I've watched leaders crash. I've watched pastors flame out, executives unravel, coaches who inspired hundreds of people eventually lose the trust of everyone closest to them. And in almost every case — not all, but almost — the failure didn't start with a bad decision on a stage or in a boardroom. It started in the room nobody saw. In the private habits that had slowly eroded. In the inner life that had stopped being tended.
The public failure was just the moment the private reality became visible.
I'm not saying this from a safe distance. I know what it feels like to perform publicly while privately running on fumes. I spent years pouring into students, organizations, and communities while quietly ignoring the signals my own soul was sending. I was good at the visible stuff. The prep, the delivery, the follow-through. What I was neglecting was the interior work that makes the visible stuff actually mean something — and that keeps it from eventually destroying you.
"The leader is always teaching — mostly what they are not saying." — Dallas Willard
What Private Leadership Actually Means
When I talk about the leader nobody sees, I'm not talking about secret moral failures (though those obviously matter). I'm talking about something more mundane and probably more widespread: the daily interior choices that shape who you actually are, as opposed to who you appear to be.
How do you handle frustration when no one's watching? What do you tell yourself about the person who just challenged you in a meeting? How honest are you in your own journal — if you keep one — versus what you say publicly about your struggles? What do you do with an afternoon that belongs to you? Do you have a practice that feeds your soul, or are you drawing indefinitely from a well you never refill?
These questions feel soft until you realize that the answers to them are forming you every day. Neuroscience has a phrase for this: neurons that fire together, wire together. The patterns you reinforce in private become the default responses you reach for under pressure. The leader who privately handles criticism with bitterness will eventually handle it that way publicly. The leader who privately maintains humility, prayer, and honest self-examination is building a foundation that can bear actual weight when tested.
Dallas Willard put it precisely: character is what you do when no one can see you and no one would know the difference. Leadership character, built or eroded in thousands of small private moments, is what you carry onto the public stage. You don't leave it at the door.
The Substitution Problem
Here's a specific pattern I've seen repeatedly, including in myself: leaders substituting activity for formation. The calendar fills. The demands multiply. The people who need you are genuinely real and their needs are genuinely urgent. And the interior practices — prayer, reflection, silence, physical care, honest conversation with a few trusted people — quietly get squeezed out. Not abandoned dramatically; just gradually deprioritized.
The insidious thing is that high performers can sustain this for a long time on stored capital. On the reputation built when the inner life was healthier. On skills and habits developed years earlier. On sheer willpower and professionalism. But it has a ceiling, and the ceiling is lower than most people expect.
I know a pastor — brilliant communicator, deeply loved congregation, decade of fruitful ministry — who hit the wall at 52. He hadn't had a genuine sabbath in three years. He hadn't met with a spiritual director or a peer group in two. He had a dozen people who respected him from a distance and almost no one who knew him close up. When a crisis came — and it came — he had nothing left to draw from. The collapse wasn't a failure of talent. It was the inevitable result of an interior life long since abandoned.
"We can only give to others what we ourselves possess. A leader who is spiritually empty will lead people to the same emptiness, however well-organized the program." — Eugene Peterson
What I Actually Do About This
I'm sixty-three years old. I've been in ministry, education, coaching, and leadership development for most of my adult life. Here's what I've settled on — not as a prescription for everyone, but as what I've found works for me when I actually do it.
I have a morning practice that runs about forty-five minutes before the day starts. It includes prayer, Scripture, some form of the Examen, and usually a few minutes of physical movement. Not every session is transcendent. Most of them are ordinary. But over years, ordinary daily practice does something that occasional extraordinary experiences cannot: it shapes the baseline. It makes the interior life a place I actually inhabit rather than a vacation destination I visit when things get desperate.
I also have three or four people who have genuine permission to tell me hard things. My wife, obviously — forty-two years in, she has clearance to say anything, and she uses it wisely. A spiritual director I've seen quarterly for years. A peer group of leaders that meets monthly and has committed to the kind of honesty that most professional peer groups carefully avoid.
And I ride my Harley. I know that's an odd thing to put on this list, but I'm serious. The open road, the wind, the forced attentiveness that riding requires — it does something for my soul that nothing else replicates. It's been forty-eight states so far. I plan to get to all fifty before I'm done.
The leader nobody sees is being formed right now — in you. In the choices you're making in private today. The question isn't whether your private life is shaping your public leadership. It is. The question is whether you're being intentional about what it's shaping you toward.
What's one private practice you've let slide — and what would it look like to rebuild it, starting small, this week?