🎙️ Bonus Episode:
“Social Cognitive Theory: The Secret Psychology Behind Leadership, Identity, and Influence”
What if I told you…
The way you lead isn’t just shaped by your resume or your strategy sessions.
It’s shaped by your survival story.
By the models of leadership you grew up watching.
By the environments you’ve had to adapt to—sometimes in silence.
By the behaviors you’ve picked up just to stay afloat in rooms that didn’t feel built for you.
📍 Let that land.
Because here’s the truth no one puts in the leadership manual:
👉🏽 You lead how you learned to survive.
Welcome to this Bonus Episode of Leadership Lessons with Dr. Fredrick D. Lee II—the podcast where we build the kind of leaders who are rooted, emotionally intelligent, and ready to rise.
Today, we’re peeling back the layers on something that’s quietly influencing your leadership, your influence, your confidence, and your team culture:
🔍 Social Cognitive Theory—the psychology behind how we learn, behave, and lead.
It’s the missing link between your leadership identity and the environments you’ve had to navigate.
And once you understand it?
You’ll stop labeling yourself “not enough”…
And start building leadership habits that are aligned, sustainable, and grounded in who you truly are.
If you're:
– In your healing era, trying to lead with self-trust instead of self-doubt…
– Trading hustle culture for a quiet luxury mindset where peace and purpose are your new metrics…
– Rewiring your nervous system so you can show up with clarity, calm, and power…
🎯 This episode is your permission slip.
So hit subscribe.
Save this one to your “Leadership Healing” playlist.
Because we’re unlocking the behavioral science behind emotional intelligence, trauma-informed leadership, and growth mindset—so you can lead with more clarity, more impact, and more freedom.
Let’s go.
💡 [Introduction of the Topic]
Most leadership podcasts will tell you:
“Communicate more.”
“Delegate better.”
“Just be confident.”
📉 But let’s be honest—that’s surface-level strategy for a much deeper issue.
Here’s the real tea:
👉🏽 If you don’t understand why people behave the way they do—including you—then every leadership tip is just a bandage on a behavioral wound that never fully heals.
That’s where Social Cognitive Theory becomes your secret weapon.
Developed by psychologist Albert Bandura, this powerful framework reminds us that behavior isn’t random—it’s a reflection of what you’ve learned, experienced, and adapted to over time.
🔁 Behavior is shaped by a dynamic triad:
🧠 Personal factors — your thoughts, self-beliefs, emotions, and yes—your emotional intelligence.
🛠️ Behavioral patterns — the habits you practice, the choices you make, and the reflexes you've built to stay “safe” or stay “successful.”
🌍 Environmental influences — your cultural background, organizational climate, leadership models, family system, and work context.
In other words:
You don’t just act—you’re constantly interacting with your world.
Your nervous system, your mental conditioning, and your environment are all shaping how you show up in every meeting, message, and moment.
✨ And leadership?
It’s not just strategy—it’s applied behavior with emotional impact.
So what does that mean for you, leader?
It means this:
– You can’t change your leadership style until you unpack your leadership story.
– You can’t coach others to regulate their emotions if you haven’t done the inner work to regulate your own.
– You can’t build a high-performance culture if you’re blind to the unspoken systems people are surviving—systems that reward silence, burnout, or perfectionism.
This is where emotional intelligence and trauma-informed leadership intersect with real organizational influence.
Because until you:
– Recognize your patterns,
– Rewire your habits, and
– Reclaim your identity…
You’ll keep showing up from a place of reaction instead of alignment.
So if you’re:
– Embracing your healing era while leading teams,
– Practicing self-awareness as your new superpower,
– Prioritizing psychological safety and not just performance reviews...
Then Social Cognitive Theory isn’t just theory—it’s your leadership playbook.
Let’s break it down and turn insight into action.
🧠 [Detailed Discussion]
Let’s start with the big three:
1. Behavior is Learned Through Observation
We lead the way we’ve seen leadership done.
