Haven’t you heard? The media is having a ball with a very unlikely story that has questioned every authority in Spain. A mysterious twenty-year-old we’ve called “little Nicolas” claims to have been involved in critical State affairs under orders from the CNI — The National Center of Intelligence — and the Spanish Vice-President herself.

What’s most surprising, however, is that he made it all the way to national television last Saturday evening, becoming a global trending topic on social networks. Everybody wants a say in the matter of separating fiction from fact. Huge laughs are an added bonus! I kid you not.

This story has been on every credible journal’s cover for the last month. The boy has been photographed with every politician and business man in Spain. He managed to get himself into carefully planned and protected celebrations of all sorts, including our King’s proclamation ceremony, and he got driven around by Madrid security agents in official cars. Until he was detained by six undercover agents who supposedly belong to police internal affairs.

Once the giddy giggles stop, we have to ask ourselves: is he the victim of powerful fantasies or did he actually build the fantastic power many attributed to him? I’m fascinated by this whole phenomenon. On one hand I love our Spanish sense of humor. We Spanish can be acutely funny and creative in our sarcasm when we gossip on the radio, television and social networks about stories like this one. But on the other hand I wonder, like most of us, what is real and what isn’t.

To each of us the plausibility of little Nicolas’s story is entirely different, which tells us that our own interpretation of reality is not sound proof either. It’s where many, many leaders have failed in the past. And where many yet will fall to ruin in the future. Because a leader is in charge of formulating a strategic vision for himself and his followers.

Whether he is the father of a small family or the CEO of a Fortune 500 multi-billion dollar organization, any mistake in his interpretation of the challenges and realities he faces can cost his followers everything. In battle it can cost them their lives. In our world of economic wars, it can cost many families their freedom to live with dignity for life. A leader’s interpretation of the opportunities and threats in his market is the foundation of all his followers’ future wellbeing.

But as the saying goes, there are always three versions of what happened: his version, her version, and what really went down. Reality is not what we think it is. Another great pearl of wisdom says that the truth is nothing more than a big lie we’ve all agreed to call true. Every human conflict in the world has two sides who can’t agree on what the truth is. Our individual perception of the world around us drags us into fights and conflicts on every level throughout our lives: family disputes, business partner fall outs, political divorces, organizational strikes…we can drag them out as long as money, power and technology allow us to.

Or we can learn to take a step back and question our own perception of things. I remember a time when I rarely questioned what I thought about how things were. I grilled everybody else, of course. But I never really challenged myself. I was sure that I was right. And yet I wasn’t. Failure taught me many times how wrong I was about so many things. Ten or fifteen years later I think that the biggest indicator of my ‘rightness’ is how often I step back and ask myself if I’m getting it all wrong again.

If I’m being fooled by my hidden wants and unconscious filters of perception. If I’m making a move out of fear or out of grounded serenity. If you ever found yourself leading a bunch of people to disaster, you know the guilt of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who, as a German medieval legend says, led children out of the city to be drowned. You ask yourself with incredulity how you could have been so fooled by your own tune that you never even considered that you might guiding your team, or your family and friends’ investments, or your entire corporation, to certain economic death.

And the response is always the same: we are fooled by our own fantastic tune when we use it to escape from our own ugly emotions. We don’t ask ourselves if our excel sheets are too optimistic because we’re scared of contemplating a less positive scenario. We convince ourselves that our business plans have to be right because we don’t want to accept how angrily important other people’s approval is to us. We run into futuristic fantasies because we’re running away from something in our past…something that is still present in the emotions and impulses our physical body briefly betrays when nobody’s looking.

We buy into fantastic strategy when we can’t face the intensity of deep ugliness in our own person. There’s no amount of money, success or power, however, to protect us from the stuff inside ourselves. It always, always, always catches up with us. When I’m done giggling at the spectacle, I feel bad for little Nicolas.

His glazed eyes, enlarged pupils and unexpressive face would raise an eyebrow in any savvy observer. They are not the features of a grounded, realistic young man. Sadly he’s managed to hold on to unlikely interpretations of events that may cost him and his family very dearly. The legal and reputational consequences of his last month of choices, declarations and actions may follow them all for many decades to come. The best indicator of mental health I know looks at the distance between a person’s wannabe talk and his real walk.

