Lead Yourself First: The Leadership Skill Women Business Owners Don’t Talk About Enough
Earlier in my business, it was clear that I was really good at following through with my clients. I was reliable, committed to getting their work done well and on time, and I took great pride in this. However, when it came to boundaries around prioritizing my own business, it was much easier to push that off and focus first on client work. I could say I was going to focus on business development Tuesday or follow up with new contacts, but I’d do my client work first and push those tasks off for one or two days, which could become one or two weeks. I realized that I needed to start treating Kathleen Lawson Consulting like any of my other clients, and consistently do the work to build my own business.
Something I tell my clients all the time is that clients are going to come and go, but your business needs to carry through. If you always think your own business can wait, there are real consequences.
I see people who begin their day by checking email, responding to what’s in front of them, or handling whatever feels most urgent. By the end of the day, there’s no time for the work that actually matters - business development, follow-up, and planning. If you do get to it, you’re out of time and energy, so it gets pushed off. Each day is a repeat of this inconsistent pattern.
What is self-leadership?
There’s also a cost when this becomes a pattern. If you repeatedly tell yourself, “I’m going to do this,” and then let yourself out of it, eventually your own plans and commitments don’t carry much weight. “I’ll do it Thursday” becomes more of a hope than a decision.
Self-leadership is your ability to decide what matters, commit to it, and follow through consistently. It goes beyond knowing your priorities or writing them down. It means your week isn’t dictated by what comes up in the moment, but by what you already decided is important. It's treating the commitments you make to your own business as real and important, if not more so, than the commitments you easily make to clients.
What does self-leadership look like in practice?
Your calendar isn’t only about availability. It’s about holding space for your priorities. You are respecting your time by filling it with intentional structure. It also shows up in how you make decisions. You make them, and then you move forward, rather than constantly reopening them and second-guessing yourself.
Something I tell my clients is to trust the version of themselves that made the plan. Having structure helps you honor the decisions you’ve already made.
Why does this break down?
Most business owners are running their business in real time. They’re deciding what to do as they go, reacting to what’s coming in, and waiting until they feel like doing something. That might feel like flexibility, but it usually means things aren’t getting done consistently. It’s not that you don’t know what to do. You just don’t have a structure that helps you follow through.
What changes when you start leading yourself first?
You will follow through more consistently rather than reacting to how you feel and putting out fires for clients. That consistency will create momentum, and momentum will allow your business to grow in a sustainable way.
What does this look like with real clients?
A few years back, I worked with a marketing strategist who was extremely responsive to her clients. She had one specific client she would drop everything for when that client reached out for something. It constantly derailed her progress.
It wasn't that she didn't understand marketing or business development - she was a marketing strategist! But she had almost no consistent business development plan or visibility strategy for her own business. What she did do was very in-the-moment and easy to push aside when a client asked for something.
So we focused on creating boundaries and structure around the work her own business needed. This didn’t mean she would be less responsive or less committed to her clients. She needed her own business to stop being the thing that automatically gave way every time someone else wanted her attention.
The problem isn’t knowing what to do; it’s treating the commitments you make to your own business as real commitments, just like the ones you make to your clients.
How do you put this into practice?
This is exactly why I created CEO Momentum. Most business owners don’t need more ideas or more strategy; they need a way to follow through on what they already know matters to move the needle in their businesses.
Inside CEO Momentum, the focus is on building that structure into your week and honoring commitments you made to your business. Instead of deciding in real time or constantly reacting, you step back, determine what matters, and give it a place. From there, you follow through consistently, which is how self-leadership becomes something you actually practice.
Where should you start?
A simple place to begin is to think about something you keep saying you’re going to do for your own business. If you had promised it to a client, would it already have been done?
If you want to learn more about CEO Momentum, you can do that here: