by Tim Gallagher, author of “The Quiet Weight of Ownership”
If your child’s second-grade teacher handed back a test with a big red “F” and wrote, “How can you be so stupid? We’ve gone over this again and again and you still keep making the same mistakes,” you’d come unglued. You’d be in the principal’s office before lunch demanding to know how anyone could talk to a kid that way.
And yet, some business owners allow a voice in their own head to talk to them exactly like that.
“No one is harder on me than me,” people say, almost like it’s something to be proud of.
It isn’t.
There’s a difference between being self-aware and being self-destructive, and some leaders cross that line without realizing it. You do need to be honest with yourself. You do need to look at what’s working and what isn’t. But there’s a harsh judge with a voice in your head that doesn’t stop at honesty. It turns every mistake into evidence. Every setback into a verdict. It doesn’t correct you — it beats you up.
And that voice comes at a cost.
If every decision gets replayed in your head as a failure, you stop trusting your judgment. You hesitate. You overthink. You reject opportunities because you don’t want to feel failure again. . Your team feels it too. They see your hesitation. They recognize your lack of conviction. And over time, the culture shifts. People either become cautious and quiet or they look for someone else to blame.
It’s hard enough carrying a business without dragging that voice along with you.
The alternative isn’t arrogance. It isn’t pretending everything is fine. Rather, it’s something much simpler and much harder at the same time. It’s being able to say, “That didn’t work. I understand why. I’ll do it differently next time,” and then actually move on.
The conversation in your head matters more than most people realize, because you carry it into every interaction, every decision. If that voice is constantly telling you you’re behind, you’re failing, you’re not enough, it shows up in the choices you make, whether you want it to or not.
That’s one voice.
There are others.
The Scorekeeper
One of the most common is the voice that keeps score.
Most of us grew up hearing some version of “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” And then we spend most of our adult lives doing the opposite — watching the scoreboard.
Revenue. Growth. Titles. Awards. Who’s ahead? Who’s behind?
I spent a long time paying attention to what I’ll call the outer scorecard. How am I doing compared to my competitors? Where do I rank? Am I winning?
The problem with that way of thinking is that there’s never a finish line. There’s always someone doing more, earning more, growing faster, attracting more attention. If that’s the game you’re playing, you won’t win. You only get to chase.
Some business owners let someone else be the official scorer in their life. Sometimes it’s a competitor. Sometimes it’s a boss. Sometimes it’s a parent or a partner or a father-in-law whose voice you continue to hear years later. And sometimes it’s just the vague sense that you’re supposed to be further along than you are.
That’s a tough way to live.
At some point, you have to decide what matters to you and how you measure it. Not in a motivational way. In a practical way. What kind of leader do I want to be? What kind of company do I want to run? What standards truly matter in my life?
Because if you don’t answer those questions for yourself, someone else will answer them for you. And you probably won’t like the result.
There’s another voice that shows up for a lot of owners. It’s quieter, but it’s more unsettling.
Imposter Syndrome
It’s the voice that says, “I don’t really know what I’m doing. And sooner or later, someone will figure that out.”
What surprised me over the years wasn’t that people felt this way. It was who felt this way. Not beginners. Not people who were obviously struggling. I heard it from people who had built vibrant companies. People with strong teams, healthy revenue, years of experience. From the outside, they looked completely in control.
From the inside, they felt like everything was falling apart.
For a long time, I thought the job was to talk them out of that feeling. Point to their track record. Show them the numbers. Remind them of everything they had achieved.
It didn’t work.
Because that voice isn’t about facts. It’s about what growth feels like from the inside.
When you’re doing something you’ve already mastered, you feel confident. When you’re doing something new — when the stakes are higher, when the decisions matter more, when there isn’t a clear playbook — you don’t feel confident. You feel uncertain.
That doesn’t mean you’re unqualified. It usually means you’ve been promoted to a new job with greater responsibility.
