Leading with Love: The Foundation of Self Trust

We live in a world that is trying to convince us of a few things:

• People are fundamentally self-interested

• Cynicism is sophistication

• Efficiency is the highest virtue

• Anything that slows you down, including your own humanity, is a liability

• No one is really trustworthy

• The system is broken beyond repair

If we believe all of this then we also begin to believe that the only rational response is to protect yourself, optimize yourself, and get yours while you can.

The medical system has its own version of this story, conditioned through the harsh training and traumas without appropriate debriefs. And so we learn, over years and decades, to lead from armor instead of from love. From obligation instead of from calling. From endurance instead of from meaning.

And then one day we look up and realize we are exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. And we wonder what happened to the person who chose this work.

Here is what I know, from my own life and from sitting with people at the end of theirs:

I know this because I have watched people at the threshold of death reach for love. They don’t grasp for productivity or care about their metrics. They look for the people they love and the moments that mattered. That is what is real.

Love is not soft. Love is not naive. Strip love out of leadership and what remains is just power over people.

But here is the question I hear underneath that, the one I have asked myself many times: how do we love more without being consumed by it? How do we keep our hearts open without handing them over?

The answer lies in reconceptualizing what it means to love fully. For most of us that starts with accepting the first one who deserves your love is YOU. Offering more love to yourself first is not selfishness. It is the only way the rest of it works.

Love, when we understand it fully, is not the self-sacrificing, boundaryless giving that our culture has sold us. Love can hold a limit. Love can contain. Love can look someone in the eye and say: I believe you are capable of more than this. Love can step back and let someone make their own choices, even ones you wouldn’t make, even ones that may not serve them well, because love also honors autonomy. Love respects the dignity of another person’s struggle.

Love holds paradox. It does not always mean harmony. It does not always mean peace. But it is always available. Even in the hardest rooms. Even at the hardest bedsides. Even in the hardest seasons of your own life.

This is the expansive view of love we are working toward together.

If this doesn’t feel accessible right now, that makes sense. The world has spent a long time teaching us that loving is dangerous. That it costs too much. That it makes us weak.

Here is where you start. One easy step you can do right now. 

The THRIVE Scale

 

It is a short self-assessment that gives you a scored snapshot across eight domains: your sense of identity beyond the credential, your habits and patterns, your nervous system capacity, your experience of joy and restoration, your inner voice and self-trust, your relationships and support, your integrity under institutional pressure, and your vision for what you are building.

The scale is not a clinical instrument. It is not meant to diagnose or measure. It is meant to create the honest snapshot that everything else depends on. Because you cannot navigate somewhere better if you do not know where you are starting from.

 Download the Thrive Scale

It takes about five minutes to complete. I recommend doing it right now, before you get pulled away by someone else's "urgent" need. Give yourself this time. 

This is the part nobody talks about. Most self-assessments tell you where you are and then leave you there. What happens next matters.

Here is how I suggest you use whatever you find.

First, receive it without judgment. Your score is not a grade. It is a map coordinate. It tells you where you are starting, not where you are going or what you are worth.

Second, notice where you are surprised. If you scored significantly lower in a domain than you expected, that gap is information. It often means you have been overriding that particular signal for a while. That is not a failure. That is useful data.

Third, identify the one domain that would make the most difference if it shifted. Not the one where you are lowest. Not the one you feel most guilty about. The one that, if it changed, would have the most downstream impact on the rest.

That is where to put your attention first.

A few things I tell clients when they are in the thick of it, not theorizing about a better season, but actively running low.

You do not need to solve anything this week. You need to survive it in a way that does not make next week worse.

The minimum viable practice when you are depleted is this: one thing that is yours. Not for your patients, not for your family, not for your team. One small thing that belongs to you. It does not have to be meaningful or restorative. It just has to be claimed.

And please: stop adding to your list. If you are already in deficit, this is not the week to start a new habit. This is the week to hold the ones you have and give yourself some grace about the ones you are dropping.

Next month, we will go deeper on Step Two: Reclaiming Identity.

If Step One is about knowing where you are, Step Two is about remembering who you are. Those turn out to be very different questions.

Until then, take five minutes with the THRIVE Scale. It is a small act of self-honesty. And that is exactly how this kind of change begins.