The Loneliness of Leadership: When Having Everyone Around You Still Leaves No One to Talk to

Again, autumn. 1 September 2026 — the first day of meteorological autumn. Autumn arrives quietly. The light changes. Evenings begin closing earlier. Trees start releasing what they have carried through summer. There is something naturally reflective about this season — perhaps even melancholic, although melancholy does not necessarily mean unhappiness. It can be an invitation to depth. And perhaps there is another way to see autumn: not as something finishing, but as something returning. Again, autumn. Again, leaves falling. Again, darker evenings. Again, the apparent ending that already carries another beginning within it.

What if we were told that we are living forever? Would we experience autumn differently? Would falling still mean ending? Would ageing mean disappearing? Would we hold so tightly to titles, identities, positions and the image we have constructed if existence itself were experienced as continuity? I am not proposing an answer. I like the question precisely because it does not require one. Perhaps again is enough. Again autumn. Again winter. Again spring. Again life. And somewhere within all these changing identities — leader, CEO, parent, partner, nationality, profession, age — there remains the one who is experiencing them.

There is even a small measurable seasonal shift in how we connect. Research from England found that 58% of people reported chatting with neighbours beyond simply saying hello at least once or twice a week in spring and summer, compared with 53% in autumn and winter. High anxiety was also slightly more common during autumn and winter. So perhaps the first day of autumn is an appropriate moment to talk about something we often prefer not to discuss: loneliness. And particularly, loneliness at the top.

According to British Red Cross research, 32% of UK senior managers reported feeling lonely often or always, compared with 10% of junior managers and 8% of non-managers. Even more strikingly, 17% of senior managers said they often or always had no one to talk to at work. Yet 85% of senior managers who expressed a view also said they had close personal relationships at work. There is the paradox. You can have people around you and still have no one to talk to. You can lead hundreds of people, spend an entire day in meetings, return home to a family, know other leaders, have advisers, colleagues and friends — and still experience something that cannot be solved simply by adding another person to the room. Perhaps loneliness is not always an absence of people. Sometimes it is an absence of exchange.

Beyond the Professional Identity

There is another identity I want to introduce here — one that does not replace British identity, professional identity, cultural identity or biological identity, but can hold all of them. I call it the Homo Spiritus Soul Identity: a universal human identity beyond nationality, title, class and professional role. It is the identity that remembers that before we became CEO, director, doctor, artist, parent, British, Lithuanian or anything else, we were human — carrying an inner life that continues developing alongside everything we achieve externally.

Perhaps our strongest leaders already recognise this, even if they use completely different language for it. We sometimes call it charisma. Presence. Authenticity. That inexplicable quality of somebody who enters a room without needing to prove that they belong there. Perhaps some of what we recognise as charisma is simply congruence: the external person and the internal person are no longer fighting one another. There is less distance between the role being performed and the person performing it.

Strength, Restraint and the Mask

I live in the United Kingdom, and I have become fascinated by something within British social identity. For centuries, British culture has developed powerful ideas around composure, duty, privacy, class, manners, emotional restraint and carrying on. History shaped them. Monarchy, religion, literature, schools, military traditions, industrialisation, empire, two world wars, institutions and family structures all participated in creating ideas about what respectable behaviour looked like. Eventually, emotional self-command became so recognisable that the “stiff upper lip” could almost function as shorthand for Britishness itself.

But we should distinguish biological identity from socially inherited identity. We are born human before we learn how our culture expects a human being to behave. A social identity can be extraordinarily useful. It creates belonging, continuity, discipline and civilisation. But what happens when the mask works so well that we forget it is a mask? What happens when “I should remain composed” slowly becomes “I cannot say what I feel”? And what happens when that person becomes a leader?

The Higher the Position, the Narrower the Conversation Can Become

Leadership expands a person’s external world: more responsibility, more people, more decisions, more money, more consequences and more visibility. But external expansion does not automatically create internal expansion. This is where I think we sometimes misunderstand leadership loneliness. Perhaps senior leaders do not simply need more people to talk to. They may need somewhere they are permitted to be whole.

Leadership creates its own filters. Can I say this to my employees? Can I admit this uncertainty to the board? Can I discuss this with investors? Can I bring it home? Will somebody misunderstand me? Will I lose authority? Is this appropriate? What will people think? Politics. Religion. Spirituality. Sexuality. Intimacy. Mortality. Fear. Desire. Doubt. Meaning. Love. Human beings think about these things, but professional identities teach us that some subjects belong behind doors. Over time, conversation can become increasingly selective. And gradually dialogue becomes monologue.

The Private Library Becomes Full

A psychologically strong person can sustain an internal dialogue for a very long time. We think. Analyse. Reflect. Rationalise. Solve. That inner conversation can be an extraordinary resource. But imagine every unspoken thought becoming another book placed into an internal library. Responsibility goes onto one shelf. Fear onto another. Decisions. Family. Money. Employees. Questions about ageing. Questions about meaning. Questions about intimacy. Things you noticed but could not say. Things you felt but considered inappropriate to express. Things for which you simply never found the right person.

Eventually, even a beautiful library can become overcrowded. Perhaps this is one form of leadership loneliness. Not emptiness. Too much inside, with nowhere for it to travel.

And this matters because human energy is also a resource. Businesses carefully measure financial resources, technological resources and human resources. I would add another: Energy Resource. Leadership is performed through a living organism. A CEO does not make decisions outside the body. Responsibility is carried through a nervous system, a heart, a brain, relationships, sleep, emotion, attention and vitality. The greater the responsibility, the more important this resource becomes.

