Howdy Vik!

So let’s answer the top question and then hit the addition in the second here. Lead leg kicks are hard to develop at first. Lifting your lead leg, shifting your weight to your back leg, rotating through with the base leg, lotta stuff going on. I tend to have students learn the rear round house kick on both legs in order to gain a better understanding of overall kick mechanics on both sides and also to help them understand that the lead leg has techniques of its own to generate force (shuffling or switching, stepping into it with the back leg, etc.). In response to the additional question, a little bit of lean is okay as long as it doesn’t break posture during recovery of the kick. If you’re fighting a much taller opponent at 5’3”, you’ll probably want to change focus to the leg kicks if throwing the kick higher makes you lose balance.