Leadership Reflection: Mirror-Book, Compass, Storm
Real tech mentoring topics
This is anonymized, but it’s straight out of tech lead mentoring.
Leaders don’t break in big moments. They break in small, repeated ones.
A decision arrives too late.
Your week gets hijacked.
You swallow it, push it down, and tell yourself you’ll reflect “when it’s calmer”.
It won’t get calmer by accident. So here are three topics I return to because they create signal, create standards, and keep your team out of the blast radius.
“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” – A stoic principle
1) Self-leadership is honesty, not motivation
You can’t lead your way out of reality by thinking harder. You lead your way out by changing behavior.
This part is personal.
I’ve been a CTO and entrepreneur for 18+ years, and I have never been unpaid for a single month. I never needed to apply for a job in the tech space, and I kept moving into leadership roles in a way that looked “natural” from the outside. It wasn’t magic; it was circumstances, attitude, and one obsession that never left me. I wanted to understand what’s going on around me on a profound level.
People sometimes smile when I dig into “boring” things. But they aren’t boring to me, because that’s where cause and effect hides. That’s where the Muse lives, and where Resistance tries to sneak in.
And the key that made this sustainable for me is simple: self-reflection.
Not vibes.
Not motivation.
A practice.
In tech lead mentoring, this is the moment where things get real. We can spend 45 minutes talking about the current situation, the company pressure, the messy stakeholders, the fear, and the frustration.
That talk matters; it’s a warm-up.
It shows me what you’re currently “made of.”
But then we have to cross the line into work. That’s where a lot of leads get uncomfortable, because the truth shows up: You can’t lead your way out of reality by thinking harder. You lead your way out by changing behavior.
That is why the Mirror-Book becomes part of basically every mentee’s life. Because without a daily mirror, you will keep repeating the same week and calling it a “phase.”
The Mirror-Book
A visible trail of who you have been becoming.
What I push is a physical practice. A small DIN A6 notebook, ideally with a cover, that you can carry. A low-tech pen. That’s it.
You want it with you because leadership doesn’t fail only at the desk. It fails in the car before a meeting. It fails in the five minutes after a call. It fails when you’re outside, and your mind is still spinning.
Over time, it becomes a series of books. A visible trail of who you have been becoming.
This is the point: you write in it daily. You can miss a day. You can be quick on a day that’s genuinely overloaded. But the point is discipline, in the older sense, disciplina, the daily practice of your craft.
💡 And your craft, as a leader, is yourself.
What the Mirror-Book really tests
It quietly answers one question:
Are you lying to yourself or not?
Because your brain will rewrite the story. Especially when you’re tired, stressed, or ashamed. So we create evidence.
And we create it in a way that does not turn into self-hate or denial. In mentoring, I see two failure modes:
People only write down what went wrong, then they train self-hate.
People only write down what went right, then they train denial.
So the Mirror-Book is built around signal + honesty.
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”
– Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations
The daily structure I teach
Keep it short. Don’t write novels. Short notes stick. I mean that, keep it short 😀
Morning (setup):
Date
Signals (1–3 only): the day’s core signals. Not to-dos. Signals force you to choose what matters.
Fitness (mental + physical): one concrete commitment. When Resistance shows up later, you’re not deciding from scratch, you’re either keeping a commitment or breaking it.
Brag (prepare 3 empty bullets): leave them blank, but create the space.
Evening (mirror):
Fill the three Brag bullets:
Where did I follow my signals.
Where did I show up as the leader I claim I want to be.
What did I learn from a failure, and what do I understand now.
Bragging here is not arrogance. It’s radical honesty. Some days you’ll write real wins. Some days you’ll realize you have nothing to brag about. Both are feedback.
Left page (identity + free thoughts):
Write a short note:
Who I want to be today
How do you want to face Resistance?
How do you want to respond when things go off-plan?
What kind of leader are you committed to being in meetings, in Slack, in conflict?
Then use the rest as free space to dump what’s in your head, so you don’t carry it all day.
