The Reputation You Have With Yourself
A CEO I work with second-guessed himself in front of his leadership team last month.
He’d made a call about resource allocation. Reasonable decision, defensible logic. Then, ten minutes later—with no new information—he started walking it back. “Actually, let me think about this more.” The team exchanged glances. Then, sensing the instability he’d created, he overcorrected. Restated the original decision with a certainty that rang false. Convinced no one.
The team felt both versions as instability.
What struck me wasn’t the wrong call. CEOs make wrong calls constantly—that’s not what erodes trust. It was where the wobble came from. Not the complexity of the decision. Something underneath.
The Internal Reputation
I’ve started thinking about self-esteem differently in that it is the reputation you have with yourself. Not confidence as a personality trait or positive self-talk, but something more structural.
Every decision you make is a data point your future self observes. Did you keep the commitment you made this morning? Did you tell the truth when it was easier to hedge? Did you follow through on what you said you’d do?
When your actions align with your own code, you build self-trust. When they don’t, you erode it—even if no one else sees.
The leaders I work with who hold a room well, who sit with disagreement without becoming defensive, who make decisions cleanly—they’re not necessarily smarter. They’ve built an internal track record they can trust. When they say, “I think we should do this,” they believe themselves.
The ones who wobble? Often it’s not that they lack information or skill. It’s that they’ve accumulated enough small violations—broken commitments, avoided truths, unfollowed-through intentions—that they don’t fully trust their own judgment anymore.
And that distrust leaks.
What It Looks Like
Leaders with eroded internal reputation show specific patterns:
- Public second-guessing. Not the healthy “let me reconsider”—but anxious revisiting that signals the leader doesn’t trust their own thinking.
- Overcorrection into false certainty. When they sense they’ve created instability, they swing to performed confidence. Teams aren’t fooled.
- Avoiding difficult conversations. Not because they lack skill, but because they don’t trust themselves to handle what might surface.
- Excessive validation-seeking. Checking with too many people before acting. This isn’t thoroughness—it’s outsourcing confidence.
Research on leader behavioral integrity shows that alignment between words and actions is foundational to how teams trust leaders. But it has an internal precursor: whether the leader trusts themselves. Teams feel the difference between a leader who is genuinely open to being wrong and one who doesn’t trust their own thinking.
How It’s Built
The fix isn’t affirmations or confidence workshops. It’s keeping small commitments to yourself. The workout you said you’d do, the conversation you’ve been avoiding, or just simply the thing you promised yourself last week.
Small acts of integrity compound into a self you can trust. Small violations—the workout skipped, the conversation pushed, the intention abandoned—erode that foundation in ways that don’t announce themselves until you need to draw on it.
The compounding works in both directions.
This isn’t about perfectionism. Perfectionism is a defense mechanism—it delays action because you don’t trust yourself to recover from a wrong move. This is simpler: noticing the commitments you make to yourself and whether you keep them.
The Foundation
The confidence you’re looking for—the kind that lets you hold a room, make decisions cleanly, sit with disagreement—isn’t something to acquire from outside. It’s something you’ve been building or eroding all along, in the small moments no one else sees.
What would change in how you show up if you spent six months keeping every commitment you make to yourself? Even the ones no one witnesses?
That’s the foundation. Leadership presence is built on top of it.