The gap between a family’s or company’s official self-description and the secret burdened reality that nobody dares discuss is a telling sign of problems. As more and more national institutions publish statements to deny absolutely everything this young man has said to the media, it becomes blatantly apparent that the gap between his talk and his walk is much wider than most.

Still, mental health is not an on-off button. It’s a continuum of shades that go from spick ‘n span healthy white to mentally ill black. Nobody is in the white. At least not anybody I know. Despite what our mirrors may tell us when we beg for a proof of reality every morning.

We’re all struggling with our very own shade of grey: Am I crazy? Does anybody else see what I see? Should I trust my gut or should I take my friends’ advice? Leading others is a huge responsibility. If we ask others to follow our dreams of power and success, we must conquer the hidden powers of our own fantasies first.

The next time you question your mirror in the morning, look at the ugly part. That’s how it will lose all fantastic power over you.

Last Friday we concluded the very first Leadership SPA (Smart Power Academy). We had 33 women leaders that range from VP’s of multibillion-dollar companies to founders of growing businesses. We had senior managers and directors and engineers and lawyers. We had women who are at the top of their careers as well as those who are looking for new starts. But by the end of the 2½ days we had one powerful team of inspired women leaders. They were united by the trust that comes from sharing mutual vulnerabilities and genuine aspirations.

They were united by the common knowledge that women have a different source of power then men and that amplifying that power can change not only their lives and their work but also the world. Yes I would have to say…. it was mind blowing. And that’s what the SPA is really designed to do…blow up old-thinking minds with a new mindset of Smart Power. Smart Power is a potent synthesis of the best parts of hard power (goal setting and accountability) and the best parts of soft power (empathy and teamwork) that enable great things to be achieved.

Our most respected president, Abraham Lincoln was a master of Smart Power. So was Mother Teresa. Smart Power is the tool set virtually every leader has used who has accomplished great things without brute force… often without any external assets or institutional power base. Smart Power begins with the new mental model of how people are inspired, directed, and developed in the pursuit of a common purpose. But just a new way of thinking about leadership is not enough to bring about fast results. And fast results are what we need today.

What’s also needed are very specific science-based leadership behaviors that research has proven to both focus attention and ignite effort. The result is positive innovation. These are innovations that address non-trivial problems. For business leaders it’s what fuels high-growth, high-margin and high-energy brands by creating value that actually has human value. For social leaders it dissolves the false choices most often advanced that pit the common good against personal freedoms…left vs. right. Smart Power is not the leadership of compromise but rather the leadership of optimize. Sounds great, right? It is.

And brain research creates an interesting wrinkle. Women are far more likely to quickly understand and adopt Smart Power as a way of leading because they’re able to deal with complexity and resolve short-term urgencies with long-term success. What inspires me is that women’s brains are more capable of thinking about money and meaning in the same thought. Perhaps that’s why women are hugely more successful at being micro-entrepreneurs around the world than men. Women everywhere tend to go into business or build their careers to serve their families, community and society rather than most chest–beating males who crave success to prove they’re the baddest gorillas in the jungle.

So if women are better wired for leadership in today’s world what is holding them back? Unfortunately it’s their brain design. Women are not only wired for complex leadership they are also designed to help, solve problems, and create harmony. This makes women vulnerable to spending their vital energy helping other people achieve their goals. But that’s not what’s needed. We don’t need high-capacity women like Sheryl Sandberg wasting their time helping Mark Zuckerberg get richer by making Facebook an advertising platform. She’s “leaning in” to the wrong thing. What we know from social science studies about what creates deep life satisfaction is that you will never be happy spending your life achieving other people’s goals. And that leads us to the one thing each one of us must know if we are going to make our difference and enjoy our lives. It is so simple. You must KNOW what your true self desires and say NO to everything else.

The first law of leadership is that you must have a personal vision of a desired future. You must have an agenda. Great leaders do not derive vision from the collective minds of confused people. Great leaders nurture visions that come from the inner reflection of their intrinsic selves. I am not just making it up because it sounds inspiring. We now know from research that daily self-reflection on the long-term difference that you want to make leads you to be crystal-clear on what’s most important to you. That clarity will enable you to see opportunities that were previously invisible. Your vision will also inspire you to learn what you need to learn and do what you need to do to bring your vision to reality.

