Why I Wrote The Sovereign Leader

By Larry “Taterpop” Doxtater — 27-year U.S. Army officer, leadership educator, and author of The Sovereign Leader: A Practical Path to Clarity, Energy, and Self-Command

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It started with a question that had nothing to do with writing a book:

Why can’t we just get along?

I was watching the world around me split into camps — the division, the anger, the certainty that one side had to defeat the other — and wondering how we’d reached a point where a simple disagreement so easily turned into hostility.

I wasn’t trying to solve politics. I was trying to understand people.

After decades in the Army, in leadership, in training and adult education, I’d spent most of my life studying how people work together — how they decide, how they respond under pressure, how they lead. So this bothered me more than it should have. We talk constantly about better leadership, better communication, resilience, emotional intelligence. And yet intelligent, accomplished, well-meaning people could still get swallowed whole by ego, fear, tribalism, or the simple need to prove themselves right.

So I began looking somewhere I hadn’t expected.

The Search Led Me to the Middle

I became interested in Shaolin philosophy — and in what I came to understand as the Middle Way.

What caught my attention wasn’t the martial arts. It was the discipline underneath them. Stillness and action. Strength and restraint. Confidence without aggression. Acceptance without surrender. The ability to remain centered while everything around you is moving.

That challenged some of my assumptions about leadership. For most of my career, leadership had been associated with action — make the decision, accomplish the mission, solve the problem, move the organization forward. All true. But it left a question unanswered:

What if the first person a leader has to command isn’t someone else? What if leadership begins with mastery of self?

That question changed the direction of my thinking.

Then I Saw Another Divide

I started thinking about introverts and extroverts — and about how much of our leadership advice quietly favors one and tries to fix the other.

But I began to see them differently: not as opposites, but as two starting points that each hold half of what the other needs. One leader is more at home in reflection and stillness, and has to learn to turn that inner world into outward influence. Another carries natural outward energy and presence, and has to develop real comfort with stillness and the inner world. One learns to move outward. The other learns to move inward.

Neither destination was introversion or extroversion. The destination was the center — the place where inner steadiness and outer influence finally meet. At one point I thought of the whole project as a kind of bridge between the two.

I still wasn’t writing The Sovereign Leader. Not yet. I was following the question.

The Ten Truths Began to Appear

As I kept studying, reflecting, and testing these ideas against my own experience, certain principles kept resurfacing. Gratitude. Stillness. The mental obstacles that distort our judgment. Protecting our health and energy. Returning to the present. Finding joy instead of endlessly postponing it. Giving happiness to others. Recognizing small wins. Taking full responsibility for what remains ours to control. And, finally, releasing our grip on outcomes.

They didn’t begin as a tidy ten-step system. They emerged one at a time, as answers to a larger question:

What does a human being need in order to remain centered enough to lead themselves well?

Eventually those principles became what I now call The Ten Truths. And something else started happening — I began holding my own life up against them.

Leadership of Others vs. Governance of Self

I’d spent decades around leadership. The Army taught me discipline, standards, responsibility, mission, service, preparation, and the obligation a leader carries for other people. I’d taught leaders. Developed them. Studied and practiced leadership for years.

And yet the deeper I went, the more clearly I saw something that experience alone had never forced me to confront: leadership experience does not guarantee self-command.

A person can be highly accomplished and still overextend themselves. They can look strong on the outside while quietly exhausting themselves within. They can carry responsibility for everyone in the room and completely neglect the one person actually shouldering all that weight. They can become extraordinarily good at performing leadership without ever asking whether the way they’re living is sustainable.

That distinction became the heart of everything. There is leadership of others. And there is governance of self. The two are related — but they are not the same.

The Idea of Sovereignty

Eventually I found the word that connected everything I’d been circling:

Sovereignty.

Not sovereignty as domination. Not independence from everyone around you. And certainly not control over everything that happens. Personal sovereignty meant something far more demanding — accepting responsibility for governing what actually remains yours: your attention, your energy, your responses, your decisions, your values, your presence, your impact.

You cannot command every circumstance. You cannot control every outcome. You cannot make everyone agree with you. But you can learn to govern yourself within those circumstances.

That was the shift. The question I’d started with — Why can’t we just get along? — quietly became a different one:

How do I remain centered, clear, responsible, and useful when the people and the world around me don’t behave the way I want them to?

That was no longer a political question. It was a leadership question. And deeper still, it was a question of self-command.

How The Sovereign Leader Was Born

What began as curiosity about conflict became a search for the Middle Way. The Middle Way led me toward mastery of self. That exploration revealed the Ten Truths. The Ten Truths became a practical path. And eventually that path became a book.

Looking back, I wasn’t searching for ten principles. I wasn’t trying to build another leadership model. And I certainly wasn’t planning to write the book that emerged. I was trying to answer a question — and I no longer believe the answer begins with convincing everyone else to change.

It begins much closer to home. Stillness before reaction. Awareness before judgment. Responsibility before blame. Strength balanced by restraint. Action balanced by recovery. Influence balanced by reflection. And the recognition that before we try to command anything around us, we have to get better at commanding what is within us.

That is the journey toward the Sovereign Center. And that is how The Sovereign Leader began.

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The Sovereign Leader: A Practical Path to Clarity, Energy, and Self-Command is the whole path in one place — the Ten Truths, and the practical work of governing yourself in a noisy, divided, uncertain world. If the question in this story is one you’ve felt too, I think you’ll find something useful in it.

Born to Be. Trained to Lead.