Not always by choice—but often by emotional default.
Whether it was empowering or toxic, nurturing or neglectful, inclusive or intimidating—that first image of “leader”didn’t just inform how you viewed authority…
🧠 It quietly built your internal blueprint for how you show up in power.
Sometimes, that model was a parent, a teacher, a boss, or a community figure.
Sometimes, it was shaped by media, church, survival, or silence.
But either way, it planted seeds.
And now—whether you realize it or not—those seeds have taken root in how you:
– Handle conflict.
– Give feedback.
– Navigate failure.
– Show up under pressure.
📍 This is the emotional intelligence checkpoint most leaders skip.
Ask yourself:
– Who modeled leadership for me growing up?
– What did they teach me—intentionally or not—about power, trust, conflict, vulnerability, or success?
– How did they respond to mistakes? To emotions? To boundaries?
Because here’s the hard truth:
👉🏽 Some of the ways you “lead” today may actually be old emotional survival patterns—not leadership at all.
And if your blueprint was shaped by criticism, fear, or control…
You may be unintentionally leading from wounds instead of wisdom.
💡 This is where self-awareness, a key pillar of emotional intelligence, becomes your competitive edge.
You can’t regulate what you haven’t named.
You can’t lead others with compassion if you’re still leading yourself with self-judgment.
You can’t model psychological safety if your inner critic is still running the show.
But here’s the reframe:
📌 Just because you learned a behavior doesn’t mean you have to keep it.
This is where unlearning becomes a leadership skill.
And not just a skill—but a practice of reparenting your leadership identity.
It means:
– Unlearning urgency that masks as worth.
– Unlearning silence that poses as professionalism.
– Unlearning perfectionism that pretends to be high standards.
– Unlearning conflict avoidance that masquerades as emotional control.
The most powerful leaders aren’t those who copy what they’ve seen.
They’re the ones who interrupt old patterns and choose new ones.
That’s the real work.
That’s the inner work.
That’s trauma-informed self-leadership.
And it’s not just personal development—it’s professional necessity.
Because how you lead yourself is how you lead your team.
So today, give yourself permission to ask:
“Is this really me—or is this what I learned to be?”
Because awareness is power.
And that power? Is yours.
2. Self-Efficacy Is Everything
One of the most powerful insights from Social Cognitive Theory is the concept of self-efficacy—the belief in your own ability to succeed in specific situations.
And let me tell you:
Your self-efficacy isn’t just a “nice-to-have” trait—it’s a leadership non-negotiable.
🧠 Because here’s the kicker:
👉🏽 If you don’t believe you can lead effectively…
If you don’t trust that you can navigate challenges, influence people, or make sound decisions…
You will unconsciously start to shrink your presence—even when you’re fully capable.
That’s where patterns like:
– Imposter syndrome (“What if they find out I’m not as good as they think?”),
– Perfectionism (“If I’m not flawless, I’m a failure.”), and
– Procrastination (“What if I fail, so why even start?”)
…get their power.
It’s not that you lack talent.
It’s that your belief system hasn’t caught up with your potential.
📉 In Emotional Intelligence terms, this is a breakdown in self-regard—your ability to recognize your own worth, value, and capability without tying it to external validation.
And here’s what most leadership spaces won’t tell you:
👥 You can be praised publicly and still feel fraudulent privately.
💼 You can have the title, the credentials, and the office—and still second-guess if you belong in the room.
📈 You can hit your goals while secretly fearing they were just a fluke.
But here’s the truth that will liberate your leadership:
💡 Self-efficacy is not fixed—it’s flexible.
It’s not something you’re born with or without.
It’s a mental muscle—and like all muscles, it can be strengthened.
Here’s how you build it:
– 🌱 Through small wins that remind your nervous system: “I can handle this.”
– 🪞 Through reflective practice that helps you name your growth and reclaim your power.
