What To Lead Me Guide Me Actually Is
It's a personal leadership and decision-making framework that has been around in various coaching and self-development circles for a while. The core idea is pretty straightforward: you define a direction for your life or a specific project, then set up regular check-ins with yourself to evaluate whether your daily actions are aligned with that direction. It's not a software tool. You won't find it on an app store. People who use it typically work through it with a coach or on their own using a journal and a simple set of questions. I ran into this framework about five years ago when someone at a consulting gig mentioned it during a strategy session. At the time I was juggling three concurrent projects with no clear priority signal, and the framework gave me a structure I actually stuck with for about eight months. That's more than I've maintained with any productivity system I've tried.
The To Lead Me Guide Me Process
Here's how it works in practice. Step one is writing down your leading question. This isn't a vague wish like "I want to be successful." It's more like "How am I building a team that can operate without me?" or "Am I spending my best hours on the work only I can do?" The question needs to be specific enough that you can honestly answer it at the end of any given week. Step two is setting a weekly review cadence. Pick a time. Sunday evening. Thursday morning. It doesn't matter as long as you show up. During that review you ask yourself: what did I do this week? Did my actions move me toward the answer of my leading question? Where did I drift? What's the one thing I should focus on next week? That's essentially the whole method. The discipline is in doing it consistently, which most people fail at within three weeks.
I'll be straight about the limitations. This framework doesn't solve execution problems. If you already know what to do but can't get yourself to do it, a leading question isn't going to fix that. It also doesn't work well if your direction keeps changing every two weeks because you're still figuring out what you actually want. The framework assumes you have enough clarity to write a meaningful question in the first place, and a lot of people don't. When I first tried it, I wrote a leading question that was too broad — something like "How am I growing as a leader?" I spent four weeks completely unable to answer it honestly because the frame was so diffuse it meant nothing. I ended up cutting it down to "Am I making decisions faster with better information?" and suddenly the weekly reviews became useful instead of frustrating. The narrowing of the question was the single most important step. Another thing beginners miss: the framework only works if you're willing to be unpleasantly honest with yourself during the review. I've seen people go through the motions for months without any actual course correction because they kept writing answers that made them feel better instead of answers that were true. Write the honest version. It will sting a little. That sting is data.
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How People Actually Use It
Some people buy books or enroll in coaching programs built around this. Others just print out a one-page worksheet and use a notebook. The commercial versions tend to add journaling prompts and group accountability components, which help some people but aren't necessary. The underlying mechanism is just the question plus the recurring review. If you want to try it without spending money, here's what I'd suggest: take a blank page, write your leading question at the top, and set a recurring calendar event for a 20-minute weekly review. That's it. No download required. The whole system fits on one piece of paper. I still use a version of this occasionally, though not as rigorously as I did back then. Life gets busy and the weekly review slips. When it slips for more than a month, I notice it — my attention scatters across too many lower-priority tasks and I lose track of what actually matters. The framework itself doesn't enforce anything. It just creates a feedback loop, and you have to be the one to close the loop.