The mistake is thinking that confidence should come first. It usually comes later. Sometimes much later.
So the question becomes: What do you do with that feeling?
You don’t ignore it. You don’t try to crush it. And you don’t let it make the decisions for you.
You acknowledge it and keep going.
You make the best decision you can with the information you have. You stay in the conversation. You learn as you go. And every once in a while, you look back and realize that things that once overwhelmed you now are manageable.
That’s growth. It doesn’t feel like progress when you’re in it. But it leaves a trail behind you, where you look back at where you were and then understand how you arrived at where you are.
Never Enough
Then there’s the voice I know best.
The one that says, “What’s next?”
In the spring of 1994, a reporter at the newspaper where I was editor won the Pulitzer Prize. If you’ve spent any time in journalism, you know what that means. It’s the top of the mountain. People spend entire careers chasing the Pulitzer.
Peers from everywhere in the newspaper industry called. They wrote letters to us. They visited the newsroom to say congratulations. That night, my wife orchestrated a fantastic dinner with close friends to celebrate.
It should have been a great moment.
And in a lot of ways, it was.
But I remember sitting there, listening to everyone talk, and thinking one thing over and over.
What’s next?
Not in a curious way. Not in a strategic way. In a restless, dissatisfied way that pushed everything else out of the room. It took a moment that should have felt complete and turned it into something unfinished.
That voice followed me for years.
Sure, it pushed me. It helped me achieve in ways I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. It also made it almost impossible to enjoy them.
Because there was not another Pulitzer Prize in my newsroom.
Later in my career, when I was running a newspaper, I set aggressive goals for our operation. We performed well. By most measures, very well. But we didn’t hit the profit number I had set as the goal. And because of that, I was fired.
Afterward, my wife asked me a simple question.
“Why did you set the goals that high in the first place?”
The honest answer was that I wanted to out-perform all of my colleagues. I wanted to prove I was better.
That’s the mindset of the hyper-achiever.
That mindset tells you that whatever you’ve done isn’t enough. That the only thing that matters is the next result. The next win. The next comparison.
And like the other voices, it can look useful on the surface. It drives you. It keeps you moving. It gets results.
Until it doesn’t.
A Horizon You Cannot Reach
Because if that voice is running the show, nothing ever feels like enough. You don’t find the daily satisfaction that lets you enjoy the work. You don’t find a moment to pause and to recognize what you’ve built.
You just keep moving the line, further and further away, where it’s harder to reach.
Champion golfer Scottie Scheffler is an example of this. In an interview a while back, after winning a tournament, he told a reporter that he felt nearly incapable of finding joy in the moment — because he was already stressing over how he’d perform the next week in the next tournament.
It took me a long time to understand that ambition and satisfaction are not opposites. You can want more and still appreciate what you have. You can continue growing without treating every moment like a stepping stone to the next one.
The challenge is not to eliminate these voices.
The challenge is to recognize them.
Knowing when the critic has taken over. Knowing when you’re measuring yourself against the wrong scoreboard. Knowing when doubt is a clue you’ve stepped into something bigger. Knowing when the drive to achieve is starting to cost you more than it’s giving you.
Because whether you realize it or not, those voices shape your decisions every day.
And the way you lead others is, in many ways, a reflection of how you lead yourself.
A Few Questions to Ponder
You don’t need to answer these quickly. They work better if you sit with them for a while.
- Which voice shows up most often for me right now — the critic, the comparer, the imposter, or the achiever who is never satisfied?
- Where in my life or business am I letting someone else keep score?
- What is one success I moved past too quickly without really allowing myself to feel it?
- When doubt shows up, do I treat it as a warning or as a sign that I’m facing new challenges?
Tim Gallagher is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor, former newspaper publisher and executive coach with more than four decades of leadership experience. A longtime contributor to Editor & Publisher, he advises CEOs and business owners on leadership, organizational culture and developing talent. He is the author of “The Quiet Weight of Ownership”.
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