Oxford Leadership

02/05/2026

Inner Critic Series #6: Why You Speak More Harshly to Yourself Than to Anyone Else

You would never speak to a colleague the way the inner critic speaks to you.

If a direct report came to you after a difficult presentation and said: “I froze on the third question and I think I looked incompetent,” you wouldn't reply: “Yes, you did, and everyone noticed, and they are discussing it now.”

You would offer perspective, context, kindness. You would remind them that one stumble does not define a career.

But when it is your own stumble, the rules change. Suddenly, compassion feels like weakness.

Self-forgiveness feels like letting yourself off the hook. The inner critic insists that harshness is the price of high standards.

Chapter 67 of the names three treasures. The first, before courage, before modesty, is .

Not the soft, sentimental kind. The fierce kind.

The kind that says: I see what happened clearly, I take responsibility for my part in it, and I refuse to let a single moment define what I am worth.

This is not the same as lowering your standards. It is the recognition that you cannot lead others with warmth and clarity if you govern yourself with contempt.

Your reflection for today: what would change in your leadership if you spoke to yourself with the same generosity you offer your best people?



Image Credit: Resat Kuleli : Unsplash

Inner Critic Series #6: Why You Speak More Harshly to Yourself Than to Anyone Else You would never speak to a colleague the way the inner critic speaks to you. If a direct report came to you after a difficult presentation and said: “I froze on the third question and I think I loo...

27/04/2026

The Inner Critic : The Voice That Never Leaves the Room

The provocation ends when the meeting ends.

The inner critic never leaves the room.

You know this voice.

It is the one that replays a conversation you had six hours ago, editing your lines, finding the thing you should have said.

It is the one that takes a compliment and immediately audits it for sincerity.

It is the one that watches you succeed and whispers: they will find out.

Here is the paradox.

The inner critic presents itself as your ally. It tells you it is keeping you sharp, keeping you safe, keeping you one step ahead of the people who might see through you.

But listen more carefully. It is not protecting you.

It is exhausting you.

And it is doing so in a voice that sounds so much like your own that you have stopped questioning whether it is telling the truth.

Lao Tzu observed that the greatest battle is the one fought inside.

Not because the stakes are higher, but because the opponent knows every weakness.

Today, just notice.

How many times does the inner voice evaluate you before lunch?

You do not need to silence it yet.

Just count.

26/04/2026

You controlled yourself. You kept your voice steady. You kept your face neutral. You waited until the meeting ended to let the anger surface.

Everyone thought you handled it beautifully.

But your chest was tight for the rest of the day. You replayed the conversation three times before falling asleep.

And the next morning, something had shifted. Not visibly.

But you were a fraction less open, a fraction more guarded, a fraction further from the leader you actually want to be.

This is not self-regulation. This is absorption. And over time, it accumulates.

In this week's Tao Guidance for Leaders, Brian Bacon explores what Lao Tzu understood about provocation that Western leadership development is only now catching up with.

He did not teach people to build stronger walls.
He asked why they needed walls at all.

The difference between suppression and genuine equanimity is the difference between a leader who performs calm and a leader who is actually settled.

One costs you energy. The other gives it back.

What is the best advice you have for a leader learning how to better handle provocation? Please share your guidance.

14/04/2026

Machiavelli is still in the room. Not as a historical curiosity. As the voice in the back of every boardroom that says: when the stakes are high, set your values & principles aside and play the board as it is.

It is the most seductive piece of leadership advice in circulation, and I believe it is quietly destroying some of the most capable leaders of our generation.



Read full article here

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/machiavelli-myth-we-need-stop-brian-bacon-57lpc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via

09/04/2026

After three amazing years as strategic partners, I am thrilled to announce that we have amalgamated the Be Courageous transformation agency and the corporate client business of Oxford Leadership.

Our senior partner, Kyle Hermans, CEO and Founder of Be Courageous, leads the newly combined venture, global operations, client experience and growth, supported by Jenna Hermans as CFO, Jonathan Yukawa as Head of Digital, Brand and Marketing.