That clarity will also motivate you to seek others who are aligned with your vision to form a dedicated team of people with diverse strengths who will do the impossible. This is exactly the path of Mother Teresa, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hannah Jones (Nike), Beth Comstock (GE) and the Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Of course we all know that great leaders have great visions. What’s difficult for women is to give themselves permission and to take the time to nurture their true selves so that they can “hear” what their hearts and minds most desire.

Neuro-science confirms that women are wired for self-doubt and self-editing that makes their confidence leak out of their minds like a bucket with holes in the bottom. Fortunately this leakage can be plugged and clarity and conviction can be gained. What’s required is self-awareness and courage. At the SPA we did a TRUE Self exercise that combines the feedback of others with a simple understanding of your unique design, drives and desires. Liberation begins when you understand that you are perfectly designed to make your difference. This not only elevates how you approach your work but also the work you choose to do. This becomes the basis of ME, Inc., which is your 40-year career. After all, we spend about 100,000 hours of our lives working, sometimes for money other times for meaning, so it makes no sense to waste your talent and sweat.

Of course it’s true, sometimes we have to work for money to make sure the gears of our life don’t grind to a halt. But as I promised all the participants, research confirms that you can change virtually everything in your life in 24 months. So the question is if you do nothing new will a life you’re living two years from now be the life you most desire? Will the work that you’ll be doing be the work your designed to do? Are you willing to invest in yourself enough to change what you need to change and grow in ways you need to grow? To make it simple, the one thing we all need to be both happy and successful is to be clear and calm.

Clear on what our TRUE Self is asking for and calm so that we are not flooded with stress and negative emotions that deplete our power. Throughout the Smart Power Academy we took time to exercise, meditate, reflect, and write about what new models and new mindsets were challenging us to do. We practiced what it means to be both passionate and calm simultaneously. And we formed Genius Circles of mutual support to help sustain the new commitments that were made.

As we reviewed the feedback from all the participants this morning what made the SPA extraordinary was the combination of self-insight and practical, research-based easy-to-do leadership behaviors that turbocharge women’s confidence, amplify their influence, inspire innovation, and drive meaningful results…all without table- banging insistence or a trace of whining. It’s true, all the leadership tips and processes are useful yet we should never forget that leadership blossoms from the soil of our souls. Research overwhelmingly confirms that great leaders, the leaders we most admire are clear and calm.

They KNOW what’s important and say NO to everything else. It’s knowing that creates clarity and saying NO that creates calm. The feedback from the SPA experience was overwhelmingly positive. My team just had a meeting that ended an hour ago. These inspired women are creating a plan to attract a national sponsor and worldwide outreach to teach Smart Power to women and girls around the world.

Hell, we might even teach a few men! If you want to know more, have some ideas or know someone who can help just send us an e-mail. In the meantime… Get CLEAR and be CALM.

I’ve been working on my new company’s vision and mission these last few weeks. No other strategic exercise takes you deeper into unexpected soul searching than this one, right? Funnily enough, I’ve learned that what I’m doing with my life is all about recycling. Recycling leadership worldwide, to be more exact. I’m even more amazed when I remind myself that the greatest trigger of my evolution into a radically new approach to leadership training was a man I met four years ago. Javier was recycling plastic waste into fashion accessories. He was grieving the slow painful death of his first, fifteen-year-old company.

He was both a crazy fool and a brave, awe inspiring genius. He still is, in fact. The day I met him I was stirred by a very deep calling to follow his streak. I too wanted to recycle the world’s trash, even if I didn’t actually manufacture anything tangible like a handbag or a pair of shoes. My trade was coaching. Intangible as they come! After my first executive development firm went belly up in 2009 I told myself I was done with building organizations.

I had tried it, learned a lot about myself, and now I wanted to be free to coach, train, write and create. I no longer wanted to be tied down by a team of people looking to me for direction, organization, motivation, yaddi-yaddi-yaddi-ya… But the future is full of surprises. “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans” is what they say, isn’t it? So yes, plenty of laughs were heard in Heaven that day. Because here I am, five years later, building away! And so I found myself drawing up power-point slides and drafting mission statements on post-it notes last week to define what it is we’re trying to achieve.

