9 Leadership Myths I No Longer Fall For. And Neither Should You.

I used to think confidence was something you had to maintain all the time.

If it wobbled, I'd question myself.

What I see now is that confidence comes and goes for everyone. It's not the foundation people think it is. It's actually the outcome of doing those uncomfortable and hard things.

Pressure definitely gets output. Deadlines get met. Decisions get made.

But my best thinking never happened when I was overloaded.

There's a difference between functioning under pressure and thinking well inside it. That's a brain and nervous system thing to learn.

I bought into this early on. Probably because I'd find myself brewing with a range of emotions at times, from anger and frustration to biting back tears or quite frankly sobbing when I didn't want to.

Stay composed. Stay neutral. Don't let things get to you. I'd say all of these things to myself (and had been advised to do this by others) and yet I found this so hard to do.

Because ignoring emotion doesn't make it disappear. It just shows up in so many other ways and in the most inappropriate of times and situations.

Learning how to process emotion productively has been far more useful than pretending it's not there or to suppress it. We're humans, it's part of our biology to experience a range of emotions.

I spent years operating in permanent urgency. Everything felt time-critical. Everything felt like it mattered equally.

But the more wound up I was internally, the narrower my thinking became.

Slowing my internal pace didn't reduce my effectiveness, it actually gave me more room to think.

Ok, there may be a bit of truth in this.

The more experience and hard knocks you go through, the more you do harden over time. Most leaders do. And as you get more senior, the stakes rise, the scrutiny increases and it can feel tougher to 'survive' so you develop a thicker skin.

You stop taking things so personally. You keep more to yourself. You become less visibly affected. You start trusting less.

But in doing that, you're often withdrawing more than you realise.

Being like tefal might protect you, but it also distances you from people, your instincts, the subtle cues in the room. You stop really listening. You miss what isn't being said. You lose some of your ability to read the dynamics around you.

And over time, that protection can start to show up as defensiveness rather than strength.

I tried all the mindset work. Some days it landed. Other days it didn't touch how I felt at all.

Because motivation isn't about mindset.

If you're exhausted or mentally overloaded, motivation drops regardless of how positive your thinking is. Realising that removed a lot of unnecessary self-judgement.

What I've found works best is action.

Even when you feel unclear or stuck focus on small steps. Lay out what's in front of you, take the next step, then the next.

It's surprising how quickly momentum and motivation start to build once you're moving, even if you didn't start taking action feeling positive about it.

By the time most people reach senior leadership, they're not short on skills.

They've got the experience. Done the training. Know the models. They understand what good looks like.

The gap shows up under pressure, when instinct takes over and all the theory and disappears.

And the experience you're drawing on in those moments might not even be constructive. It can be patterns you wired from what others did to you. Moments that left you feeling awful at the time but became so deeply engrained that they now play out as your default behaviour, in a way to help you stay safe.

Even when you know that behaviour isn't productive. So leadership isn't a skills issue, it's something deeper within you. That's the real work.

I see imposter syndrome very differently now. It tends to show up when you step into bigger visibility, bigger responsibility, bigger stakes.

Your brain reads that as risk before it reads it as growth. It's uncomfortable but it's not proof you shouldn't be there.

I've sat in enough culture workshops to know the language well.

Values statements. Behaviour frameworks. Engagement initiatives.

But culture feels very different on the ground.

People watch how safe it is to speak honestly, disagree, admit mistakes or challenge direction. That tone is set far more by individual leaders by how they show up, regulate themselves and express what's going on internally.

No corporate values or behaviour statements will fix that on their own.

Real culture happens when individual leaders understand themselves better and are willing to change the patterns that limit both their own performance and everyone else's.