The Meeting Before the Meeting
A CEO once told me the most important part of leadership wasn’t what happened in the boardroom. It was the meeting before the meeting—the one you have with yourself.
Before stepping into the room, she had already prepared. She had reflected on why she was there, what her role was calling from her, and the company’s deeper why. She had been noticing the patterns: who was leaning in, who was pulling back, what conversations were emerging underneath the surface.
By the time she walked through the door, she wasn’t focused on carrying the pressure of “having the answer.” She was present to something larger: what wanted to happen.
This shift is subtle and radical. In anxious times, authority alone isn’t enough. Pressure mounts when leaders hold the weight of certainty on their own shoulders. The alternative is to lead from meaning—to stand in life mission, personal and organizational, and steward what is asking to emerge.
Viktor Frankl called it simply: courage is commensurate with meaning. When leaders are anchored in why, they enter every conversation differently.
The problems don’t go away. The complexity doesn’t lessen. The board, the market, the stakeholders remain. What changes is the orientation—from “I have to solve this” to “we are here to steward this together.”
That’s the meeting before the meeting. And it changes everything.
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