I look forward to supporting the management team as Group Chairman, stewarding our shared purpose, mentoring senior leaders and boards, holding the long view on what this work is for, and bringing the firm's capabilities to leaders at the most senior levels.

This is a big moment, charting the next chapter of both firms, and I have to say, it feels every bit as good as I hoped it would.

Most leadership development does not lead to organisation transformation.

It develops individual leaders, which matters. But it does not guarantee a change in the system, the culture, or the ex*****on environment. Leaders return from programmes energised, and then collide, repeatedly, with the same structural and cultural forces that were there before they left.

Genuine, systemic transformation requires something different.

Oxford Leadership's methodologies have always addressed the inner architecture: how leaders think, decide, commit and act.

What Be Courageous brings is the bridge from that inner work to the outer results: culture change, courageous innovation and ex*****on, and the judgment required as AI and technology reshapes how decisions are made.

Together, we can now work from the inside out and the outside in, simultaneously. That is what our clients have always needed.

We can now deliver it in full.

Our entry point for new relationships is the Transformation Readiness Diagnostic, an outside-in assessment of the purpose, courage, leadership, culture and ex*****on conditions needed for your transformation to succeed.

As your world is changing, we are here, prepared, and committed to staying ahead of that change with you. Reach out for a conversation, DM Kyle, Jonathan or myself, or email [email protected]

Together, we are now Guiding Courageous Transformation for Good.

Global transformation consultancy enters its next chapter with expanded capability across Purpose, Courage, Intelligence and PerformanceLondon, ...

08/04/2026

Her husband divorced her for being too educated. A judge jailed her for speaking the truth. Her president had her beaten and put her on an assassination list.

Wangari Maathai had founded a movement to plant trees across Kenya.

She kept planting, and she didn't stop.

Her story is not about injustice.

It is about what happens when purpose is rooted so deeply that no institution can reach it.

Article 3 of Women Who Transform is live.

Read it here. 👇

Her husband divorced her because she was too educated, too strong, and too hard to control. A judge sent her to prison for saying he was corrupt.

31/03/2026

“You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass.”

- Bruce Lee

The leader who reacts to every provocation has handed the room their power.

Not dramatically, not all at once, gradually, invisibly, one unnecessary response at a time.

The Tao calls this losing the centre.

When you are moved by everything, you are anchored by nothing.

And an unanchored leader, however brilliant, becomes predictable.

Predictable becomes manageable.

Manageable becomes irrelevant.

Restraint is not distance.

It is not coldness or suppression.

It is the cultivation of a space between stimulus and response wide enough to act from wisdom rather than wound.

That space is where real authority lives.

Anyone can react.

It takes practice, and a particular kind of courage, to simply breathe, observe, and choose.

The question worth sitting with today: in your last difficult conversation, who was actually in control?

29/03/2026

She moves forward into water she cannot see. Every stroke pulls from what is behind her, what has already passed. And yet she arrives.

This is the image leadership rarely admits it needs. We are taught to scan the horizon, to anticipate, to see around corners before anyone else does.

The leader who cannot see what is coming is assumed to be failing.

But the rower’s power comes precisely from not grasping ahead — from trusting the stroke, the resistance of the water, the rhythm of the body. She does not force. She pulls, releases, glides. The boat moves forward because she has stopped trying to see forward.

Laozi called this wu wei. Not passivity. Not drift. The effortless action that arises from perfect alignment — force applied only where it meets no resistance, because the rower has learned to read what the water is already doing.

The leaders I have worked with who burn their organizations out share one habit: they face forward. They push. They impose. They take credit for the wind and blame the water for not cooperating.

The leaders who endure have learned something quieter. Most of what they are managing is already in motion. The culture is already forming. The team already knows what is broken. The market is already telling them what it needs. The work is not to generate movement — it is to align with what is already moving.

