What a decade of coaching leaders has taught me about questioning what I think I know.
For years, I thought my commitment to quality was one of my greatest strengths. It took me much longer to realise it was also protecting me from being judged.
I was reminded of that a few days ago, when I came across something I had written in 2016: a collection of thoughts about leadership, influence, decision-making and human behaviour.
Leadership isn’t a title. It’s influence. Personal change precedes organisational change. The decisions we make shape our future. Understanding what drives human behaviour is fundamental to leadership.
Reading them a decade later, I was struck by how much I still agreed with. But I no longer understand them in quite the same way, and the difference has changed how I coach leaders.
It has also reinforced something I now recognise in every leader I work with, myself included: there is always another ceiling.
The Leadership Philosophy That Made Sense
When I wrote those notes, I had already been coaching full time for several years, but my focus was shifting towards leaders, and I had just started working with CEOs. If I’m honest, I was a little intimidated. These were people running successful businesses, making significant decisions and carrying responsibilities I hadn’t necessarily experienced myself.
I felt I needed to have the answers.
My philosophy at the time reflected that. I believed that becoming a more effective leader meant developing greater mastery over myself: managing my emotions, making better decisions, anticipating problems, setting higher standards, taking responsibility for outcomes and influencing people towards something worthwhile.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. In fact, it served me well as a coach. What I couldn’t see at the time was that many of my strengths were also serving another purpose.
They were protecting me.
My commitment to quality was partly driven by that fear of being judged. My willingness to take responsibility was also a way of avoiding being let down. My desire to help others often came with an unspoken need to be needed. And my belief that I needed to have the answers meant my clients sometimes relied on mine rather than discovering their own.
I thought I was being an effective coach, and in many ways I was. But I was also becoming the ceiling on what my clients could see for themselves.
I was so concerned with being a good coach that I sometimes got in the way of good coaching.
I see the same pattern in leaders. The manager who wants so much to develop their people that they keep solving their problems. The CEO who works so hard to make the business succeed that it cannot succeed without them. The leader so focused on demonstrating effective leadership that they leave little room for anyone else to lead.
The desire to be effective can become the very thing that limits our effectiveness. Not because the intention is wrong, but because we become attached to what being effective must look like.
The Problem With Mastering Yourself
One idea I once subscribed to was that great leaders master their internal state. Control your emotions, direct your focus, change the meaning you give events and choose how to respond.
It sounds perfectly reasonable. But there is a problem: how do you master something you cannot see?
Consider a leader who prides themselves on exceptionally high standards. They review everything, challenge weak thinking, anticipate mistakes and intervene whenever quality is at risk. They are respected for their judgement. They are also exhausted. Their team has become dependent on them, decisions keep returning to their desk and people hesitate to take responsibility.
The leader concludes that their people need greater ownership, so they attend a leadership programme. They learn to delegate, ask better questions and empower their team. For a while, things improve.
Then pressure arrives. A deadline slips, a mistake is made or an important decision stalls, and the leader steps straight back in.
Why? Because the problem was never simply their behaviour. It was the identity driving it.
They weren’t just committed to high standards. They had become someone who needed to be the person guaranteeing them. Letting go threatened something far more personal than the quality of the work. It threatened who they believed they had to be.
From Mastery to Awareness
This is where my thinking has changed most. I spent years believing that the route to greater effectiveness was greater control over how I thought, felt and behaved. Today, I’m far more interested in what is already shaping those thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
What assumptions am I making? What am I interpreting as a threat? What am I trying to protect? What do I need others to think about me? And what becomes unavailable because of the person I believe I have to be?
These aren’t simply questions about behaviour. They are questions about being.
That shift didn’t come from one place. It has been shaped by seminars, courses and books, by being coached myself by some of the world’s leading coaches and, above all, by the leaders I’ve worked with.
Some of the most useful learning came from approaches I initially disagreed with. I deliberately explored courses that challenged my methodology, partly to understand them and partly to test my own thinking. Some confirmed what I believed; others exposed assumptions I hadn’t realised I was making. Both made my coaching better.
But I began to notice something else. Questioning a methodology was relatively easy. Questioning the person who had become invested in that methodology was considerably more uncomfortable.
I could challenge an idea, examine a different approach and still remain completely attached to being the person who knew what good coaching looked like. That attachment shaped what I was willing to hear.
In ontological coaching, we explore how language, emotion and the body shape our experience of the world. Two leaders can say exactly the same words and create entirely different experiences. One asks, “What do you think?” because they are genuinely curious. The other asks the same question while waiting for someone to confirm what they already believe.
The words are identical. The impact isn’t. Leadership is never simply about what you do. It is about who you are being while you do it.
The Hidden Cost of Being the Expert
Experience creates a particular challenge. The more knowledgeable and capable we become, the easier it is to confuse what we know with what is possible. We trust our judgement not only because it has served us well, but because being someone with good judgement has become part of who we are.
People come to us for answers. They value our experience and trust us to see what they cannot. Over time, that recognition becomes something we feel compelled to maintain.
I experienced this in my own coaching. The more I learnt, the more I felt I should know. And the more I believed I should know, the harder it became to stay genuinely open to what I didn’t. Not because I was unwilling to learn, but because questioning my thinking could feel like questioning the very capability I had spent years developing.