Next day: Re-read yesterday for 30 seconds. Are you happy with what you see. Did you live up to your commitments or drift? That tiny loop is how you build self-trust.
Rating (0–5): Give the previous day a simple score. Not for others. For pattern recognition over weeks.
Why does this become part of mentoring
Because mentoring isn’t therapy and it isn’t cheerleading. It’s a transformation through repetition.
Signals force focus.
Fitness primes you against Resistance.
Brag turns your day into evidence.
“Who I want to be today” anchors identity before the storm.
The rating closes the loop.
This is quiet work. No one applauds you for filling a Mirror-Book. But over time, it decides whether people follow you because of your title or because of who you actually are.
Mentoring Session: Self-Mirror-Journal – Practise Self Mastery
“Ask yourself the question: Can you be honest with yourself?
2) Purpose building, not motivation; the 5-year compass
Tech leads over-identify with the current week. That’s normal and part of the external agenda we need to follow at least to some point. It’s also how your standards slowly die.
A stressful phase is often a task for that day. Not destiny. Not identity. Not proof that you are “this kind of person”.
If you stay stuck inside short-term chaos, you start negotiating your standards down. You tolerate more. You ship weaker decisions. You call it “being pragmatic”.
So I ask you the same question I ask mentees: Who are you becoming over the next five years?
What do you want your leadership to be known for?
What do you refuse to normalize?
What are you willing to risk to get there?
Because this is the hard part: Feedback is an activity. Intention is a result. If you want something to change, you need an intention that bites. Sometimes that means being willing to put comfort and even a friendly relationship on the table.
Management is often what you’re paid for.
Leadership is what you choose to carry, even when nobody asks you to.
“First say to yourself what you would be; then do what you have to do.”
Takeaway: Write your 5-year direction in one sentence, then choose one boundary this week that proves you mean it.
3) Leading in the storm; protecting the team from late chaos
“Be like the cliff against which the waves continually break; it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.”
Here’s the recurring reality in tech: decisions arrive too late, and execution is still expected to be flawless.
If you let that storm hit your team directly, you’ll get output for a while. Then you’ll lose people, or you’ll keep them and drain their standards. They learn the wrong lesson: quality is optional, commitment means overwork, and “alignment” is a word used to justify pressure.
The leadership move is to absorb. Not to hero it, not to be a martyr; to stand between chaos and your team.
That looks like this:
Translate late change into clear constraints.
Remove emotional noise.
Stop top-down panic from becoming your team’s daily weather.
Set a boundary so it doesn’t become the normal operating mode.
One practical rule I push hard in mentoring: Don’t be deadline-driven as a default. You can talk time and scope, but only inside a quality contract. If quality is not the highest priority, the deadline is not binding.
A simple self-check at the end of the day: Did I dump pressure downward today, or did I turn it into clarity?
Takeaway: The next time a late request hits, don’t forward the stress; translate it into constraints, and ask the one question that changes the plan.
The Fortress vs. The Cell
In this reflection, I’m drawing on a real mentoring session with a leader I recently worked with. I’ll keep the person and context anonymous, because what matters here is not who they are, but what we explored together: how easily “being calm and professional” can turn into emotional isolation, and why we use metaphors like the fortress and the cell in …
Extra reflection: Team alignment is a mechanism, not a perk
Sometimes the strongest alignment move isn’t another meeting. It’s changing the environment.
Offsites, nature, walking, shared challenge; these are not perks. They are mechanisms. Humans calm down outside. Ego drops a notch. People talk differently. Mission lands better.
If you do it, set the mission early. Frame the week as a journey, not “we’re here to annoy you for five days”.
—Adrian
My recommendations for this week:
Ashley Evans: Really good article about procrastination. Must read imo.
Stoic Productivity: A great source of stoic reflections.
Gregor Ojstersek: One of my favourite engineering leadership newsletters.
Thank-you for sharing my article on procrastination, Adrian. That's so kind of you. I'm enjoying reading this article of yours. This image is going to stay in my mind: “Be like the cliff against which the waves continually break; it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.”