A last minute quick-and-dirty video-pitch for the upcoming TEDxCibeles event, themed “I’mpossible”, jolted me to my end result: We are recycling leadership worldwide. I am recycling!!! I’m cleaning out all the impurities from the limited, polluted interpretations of leadership our modern society puts up with: unlimited thirst for money, expectations of chronic success and corrupt addictions to power. I’m surfacing the primal origins and aboriginal understandings of leadership which were present among our earliest ancestors, and are still practiced by animals in Nature.

Yet when I insist on embracing the wild within ourselves, however, I’m not inventing anything new. I’m simply uncovering the timeless wisdom hidden underneath all our mind trash.

My first fundamental innovation is to democratize leadership: We are all leaders. Leadership is not about a few guys at the top of society. It concerns every human being. No matter your age, your gender, your race or your status in society as you read these lines. Every time you take responsibility for another person’s results, you are acting as a leader. Every parent leads his children. Every daughter leads her sick parents through hospitals. Every friend leads colleagues when driving them home. And because every human being is designed to lead, wherever you go, every other species on the planet will treat you as a leader. Whether you notice or not. My second innovation is to bring the body into executive conversations about leadership: It doesn’t happen in your head. It’s in your body. Your body talks to other bodies in order to decide who is in charge before you have time to come up with something interesting to say.

Your body is still a mammal animal. It is designed by millions of years of evolution to synchronize behavior immediately with other human bodies in order to survive every minute. But the true beauty of my challenging message lies in the third realization I’m about to share with you now: Even if you fully agree with the two ideas I just laid out for you, we are still far away from finding the authentic leader buried inside you. Because this definition of leadership is not something you understand with your head. It’s something you feel with your heart. And learning from the heart is a whole other battle in itself. For years I asked myself how the heck I was going to get executives to understand what I was talking about.

For years I feared I might be a crazy fool myself! Which is why I found myself engaging the invaluable help of our beloved Mother Nature. I discovered that horses, and wild dolphins, and silent treks up beautiful mountains overlooking magnificent canyons and rivers had an irresistible way of pulling up a wilder version of who we are. Nature brings out the powerful wild animal that still is the human body. Huge wild animals and open breath-taking landscapes make us cry, or swallow back our tears. They make us jump with joy, or shudder with fear.

They uncover all the impurities and trash we unknowingly carry in our hearts as they awaken our bodies out of civilized sleep. They train us exactly the same way youngsters were prepared to become adult warriors in tribal rituals all over the world. I’m not inventing anything new. I’m simply reminding us all what leadership used to be like thousands of years ago for humans, and still is for many animals.

Like every ancestral Shaman depicted in awe-inspiring pictures tens of thousands of years ago, the world is a perfect mirror image of what you carry in your heart. All you need to recycle your leadership is to focus on your body and learn its wild language of emotions, instincts and impulses. And if you can’t hear it or can’t understand it, you can always go back into Nature to feel how animals and trees shake you out of your unfeeling comfort zone, back through time to discover your ancestral animal self. All this may sound crazy to you. Trust me.

I’ve been called crazy by so many people so many times that I’m beginning to like it! Javier and I love to fight over who’s craziest of the two. Every week somebody tells me that it can’t be done, that my company is too hard to build. And yet, here I am, drawing comfort from that iconic ad campaign Steve Jobs orchestrated in the late nineties, when he came back to Apple to remind everybody, his own employees included, of what his company had always been about: Here’s to the crazy ones…think different.

You see, for a very, very, very long time, everything about my life was impossible and nothing was possible. In a way that was impossible to explain, let alone understand. So if I’m here writing to you today it’s because I don’t take no for an answer. I never give up. As long as there is a breath of air in my lungs or a beat in my recycled heart, I’m-possible. And so are you.

Sheryl Sandberg popularized this expression recently when talking about women in business. It was such a simple and powerful way to put career wisdom into words that the expression grew into a bestselling book worldwide. Well, I’m going to borrow Sheryl’s expression today to write about how women AND men fail to lean in to their own leadership growth.

Spain is quite the example of leaning back, looking away, bending down and ducking under any visible table within a ten mile radius when anybody starts talking about self-awareness, introspection and growth. I often wonder what I’m still doing here, in a market where an overgrown coaching offer makes demand look like a teeny-weeny, shy little kitten.

