The Inner CEO
Managing yourself before managing everything else
A few days ago, I looked at my calendar at the end of what had felt like a particularly productive day. It was full of the usual evidence of a working life — meetings attended, calls returned, decisions made, problems resolved and a long trail of messages answered. By the standards we normally use to judge our days, it had been a good one.
And yet, I was strangely dissatisfied.
As I thought back over the day, I realised that I had allowed someone else’s urgency to become mine. I had reacted more strongly than necessary to something that irritated me. I had spent far too much mental energy on an issue that probably didn’t deserve it, while something genuinely important had been postponed because several less important things were shouting louder.
It occurred to me that I had spent the entire day managing almost everything around me, but had done a rather poor job of managing myself.
There was nothing dramatic about any of this. That, perhaps, was the more interesting realisation. We rarely mismanage ourselves through one catastrophic decision. We do it quietly, in small instalments.
An unnecessary argument. A meeting we didn’t need to attend. An hour spent thinking about something we cannot change. An email allowed to alter our mood. A decision made when tired. Another evening when we promise ourselves that tomorrow we will exercise, read, sleep earlier or simply switch off.
Each seems inconsequential. But repeated often enough, these small choices become habits, habits become behaviour, and behaviour eventually becomes a life.
We Manage Everything Except Ourselves
I have spent much of my professional life thinking about management. Businesses are constantly asking themselves some version of the same questions: Where should we invest? What deserves our resources? What is producing a return? What should we stop doing? Where are we underperforming? What needs to change?
These are considered sensible questions when applied to organisations. Strangely, we ask them far less often of ourselves.
If a company continually invested scarce capital in activities producing little return, we would question its strategy. Yet we can invest enormous amounts of scarce attention worrying about things over which we have almost no control.
If an expensive machine operated continuously at maximum capacity, somebody would eventually insist on maintenance. Yet many of us run ourselves exhausted and wear it almost as a badge of commitment.
If a manager reacted emotionally every time something went wrong, we would probably suggest greater maturity and self-awareness. When we do exactly the same thing ourselves, however, we can usually construct an excellent argument explaining why our reaction was entirely justified.
Management principles, I have discovered, become surprisingly flexible when the person being managed is ourselves.
The Most Difficult Employee I Have Ever Managed
There is one person I have been managing for most of my adult life.
He can be ambitious, disciplined and energetic. He can also be impatient. He sometimes worries about events that haven’t happened. He occasionally spends too much time thinking about what other people think of him. He knows perfectly well that sleep, exercise and quiet time make him perform better, and yet regularly negotiates with himself about all three.
He can give remarkably sensible advice to other people and then ignore precisely the same advice when it applies to his own life. And, like most difficult employees, he is particularly good at explaining his own behaviour.
Unfortunately, I cannot fire him. That person, of course, is me.
The more I thought about this, the more I realised that there is something curious about adulthood. We gradually become more capable of managing increasingly complicated things outside ourselves — businesses, teams, money, families, careers and relationships — while remaining surprisingly amateur at managing what happens inside us.
That contradiction is what led me to an idea I have started calling The Inner CEO.
The Company Called You
Imagine for a moment that you are responsible for running an enterprise called You. It owns some extraordinarily valuable assets, but all of them are finite.
Your attention is its capital. Where you invest it determines what grows. Your time is its inventory. Once used, it cannot be replenished. Your energy is its operating capacity. Without it, even the best strategy is irrelevant. Your habits are its systems — the invisible processes producing results every day. Your relationships are its network, influencing both opportunity and wellbeing. Your reputation is its brand, built slowly through hundreds of interactions and capable of being damaged surprisingly quickly. And your capacity to learn is your R&D department. It determines whether you continue evolving or gradually become a very experienced version of someone the world no longer needs.
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Once I started looking at myself through this lens, different questions appeared.
Where was I allocating my attention? What was consuming energy without creating value? Which habits were quietly compounding in my favour and which ones were compounding against me? Which relationships left me stronger and which consistently depleted me? What was I continuing to do simply because I had always done it?
If I were managing someone else the way I manage myself, would I consider myself a good manager? I wasn’t entirely sure I liked the answer.
When Our Strengths Begin Working Against Us
There is another dimension to self-management that becomes particularly interesting as we grow older and more successful. Success doesn’t automatically make us better at managing ourselves. Sometimes it simply makes us better at justifying ourselves.
The qualities that help us succeed can slowly become the qualities that hold us back.
Attention to detail can become micromanagement. High standards can become impatience. Confidence can become certainty. Ambition can become permanent dissatisfaction. Responsibility can become an inability to switch off. Experience, perhaps our greatest professional asset, can become the conviction that because something worked yesterday, it must still be right tomorrow.
The transition is rarely obvious because the weakness often arrives disguised as the strength.
We tell ourselves we are being thorough when we are actually refusing to delegate. We call it high standards when we are being unnecessarily critical. We call it commitment when we have forgotten how to disconnect. We call it ambition when we have lost the ability to enjoy what we have already achieved.
Perhaps maturity is not about acquiring more strengths. Perhaps it is about recognising when our existing strengths have gone too far.
The Board Meeting Within
This is what I want The Inner CEO to explore. Not productivity hacks, perfect morning routines or seven steps to becoming a new person by next Tuesday. I am far more interested in the imperfect and ongoing business of managing attention, energy, emotions, time, relationships and ambition while trying to live and work well.
How do we remain ambitious without allowing ambition to consume everything else? How do we deal with difficult people without becoming difficult ourselves? How do we protect our attention in a world increasingly designed to capture it? How do we respond rather than react? How do we know when to persist and when to let go? And how do we continue learning when experience begins whispering that we already know enough?
At the end of that busy day, I tried a small experiment.
Instead of reviewing my calendar to see what I had accomplished, I reviewed how I had managed myself.
Where had my attention gone? What had consumed my energy without creating much value? Where had I reacted when I could simply have observed? What had I done because it genuinely mattered — and what had I done merely because it was there?
The answers weren’t particularly flattering. But they were useful.
And perhaps that is where self-management really begins. Not with controlling ourselves. Not with reinventing ourselves. Simply with noticing ourselves.
Perhaps every one of us needs an occasional board meeting with our Inner CEO. No presentation. No dashboard. No performance review. Just a quiet conversation with ourselves and three questions:
What deserves more of my attention?
What deserves less of my energy?
And if I continue managing myself exactly as I do today, will I like the person I am becoming?
I intend to keep asking myself those questions.
Because after years spent learning how to manage businesses, teams, problems and opportunities, I am beginning to realise that the most complicated organisation I will ever manage has only one employee.
And he still needs quite a bit of work.
Welcome to The Inner CEO.
