Rewiring Leadership Habits: How Executives Transform Destructive Patterns
- Ron Adiel
- Jul 22
- 5 min read
Most of what drives your leadership behavior isn’t strategic — it’s habitual.
Some habits serve you. But others erode your relationships, clarity, and energy, especially under pressure.
The most damaging habits are relational – they shape how you interact with others. You interrupt your team mid-sentence. You snap when challenged. You withdraw when presence is most needed.
And these patterns don’t just pass — they leave deep residue: fractured trust, stifled collaboration, and cultures shaped by avoidance.
Inner habits can be just as corrosive: compulsively checking messages, replaying doubts on loop, second-guessing your instincts.
Here’s the truth: you can’t fix these patterns by adjusting your behavior alone. Real change requires rewiring the system they emerge from. That’s where transformation begins.
You can’t fix destructive habits directly. You have to reengineer the platform they stem from.
The Damaging Impact of Habit Loops in Executive Life
In high-stakes environments, executives default to patterns designed for speed and survival. But those patterns, while efficient, can become very costly over time.
Habits run automatically, beneath conscious awareness. That’s their design. But when they’re destructive, they quietly become liabilities — damaging trust, performance, and culture.
A 2025 TalentLMS survey cited in Forbes found that 54% of employees experience self-sabotaging “quiet habits” that erode engagement and performance*. Nearly 1 in 5 say it happens regularly. And while that data focuses on employees, these same invisible patterns often run even deeper in executive life, where pressure and isolation amplify them.
Relational Habits: The Quiet Culture Killers
The most dangerous habits are relational, and they’re often mistaken for strength.
These habits damage the very currency of leadership: trust, presence, and psychological safety.
Common examples include:
Lashing out in conflict
Dominating meetings to maintain control
Overcorrecting by micromanaging
Seeking validation through over-explaining
They’re not conscious strategies but emotional reflexes, wired by fear, masked as leadership. “I’m being decisive.” “I’m protecting the team.” But beneath the surface, they’re survival-driven and identity-protective.
And they’re contagious: shaping how others behave, engage, and show up around you.
Internal Habits: Erosion from Within
Not all habits are visible. Some operate quietly — but not less destructively.
Ruminating on past decisions
Compulsively checking messages
Mentally rehearsing worst-case scenarios
Seeking relief through busyness
These loops trap leaders in the Survival State — reactive, short-term, emotionally fused with the moment. They create a constant background noise of urgency. And because they’re so normalized, they rarely get challenged. They just repeat — with new teams, new goals, and new costs.
Without awareness, we don’t change our bad habits — we deepen them.
The Belief–Emotion–Habit Loop: How Patterns Form and How to Break Them
At its core, a habit is a shortcut — a way for the brain to act without wasting energy. But a destructive habit is different. It’s fused with negative emotion. And it undermines long-term wellbeing and growth.
Why do these habits persist? Because they protect beliefs that feel essential to our identity.
Take a leader who interrupts frequently:
Trigger: A colleague questions their decision
Emotion: Discomfort, fear of being wrong
Belief: “If I don’t stay in control, I’ll lose authority”
Behavior: Cut in. Reassert authority. Shut it down.
That loop creates short-term certainty — but erodes trust and weakens connection over time. The behavior reaffirms the belief while deepening distrust.
The habit protects the belief but sabotages your growth.
Why Relational Leadership Habits Matter Most
Negative relational habits often hide behind personality — but they shape everything. They wear away trust, culture, and performance. They create invisible ceilings on leadership impact.
Because they seem to generate impact in the short term, they rarely get challenged. But over time, they create hidden debt: mistrust, disengagement, and fractured teams.
To break these loops, leaders need four foundational capacities:
Awareness – seeing the trigger and the emotional spike
Objective Observation – noticing without judgment
Emotional Regulation – staying grounded amid discomfort
Reconstruction – choosing a new belief and response
This is where the gap opens — the space between a feeling and the automatic reaction. That’s where new leadership begins.
Proof You Can Change: From Fixation to Focus
Consider this real-world parallel:
On curved roads, one of the most common causes of fatal motorcycle crashes isn’t speed — it’s visual fixation. When a rider enters a challenging turn, instinct locks their eyes onto the danger — the ditch in front of them. And since the motorcycle follows the rider’s gaze, that fixation becomes fate.
The fix? Riders are trained to focus their eyes on the exit, not the ditch. But this can’t be forced. It must be trained gradually, under low pressure, until the new habit is automatic.
The same principle applies to leadership.
Under pressure, leaders often fixate on what they fear: looking weak, losing control, being wrong. Their reactions follow that fixation: defensiveness, aggression, withdrawal.
To change, you train your system to stay locked on your leadership “exit point”: your intention, values, and presence. With repetition, clarity replaces reactivity, and leadership sharpens.
How to Rewire Leadership Habits from the Inside Out
Leadership habits are relational habits — they shape how people experience you.
But they are just that: habits. And habits can be reengineered.
Here’s how executives begin to rewire from the inside:
Micro Awareness Moments
In moments of stress, pause. Breathe. That half-second of stillness is your pivot point.
Emotional Pattern Mapping
What emotions consistently show up before your reactions? Identify the pattern.
Belief Audit
Ask: What belief is driving this loop? Is it helping or harming?
Identity Reframe
Shift from “This is just how I am” to “This is what I’m choosing to strengthen.”
Stretch Practice
Each hard moment is a ‘rep’. You’re not chasing perfection — you’re building emotional capacity.
Example:
A founder keeps reacting aggressively during board meetings. The underlying belief? “If I don’t show dominance, they’ll lose faith.”
But it backfires. Trust erodes. Investors start disengaging.
The shift begins when the founder learns to pause, name the fear, and stay engaged. As they retrain their system over time, the reactions give way to presence. Connection replaces control.
When you rewire your reactions, you reshape your habits — and your results.
Awareness Is the First Shift
You don’t change habits through discipline alone. You change them by seeing them clearly with awareness, not judgment.
This week, experiment with this simple practice:
Notice one moment where a destructive habit starts to surface:
Pause.
Name the emotion.
Name the belief behind it.
That’s where transformation begins — in the moment you choose to observe instead of react.
Awareness is the beginning of every better habit.
Ready to evolve your leadership patterns from the inside out?
Discover how the Lifetime Evolution Program helps executives rewire habits, shift beliefs, and lead from clarity — not reactivity.
(*) Caroline Castrillon, 7 Quiet Cracking Habits Sabotaging Your Career Growth, Forbes, July 15, 2025
About the Author
Ron Adiel, PhD, empowers CEOs, Founders, and CXOs to achieve holistic transformational growth through the Lifetime Evolution Program, which integrates executive leadership expertise, psychology, and neuroscience.
