We spend a lot of time telling young people to step up. To lead. To be the change. And I believe that. I believe in that deeply.
But I’ve been in enough rooms with enough young men and women to know that you can’t pour from an empty cup. And you definitely can’t lead from a place you haven’t visited yourself.
The reality is, most conversations about leadership skip the most important step. They go straight to the skills, the titles, the opportunities. And those things matter. But if you don’t know who you are first, none of it holds. You’re building on sand.
That’s why in the 6 Circles to Purpose Leadership Training program, we start right there. With the person in the room. With you.
What Self-Awareness Actually Is
Let me be real with you about something. Self-awareness isn’t the same thing as knowing your strengths. A lot of programs stop there. “Here’s what you’re good at. Here’s your personality type. Go lead.” That’s not it.
Self-awareness is knowing what you value. It’s knowing what triggers you, and why. It’s knowing the difference between what you actually want and what you’ve been told you should want. It’s knowing where your fears live and whether you’re letting those fears make decisions for you.
And I’m telling you, when a young person sits down and really does that work for the first time, something shifts. I’ve watched it happen. The posture changes. The voice changes. There’s a stillness that wasn’t there before. Because suddenly they’re not just reacting to the world around them. They’re responding from something inside them. That’s when leadership becomes real.
Why Young People Struggle With This Step
Here’s what I’ve noticed. Young people aren’t afraid of hard work. They’re not afraid of challenges. What they’re often afraid of is sitting still long enough to look at themselves honestly.
And I get it. We live in a world that is loud. It rewards performance. It rewards the highlight reel. Nobody’s posting their identity crisis on social media. So a lot of young people have learned to keep moving, keep performing, keep looking like they have it together, because that’s what gets the likes and the nods of approval. But that kind of performance is exhausting. And it doesn’t lead anywhere real.
One of the things we do in the 6 Circles program is slow that down. We create space, structured and intentional, for young people to ask questions they’ve maybe never been invited to ask out loud. Questions like: What do I actually believe? What matters to me, separate from what my family wants for me, or what my friends expect? What kind of person do I want to be when nobody’s watching? Those aren’t soft questions. Those are the hardest questions there are. And they’re the ones that build real leaders.
What Happens When You Skip This Step
I’ve mentored young men who were incredibly talented. Smart, charismatic, driven. And I’ve watched some of them make decisions that cost them years, because they were operating on autopilot. They were doing what looked right from the outside, what sounded right, what would get people to respect them, but they hadn’t actually decided what they stood for.
So when pressure came, they folded. Not because they weren’t capable. But because they didn’t have a clear enough sense of themselves to hold the line. Self-awareness is that line.
When you know your values, you know what you won’t compromise. When you understand what you’re afraid of, you can choose not to let fear make your choices. When you’ve done the work of looking inward, you can lead outward with actual clarity. Without it, you’re just responding to whatever the room gives you. That’s not leadership. That’s survival mode with good shoes.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Let me get into this for a second. Because I don’t want this to feel abstract.
In our program, self-awareness isn’t a worksheet you fill out once and forget. It’s a practice. It’s a discipline. We come back to it throughout the 6 Circles because who you are is always evolving. The 19-year-old you and the 24-year-old you should not have identical answers to these questions. Growth means the answers change. But what doesn’t change is the practice of asking. Of pausing. Of checking in with yourself before you check in with the crowd.
We ask young people to identify their core values, not a list they copied from a website, but ones they can actually defend with their story. We ask them to look at the gap between who they say they are and how they actually show up. That last one is uncomfortable for everyone. I’ll admit that. I still sit with it myself.
But that discomfort is not the enemy. That discomfort is the work. And the young people who lean into it, who are willing to be honest about what they find, those are the ones who come out of this program fundamentally different. Not just as leaders. As people.
A Word for the Mentors, Parents, and Educators Reading This
You can’t force this process. I want to be honest about that. What you can do is create the conditions for it. You can be someone who models self-reflection. You can ask good questions and actually wait for the answer. You can sit with a young person in the uncertainty instead of rushing to fill the silence with advice.
The most powerful thing a mentor can do is hold space for someone to find their own answer. Not impose the answer. Not lead them to the one you already decided on. Hold space for the real one, even when it takes longer than you expected.
If you have young people in your life, I challenge you to ask them one genuine question this week. Not “how was school.” A real one. What do you believe in? What do you want your life to look like in five years? What’s something you’re proud of that nobody knows about? Then listen. Really listen. Not to respond. To understand. That’s where everything starts.
Where the 6 Circles Begin
Self-awareness is the first circle in the 6 Circles to Purpose Leadership Training because it’s the foundation everything else is built on. You can’t clarify your values without it. You can’t build a vision without it. You can’t serve a community without it.
It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the starting point. And the good news is, it’s a skill. It’s learnable. It’s buildable. It doesn’t require perfection or having everything figured out. It requires honesty and the willingness to keep asking the right questions.
If you’re a young person reading this: you are not too young to start. In fact, starting now is one of the best decisions you will ever make for yourself. I’m telling you that for real.
Ready to go deeper? Explore the 6 Circles to Purpose Leadership Training program and find out how to bring this work to your school, youth organization, or community. Learn more at justinspirementoring.online.
JustINSPIRE Mentoring is a mentoring-based organization focused on helping youth, emerging leaders, and communities grow with clarity, confidence, discipline, purpose, and expression. Learn more at justinspirementoring.online
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