What If You're the Red Flag?
After spending weeks talking about red flags, I had an uncomfortable thought.
What if you're the red flag?
Not all the time.
Not in every situation.
But what if some of the patterns creating friction around us have our fingerprints on them too?
Because honestly, it's a lot easier to identify red flags in other people than it is to recognize them in ourselves.
We notice poor communication.
We notice inconsistency.
We notice emotional reactions.
We notice lack of accountability.
Usually pretty quickly.
But self-awareness moves slower.
Especially when we're evaluating our own behavior.
I think one of the hardest parts of leadership is accepting that our intentions and our impact aren't always the same thing.
We can have good intentions and still create unhealthy outcomes.
We can care deeply and still communicate poorly.
We can work hard and still create confusion.
We can want healthy relationships and still contribute to unhealthy patterns.
And honestly, I think that's where real growth begins.
Not when we become experts at identifying everyone else's issues.
When we become willing to examine our own.
Over the years I've found myself asking questions like:
Am I communicating as clearly as I think I am?
Am I creating expectations that nobody actually understands?
Am I contributing to the pressure I'm complaining about?
Am I modeling the behavior I'm asking others to demonstrate?
Those aren't comfortable questions.
But they tend to produce honest answers.
And the truth is, some of the biggest improvements we've made in business didn't come from fixing other people.
They came from recognizing patterns we needed to address ourselves.
Better communication.
Better expectations.
Better systems.
Better leadership habits.
Not because we had everything figured out.
But because we finally stopped assuming the problem always existed somewhere else.
Growth became a lot more possible when we stopped asking, “Who's causing this?” and started asking, “How might I be contributing to it?”
Honestly, I don't think self-awareness is about beating yourself up.
It's about becoming curious enough to investigate your own patterns with the same honesty you investigate everyone else's.
Because the red flags we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves often become the same ones we keep encountering in other people.
And maybe that's the biggest lesson I've taken away from this entire series.
The goal was never to become experts at identifying brokenness in everyone else.
The goal was to become more aware of it in ourselves too.
— Ruben Escalona
Red Alpha Custom Prints
Coming Next Week
We've spent weeks talking about red flags, unhealthy patterns, emotional urgency, normalized chaos, leadership blind spots, and self-awareness.
Next week we'll begin exploring the other side of the conversation:
What Healthy Actually Looks Like.
Because identifying dysfunction is only the first step. Eventually we have to learn what healthy leadership, healthy communication, healthy teams, and healthy business cultures actually look like in practice.