…. our leadership narrows.
I often hear from clients starting coaching:
“I don’t want to change who I am.”
It’s usually from thoughtful, successful, high-performing senior leaders who have built extraordinary careers by being very good at something. Does this ring a bell?
Maybe you are known as:The decisive one
The analytical one
The calm one
The results-getter
The challenger
The peacemaker
The relentless driver
So when you receive feedback, like “be warmer,” “show more gravitas,” “tell more of a story,” “take up more space,” it can feel like a threat to your core identity. It’s heard as someone attempting, wanting, or demanding a change in who you really are.
But that’s rarely what’s happening.
What’s often being communicated is that your leadership has begun to narrow.
Remember that well-worn phrase: “Always do what you’ve always done, and you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” That’s what’s at play here. Our habitual places get overused—often our so-called strengths— they keep us stuck, reputationally and behaviourally.
Success Creates a Pattern
Over nearly 30 years as an executive coach and psychotherapist, working with developmental psychology, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Buddhist psychology, I’ve seen, so many times over, that our strengths are not random. My own certainly aren’t.
They are often much-needed, long-serving, intelligent, early adaptations.
In IFS language, we call them “protective parts”: organised strategies that helped us succeed, belong, and stay safe. We all have them, and we come to know them as personality: It’s just who I am.
In psychodynamic terms, they are described as defences—not pathological, but purposeful—ways we had to protect our sense of self in order to survive, most likely developed in childhood. In Buddhist psychology, they are called conditioning: habits of responding shaped by experience.
However we describe these parts of ourselves, it’s critical to understand and genuinely believe that none of them are flaws. In fact, for so many, they are often the very reason you are sitting at the top table. So why would you give them up? The truth is, you don’t have to. But you will benefit from growing new capacities to sit alongside them.
Without that growth, that one move we have, that one version of ourselves, can become our only move. Then your leadership narrows. The classic “one-trick pony” problem.
At comma, coaching isn’t about reinvention. It’s about range.
You keep your directness—you grow the capacity to temper it.
You keep your drive—you grow the ability to soften it.That’s growth. We coach you to expand your leadership repertoire.
Because as we mature, very few of us have met our whole selves yet. We are always becoming more of who we are capable of being. But this natural capacity in us goes nowhere without awareness.
One of the most insightful realisations for any of us is this:
“I’m not broken. I’m just over-relying on one part of me.”
IFS speaks of the Self: a steady, wise centre characterised by calm, clarity, courage and compassion. When we are led from that place, we don’t lose our strengths; we integrate them. Buddhist psychology echoes this. Beneath our conditioned responses is awareness, the capacity to notice without being hijacked by conditioning.
So your work is not to get rid of your survival strategies. It is to befriend them.
To notice:
When does my efficiency tip into impatience?
When does my rationality bypass emotion?
When does my calm become distance?
Not with shame—although we often need to travel through a few layers of defence to reach these parts of Self—but with curiosity.
Because once you can see the pattern, you are no longer inside it. And then you have choice.
Emotional Maturity Comes From Early Recognition
Emotional maturity in leadership isn’t about being less emotional. It’s about recognising how you feel before your behaviour has to communicate it for you. When frustration isn’t acknowledged internally, it leaks as sharpness. When anxiety isn’t recognised, it shows up as control. When exhaustion isn’t admitted, it becomes cynicism.
In Core Process psychotherapy, we speak about embodiment: sensing what is happening in real time. In neuroscience, we might call it interoception. In mindfulness practice, it is simple awareness.
Whatever language you use, the principle is the same:If you can feel it early, you have choice.
If you don’t, your leadership behaviour will express it anyway.
So we support you to shift from automatic pilot to awareness and choice
This is the heart of the work we do at comma.
A leader might say, “I’m just a straight talker.”
Perhaps.
And perhaps that straightness once protected you from being dismissed.
But can you also choose warmth when needed?
Can you choose curiosity?
Can you choose silence?
Freedom in leadership is not about altering your nature. It is about widening your repertoire so that your familiar response is no longer your only response.
If you have done any therapy, you will recognise terms like “exiles” or “splitting.” Simply put, they describe parts of ourselves that had to be exiled or split off to keep us safe as we grew up. These splits can happen in later life as well.
In a world obsessed with tactics and frameworks, this kind of work can sound intangible and soft. It is anything but. It asks that you examine your inner landscape with the same rigour you bring to strategic planning.
It asks:
Who would I be at this moment if I weren’t defending anything?
What part of me is driving this decision?
What am I protecting right now?
What do I not want to feel?
These questions have the power to change how our meetings unfold, how relationships improve, and how conflict is handled. And perhaps most importantly, they change how safe others feel in your presence.
And psychological safety, as organisational research repeatedly shows us, underpins performance.
So those coaching briefs that ask for “more gravitas,” or “more warmth,” can feel like criticism of character, but they are often a request for breadth. We are all a multiplicity of parts on the inside; some well-developed, others less so.
We don’t need reinvention, but we do need range. And that kind of leadership doesn’t narrow; it deepens.
If you would like a great read on this subject, look to James Hollis, a brilliant Jungian author. You may have noticed our series of “books we return to time and time again” on LinkedIn. Hollis’s work features largely.
His book “A Life of Meaning” shares a central theme: encouraging each of us to ask the large questions about what really matters. That involves a continual examination of where we still live from internalised, self-limiting scripts of our personal history.
The price of not undertaking this enquiry, Hollis writes, is to feel haunted by our unlived lives. That haunting then drives compensatory behaviours, such as materialism and workaholism. Hollis advises that we pay attention to our patterns, projections, and dreams as clues to what more is seeking to emerge. Finding the courage to face our fears is, Hollis suggests, the best contribution anyone can make.
And for coaches: if we ask our clients such questions, we must, of course, be continually asking ourselves the same.
Feature Image Credit: Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash
