You Might Be Living Someone Else's Leadership Story Here's How to Write Your Own

Posted on December 31, 2020 by Paula Castillo, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

Most leadership development focuses on what you do.Better communication. Stronger executive presence. More effective feedback. Sharper strategic thinking.These are real skills and they matter. But there’s a deeper question underneath all of them that rarely gets asked in executive coaching:

Who is doing the leading?

Not what role you hold or what skills you’ve built. But who is actually in the driver’s seat of your leadership, and your life.

The Story You Inherited

Many of the leaders I work with arrive having done everything right. They’ve built impressive careers, earned the trust of their teams, accumulated the credentials and the titles.

And yet, when we slow down together, something interesting emerges.

The values they lead by: where did those come from?
The definition of success they’re chasing: who wrote that?
The voice in their head that evaluates every decision, every conversation, every performance review: whose voice is that, really?

For multicultural leaders and immigrant professionals, this question carries particular weight.

Because you haven’t been authored by just one script.

You’ve been authored by many, often simultaneously, often in conflict with each other.Your family’s definition of success. Your culture of origin’s expectations of who you should be and how you should lead. The unwritten rules of the organizations you entered. The feedback that told you to be more of this and less of that. The version of yourself you assembled in order to fit — and the parts of yourself you quietly set aside in order to survive.

You learned to navigate all of it. You became extraordinarily fluent in many versions of yourself.

But here is what I’ve observed in years of working with multicultural leaders and bilingual leaders: the very capacity that allowed you to navigate multiple worlds simultaneously — to hold different cultural frameworks, different ways of knowing, different definitions of what it means to lead well — is also the capacity that makes you uniquely positioned for the deepest kind of leadership growth.You have spent your whole life holding cultural complexity. You just haven’t always had language for it or permission to see it as a strength.That’s what this work gives you.

The Shift That Changes Everything

The psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey spent decades studying how adults grow — not just what they learn, but how the way they make meaning evolves over a lifetime. Their work on vertical development is some of the most important research in adult learning and leadership identity.

One of their most profound observations is this: most of us spend much of our lives being authored. By our families. By our cultures. By the organizations we belong to. By the expectations we internalized so early they feel like our own.

And then, if we do the work, something shifts.

We begin to become the author.

Not by rejecting everything that shaped us nor by abandoning the cultures and communities that formed us. But by developing the capacity to hold all of it, to see it clearly, to choose consciously what to carry forward and what to release, and to lead from a place that is genuinely, authoritatively our own.This is what self-authoring leadership looks like in practice. And for multicultural leaders, this shift has a particular tenderness to it. Because becoming the author of your own leadership story can sometimes feel like a betrayal of your family, your culture, the people who shaped you.It isn’t. It’s the deepest form of honoring them.

Because you are not rejecting what they gave you. You are choosing it consciously, freely, as your own.

That is the difference between being authored and self-authoring. And it changes everything.

And Then Something Even More Interesting Happens

Because here’s what Kegan and Lahey also found — and what I witness in the leaders I work with who go furthest in this journey:The most mature leaders don’t just become self-authoring. They develop the capacity to hold cultural complexity that most leadership models never address.They can hold multiple truths at once without needing to resolve them. They can be rooted in their own values while remaining genuinely open to being changed by others. They can lead with conviction and with humility, with structure and with heart, with ambition and with deep care for the people around them.For multicultural leaders, this stage of vertical development is not abstract. It is lived experience. You have been holding multiple worldviews, multiple definitions of success, multiple ways of being human your entire life.The work of authentic leadership at this level isn’t about learning something new. It’s about recognizing — finally, fully — that what you’ve carried all along was never a burden.It was always a gift.

What This Looks Like in Practice

In my executive coaching work with leaders globally, this shift shows up in very concrete ways:

It’s the leader who stops reflexively deferring to authority — and starts leading from their own considered judgment.

It’s the executive who stops performing confidence — and starts embodying it.

It’s the multicultural professional who stops apologizing for the cultural complexity they carry — and starts recognizing it as one of their greatest leadership assets.

It’s the moment a client looks at the values they’ve been leading by and realizes with quiet clarity: some of these are mine. And some of them I inherited and never examined.

That examination, which is gentle, honest, and deeply human, is where the real growth begins.

Not just becoming a better leader. But becoming more fully yourself.And discovering that these are, in the end, the same thing.