The Myth of the Self Sufficient Leader
In 2018, I was hired by a hundred year old American peace and justice organisation to lead their programs across China, Myanmar and Cambodia. I relocated to Beijing as Country Representative. It was the biggest role I had ever taken on, and I loved it.
The pace. The complexity. Sitting inside the tension of US China relations as a foreign NGO, navigating geopolitics I could barely have imagined years earlier. I helped rebuild a relationship with one of the largest NGOs in China, bringing US and Chinese academics together for dialogue at the height of diplomatic strain. I felt trusted. I felt capable. I felt, for the first time, truly powerful in my work.
And then there was the thing nobody warned me about. When you hold the authority, the freedom and the big decisions, the view from that position can feel extraordinary. And strangely, quietly, deeply alone. I did not understand the full weight of that until much later.
Years later, now as a transition and leadership coach, I sat with a client who runs regional operations for a foreign engineering company across Asia. Accomplished. Disciplined. A generous leader, a present father, a man who had built things that mattered. Four months into our work together, he asked me a question I still think about : "Who's carrying me?"
That is the moment I understood this is not rare. It is common, and it hides in plain sight, because nobody talks about it.
We tell ourselves a story about strong leadership, and most of it is myth.
Myth #1: strong leaders are self reliant. True, in the beginning. Self reliance keeps you alive in the early years. But left unexamined, that same self reliance becomes a habit, then an identity, then a wall. In much of Asia, this gets an extra layer. The strong boss does not ask, the strong boss knows. Admitting doubt is not just uncomfortable, it can feel like losing face, for you and for everyone connected to your name.
Myth #2: asking for help means losing authority. Success rewards speed and decisiveness. Slowing down to ask can feel like weakness. So leaders stop asking. Advice still exists around them, but the accountability sits with them alone. And people, sensing the distance, start filtering what they say. Not lying. Just softening. Aligning. Agreeing.
Myth #3: success brings connection. It does the opposite. It quietly removes your peer group. You cannot fully celebrate with your team, the power gap makes it awkward. Old friendships shift because you have changed and so have they, and nobody knows what to do with the gap. You lose the very people who once challenged you to think harder.
Myth #4: loneliness at the top is just an emotion, something to manage privately. It is not. It is structural. It is built into how hierarchy works, who is allowed to speak up and who is expected to already have the answer. That makes it a system, not a mood. And a system, left unmanaged, reinforces itself.
Self reliance is not weakness. It carried you here. But unexamined, it becomes isolation, and isolation is not a personal failing. It is a predictable outcome of climbing, in every culture, in every sector, whether you are leading a country program or a company.
I have sat on both sides of this. As the leader carrying the weight, and now as the coach sitting across from leaders who finally say the quiet part out loud. If any part of this found you today, ask yourself honestly: on a scale of one to ten, how isolated do you feel in your leadership right now?
In the next article, I will walk you through the framework I use with my clients to name exactly how that isolation forms, stage by stage, so you can see precisely where you are and what to do about it.