– 🤝 Through psychologically safe environments that affirm your progress without punishing your learning curve.
And here's where self-awareness comes in:
You must catch yourself in those quiet moments of doubt—
And instead of spiraling, self-regulate.
Instead of overworking, reframe.
Instead of shutting down, step forward.
Because confidence isn’t something you wait for.
It’s something you practice into existence.
👉🏽 Real leadership is built in the reps:
Every hard conversation you don’t avoid.
Every risk you choose to take.
Every “I don’t know, but I’m willing to learn” moment you own.
That’s the work of becoming emotionally intelligent—and emotionally anchored.
So if you’ve ever asked yourself:
“Why don’t I feel ready, even when I am?”
This is your reminder:
🗣️ Readiness doesn’t come from perfection.
It comes from trusting yourself enough to show up anyway.
You’re not missing the skill—you’re missing the self-trust.
Let’s rebuild it—one choice at a time.
3. Environment Matters More Than You Think
Let me say this plainly:
🌬️ If your work culture is chaotic, punitive, or performative—you will begin to internalize survival strategies that look like leadership on the outside…
but are actually trauma responses in disguise.
– Over-functioning?
– People-pleasing?
– Hyper-vigilant perfectionism?
– Chronic overachievement tied to your worth?
That’s not a lack of emotional intelligence.
That’s your nervous system doing its job—trying to keep you safe in an environment that doesn't feel safe to be real.
💡 That’s not weakness. That’s adaptation.
But here’s where the leadership work begins:
🌱 You get to co-create a different culture.
Not just on your team—but inside yourself.
One where:
– People regulate their nervous systems, not just their calendars.
– Feedback becomes a tool for growth, not a weapon of shame.
– Psychological safety isn’t something we talk about once a quarter—it’s the daily standard.
This is the shift from survival leadership to healing-centered leadership.
And it starts with one core EI truth:
🧠 You can’t change the external culture if you haven’t transformed the internal one.
Because here's what often gets missed in traditional leadership development:
You bring your entire emotional history to work—
Your beliefs about worth, your fears of failure, your unspoken rules about being “good enough.”
And unless you’ve done the work to unpack, reframe, and rebuild those inner environments,
You will unintentionally recreate the same harm—just with a better title and a corner office.
🔄 Leadership doesn’t begin with your org chart.
It begins with emotional self-awareness.
Ask yourself:
– What “professional” behaviors have I been rewarded for that were actually responses to fear or anxiety?
– What did I normalize in toxic cultures that I now carry as “just how things are”?
– What would shift if I led from wholeness instead of hyper-vigilance?
Because here’s the truth:
🗣️ You can’t create safety for your team if your inner world is still running on alarms.
That’s why emotional intelligence—specifically reality testing, empathy, and impulse control—isn’t optional for modern leadership.
It’s essential.
It gives you the tools to:
– Slow your breath before reacting.
– Hear the emotion beneath the behavior.
– Disrupt urgency culture with intentional calm.
– Choose curiosity over control.
– Create environments where people are safe to grow, not just expected to perform.
And the best part?
🎯 You don’t have to wait for HR to roll out a new initiative.
You don’t need a reorg or a policy change.
You can start with you.
Because culture is not just what happens at the top—it’s what’s tolerated, modeled, and repeated in the middle.
And as a leader with emotional intelligence?
👉🏽 You don’t just manage people.
You model what’s possible.
So here’s your invitation:
Reclaim your inner environment.
Regulate your own nervous system.
Reimagine leadership that feels safe—to give, to receive, to fail, to rise.
Because that version of you?
That’s the leader your team is waiting for.
🔧 3 Change Moves to Help You Lead with More Insight, Belief, and Emotional Intelligence
🔹 1. Check the Story Behind Your Style
Let’s get honest:
📝 Who taught you what leadership looks like—directly or indirectly?
👀 Was it loud and dominating? Quiet and perfectionistic? Always “on”?
