Executive coaching · Melbourne & online worldwide

The inner game of leadership

The inner game is the part of leading that happens inside you before anything reaches the room. It sets a ceiling on the outer game, because a leader can only extend to other people what they can extend to themselves.

Most executive development attends to the outer game. Strategy, influence, communication, team design. All of it useful, and all of it delivered to a person whose internal conditions decide how much of it survives contact with a real Tuesday.

What follows covers the three things that show up most often in this territory at senior level. This sits under the broader executive coaching practice, and the mechanism underneath it is described in somatic executive coaching.

What the inner game covers

Three things, mostly. The judgments you make about your own competence and standing. The standards you hold yourself to, and what happens when you miss them. And what you do with doubt when there's no one you can say it to.

Senior roles concentrate all three. The higher you go, the fewer people are positioned to tell you the truth, the more visible your calls become, and the more your sense of your own competence has to be self-generated. A lot of executives are running that calculation alone, and running it harshly.

The critic that got you here

Almost every senior leader has a demanding internal voice, and in most cases it has a genuine track record. It caught errors. It made you prepare properly. It pushed you through work other people left at good enough, and some meaningful part of your career sits on top of that.

The question worth asking is whether it's still earning its keep. The voice that got you promoted at 30 has a tendency to make you a bottleneck at 50, because the standard it enforces stopped being about the work and became about you.

You can usually tell by what happens after something goes well. If a good outcome buys you about four minutes before the next thing, and a bad one gets rehearsed for a fortnight, the accounting has gone one-sided. Leaders in that pattern tend to hold information close, brief in more detail than anyone needs, and take criticism as evidence rather than as data.

The work here doesn't involve talking yourself out of the voice, which most people have tried and which tends to produce a second voice criticising the first. Internal Family Systems offers a more workable approach, treating that part of you as something with a job it took on a long time ago for reasons that made sense at the time. Parts of you that feel heard tend to relax their grip. More on how IFS works.

Imposter patterns at senior level

Imposter feelings are usually discussed as an early-career problem. They're at least as common at executive level, and they behave differently there. The gap between what people assume you know and what you actually know widens with seniority, and so does the cost of being found out.

What it produces is rarely visible as insecurity. It shows up as over-preparation, as a reluctance to say the honest "I don't know" in a forum where that would be genuinely useful, and as a strange flatness when someone praises the work.

Perfectionism and the delegation problem

Delegation gets treated as a skills gap, and it's taught that way in most leadership programmes. Executives who struggle with it can generally recite the theory. They know the framework, they know their team is capable, and they take the work back anyway.

What's actually happening is that the standard lives in their own hands. Handing something over means accepting a version that isn't theirs, tolerating the stretch while someone learns, and carrying the risk in the meantime. For a system organised around not getting things wrong, that's a genuinely uncomfortable proposition, and no amount of framework touches it.

This is the most expensive item in the inner game, because it compounds. A leader who can't let go caps the growth of everyone below them, and the team learns to bring things back rather than take them forward.

Why understanding it hasn't been enough

Most people arriving here can describe their patterns fluently. They've done the 360s, read the books, had the coaching, and can name exactly what they do and roughly when it started. Then the meeting happens and the pattern runs anyway.

That's because these patterns aren't held as beliefs you can argue with. They're held as states in the body, formed early, reinforced over decades, and firing before deliberation starts. Insight tells you what's happening. It operates at a different level from where the thing lives.

So the work goes to that level. In a session, that might mean slowing down the moment you felt the pull to take a piece of work back, and finding what happened physically a half-second before the decision. Between sessions, short daily practices train a different response. Repetition does the building. Roughly 30 repetitions creates familiarity and 300 creates muscle memory, with embodiment arriving around 3,000.

How the work runs

Everything starts with a free 30-minute call, because fit decides whether this is worth either of our time. Engagements typically run three to six months of fortnightly sessions, with short daily practices between them and an honest review at the midpoint. Sessions run online across Australia and internationally, with in-person available in Melbourne.

Fees are $550 a session plus GST self-funded and $750 plus GST when an organisation sponsors the work. The full pricing breakdown is on its own page.

I'm an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and a certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, also certified as an Integral Coach through New Ventures West and trained in Internal Family Systems. I hold the Executive Master in Change from INSEAD, serve on the transformation faculty of Mobius Executive Leadership, and coach executive presence and leadership communications with Stand & Deliver. Before any of that I spent 15 years inside the corporate world. More about my background.

A note on scope

This is coaching. It works on leadership performance and self-regulation for capable people under pressure, and it stays outside the territory of diagnosis and treatment. If you're dealing with significant distress or a mental health concern, that deserves proper psychological or medical care, and coaching can sit alongside it. No outcome is guaranteed.

Common questions

What is the inner game of leadership?

It's the part of leading that happens inside you before anything reaches the room. The judgments you make about your own competence, the standards you hold yourself to, and what you do with doubt. It sets a ceiling on the outer game, because a leader can only extend to others what they can extend to themselves.

Isn't the inner critic what made me successful?

Often, partly. A demanding internal standard drives real achievement, and most senior leaders have one. The question worth asking is whether it's still earning its keep, because the same voice that got you promoted at 30 tends to make you a bottleneck at 50.

I understand my patterns already. Why hasn't that changed anything?

Because these patterns aren't held as beliefs you can argue with. They're held as states in the body, formed early and reinforced for decades, and they fire before deliberation starts. Insight tells you what's happening. It doesn't reach the level where the pattern operates.

Is this therapy?

No. The methods are body-based and trauma-informed, and the frame is professional development, meaning how you operate and lead. Where therapy would serve you better, I'll say so and help you find it.

Will this make me softer as a leader?

The opposite is more common. Leaders who stop running on self-attack usually get more direct, because directness stops costing them so much. What tends to go is the reactivity, the over-explaining and the delay before hard conversations.

Rudi Doku · Executive Coach (ICF PCC) · Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) · Melbourne, Australia · Coaching online worldwide