What a New Hip Is Teaching Me About Leadership

Lessons in Self-Awareness, Asking for Help, and Leading Through Recovery

One week into hip replacement recovery and I'm learning some things about myself that I honestly didn't see coming.

When Self-Awareness Gets Real

I thought I had a pretty good handle on who I am as a leader. I know my strengths. I know the things I'm still working on. I've spent years helping business owners and entrepreneurs grow in their self-awareness, and I've done a ton of my own self-reflection work, so you would think I had my own figured out pretty well by now.

And then surgery slowed me all the way down and showed me a few things I had been glossing over.

The Leader Who Can't Stop

The biggest one? How hard it is for me to actually stop. I want to meet with clients. I want to be helpful. I want to feel like things are moving forward, and lying on the couch while the pain medication makes me foggy and sleepy is just not how I'm wired. Every part of me wants to push through and get back to it, and this week I simply could not do that.

This is something I see in so many of the leaders I work with, the inability to pause, the constant need to keep momentum going, the discomfort that comes with stillness. We've built our businesses and our identities around being productive, and when that gets taken away, even temporarily, it reveals patterns we didn't know were running the show.

The Hard Part About Asking for Help

The other thing that has surprised me is how much I've had to lean on asking for help. People have offered help and I don't know what I need so I have nothing to tell them. Some have brought meals. Some people are covering a group I normally lead. My clients have graciously shifted our sessions to other times so I can recover and be properly present for them. And every single time I said yes to that help, there was this little resistance in me that had to be talked down.

I think a lot of leaders know that feeling. Asking for help can feel like admitting you're not holding things together as well as you "should" be. Even when you know better, even when you teach other people that asking for help is actually a sign of strength, it can still feel uncomfortable when it's your turn to receive it.

Patterns We Don't See Until We're Forced to Slow Down

And that's exactly the kind of thing that tends to go unnoticed when life is moving fast. Not because we're avoiding it, but because we're busy and the days keep coming. Recovery has slowed me down enough to actually see it. To notice how I really operate when I cannot just push through, not just how I think I operate or how I like to believe I do.

Honestly, that kind of noticing is uncomfortable sometimes. But it's also really valuable.

The truth is, most of us don't get a forced pause like this. We just keep going, and our behavioral patterns keep running in the background without us noticing them much. But those patterns shape everything, how we lead our teams, how we communicate with clients, how we handle the hard weeks, and how we treat ourselves when things don't go the way we planned.

Growing Self-Awareness as a Leader

This experience has reminded me why self-awareness work is so critical for effective leadership. It's not just about knowing your strengths or understanding your personality type. It's about seeing the unconscious patterns that drive your decisions, stress responses, and relationships.

When you can identify these patterns, the need to push through, the resistance to asking for help, the discomfort with slowing down, you gain the ability to choose a different response. You move from reactive leadership to intentional leadership. And that shift changes everything.

What Recovery Teaches Us About Sustainable Leadership

Recovery, whether from surgery or burnout or a difficult season, forces us to confront the ways we've been operating that aren't sustainable. It shows us where we've been running on willpower instead of wisdom. It reveals the gaps between how we want to lead and how we actually lead when we're under pressure or out of our comfort zone.

For entrepreneurs and business owners, this kind of awareness is gold. It's what allows you to build a business that doesn't require you to constantly sacrifice your well-being. It's what helps you create leadership habits that actually serve you instead of drain you.

Your Invitation to Grow

If growing in self-awareness feels like the next right thing for you, I would love to explore what that could look like together. I work with entrepreneurs one-on-one through business coaching and life coaching to help them understand their patterns, lead their businesses with more intention, and stop feeling like they're just reacting to everything around them.

If you're curious about working together or want to learn more about developing emotional intelligence and intentional leadership, reach out here and we can start a conversation. I would love to hear where you are right now.

More next week, hopefully from a slightly more upright position. 😄

Tami Holladay Leadership + Business Coach Denver, CO