Leadership starts with leading yourself: doing what you told yourself you’d do, even when nobody’s checking.

Underneath every other kind of leadership is the habit of keeping promises you made only to yourself. Nobody checks those, which is what makes them a real test: no audience, no consequence except the slow one, where you find out whether your own word means anything. People who cannot rely on themselves find it very hard to ask anybody else to rely on them.

Make one small promise to yourself this week and keep it exactly. Choose something you can genuinely do rather than something ambitious. Do it on the day and at the time you said, then notice what that does to the next promise.