Lead Well Part 1: Starting With Yourself

When someone asks me what Allie Jones Consulting is about, I tell them that I built my leadership and business coaching practice around three concentric circles: leading yourself well, leading your team well, and leading your work well. The order matters. Each one builds on the other, and the most effective, intentional leaders I know are actively working on all three. 

But effective leadership always starts from the inside out.

Leading yourself well is the most foundational piece. Here’s my working formula for effective self-leadership. 

(Self awareness + regulation skills) x growth mindset = a leader I’d follow anywhere 

Understanding who you are and how you’re wired helps you navigate situations with clarity and avoid pitfalls. Self-awareness becomes effective when you pair it with the skillsets of self-regulation—knowing how to act in alignment with your true self and your values rather than your knee-jerk responses. Multiply that by a genuine curiosity and desire to continually grow, and you become unstoppable. 

So what does that actually look like in my day-to-day life right now? Lately, the honest answer is that it has looked like trying to quiet a very busy mind.

Life has been full and fast in recent months, and when that happens, I notice I start reaching for my phone more. Social media. Games that give me a dopamine rush and a sense of order. Audiobooks and TV shows that help me escape from my busy life. It feels like the easiest available form of a little break throughout a busy day. 

But just last week, I sat with the red flag that had been popping up around this increase in my weekly screen time. My curiosity about what was driving this behavior helped me recognize that this was my attempt at rest; my mind was craving a badly needed break. But scrolling on my phone doesn't replenish me. It keeps my mind scattered and pulls me out of presence with my kids, my husband, and myself.

So here are three practical, unsexy, but effective things I've been doing to lead myself well in this season:

Quieting the Chaos by deleting apps. Over the weekend, I deleted social media and games from my phone. Not forever -- just for now. But naming what was driving the scroll, getting curious about it rather than just reacting to it, and then making one small decision to remove the friction point is exactly the kind of honest, practical self-leadership I believe in. Simple but not easy.

Cultivating more inner space with Insight Timer. I've never been a consistent meditator, but I've been craving space in my cluttered mind, and this app has been a good on-ramp. It offers a wide variety of free guided meditations across topics, styles, and durations, or you can just set a timer and sit quietly. I'm often still surprised by how much clearer I think and how much more connected to myself I feel when I start the day with a few minutes of breathing and stillness.

Listening to Myself More through Journaling. I've been a journaler my whole life, but I can stray away from it when life gets busy. Writing my thoughts out by hand is one of the best ways I know to feel grounded and clear. Now that my toddlers are mostly sleeping through the night, I've been able to return to my morning routine — a cup of licorice peppermint tea, about ten minutes of yoga, and then time to write. Sometimes it turns into a mind map or a to-do list. Sometimes I just set a timer for ten minutes and let a stream of consciousness flow out of my pen. Either way, it quiets my mind and helps me explore my own thinking. Research supports this too: the hand-eye coordination of handwriting slows the brain down enough to actually process information and think about your thinking.

Ironically, while I was scrolling recently, I came across an interview with Olympic skier Eileen Gu, where she talked about her love for journaling as a tool for examining her thoughts. Here’s what she said: 

“I spend a lot of time in my head, and it’s not a bad place to be. I journal a lot. I break down all of my thought processes. I think I apply a very analytical lens to my own thinking, and I modify it because it’s so interesting.

"You can control what you think. You can control how you think, and therefore, you can control who you are. And especially as a young person, I’m 22, so with neuroplasticity on my side, I can literally become exactly who I want to be. How cool is that? How empowering is that... Yes, I think a lot. But it’s not really in an egotistical way. It’s in a tinkering, like a scientist way. I’m always trying to modify. I’m trying to think, how can I be better?”

Leading yourself well isn't about perfection or having it all figured out. It's a combination of honesty and gentleness -- being willing to see yourself clearly, and then meeting what you see with compassion rather than judgment. It's discipline without rigidity. It's noticing the patterns, getting curious about what's driving them, and then taking small, consistent steps back toward alignment. Not a dramatic overhaul. Just the quiet, steady work of showing up for yourself first, so you can show up well for everything and everyone else.

That's the work. And I think it's some of the most important work there is.