The 13th-century Persian poet Rumi wrote almost nothing directly about leadership — yet the Masnavi contains one of the sharpest observations about it: that the person everyone turns to in a crisis is rarely the one who has rehearsed authority, but the one who has stopped needing it. This maps surprisingly well onto what psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan called 'security operations' — the subtle, constant behaviors people use to manage anxiety about how they're perceived. Most leadership failures aren't failures of strategy or skill. They're security operations caught in the act: the unnecessary explanation, the meeting hijacked by the boss's nervous humor, the decisive tone used not because a decision is clear but because uncertainty feels unbearable. Rumi's image for this is the reed flute (the ney) — it makes music precisely because it has been hollowed out. Influence flows through the space you've cleared in yourself, not through the substance you've accumulated. Today, notice once when you're about to add something — a justification, a qualification, a display — and see what happens if you don't.

Name a recent moment when you justified a decision to someone who hadn't actually questioned it — what were you actually protecting?

Drawing from Sufi Mysticism / Interpersonal Psychology — Rumi (Masnavi, Book 1) and Harry Stack Sullivan (The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, 1953)