(Media) Leadership is increasingly framed as an inner project, for good reasons. I’m an example of someone who became a better manager after studying coaching and going through a thorough two-year program that laid bare my own vulnerabilities and triggers.
As a good leader, you are expected to be self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and regulated, meaning you take responsibility for your behavior. You know your triggers, understand your attachment styles, you can name your needs, and set boundaries. On paper, this sounds like progress, and in many ways, it is. But I also see examples of taking this self-improvement to a level where it strengthens authority and judgment instead of the capability to relate to others.
Regulating yourself through self-improvement can lead to withdrawal from difficult situations if you don’t learn how to apply book knowledge and coaching sessions in work practice. You might become unsure about how to behave as “the new you” or become too afraid to make old mistakes. The language of growth is now being used by you to end conversations instead of opening them. Does that sound familiar?
Emotional curation as a leadership style
Self-improvement is reflective and asks questions such as: What is happening in me? Why do I respond this way? What do I need to learn? But it can also slide into controlling the environment and the people around you.
Instead of staying present in discomfort, you start to excel in removing discomfort altogether. Your boundaries are cast in concrete, you diagnose others, and you reframe complex situations as other people’s issues (that they should deal with, obviously).
It’s often how we approach self-improvement in the West: responsibility becomes individualized. The relational field and what happens between people disappear from view. The interesting part is that it can look and feel like calm and ethical leadership from the outside; there are not many conflicts because you control the conversation. The result is that it often leaves others carrying the emotional and organizational cost. The part you, as a leader, easily miss.
I’ve started thinking of this pattern as “emotional curation” because what is happening is that people and perspectives are getting “curated” or filtered out. A situation that is disruptive to the leadership’s worldview is easily put aside. It can become structural when companies hire people who look like the ones working there already. Take a look around in the newsroom if that sounds like your workplace. Filtering like this is often framed as professionalism, and on a personal level, we celebrate someone’s strong boundaries and maturity.
It also mirrors how we consume news nowadays.
News consumption as self-regulation
We increasingly consume news not with the goal to understand the world, but with the aim to manage our emotional response to it. Algorithms help us by rewarding clarity over contradiction and coherence over complexity. It becomes easy to avoid friction or stories that disturb our moral and emotional balance. If they do pop up in our timeline, we frame them as biased and call ourselves smart for knowing what not to read and watch. Sometimes it is. But it can easily be emotional curation disguised as critical thinking.
The thing is, our imagination gets shaped by what we consume, and so if we learn that discomfort is something to avoid, and that staying regulated matters more than staying accountable, it’s not surprising that our leadership behavior also copies that dynamic.
There is a widespread assumption that self-awareness naturally leads to empathy. That’s not true. Insight and relational capacity are really two different skills.
As a leader, you can be very much aware of your inner world and still lack the ability to stay present with other people’s emotional realities. You can be fluent in therapeutic language and still struggle profoundly with ambiguity. In fact, self-improvement can even strengthen avoidant leadership patterns.
When you end up in the healing loop
This is where critiques of long-term self-improvement become relevant. A friend advised me to read Katherine Woodward Thomas’s book What’s True About You, in which she makes an important distinction: healing the past is not the same as transforming the future. Therapy and coaching can help you understand your wounds, develop compassion for yourself, and make sense of your history, which is essential work. But insight alone does not automatically change how you lead.
When self-work and self-improvement remain focused on rational explanation, they can become a holding pattern. You become fluent in sharing your past and how it influenced you, but are less practiced in shaping your future responses and behavior. Just because you don’t bring it into practice. It’s holding on to “this is just how I am,” or to a fear of failure, instead of working on showing up when things are messy.
Leadership should be about you creating conditions others can work within. If you keep focusing on yourself or on being better understood by others, you pass your target.
The problem is what happens when self-work becomes a moral project, and growth is measured by the increased ability to disengage instead of improving your listening and mediation skills.
In organizations, this produces leaders who look calm from the outside, but actually can’t deal with fractured systems because they step back. They are very regulated but also very unavailable. They might talk about care and use therapeutic language, showing they’ve worked on themselves, but they avoid other people’s discomfort.
In society, you see the same dynamic. Structural problems are individualized, and complexity is reduced to clean, often black-and-white, and oversimplified narratives. It’s even sometimes reframed as personal or emotional failure. Again, the individualized approach.
A different definition of leadership
Good leadership asks for emotional intelligence, nervous-system regulation, and setting personal and professional boundaries. All of that matters, but it shouldn’t just be about how well you manage yourself and your own chaos; it’s as important to face other people’s discomfort and, in general, uncomfortable situations. If you think you don’t have space for that, it might be because you’re afraid to fail or caught up in the healing loop.
You can be deeply regulated but unable to stay with conflict or ambiguity because you always choose coherence. Whereas the world isn’t coherent, and people are neither. This attitude shapes work cultures more than any mission statement ever could.
It took a while for me to realize that real growth doesn’t make me a “cleaner” or more professional leader, and that’s ok! Leadership growth shows by being more capable of staying with tension and disagreement, without immediately deciding who is right and regulated, versus who needs to work on themselves.
In a world obsessed with optimization, we need leaders who are self-aware and still make mistakes, but are willing to hold discomfort and not retreat behind better language.
Inclusive Journalism 
You must be logged in to post a comment.