Close your eyes for a second and think back to your first real job. You know the one. Where you sat up a little straighter when the boss walked by, where you read every email three times before sending it, where you just desperately wanted someone to believe you belonged there. That version of you who had ideas but wasn’t entirely sure anyone cared to hear them. That version who sometimes drove home feeling like you’d shrunk a size or two during the day.

We’ve all been there, right? And if you’re leading people now, those memories aren’t just some nostalgic trip down memory lane. They’re actually a manual you’ve been writing without realizing it.

Think about the moments that made your stomach turn. When your manager dismissed your idea without any real explanation, then somehow presented something suspiciously similar in the next meeting as if it had arrived to them in a dream. The projects where you stayed late and poured everything you had into the work, only to get it back covered in edits and absolutely zero conversation about any of it. The meetings where decisions about your actual work got made entirely without you in the room, and you heard about it later from someone who heard it from someone else like the world’s most depressing game of telephone.

Remember how that felt? That very specific cocktail of frustration and helplessness that sits heavy in your chest?
Here’s the part that’s hard to admit. Unless you’re actively working against it, you’re probably doing some version of those exact same things to the people working for you right now.

I know. It stings a little. But it’s not because you’re a bad person or even a bad leader. It’s just how this stuff works. We pick up leadership styles the same way we pick up accents or family recipes. Through osmosis. Through repetition. Your first nightmare of a boss is probably still rattling around in your management approach, whispering terrible advice, and you might not even know they’re there.

So let’s actually do something about it.

Grab a notebook or pull up a blank document and start writing your first list. Everything that was done to you early in your career that made you feel invisible, unheard, or like you didn’t really matter. The micromanaging that screamed you couldn’t be trusted with the simplest task. The feedback so vague you had no idea what good work even looked like anymore. The way your time got treated like it was infinite while their calendar was apparently written in stone. The information they kept to themselves that would’ve made your job so much easier. All of it. Write it down.
This isn’t about holding grudges or keeping a running tally of everyone who wronged you. It’s about building yourself a map of terrain you don’t want to repeat. Think of it as your deeply personal, oddly specific guide to what not to do. When you catch yourself hovering over someone’s shoulder while they’re trying to work, that list will whisper “hey, remember how much you hated this.” When you’re about to hand someone criticism with no actual path forward, that list gives you a gentle nudge.

The real shift happens when you start flipping those frustrations around. Where you felt excluded, you make space for involvement. Where you got silence, you offer explanation. Where someone doubted you, you choose to trust. It sounds simple because it kind of is. But it takes effort. It takes staying awake instead of just running on autopilot.

Now here’s the good part. You need a second list.

This one is for the people who actually got it right. The manager who said “I trust you to handle this, and I’m around if you need me” and genuinely meant both halves of that sentence. The colleague who took twenty minutes out of their day to walk you through the reasoning behind a decision, even though they absolutely didn’t have to. The leader who handed you a project that honestly scared you because they saw potential you hadn’t quite seen in yourself yet. The person who gave you hard feedback but delivered it with so much care and clarity that somehow you left the conversation feeling motivated instead of demolished.

These moments matter. They stick with us for years. They show us what’s possible when leadership is done with real intention and actual heart. That time someone circled back on something small you’d mentioned in passing just to check how it went. The way someone carved out space for your voice in a room full of much louder people. The leader who said out loud “I don’t have all the answers here” and actually invited the team to work through it together.

Write those moments down too. Be detailed about it. Try to capture not just what they did but how it landed with you emotionally. Because those feelings are exactly what you want to create for the people you’re leading now. That sensation of being truly seen. That boost that carries you through the rough weeks. That quiet belief that someone genuinely cares about you growing, not just about what you produce.

Together, these two lists become something like a compass. One shows you where the edge of the cliff is. The other one lights up the better path forward. And the beautiful thing is that neither of these requires some fancy degree or working through a stack of leadership books. They just require you to remember. To sit with what it actually felt like to be on the other side of leadership, both the good and the deeply frustrating.

Spend time with these lists. Let them be a little messy and emotional. Let them stay unfinished. Come back to them when you’ve had a particularly good day or after a conversation that didn’t go the way you hoped. Keep adding to them as you go. Let them remind you that leadership really isn’t about having authority or being at the top of some chart or always having the perfect answer ready. It’s about making a choice, over and over, to be the kind of person you needed back when you were just starting out and everything felt uncertain.

The best leaders aren’t the ones with the most power or the biggest titles. They’re the ones who remember exactly what it felt like to have none of that, and who refuse to make anyone else feel that small. They’re the people who look at their own scars and think “okay, how do I turn this into something that protects someone else.”

That’s the real work. And honestly? It starts with just remembering.