LEARNING FROM WITHIN: A RECIPE FOR GROWTH INSEAD and HBS alumnus Johan Depraetere reflects on the value of travel, meditation and emotional honesty in his journey towards gaining self-awareness and becoming a more complete leader
E arly in my career, I was taught to lead from my head by developing analytical thinking, becoming an excellent problem-solver, mastering frameworks, projecting confidence and communicating effectively. And I feel grateful to have trained at some of the best places in this field: Harvard Business School, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. However, as I became more proficient in these areas, I grew aware of a gap that did not lie within the skills themselves, but in myself. The leaders I admired most were those who remained calm under severe pressure, told the truth even when it was costly and inspired not through authority but through something harder to define. They also shared a quality no case study had ever taught me. That quality was that they knew themselves, not perfectly, but well enough to act from a deeper place when all the frameworks ran out. They were grounded and centred. I have come to believe that self- knowledge and self-awareness are key ingredients of becoming a more complete leader. Throughout my own journey, I have discovered two unlikely teachers of these traits – travel and spirituality – and one powerful practice: emotional honesty. CROSSING CULTURES I left Belgium at the age of 27, lived across three continents and visited
close to 100 countries. My life partner, meanwhile, is South Korean. Throughout it all, crossing borders and cultures has been an invaluable teacher. My early backpacking trips stripped away the certainties of my normal life; that is, my routine, job, structure and identity. Everything familiar was gone. Every encounter became a mirror through which I could see myself more clearly, question my beliefs, examine my values, observe my conditioning and reflect on my unresolved wounds. These experiences forced me to choose between changing the parts of myself I didn’t like or simply leaving them be. I came to understand that this inner journey would never end; it had become a lifelong quest for self-knowledge. When I moved to Seoul in 2003 to join Samsung, it felt like I was backpacking again, but in a professional setting this time. Decision-making, hierarchies and rhythms operated according to rules I didn’t fully understand. It demanded something specific from me: the willingness to be a beginner again, relearn quickly and adapt. That humility, hard-won through travel, turned out to be one of the most valuable skills I have ever developed. THE POWER OF PRESENCE I am aware that the word “spirituality” will encourage some of you to reach for the exit, but I invite you to stay a little longer. For the past five years, I have
maintained a daily meditation practice. While there is research to demonstrate how meditation impacts the prefrontal cortex, improving emotional regulation and decision‑making, I am more interested in what I have experienced directly and there are three things that stand out to me. To begin with, there is the extraordinary power of internal and external attention. We all know the person who is fully present when you meet them, not distracted, not elsewhere and in that moment, you feel truly seen. Meditation has trained that quality in me. Through focused internal attention, I have also come to realise that I am not my thoughts, emotions or sensations. They appear and disappear, like clouds in the sky. Through meditation, I have discovered glimpses of a deeper presence – a stillness beneath the noise of my thinking mind – that feels ageless and borderless. A presence that simply is. Lastly, meditation has trained me in equanimity, or the capacity to maintain stability regardless of what I encounter. I discovered a space between the impulse of a strong emotion or provocation and my reaction to it. In that space lies a choice: to let things be, without reacting. For a leader under pressure, that space becomes sacred. THE VALUE OF EMOTIONAL HONESTY On the path towards becoming a more complete leader, emotional honesty
36 Business Impact • ISSUE 3 • 2026
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