategies are what we learned from our family of origin, and they represent the quickest means we have of calming ourselves and everyone else down when anxiety strikes. They’re both autopilot reactions rather than thoughtful responses. Both reduce anxiety, though through very different means. The overfunctioner takes over and directs, while the underfunctioner distances themselves and avoids. Taking over means you swoop in and problem-solve, which makes the anxiety go away. Distancing means you back off and avoid the anxiety-provoking situation altogether. Neither is a great leadership quality.
If this is you, give yourself some kudos for developing strategies that have helped you manage through life. And, consider if these patterns are still serving you, or if it’s time to change.
I recently interviewed David Flink, Founder and CEO of the Neurodiversity Alliance and one of the most thoughtful people I know on the subject of self-understanding and leadership. David is dyslexic and has ADHD, and he has spent decades helping others reframe what they believe about their own minds, because he had to do it himself.
He described recently standing at his mother’s gravesite, a rabbi handing him a piece of paper and asking if he’d like to read a passage aloud. In front of the people who loved him most, in probably the safest moment of his life, he said no. Not because he couldn’t do it—he could have, slowly. But because reading aloud is challenging, and a tiny spark of old shame was still there. And so David said he’d rather not read aloud.
“You take a little withdrawal from your self-esteem piggy bank,” he told me. “But luckily, people put deposits in all day long.”
What struck me wasn’t the vulnerability of the moment. It was that David—a CNN hero, a GQ Man of the Year, a professional speaker who commands rooms for a living — still had to make a conscious calculation and choose an unpopular answer. He still had to weigh the shame against the reality, because like most of us, he was taught that something only has value if it is hard. That’s how durable these early learnings are. That’s how much work the unlearning takes. And it’s also a superpower.
What do you want to unlearn?
Can you think of a message, an assumption or even a habit that you have about how you perform or what you’re good at or what you’re not good at that has been with you as long as you can remember? What do you need to unlearn?
David puts it this way: great leaders don’t spend their energy trying to look like everyone else. They spend it figuring out where their brain lights up and running toward it. They learn to say no. We get so good at covering for our weak spots—through conscientiousness, anxiety, sheer will—that we mistake that performance for who we are. And then we build leadership identities on top of it, wonder why we’re exhausted, and conclude that leadership is just supposed to feel this hard.
It doesn’t have to.
Try this: Think of one belief you hold about what you’re not good at at work. Maybe it’s public speaking, or managing up, or strategic thinking, or just “the numbers.” Now ask yourself: how old is that belief? Did some one teach it to you, or reinforce it—a teacher, a boss, a parent, a grade? Is there actual evidence it’s still true today, or have you simply been carrying it forward, unexamined, as fact?
Most of us have at least one of these. It’s a story about our own limitations handed to us when we had very little power to push back. Try not to judge yourself as you uncover the belief, but instead as: is this still serving me, or can I let this go?
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