His Private Soundtrack Amplified Through 300 Speakers


The AOA Leadership Newsletter

Hi Reader,

A few years ago, I coached the founder of a 300-person health-tech firm.

Brilliant product sense, generous heart—yet his team was constantly missing deadlines due to second-guessing.

One afternoon, while white-boarding priorities, I asked him to narrate his thoughts out loud.

What poured out was a stream of quiet self-doubt:

“This plan is probably naïve.”
“Marketing will poke holes in this—maybe they’re right.”
“I’m not sure I’m the guy to lead the next stage.”

It struck us both: The hesitancy plaguing the company was simply his private soundtrack amplified through 300 speakers. His team’s Slack threads echoed his inner monologue—“Not sure… might be dumb… just a thought.”

That quarter we worked on a single lever: how he spoke to himself.

As the self-talk shifted—more curiosity, less contempt—meeting notes sharpened, roadmaps locked sooner, launches sped up. Same people, new atmosphere.

Your team culture is a reflection of your internal culture

I see this pattern play out constantly in leadership: Your inner consciousness as a leader is always reflected in the consciousness of your team.

  • Your self-talk becomes team communication
  • Your boundaries become company policies
  • Your blindspots become organizational weaknesses

A founder who secretly fears conflict will, over time, seed an organization fluent in polite avoidance until unresolved tension eats away at the company.

A CEO who prizes flawless execution yet ignores their discomfort with vulnerability will hire for competence over candor and wonder why problems aren’t coming to the surface—blowing up parts of the company with no warning.

What we avoid personally doesn’t go away. It becomes institutional.

Boundaries tell a similar tale. Show me an executive who answers emails at 1AM, and I’ll show you employees who hesitate to take a real weekend. Show me a leader who doesn’t solve an urgent issue right away, and I’ll show you a culture that doesn’t meet deadlines.

Policy manuals matter, but the company receives its true operating system from the behavior it watches at the top.

In that sense, leadership isn’t just about steering an external ship. It’s also about tending your internal landscape. A cultivated mind becomes a cultivated culture; an untended mind forces culture to compensate for its overgrowth. Every organizational change initiative, when traced far enough upstream, arrives at a mirror.

Experiment

  1. Name 3 things you want from your team, but you’re not 100% convinced that you deserve it or that it’s possible.
  2. Write a short paragraph on how these negative beliefs affect your company culture.


(For example: “I want to have more time to do my own work, but I need to do everyone else’s job.” or “I want people to act like owners.” or “I want people to figure it out.”)

Go deeper: Listen to our podcast on Company Culture

show
The Secret to Thriving Compa...
Jan 3 · The Art of Accomplishmen...
33:47
Spotify Logo
 

Big Love,

Joe

PS. Missed past issues or want to review them again? Read our archive our check out some of our most popular posts below:

  1. The Hidden Lever for Lasting Cultural Change
  2. What Baboons Teach Us About Leadership

Art of Accomplishment

Read more from Art of Accomplishment

The AOA Leadership Newsletter Hi Reader, In 2009, a small team of neuroscientists set out to answer a question—can you really smell fear? They began with two very different afternoons and a stack of cotton pads. Afternoon #1Twenty volunteers ran hard on treadmills until their pulses raced. Researchers blotted the sweat from each runner’s underarms, sealed every pad in glass, and tucked the jars on ice. Afternoon #2Then, those same volunteers suited up for their first skydives. As the plane...

The AOA Leadership Newsletter Hi Reader, For a long time, I’ve been a student of the many ways humans make sense of life—psychology, spirituality, neuroscience, and beyond. Among the most fascinating to me are the ancient medical systems of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda. In those systems, there’s a core principle that feels increasingly relevant to how I see companies: When something is imbalanced in a living system, you can see it everywhere. Take the liver, for instance: In TCM,...

The AOA Leadership Newsletter Hi Reader, When I was working as a VC, I found myself in the midst of a fundraising process that I wasn't particularly enjoying. It felt mechanical and draining - a necessary evil rather than something meaningful. So I thought, “Okay, how do I really enjoy this process?” And I asked myself, “What are the things that I enjoy? I wrote down: I enjoy learning. I enjoy going deep with people. I enjoy strategy. Then, I also realized that everybody I was fundraising...