Self Awareness Is Your Leadership Superpower
An Intro to Self-Mastery for Wellbeing, Relationships, and Performance
(9min read)
My favorite part about coaching is helping my clients get to know themselves better as humans, so they can be better leaders.
Emotional intelligence is not a soft skill. It is a core leadership capacity.
It helps us interrupt reactivity, respond with intention, and build deeper trust with the people around us. It also improves how we manage conflict, reduce stress, build resilience, unlock creativity, and make better decisions.
“Emotional intelligence accounts for nearly 90% of the difference between high performers and their peers, particularly in roles of leadership and collaboration.” (Harvard Business Review (Cherniss, 2010))
Owning your behavior and cultivating a deeper awareness of yourself and others is also simply an important part of being an adult.
In my coaching practice, we don’t just focus on strategy, communication, and getting things done. We work on building the inner capacity to lead. That means developing self-awareness, practicing emotional regulation, and learning to operate from grounded clarity even under pressure.
👋 Hey, it’s Jess. Welcome to my weekly newsletter, Thought(ful) Leaders, where I share practical tools and frameworks, share research, and interview thoughtful leaders on the future of work.
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The Untrained Mind
When we neglect this inner work, we’re more likely to sabotage our success and the success of those in our charge. We avoid hard conversations, react impulsively in meetings, procrastinate on priorities, or burn ourselves out trying to prove our worth.
Often, we blame circumstances, but the root of the problem lives within our own mental habits.
Let’s take an honest look at why we need to train our minds.
The mind is often triggered, anxious, needy, jumpy, and nervously scanning for threats. Evolutionarily, our minds developed this way to protect us. It has kept us alive. But left untrained, the mind becomes reactive and unreliable. At worst, it becomes absolutely dangerous. Additionally, we believe and routinely identify with all of the crazy stuff it does.
I’ll go so far as to say untrained minds are the source of everything from road rage, to our wars, divisions, our judgements, our violence- just look at the state of the world.
We train our mind so that we can use it well.
How We Create Conflict
It’s not always the difficult colleague that creates tension. It’s our interpretation of their behavior and the stories we tell ourselves about what it means.
The mind generates thoughts rapidly, often based on limited or distorted information. It does not just think thoughts, it believes them. Some are obviously irrational. Others feel deeply convincing. The mind assumes, misreads, and dramatizes. It creates entire narratives from fragments, then clings to them as fact.
It leaps to conclusions. It assumes it knows what others are thinking. It replays and rewrites situations until we feel trapped in our own mental loops. And it does all of this while seeking control, craving certainty, and trying to keep us safe. Without awareness, we end up believing these stories and acting from them.
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves”
- Carl Jung
Emotional intelligence helps us interrupt these loops. It allows us to step back, observe the pattern, and choose a more skillful response.
Creativity and Anxiety
It’s easy to say we want innovative teams, but fear, perfectionism, anxiety, and judgment often get in the way. Without awareness of how those inner blocks show up, we won’t unlock new ideas or take bold risks.
We are born curious but as we age and get used to performing in school and in our careers, we slowly atrophy our curiosity muscle. We don’t take the time to cultivate curiosity because it often feels antithetical to performing. So we become anxious performers at work, even when there is no quiz, and we wonder why it’s so hard to build teams that are creative.
"I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened."
- Mark Twain
In her new book, Beyond Anxiety (Penguin Random House), author Martha Beck shows us that the antidote to anxiety is actually to practice creativity.
“Theres a tiny part of your brain called the amygdala which is designed to keep you safe by being alarmed when you see unfamiliar things.”
She goes on to explain that this isn’t a broken function within us or a disorder that needs to be fixed. We must welcome the anxious parts of ourselves and let them be there with a sense of total acceptance.
Then once you’re calm, we must start creating. She says, “anxiety and creativity just can’t exist at the same time. When you start creating, that little anxious part of you switches off. This is when you can start accessing a state of flow.”
If we want to cultivate creativity, we must create the conditions where it’s ok to explore, ask questions, and be wrong. Jeff Hamaoui talks about this as moving from “imposter syndrom to explorer syndrom.” When we allow ourselves to be open and curious, our creativity flows. Our connections deepen, and we’re capable of doing our life’s greatest work.