This requires a particular kind of trust. Not trust in a plan. Trust in the water itself.
There is a version of leadership that exhausts everyone, including the leader — characterised by urgency, by forcing, by the belief that nothing happens unless you make it happen. It is also the version most celebrated: in board presentations, in the mythology of the exceptional founder, in the business press that mistakes noise for motion.

I have sat across from enough exhausted founders to know what it costs. The noise obscures the signal. The stirring muddies the pond.

The pond doesn’t need to be stirred. It needs to be left alone long enough to clear.

What are you forcing right now that might resolve itself if you simply stopped?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

25/03/2026

“In pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.” - Tao Te Ching, V48

We spend the first half of our careers stacking bricks, layering on what culture expects, mimicking the authority of those who came before us, holding fast to conclusions we drew as children about what it means to be powerful.

The work of the second half is not addition.

It is excavation.

And excavation is how you find your way back.

The most disorienting discovery for a serious leader is that they were never lost.

The self that leads with clarity rather than performance was never absent. It was buried.

Under decades of other people’s opinions. Under the accumulated weight of needing to look like they know.

When that weight comes off, you stop managing and start remembering.

The voice that speaks from that place doesn’t need to be loud.

It carries a different kind of authority — the kind that rooms quiet down for, even when it hasn’t asked them to.

Something else returns as the debris clears: the capacity to trust what you cannot yet name.

Every experienced leader knows the sensation.

The data is ambiguous, the room is divided, and yet something beneath the analytics registers a quiet resonance.

Not certainty. Resonance.

The body-knowledge of someone who has paid close attention for a long time.

Leaders who have done the interior work learn to trust that signal.

Not blindly, but without the reflex to override it simply because it won’t fit in a slide.

The world is not short of people performing leadership.

What it needs, and what is genuinely rare, is a leader who has made the return.

And has the courage to lead from what they found there.

What have you been carrying that no longer belongs to you?

24/03/2026

In 1986 she stepped off a plane in Los Angeles speaking no English. By 2014 she had built a $500 million company.

When a non-compete stopped her returning to the industry she'd mastered — she started a new one.

Toni Ko's story is not about cosmetics or eyewear. It is about what genuine transformation actually requires of a leader.

Article 1 of is live.

It's the first in a series I'm writing on the women whose careers contain the clearest lessons in strategic courage, reinvention, and legacy leadership.
Read it here. 👇

Article 1 | Women Who Transform — a new series by Oxford Leadership In 1986, a 13-year-old girl stepped off a plane in Los Angeles from Daegu, South Korea. No English.

21/03/2026

St. Patrick's Day was earlier this week. 🍀 The shamrock memes have faded. The Guinness has settled. And I'm still thinking about a cuppa tea.

Specifically, about a passage in an Irish urban fantasy novel that contains more practical wisdom about leadership than most business books I have read...

It goes like this: someone offers you tea. You say no. They ask again — well, I was putting the kettle on for myself anyway. You relent. Somehow, twenty minutes later, you're both in the kitchen, cups in hand, saying the things you actually needed to say.

In America, the author notes, you say no — and you don't get any damned tea.

I've spent thirty years living and working across a dozen countries, trying to find my own way to the kitchen table in each one. Different cultures, different rituals, different ways of saying come and give me a hand — but the same fundamental truth underneath all of them.

Leadership is personal.
It's all about relationships.
The conversation IS the relationship.

Not the strategy deck. Not the OKR. Not the town hall with its prepared remarks and careful applause. The conversation, the real one, the one that happens only after you've offered the tea twice.

This week's Tao Guidance for Leaders is about why the curved path, the long way, the cuppa tea way — is the only route that actually works. And three ways to practise it.

Full article below. ↓

In the geometry of the heart, the straight line is a lie — the cold promise of efficiency, the fastest path from a question to an answer, a command to a result. It is seductive in its speed, and it almost always leaves the most important thing untouched.