The Solitude of Leadership - Alone but not Lonely

It’s often said that being a leader can feel lonely. You can’t share how you feel with your team or your superiors. Your peers - if you have any - might not even relate. Dumping on your partner may not do that relationship much good either.

So what do you do? In this article, I’ll explore the dynamics of solitude so that you can start to cherish being alone, without feeling lonely or isolated.

Let’s start with how leadership promotes isolation. It’s pretty obvious that - whether you’re leading a team or an organisation - you’re not going to share your innermost thoughts, feelings and fears with every tom, dick and harry that works with or for you. To do so would be risky at best, career-limiting at worst. Radical candour and vulnerability may sound like the latest way of turbo-charging your leadership, but in practice they risk sabotaging it instead.

It all comes down to intention. If you’re sharing thoughts, feelings, perceptions with colleagues because they need to know and will help them fulfil their duties as a result, go right ahead and don’t hold back.

But if - on the other far more likely hand - you feel compelled to share in order to offload, to lean on someone else and to make yourself feel better, even momentarily, then that’s a red flag telling you it’s the wrong path to go down.

You need to be pretty astute and tuned-in to make this call, since your ego can do a great job of convincing you that others need to know when they really don’t - when the real, compulsive need is to dilute your feelings by roping someone else in to share the load. Whether they want to or not.

To deny yourself the impulse to share can indeed leave you feeling frustrated and isolated, privy to things that no one else suspects. This is the so-called burden of leadership - carrying a load that you cannot split with anyone else. It’s a lonely business.

So how do you deal with this syndrome and enter a world where solitude does not make you lonely?

The first step is the realisation that being alone is not a pathological state - it is simply one version of us as individuals. Individual means not separate from, but not divisible - it is the smallest quantum of humanity. You might be able to split a person in two but you will kill them in the process.

The individual is complete within themselves. You are complete within yourself. All of us are physically mortal but, once born, that mortality is not continuously dependent on anyone else. Right now, all we need is air.

So being solitary is a perfectly normal state to be in. After all, our experience of birth, sleep and death are all solitary, regardless of those at the bedside.

Of course we need social interaction - at least most of us do. It nourishes, stimulates and challenges us into new and expansive experiences of body and mind. But we don’t need others in order to be who we really are. In fact frequently, our relationships take us away from who we are.

Perhaps this is why in 1818, the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote:

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; ... if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Often the reason that some of us get bored, listless or depressed when we are alone is that we are keeping bad company! We are bad company for ourselves. If that is the case, you can be pretty sure that you don’t make great company for anyone else either.

So rather than trying to compensate for your own lack of good company by relying on others, make yourself good company for you first and the rest will follow.

How do you do that? Prioritise time with yourself. It doesn’t have to be long. It can be a walk in the park, ½ hr with a book, listening to music. The only condition is that you need to be conscious, aware, awake - just as you would be with someone else. You are just as important, worthy of attention - give it to yourself freely. Rinse and repeat.

The inner dialogue which often accompanies solitude is perfectly normal - let it be. Which brings us to the next step which is acceptance. Our judgemental minds champ at the bit to write something or someone off as being below par, dysfunctional, broken or unwanted - including ourselves! Practice catching the verdicts of judgement and replace them with acceptance - acceptance in the knowledge that everything which is, is the perfectly natural consequence of what was. Life does not make mistakes.

Remember that other famous adage: There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. And our thoughts are artifices which we mistake for reality. They have their place, but not as replacements for what is. So the 3rd step is to constantly remember that whatever we think - useful as it may well be - is not the reality we may believe it to be.

Armed with these insights, solitude can be a place of reflection, inspiration and wisdom that many relationships struggle to attain. And far from a place of loneliness, it becomes lush and abundant with life, truth and beauty. Deep solitude eventually displaces all sense of loneliness with the freedom of which Schopenhauer speaks and transforms the burdens of leadership - which many of us yearn to share - with the deep sense of peace which comes with acceptance.

If you enjoyed this article, check out my Are You Leading, or just Managing Scorecard - and get some more insights into your leadership.