Lots of executives take up coaching careers when they lose their jobs. But they all want to coach somebody else. It’s tough finding an executive who is serious about getting coached. Maybe I’m a little suicidal. Maybe I love a difficult challenge. Maybe it’s just my destiny. Whatever the reason, I still haven’t given up after ten really hard years of executive coaching and leadership training in this country. Of course I work a lot outside of Spain too. I might be dead otherwise. Still, nothing builds purpose and tenacity like repeated rejection.

And Spain is not the only country where top executives lean far back from their own leadership growth. Sandberg’s core message is inspiring to women because it states an obvious truth. If you take yourself off the table nobody else is going to bother to keep you involved in the game. Women lean back out of fear that they won’t be good enough, smart enough, strong enough. It’s not that different to what keeps executives away from serious self-evaluation and soul searching. Both men and women avoid conversations, events and people who confront them with scary shadows inside themselves.

Both men and women leaders fear they won’t be good enough, smart enough, or strong enough to overcome their own inner darkness. The problem is, if you don’t lean in to your own self-improvement, you are also erasing plenty of unsuspected business opportunities from your future career.

If you don’t proactively search the best possible version of yourself, nobody else can do it for you. And what’s worse, nobody under you will try to do it either. You will nurture a company culture of avoidance, lazy complacence and over-inflated egos. The more you fear who you really are, the bigger an ego you need to hide yourself when facing your colleagues.

So how do CEOs get from “not me” to “me first” in leadership development efforts? In my experience timing is key. An old oriental saying says that “when the student is ready, the master appears”, and I have found it to be true lots of times, both as student and as master. Clients who fall into my hands are seriously looking for intense awakenings. People who appear in my life, in fact, and stay in it, are also in search of something meaningful.

It’s very humbling to accept that something inside you is somehow operating on others, despite you and whatever it is you may think you’re doing. So I do strongly believe there is some kind of synchronicity or magic randomness bringing the right coaches to the right executives at the right moment. But if you have to push a CEO to show up to his executive coaching sessions, you’re probably too early for him or her.

Everybody needs to build up some personal strength before looking at ugliness. This specific kind of strength can’t be imposed by will power. It can’t be forced, pushed or bullied. It’s not hard. It’s a kind of strength that is soft and relaxed. Unwavering and often unbreakable. It comes from years of painful experience. It is built by suffering the consequences of your own repeated mistakes again and again and again. Every executive has a minimum required number of erroneous repetitions before he’s ready to question himself. The distance between “not me” and “me first” is paved by an unknown number of well-known falls.

This is a very interesting fact of behavioral change that very few coaches or therapists dare to realize or admit: repetition is absolutely necessary to growth and sustainable change. We need X number of blind repetitions in order to accept that we are doing something weird, and start observing ourselves. Then we need Y number of aware, self-analyzing repetitions in order to gradually undo the pattern altogether. And nobody knows how much X+Y will be. We always wish for a low number. We’re often exasperated by how high a figure it turns out to be.

Any coach or therapist who pretends to reduce a client’s number of repetitions is acting out of an over-inflated ego. No master can impact his student’s learning path. No master should. Learning and growing as a leader is not a destination. It’s a journey full of emotion that makes the student strong, interesting, seasoned, humane. And youthfully attractive, I might add. Exhaustion, frustration, fear of internal shadows and grief over past mistakes are all crucial ingredients of that unique learning journey. Facing and overcoming these demons is the mark of true, irresistible leaders. Executives who don’t lean in, will never be inspiring or visionary or worth following in any way.

They will need plenty of botox and hours at the gym to get any attention at all. ;-)! Yesterday I was discussing this notion with a colleague and I wondered out loud what Spain was repeating in order to get from “not me” to “me first”. He sent me a quote attributed to XIXth-century German aristocrat and statesman Otto von Bismarck, also known as the Iron Chancellor: “The strongest nation in the world is undoubtedly Spain. They’ve always tried to destroy themselves though they’ve never been successful. The day they stop trying, they will once again lead the world!”

Maybe this is why I’m still here, coaxing Spanish leaders to lean in to their leadership growth. Maybe I’m just a suicidal coach acting out of an over-inflated ego. But maybe, just maybe, we’re in for a really wild ride of leadership growth in this beloved country of mine. God knows we keep repeating our patterns like crazy.

We must be getting very, very strong. Lean in, my friends! I guarantee you won’t look back.