I believe that better humans make better leaders. I further believe that the process of learning to lead well can help us become better humans. By growing to meet the demands of the call to leadership, we’re presented with the chance to finally, fully, grow up.

Success and money—and even more important, the busyness needed to create those—became proof of my worth as a human.

I received a powerful lesson in facing reality when something is failing, in trusting the team, and in holding oneself steady. I learned the power of the warrior pose.

Over time, hyperawareness became part of my character, part of me. It became, as I’ve often joked, a superpower. Even today, when I work with coaching clients, I track every bob of the Adam’s apple, every pause in the story (where it occurs, what words preceded and followed it, where their eyes move when they pause), to brace for the coming storm or, even more, to discern what they might need, right then, in that moment. If I give them what they need, says my little boy, they will be saved, and if I’ve saved them, then I’ll be safe.

So much of what I’ve learned about growing up came from learning to lead.

In fact, the process of becoming me made me a better leader. The two processes, becoming a leader and becoming ourselves, are intertwined and interdependent; better leaders are better humans and better humans are better leaders. Leadership lessons, then, are, at their core, lessons in humanity.

Sometimes the belief systems that are most difficult to overcome aren’t the ghosts in the machine of our childhood. Sometimes the most difficult belief systems fall under the rubric of “conventional wisdom.” Conventional wisdom, for example, dictates that, in our process of becoming warrior-leaders, we focus on the hard things. Big rocks, folks say knowingly. ‘Break down the big rocks and then focus on the little rocks.’ But how do you discern a big rock from a little rock?