I see the same with experienced executives. When their judgement becomes inseparable from their identity, being wrong is no longer just an error. It becomes a threat to who they are, and the temptation is to defend what they know rather than explore what they don’t.
What happens when the philosophy you have built your career around becomes something you are no longer willing to question? What happens when your experience stops being a resource and becomes the boundary of what you consider possible? And how would you know?
From inside your own way of seeing the world, your assumptions rarely look like assumptions. They look like reality.
The experience that makes us valuable can also make us less available to learning. The challenge isn’t to abandon it. It’s to stop letting it set the limits of what we can see.
When Your Greatest Strength Becomes Your Greatest Limitation
Over the years, I’ve coached and interviewed hundreds of leaders, and one pattern appears again and again. The qualities that made people successful often become the very qualities that hold them back.
The problem solver becomes the bottleneck. The perfectionist prevents others from developing. The decisive leader stops listening. The supportive leader avoids difficult conversations. The visionary can no longer see possibilities they didn’t create.
These aren’t incompetent people. Quite the opposite: they are talented, capable and successful. But somewhere along the way, a strategy that worked became an identity that had to be maintained. And because that identity produced success, there was little reason to question it, until it stopped working. Or, more accurately, until the cost of maintaining it outweighed the results it produced.
The Difference Between Improving and Transforming
This has led me to a distinction that now sits at the heart of my coaching.
Improvement is becoming better at what you already know how to do. Transformation is becoming capable of something your current way of being doesn’t allow.
Improvement might mean learning to delegate more effectively; transformation might mean becoming someone who no longer needs to be indispensable. Improvement might mean better communication skills; transformation might mean tolerating disagreement without experiencing it as rejection. Improvement might mean making better decisions; transformation might mean recognising when your need to be right is stopping you from seeing what is possible.
And in my own case? Improvement might have made me better at asking questions, listening and helping clients solve problems. Transformation required me to become someone who no longer needed to have the answers.
That was a very different challenge, because it wasn’t another coaching technique. It meant sitting with uncertainty, allowing a client to struggle without stepping in, asking a question without knowing where it might lead and trusting that my value as a coach didn’t depend on being the one who found the answer.
Sometimes that meant resisting an impulse that felt entirely reasonable. Sometimes it meant realising afterwards that I had stepped in when I didn’t need to. And sometimes it meant discovering that a client could create something far more powerful than anything I might have suggested.
Many years ago, I coached a highly successful founder who wanted to take his business to the next level but kept hitting the same barriers. He blamed his team. To me, it was clear that the real issue was that he didn’t trust them, and he couldn’t see it. Every time I pushed, he reacted strongly, and I backed off.
In hindsight, I was protecting myself as much as him. He didn’t trust his team, and I didn’t trust him to handle the challenge. Today, I would stay with the discomfort and not let him off the hook, because that is often where the real coaching begins.
Both improvement and transformation matter, but they are not the same thing. I believe many leadership development programmes concentrate almost entirely on the first. We teach leaders new skills, techniques and behaviours without examining the identity that determines how they will be used. Then we wonder why, under pressure, they return to their old ways.
Leadership Is Still About Influence
I still believe leadership is fundamentally about influence. But today I understand influence differently. It isn’t simply the ability to persuade, motivate or move people to action. It is recognising that who you are being shapes what other people experience as possible.
Your certainty can close down a conversation. Your fear can make others cautious. Your need for control can create dependence. Your willingness to be wrong can make it safer for others to speak. Your ability to stay present in uncertainty can give others space to develop their own judgement. And your willingness to stop being indispensable can allow the people around you to become extraordinary.
You are always influencing others. The question is whether you recognise what you are creating.
Which brings me back to something I wrote in 2016: personal change precedes organisational change. I still believe it. But I now understand that personal change isn’t only about improving how we think, feel and behave. It is also about becoming aware of the identity those thoughts, feelings and behaviours come from.
The way we lead doesn’t simply influence the results we achieve. It shapes the environment in which everyone else is trying to achieve theirs.
The Question I’m Left With
Reading those 2016 notes, I don’t think my earlier philosophy was wrong. It was incomplete. And I suspect that in another ten years, I’ll say the same about what I believe today.
Back then, I was focused on becoming more effective at influencing myself and others, and on being the coach who had the answers. Today, I’m interested in what sits underneath that.
Who am I being that determines how I influence myself and others, and what becomes possible when I am no longer constrained by that identity?
It’s a question I keep asking myself, because understanding your patterns doesn’t make them disappear. Fear still shows up. The need for approval still makes itself known. The pull back towards what feels familiar remains. The difference is that I can increasingly recognise those things without letting them make my decisions for me.
There is something liberating about accepting that I haven’t finished learning. I don’t have to defend everything I believed ten years ago. I don’t have to pretend that what I believe today will stay unchanged. And I don’t have to arrive at some final version of myself to be effective in my work.
What matters is staying willing to examine what I think I know, particularly when my experience tells me I’m right.
Perhaps that’s what leadership development is really about. Not arriving at a final version of the leader you should be, but continuing to become free from the leader you believe you have to be.
Because the moment we believe we have arrived is often the moment we become the ceiling.
If this resonates and you’d like to explore what your next level might look like, I’d welcome a conversation. Get in touch.
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