The Patterns That Run The Show
When we’re unaware of our own thought patterns, especially those tied to inadequacy, fear of failure, or unresolved emotion, we risk sabotaging ourselves and creating ripple effects for the people around us. We may blame deadlines, teammates, or lack of support. But often, the source is internal.
Here’s an example of my own inner saboteur that many might relate to: the striver or hyper-achiever.
I spent years chasing serious titles and external markers of success, always trying to prove (to myself) I was smart and worthy. It earned me promotions, but it also earned me burnout. At 34, newly promoted and eight months pregnant, I hit a wall.
That breaking point forced me to face what I had been avoiding. I started to question not just how I was working, but why. Slowly, I began to shift toward self-compassion, toward presence, and toward a different definition of success.
That striving part of me still shows up. But now, I see it more clearly and have more choice in how I respond.
We all have patterns like this. They are not flaws. They are overused strengths that were designed to keep us safe. With awareness and practice, they become something we can work with, rather than something that works against us.
The truth is, leadership is hard. Life is complex. The world is heavy. Between global uncertainty and personal stress, including aging parents, unexpected tragedy, illness, parenting, and financial pressure, it's no wonder we get overwhelmed. But we don’t have to stay stuck in survival mode. We can build the skills to meet it all with more grace.
We all operate on learned patterns formed early in life. These habits were designed to protect us, but as adults, when triggered by stress they become counterproductive.
These are not personal defects. They are overused strengths, and without awareness, they create confusion, conflict, and exhaustion.
Leading Yourself, So You Can Lead Others
We spend nearly 70% of our lives at work. That time is shaping us, whether we realize it or not. Why not use it to become the kind of person, and leader, we truly want to be? The more we can reflect on our own patterns and metabolize our experiences into wisdom, the better leaders and humans we will be.
Leadership is not about perfection. It is about learning to pause, reflect, and respond with intention. The more we understand our inner workings, the more effective and human we become.
In my past interview with Chip Conley, he emphasized that many of the most valuable insights come from life’s challenges: “Often, our painful life lessons are the raw material for our future wisdom.”
One helpful tool for me early on was journaling. Here are some journal prompts from the book Reboot by executive coach Jerry Colonna. You can find more great questions in his reading guide. I encourage you to start exploring these when you’re ready to being taking responsibility for yourself:
What are the conditions that aren’t working?
How have i been complicit in creating the conditions i say I dont want?
What am i not saying that i need to say?
What am i saying thats not being heard?
Whats being said that im not hearing?
These questions are important because they force us to be honest with ourselves, and we’re socialized not to do that. We laugh things off, numb out, distract ourselves from the important issues that need tending, and keep life at the surface level.
But those tactics don’t make the issues go away, and they will spring up one way or another, so you may as well get in the drivers seat of your self-inquiry process. The benefit of doing this is you get more comfortable in time being honest with yourself, and it spills over into your ability to be honest with others.
“Great leaders look unflinchingly in the mirror and transform untamed hungers and unruly compulsions into moments of self-compassion and understanding. In doing so, they create spaces for each of us to do the same.”
- Jerry Colonna
Imagine having the capacity to just be with people where you can tell the truth. Were socialized to bullshit each other- everything is great, our team is crushing it, our product is perfect, our customers love us, our people are rockstars. Everyone needs a pep talk now and then, but everyone needs honesty too. It’s fundamental to building trust, so start with yourself.
There are three frameworks I return to often with clients:
Mindfulness-based self-inquiry, which helps us observe our thoughts, regulate our nervous systems, and develop more choice in how we respond.
Positive Intelligence (PQ), a neuroscience-backed framework for identifying self-sabotaging mental patterns and building “Sage” traits like empathy, curiosity, and purpose.
DiSC, a behavioral assessment that helps leaders understand their communication style and stress responses, while learning how to collaborate more effectively with people who are wired differently.
Each of these frameworks offers a different lens, but they all share one foundational belief: self-awareness can be cultivated. And when it is, it changes everything.
Up Next
In a forthcoming post, I’ll take a deeper look at each of these practices and welcome your questions and comments below.
That’s what we’re after here. The kind of leadership that starts with honesty, grows through compassion, and expands our capacity to lead with strength and heart.
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