At 27, I hustled my way into my first leadership role, heading up the most innovative arm of a global media agency. I quickly jumped ship to a start-up that sat between the worlds of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. From there: Strategy Director at VICE. Managing Director of i-D magazine. General Manager of Atlantic Records.
Always the youngest in the room, always pushing myself. For a decade I turned cultural icons into profitable businesses, ran budgets, made big calls, and kept getting promoted.
What nobody saw was what was running underneath. A constant hum of imposter syndrome and a deep distrust of my own instincts. I led by watching the people around me and copying what they did, because I didn’t believe my own way was good enough. I was getting ahead and waiting to be found out, at the same time.
I worshipped at the altar of logic and strategy was my superpower: the plan, the structure, the relentless forward motion. If something wasn’t working, I worked harder. Pulled longer hours, build more spreadsheets, designed a better deck. I ran almost entirely on my thinking brain (and Diet Coke) and for a long time it carried me.
But that can only last so long and the signs kept showing up. The harder I worked, the more hollow it felt. I used substances to stay afloat, and ran my ADHD brain into the ground to keep up. Eventually, I burned out.
So I stopped, and rebuilt.
On the way back, I learned the answer was never a better plan. The bold moves in my career, the decisions that had actually moved things, hadn’t come from the decks I was building - they’d come from my instinct. The thing I’d trusted least had been right all along.
I went looking for what was underneath. I retrained as a coach, and spent the next years on the kind of personal work many people talk about and very few stick with. I learned to work with my nervous system instead of overriding it.
Slowly, I found my way back to myself. I stopped copying and started leading as me: my best bits at the front, unapologetically having other people (or Claude) do the bits I’m not good at.
I’m still restless and I still get lit up. But I’m no longer running on reactivity. I have access to myself when it counts. That, for me, is regulated leadership.
Once I could see it in myself, I saw it everywhere: brilliant leaders running on threat, passing the pressure down the line, burning out themselves and the people around them. We’re living through an age of reactive leadership, and it isn’t working.
Nobody is regulating who gets to lead. So leaders have to regulate themselves. I didn’t start out as a regulated leader. I learned it the hard way. My work is about making it a little less hard for you, and championing the regulated leaders the world needs.