Whose voice is making your decisions?

There is an image I keep coming back to.

Picture a sovereign of the old world. Every power vested in them. And around them, a council: the astrologer, the physician, the general, the priest, the treasurer, the logician. Each one an expert. Each one with an opinion. Each one, if we are honest, with an interest.

The sovereign listens to all of them. And then the sovereign decides. Alone.

I love that image because it describes something I see in almost every leader in transition, and something I have lived myself. When the ground moves, we gather counsel. We should. But somewhere along the way, the counsel starts to make the decisions for us.

The consultant’s framework becomes the strategy. The loudest board member becomes the direction. The voice in our own head that sounds suspiciously like a parent, a former boss or a culture we grew up in becomes the final word. And we tell ourselves we decided, when really we deferred.

I call the alternative inner authority.

It is not arrogance, and it is not ignoring advice. It is the discipline of hearing every counsel, then returning to your own centre and choosing from there. It is knowing the difference between advice and a decision dressed up as advice.

There are a few questions I have learned to ask of any counsel I am given. What is their exposure if this goes wrong? What is their interest if I follow it? Would they say the same thing if I could not pay them? And the one that matters most: does this advice leave me more able to decide for myself, or less? Good counsel increases your capacity. Poor counsel quietly takes it.

Then the harder questions, which are about me. Am I deciding from fear, or exhaustion, or the wish to be proved right? Is this relief, or is it genuinely settled? Would I still choose this in a week?

But inner authority is only half of it.

The sovereign in my image is not an owner. Every serious tradition of leadership I know holds that power is held on behalf of others. The realm is not the ruler’s property. The moment a leader starts treating it as theirs, they stop being a steward and start becoming something far more dangerous.

That is stewardship, and I think it is the most important thing a leader in transition can hold on to. Because transitions hand us power. A bigger role, a new board seat, a business that is suddenly growing. Sometimes they take power away. Either way, power shifts, and how we hold it decides what we become.

I have spent most of my career in rooms where power was being exercised, in audit, in risk, in the boardroom. I have seen what happens when the accounting stops. Very rarely is it a villain. Much more often it is a good person who slowly stopped asking whose interests they were serving.

So here is the question I would put to you, and I put it to myself regularly: are you using your position to climb, or to lift?

And if you are in the middle of a transition right now, try this. Write down the last important decision you made. Then ask, honestly: whose voice made it?

If the answer is not yours, that is not a failure. It is the beginning of finding your inner authority again.

Talk through your next move: a free 30-minute conversation. No obligation, and you don’t have to figure it out alone.