Grow Leadership Insight with Practical Resources

We talk a lot about workplace culture. Engagement scores, wellbeing programmes, psychological safety frameworks. Organisations are investing more than ever in understanding why some workplaces thrive and others quietly drain the people in them.

There is a moment in almost every manager’s development when they discover coaching and want to use it for everything. The intention is good. But the impact, without discernment, can be the opposite of what they hoped for.

In my work with leaders, one thing has become consistently clear to me: the most important conversations a leader has are the ones they have with themselves.

Most managers I work with are not avoiding feedback because they don’t care. They are avoiding it because they care too much and don’t quite know how to begin.

The leaders who sustain high performance over time are the ones who have built the most intentional support around them and who have given themselves permission to use it. The most important thing you can do for the people who depend on your leadership is make sure you are genuinely supported yourself.

You have worked hard to get where you are. You have the title, the track record and the respect of the people around you. By any external measure, you are succeeding. And yet something else is often running beneath the surface.

In the first article in this series, we explored the confidence gap, the disconnect that many senior leaders experience between their external success and their inner experience of themselves. In this article I go a layer deeper, because understanding where the pattern comes from is what makes it possible to shift.

In the first two articles in this series, we explored the confidence gap and where the pattern comes from. In this final article, I want to talk about what actually shifts it. Self-awareness has many dimensions, and there is one dimension that is rarely talked about in leadership development, and that in my experience is often where the deepest change happens.