There’s a question I ask every young person who comes into the 6 Circles to Purpose program. I don’t ask it to test them. I ask it because the answer tells me everything about where we need to start.
The question is simple: Who are you?
Not what do you want to be. Not what do your parents want for you. Not what’s your GPA or what sport do you play. Just: who are you?
Most of the time, there’s a long pause. And that pause — that silence — is exactly where real leadership development has to begin.
Why Most Leadership Training Gets It Backwards
Here’s the thing about how leadership is typically taught to young people. We hand them a checklist. We teach them how to run a meeting, how to speak in public, how to resolve conflict in a group setting. Those are real skills. There’s nothing wrong with them.
But we skip the foundation. We give a young person tools before we give them clarity about who’s supposed to be holding the tools. And when that happens, you get a young person who can speak confidently about things they don’t actually believe yet. You get performance instead of leadership.
The reality is, you cannot lead from a place you haven’t been. If you don’t know your own values, you’ll default to someone else’s when the pressure comes. If you haven’t sat with your own story — the hard parts included — you’ll flinch when leadership asks you to be honest about something that costs you something. If you don’t understand what actually drives you, you’ll chase goals that look good on paper and feel empty when you reach them.
Self-awareness isn’t a soft skill. It’s the foundation everything else is built on.
What Self-Awareness Actually Looks Like for a Young Person
I want to be clear about what I mean here, because “self-awareness” can sound vague. It’s not about being able to describe your personality type from an online quiz. It’s not about having the right answers. It’s about having the courage to sit with real questions.
Questions like: What matters to me — not to my parents, not to my peers — but to me? Where do I feel most alive? What am I afraid of, and is that fear protecting me or limiting me? What have I been through that shaped how I see the world? What kind of person do I want to be when nobody’s watching?
Those aren’t easy questions. They take time. They take honesty. And honestly, they take someone — a mentor, a trusted adult, a real conversation — who can sit with you while you work through them. That’s not weakness. That’s the actual work.
A young man who has done that work carries something that no one can take from him. He knows what he stands on. When things get hard — and they will get hard — he’s not scrambling to figure out who he is. He already knows. That’s what gives real leadership its weight.
The Connection to Purpose
Here’s where it gets important. Self-awareness isn’t just about knowing yourself for your own sake. It’s about discovering what you were put here to do.
Purpose isn’t something you manufacture. You don’t sit down one afternoon and decide what your purpose is. Purpose gets revealed over time, through honest reflection, through paying attention to what moves you, through understanding how your specific experiences and strengths and values point somewhere.
That’s exactly what the 6 Circles to Purpose Leadership Training is built around. It starts where it has to start — with you. Who you are, what you value, how you see yourself and the world around you. And it builds from there. Self-awareness leads to values clarity. Values clarity leads to vision. Vision leads to skill-building. Skill-building leads to contribution. Contribution leads to action.
Each circle builds on the one before it. But if you don’t start in the right place, the whole thing is built on sand.
For the Adults in the Room
If you’re an educator or a parent reading this, here’s what I want you to hear.
The young people in your life are not going to get comfortable with self-awareness unless the adults around them model what that actually looks like. They watch what you do, not just what you say. If you want them to do the honest, reflective work of knowing themselves, you have to create space for that kind of conversation. Not a motivational speech. A real conversation.
Ask them the real questions. Listen without rushing to fix or direct. Let them sit with not knowing the answer yet. That discomfort isn’t a problem. It’s the process.
When a young person feels genuinely seen — not evaluated, not managed, but actually seen — something shifts in them. They start to believe their inner life matters. And once they believe that, they become capable of developing it. That’s where growth starts. That’s where real leaders are made.
What We’re Really Developing
I want to say one more thing before I close this out.
The goal of the 6 Circles to Purpose program — and honestly, the goal of everything we do at JustINSPIRE — is not to produce impressive young people. It’s not about trophies or titles or college acceptances. It’s about young people who know who they are, who lead from that place, and who are capable of giving something real back to the communities they come from.
That starts with a young person being willing to sit with that first hard question.
Who are you?
Listen. The answer is already in there. Sometimes it just takes the right environment, the right conversation, and the right support to bring it out.
That’s what we’re here to do.
Explore the 6 Circles to Purpose Leadership Training at JustINSPIRE Mentoring. This program is available for schools, youth organizations, and community partners. Connect with us to bring it to your community.
JustINSPIRE Mentoring is a mentoring-based organization focused on helping youth, emerging leaders, and communities grow with clarity, confidence, discipline, purpose, and expression. Learn more at justinspirementoring.online.