📣 What messages did you absorb about being too ambitious, too emotional, or not enough?
Now pause. Write it out.
Then ask: “Is this really mine—or is it just what I learned to survive?”
🧠 This is emotional self-awareness in action. You can’t grow out of what you haven’t named.
So name it. Challenge it. Change it.
🎯 EI Skill Activated: Self-Awareness + Reality Testing
🔹 2. Build Confidence with Micro-Wins
Confidence doesn’t drop out of the sky. It’s built through repetition.
Stop waiting to “feel ready.”
Start where you are—with small, doable moves that stretch you, not break you.
Try this:
– Speak up once in a meeting—even if your voice shakes.
– Ask for feedback—not just praise.
– Take your lunch break without guilt.
Every time you follow through, you teach your brain:
📢 “I can trust myself. I do hard things. I’ve got this.”
💡 The key? Don’t underestimate small wins. They build real, emotional resilience.
🎯 EI Skill Activated: Confidence Conditioning + Emotional Agility
🔹 3. Design Your Circle, Don’t Just Survive It
Your environment always sends messages about what’s safe, what’s valued, and who belongs.
So ask yourself:
– Who affirms my growth—without demanding perfection?
– Who gives feedback that’s real but still respectful?
– Who reminds me that learning out loud is a leadership strength, not a weakness?
Now… get intentional.
– Invite those people closer.
– Be that person for someone else.
– And use the phrase “I’m learning” like it’s a power move—because it is.
When you normalize growth, you create a culture where people can breathe and lead.
🎯 EI Skill Activated: Social Intelligence + Influence
Here’s what I want you to leave with today:
🧠 You are not a fixed personality.
You are a dynamic, evolving system—shaped by experience, yes, but not defined by it.
You are more than your habits, more than your trauma responses, more than what you were taught to believe about leadership.
Leadership isn’t about having all the answers or pretending everything is under control.
It’s about cultivating the emotional intelligence to say:
“I know what shaped me—and I choose to lead differently.”
It’s about:
– Replacing hustle with healing.
– Trading performance for presence.
– Leading not from your wounds—but from your wisdom.
So whether you’re in your soft life season, your healing era, or just trying to stay centered in a world that keeps demanding more from you:
Hear me when I say this—
🗣️ You can shift how you show up.
🛠️ You can break patterns that once felt permanent.
🌱 You can lead from a place of truth, self-trust, and emotional clarity.
Because when you truly understand that behavior, identity, and environment are part of an interconnected system…
🔥 You stop blaming yourself for the past.
🔥 And you start building a leadership style that actually honors your growth.
This is what it means to lead with intention.
This is the work.
And you don’t have to do it alone.
📝 Journaling Prompt for this Bonus Episode:
What behavior are you repeating that once protected you… but no longer serves the leader you're becoming?
And what belief, what story, what inner narrative—needs to be rewritten starting today?
Take five minutes. Write it out. Say it out loud.
Then… choose something different.
📬 Want support doing this inner work in real time?
I offer 1:1 executive coaching, emotional intelligence intensives, and team leadership retreats that help you lead from the inside out.
Email me directly at info@mrchangeyourlife.com to explore how we can work together.
📱 Follow along on Instagram and Facebook @DrFredrickDwaneLeeII—for daily insights on emotional leadership, nervous system regulation, and real-talk strategy that doesn’t require you to lose yourself to lead well.
🔔 And if this episode hit home?
Subscribe. Share it with a colleague. Drop a review.
Your voice helps this community grow—and your share might be the reminder another leader desperately needs today.
Because your leadership isn’t just what you do.
It’s what you model.
And when you model clarity, compassion, and courage?
💥 You don’t just lead better.
You lead in a way that changes people.
So be well. Be whole.
And lead like your healing matters—because it absolutely does.
Until next time, I’m Dr. Fredrick Lee, and this has been your Leadership Lesson.