How to Lead Yourself: The Ten Principles I Discovered by Accident, Not Design

By Larry “Taterpop” Doxtater — 27-year U.S. Army officer, leadership educator, and certified John C. Maxwell coach

Learning how to lead yourself starts with one deceptively simple question: what does a human being actually need in order to stay centered enough to lead well? I didn’t answer that by sitting down and inventing a ten-step system. The answer assembled itself — a handful of principles that kept resurfacing across study, reflection, decades of leadership, and plenty of my own mistakes. I didn’t design the Ten Truths. I recognized them. And that distinction matters more than it sounds.

Because principles you discover tend to hold up under pressure. Principles you manufacture to fill out a framework usually don’t.

Why You Have to Lead Yourself Before You Lead Anyone Else

You cannot give from an empty account, and you cannot govern others from a self you’ve never learned to govern. Self-leadership is simply first — everything you do for a team is filtered through your own steadiness, judgment, and energy, which means the inner work isn’t separate from leadership. It is leadership, just aimed at the one person you can actually control.

I learned this the slow way. I’d spent decades around leadership — the Army taught me discipline, standards, responsibility, and the obligation a leader carries for other people. I could develop leaders, teach leadership, practice it. And yet experience alone never guaranteed the harder thing: self-command. A person can be highly accomplished and still overextend themselves, still perform strength while quietly running on empty, still carry everyone in the room while neglecting the one carrying all of it. There is leadership of others, and there is governance of self. They’re related — but they are not the same, and the second one is where you have to start.

I Didn’t Invent These Principles — I Recognized Them

The honest origin of these ideas isn’t a whiteboard brainstorm — it’s a question I kept chasing until patterns emerged on their own. I wasn’t trying to build a model. I was trying to answer what does a person need to remain centered enough to lead themselves well, and the same answers kept surfacing whether I looked in philosophy, in the field, or in my own life.

That’s why I resist calling them a “system.” A system implies I engineered them for tidiness. These weren’t engineered; they were noticed — the way you notice a path that’s already been walked. Some showed up in ancient discipline, some in modern leadership research, some in the plain wreckage of my own overextension. When the same principle keeps appearing from completely different directions, that’s not a clever construct. That’s a clue that it’s load-bearing. Ten of them earned their place that way.

The Ten Truths: How to Lead Yourself in Practice

Here are the ten principles that kept resurfacing — each one a practice, not a slogan. Think of them less as a checklist to complete and more as the operating conditions a centered leader keeps returning to.

Notice what these are not: they’re not tactics for controlling other people or circumstances. Every one points inward, at what remains yours to govern.

Why Small, Repeated Practices Beat Big Resolutions

None of these ten work as a one-time decision — they work as repetitions, because that’s how human beings actually change. Researchers at Duke University found that more than 40% of the actions people take on a given day aren’t decisions at all — they’re habits. Which means the real question isn’t whether you’ll live by principles, but which ones your autopilot is already running.

That’s the good news. You don’t have to overhaul your character through willpower. You have to install a few small reps until they run on their own. This is the ground James Clear covers in Atomic Habits — that lasting change is identity built one small action at a time, not one heroic resolution. It’s also why Truth #8, finding joy in small wins, isn’t soft — it’s the fuel that keeps the reps going long enough to become who you are. A leader isn’t made by a big annual commitment. They’re made by what they quietly repeat on an ordinary Tuesday.

Start With One, Not Ten

The fastest way to fail at ten principles is to try to do all ten at once. Pick one. Run it until it’s automatic. Then add another. That’s not a compromise — it’s the only method that actually works.

If you want the highest-leverage place to start, begin with gratefulness, because it changes the lens everything else passes through. John Maxwell built a career on the idea that leadership is influence, and the most contagious thing a leader carries into a room is their internal state. Research on gratitude — going back to Emmons and McCullough’s work — keeps finding that the simple, repeated practice of noticing what’s good measurably lifts mood and outlook. Start there. One truth, practiced daily, will teach you more than all ten admired from a distance.

Your 5-Minute Practice

Here’s the entry point, and it takes five minutes tonight. Write down three specific things that went right today — not “my family” in the abstract, but the actual moment your colleague covered for you, or the problem that finally cracked. Specific beats generic every time.

Do that for one week and watch what it does to the lens you lead through. Then reflect: Which of the other nine truths is my life most quietly starving for? That’s your next rep.

These ten weren’t handed down as commandments and they weren’t invented for a book. They were discovered, one at a time, by someone trying to answer an honest question — and The Sovereign Leader: A Practical Path to Clarity, Energy, and Self-Command is where all ten live together as a path you can actually walk.

Next week, the finale: how the question I started with — why can’t we just get along? — quietly became a different question entirely, and the single word that named everything.

Of these ten, which one is your leadership most quietly starving for right now?

Sources

• Wood, W., Quinn, J. M., & Kashy, D. A. (Duke University research on habits) — more than 40% of daily actions are habits rather than deliberate decisions.
• James Clear, Atomic Habits (2018) — lasting change as identity built through small, repeated actions.
• Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. “Counting Blessings Versus Burdens.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2003) — regular gratitude practice improves mood and outlook.
• John C. Maxwell — leadership as influence, beginning with the leader’s own state.