Your employees don't trust you. Not you personally — leadership in general. And most leaders have no idea how deep that distrust runs or what it actually takes to fix it.

In this episode of The Self Aware Leader, Jason Rigby breaks down the employee trust crisis happening in 2026 — why your team walks in the door already suspicious, what toxic leadership looks like from the inside, and why servant leadership is the only real answer to a generation that has been let down by every authority figure in their lives.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why Gen Z and younger employees distrust authority before you've done anything wrong
• The difference between toxic leadership that relies on title and servant leadership that earns trust through genuine investment
• Why Jesus is the most relevant leadership model for 2026 — not for religious reasons, but because he operated in the exact same environment of corrupt authority and institutional failure that your employees grew up watching
• The three specific things servant leaders do that toxic bosses never will
• Why "not being a bad boss" is not the same as being a good leader
• What it actually looks like to invest in your people — and why the ROI follows genuine care, not the other way around

If this episode hit you, two things:

1. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one — new episodes every week on leadership, self-awareness, and the real stuff underneath the surface
2. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts — it takes 60 seconds and it's the single biggest way to help this show reach more leaders who need it

Go deeper every week: Jason writes about leadership psychology, self-awareness, and the inner work of leading at jasonrigby.substack.com — free to subscribe.

Links:

• Substack: jasonrigby.substack.com
• Quiz — What's Running You? selfawarepodcast.com/quiz

00:00 — Why your team already doesn't trust you before you've done anything
01:45 — The political, institutional, and cultural reasons distrust runs so deep in 2026
04:00 — The Roman Empire, the religious elite, and why that's your workplace right now
06:30 — What Jesus actually did differently — and why it worked
08:45 — Jason's personal story: the mentor who saw him in a crowd of thousands
10:30 — What lazy leadership looks like in 2026 (and why your team can feel it)
12:15 — Three things servant leaders do that toxic bosses never will
14:30 — Why profit and ROI follow genuine investment — not the other way around

You've already met the version of yourself you're trying to become.

The conversation where you stopped managing yourself and just told the truth. The decision that cost you something but felt clean all the way down. The morning where nobody needed anything from you and for an hour you were completely, unmistakably yourself.

That wasn't a fluke. That was the signal.

In this episode, Jason digs into one of the most misunderstood concepts in personal development — the higher self — and strips away the woo-woo to get to what it actually means and how to practically use it.

What you'll hear:

• What ten thousand years of spiritual tradition — from Sufi mystics to Egyptian priests to medieval Christian mystics — actually agree on about the higher self (and why it changes everything about how you approach growth)
• The real reason the best version of you feels buried — and why it has nothing to do with effort or information
• A four-domain self-assessment that forces honesty without the spiral (and why there are no 7s allowed)
• Four questions that cut through the performance and point you back toward yourself
• The one ten-minute practice that every tradition and every piece of behavioral research points toward — and why most people never actually do it

The line from this episode:

"The higher self is not a destination. It's a direction. You orient toward it one honest moment at a time."

Timestamps:

• 0:00 — The signal you've already had
• 1:30 — What ten thousand years of tradition agree on
• 3:45 — Meister Eckhart, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Sufi mirror
• 6:00 — Meet Sarah — and the armor we all built
• 8:00 — The four-domain assessment (no 7s)
• 12:30 — Four questions that cut through
• 15:30 — The ten-minute practice
• 17:30 — The close

Resources mentioned:

• The quiz: selfawarepodcast.com/quiz — "What's Running You?"
• Full essay version of this episode: jasonrigby.substack.com
• Paid subscription (go deeper every week): jasonrigby.substack.com

The Self Aware Leader with Jason Rigby — the inner game of leadership for people tired of surface-level advice.

Self-awareness is not thinking about yourself all day. It is the ability to notice what is happening inside you before it leaks into your leadership.

In this episode of The Self Aware Leader, Jason Rigby breaks down what self-aware leadership actually means in real life: the meeting where your tone changes, the feedback you do not want to hear, the hard conversation you keep avoiding, the moment your ego gets hit, and the pattern your team has quietly learned to manage around.

This episode explores why self-awareness is one of the most practical leadership skills you can build. Not as theory. Not as vague emotional intelligence. As a daily practice for leading with more clarity, honesty, humility, and strength under pressure.

You'll learn:

What a self-aware leader actually is
Why your intention and your impact are not the same thing
How defensiveness, people-pleasing, control, and avoidance leak into leadership
Why "why am I like this?" often keeps leaders stuck
The better question to ask when you get triggered
A simple daily practice: catch the signal, name the pattern, choose the cleaner move

If you lead people, your inner life does not stay private. It becomes culture. It becomes tone. It becomes trust or tension.

The question is not whether you have patterns.

The question is whether you can see them before everyone else has to manage them.

Subscribe to The Self Aware Leader for weekly episodes on self-awareness, emotional intelligence, leadership development, shadow work, and leading with practical clarity under pressure.