Perhaps this is where the Homo Spiritus leader becomes particularly interesting: a leader whose development is not measured only by the expansion of the organisation, but also by the capacity of the human being carrying it. External growth and internal growth need to remain in conversation. Otherwise, the company expands while the person contracts. And when that human reserve is continually spent but rarely restored through authentic exchange, something eventually asks to be heard. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes through sadness. Sometimes through exhaustion. Sometimes through the strange realisation: I know everybody. But who actually knows me?

Beyond the Role

The latest official figures tell us that around 7% of people aged 16 and over in England feel lonely often or always, while 9% experience high levels of indirect loneliness — measured through lack of companionship, feeling left out and feeling isolated. The senior-management figure reported by the British Red Cross was 32%. These surveys are methodologically different, so they should not be treated as a direct statistical comparison. But the contrast raises an important question: why can someone become more socially powerful and simultaneously feel more alone?

Maybe because human development does not stop when we receive a title. As our professional capacity grows, something else in us may also ask to grow. Call it consciousness. Call it emotional maturity. Call it the inner self. Call it soul. The terminology matters less to me than recognising the phenomenon. If the external identity becomes enormous while the inner identity is given less and less room, eventually there is an imbalance. And perhaps what we call loneliness can sometimes be the sensation of that distance — the distance between who I perform and who I am.

Transparency — But Not the Transparency We Usually Mean

This is where I use the word transparency differently from its conventional leadership meaning. Not financial transparency. Not organisational transparency. Not disclosure. Transparency with oneself.

I call this my Transparent Happy Soul Formula. Not “happy” as permanent positivity, and not as a demand to smile when something hurts. I mean something closer to wholeness: being transparent enough with yourself not to hide from what is actually there. This is what I think. This is what I feel. This is what I fear. This is what I want. This is what I do not yet understand. And only then comes the decision about what should remain private and what can become dialogue.

Transparency does not mean telling everybody everything. That is not transparency; sometimes that is simply absence of boundaries. Inner transparency means that even when something should not be said publicly, it does not have to be hidden from yourself. That distinction matters enormously in leadership because self-awareness is not the opposite of authority. It is part of what makes authority sustainable.

Maybe We Don’t Need Another Rule

I come from a health background, and through both professional observation and my own human experience, I increasingly return to something very simple. We do not necessarily need another instruction telling people how they should feel. We already have enough rules. Professional rules. Social rules. Class rules. Etiquette. Expectations. Leadership language. Even unwritten rules about which parts of being human may safely enter a conversation.

Of course boundaries matter. Ethics matter. Responsibility matters. But a boundary that protects human dignity is different from a restriction that gradually removes our humanity. So I am not suggesting another formula that people should obediently follow. Quite the opposite: Don’t follow mine. Find your own. Perhaps transparency will look completely different for every person. But somewhere there must be a place where the monologue becomes dialogue. And before we can have that dialogue with another human being, perhaps we first need permission to have it with ourselves.

Put your hand on your heart for a moment. Remove the title. Remove the profession. Remove nationality. Remove status. Remove everything you have achieved. There is still somebody there. You. Maybe that is where another form of leadership begins. Not leadership as the ability to conceal vulnerability convincingly enough that everybody else feels safe, but leadership as the capacity to remain whole while carrying responsibility. To know the mask — and know the face beneath it. To understand your inherited identity without becoming imprisoned by it. To be able to say: I am a leader. I am also a human being. Both identities can exist at the same time.

Perhaps then being alone does not necessarily mean being lonely. Because wherever you go, somebody is finally there with you: yourself. And perhaps the higher we rise, the more important that relationship becomes.

Be. Do. See. Say What You Want.

Perhaps leadership can return to something extraordinarily simple: Be. Do. See. Say what you want. Or, in Latin: Esto. Fac. Vide. Dic quod vis. Be — before performing the identity. Do — because leadership eventually requires action. See — beyond the immediate role, system and inherited assumptions. Say what you want — because a person who cannot recognise and articulate their own intention eventually begins living through other people’s expectations.

This does not mean saying whatever you want without responsibility. Quite the opposite. It means knowing yourself sufficiently that your being, your actions, your perception and your expression increasingly belong to the same person. Congruence is not the removal of discipline; it is the removal of unnecessary contradiction.

Who, if not leaders, should practise this?

Perhaps the leaders humanity needs next will not be those who have perfected the separation between the professional and the human. Perhaps they will be those capable of integrating both.

The Homo Spiritus Leader

Not a new elite. Not another title. A universal identity. A leader who can belong to a nation without being limited by nationality. Who can hold authority without disappearing behind authority. Who can develop intelligence without abandoning heart. Who can carry responsibility without forgetting the living organism carrying it. A leader whose charisma does not come only from technique, but from congruence. Whose transparency begins privately before it becomes organisationally visible. Whose external expansion is accompanied by internal expansion.

This is what I mean by the Transparent Happy Soul Formula. Not another formula that I ask you to follow. Find your own. But perhaps begin by allowing yourself to become transparent enough to yourself to discover what that formula is.

Put your hand on your heart. The CEO is there. The leader is there. The nationality is there. The history is there. The responsibilities are there. And underneath all of them, still alive: the human.

Maybe this autumn we can allow the monologue to become dialogue. Maybe being alone can become different from being lonely. Maybe we simply need to become less afraid of speaking from the places we have been trained to hide. Because the future of leadership may not belong to the person who creates the most perfect professional mask. It may belong to the person courageous enough to become whole.

And perhaps real leadership begins when we no longer need to become smaller inside in order to appear bigger outside.

Again, autumn. Perhaps not an ending at all. Perhaps another invitation to become transparent enough to ourselves to recognise what continues beneath everything that changes.

What if we were told that we are living forever?

I don’t know.

But perhaps we would finally stop postponing being fully alive.

Esto. Fac. Vide. Dic quod vis.

Be. Do. See. Say what you want.

Homo Spiritus. Human to human.

Lina Sima