Knowing Yourself Is Not the Same as Knowing Your Impact

The more senior we become, the easier it is to believe we know ourselves well.

After all, we've gained experience, faced challenges, led teams, and built successful careers. Surely that should make us more self-aware.

But leadership comes with a hidden risk. As our responsibilities grow, honest feedback often becomes harder to come by. Fewer people challenge us directly. More people soften their message or tell us what they think we want to hear. Without realising it, we can lose sight of how our behaviour actually lands with others.

I've seen this many times in my coaching work: capable, well-intentioned leaders who care deeply about their people and genuinely want to have a positive impact, yet who are surprised to discover that others experience them quite differently than they experience themselves.

This is the paradox at the heart of organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich's research. Across a multi-year study involving thousands of participants, she found that while most people believe they are self-aware, only a small minority genuinely are. The gap between perception and reality is a useful place to begin.

Eurich's contribution is to show that self-awareness is not one thing, but two distinct capacities that do not necessarily travel together. The first is internal self-awareness: a clear view of our own values, strengths, patterns, and motivations. The second is external self-awareness: an accurate understanding of how we are experienced by others. We can be strong in one and blind in the other, and the difference matters more than most leaders realise.

In my coaching work, I often meet leaders who are surprised when colleagues describe them as intimidating, distant, or hard to approach. They have done the inner work, but they have not yet seen themselves through the eyes of others. Because that gap is uncomfortable, it is often ignored.

This is where many leadership development efforts fall short. They focus heavily on the inside — values work, strengths profiles, reflection exercises, personality tools — and these are useful, but incomplete. External self-awareness depends on something most organisations struggle to provide consistently: honest, specific feedback from people who feel safe enough to give it.

The people best placed to give us that feedback are often the least likely to do so. Power, hierarchy, and relationship dynamics all interfere; as leaders rise, fewer people feel able to speak plainly to them. This is one of the quiet paradoxes of leadership — the more influence we have, the less truth we tend to hear.

Psychological safety plays a critical role here. People only speak honestly when they feel it is safe to do so, which places a dual responsibility on leaders: to actively seek feedback, and to create the conditions where honesty becomes possible.

Eurich's research also found that self-awareness does not automatically increase with experience or seniority. In fact, power often reduces it — not because leaders stop caring, but because the feedback loop weakens over time. Left unattended, self-awareness does not evolve with tenure. It erodes.

The leaders who improved most, however, were not those who reflected the most. They were the ones who stayed open to feedback, especially when it was uncomfortable, and who learned to ask better questions of themselves: not why am I like this, but what impact did this have, what pattern keeps repeating, what would I do differently next time. These questions move us forward in a way that endless reflection rarely does.

For those of us working in leadership development, the implication is simple: internal insight without external feedback is only half the work. Real self-awareness requires both, developed deliberately and revisited often, because the conditions that distort it — seniority, success, a weakening feedback loop — do not disappear as careers progress. If anything, they tend to intensify.

This is the foundation of Becoming an Authentic Leader. The programme is built on a simple belief: authentic leadership requires both self-awareness and an honest understanding of impact. It is a cohort programme for up to twelve leaders with Charlotte and inspiring leaders by your side throughout. We work in a circle format across four residential and hybrid days at Bautahøj, five masterclasses with guest speakers, a Gallup CliftonStrengths Assessment and feedback session, and four individual coaching sessions.

The September 2026 cohort runs from September 2026 to March 2027. Early bird pricing is available until 1 July 2026: 24,575 kr. excl. VAT + 5,000 kr. expenses — a saving of over 5,000 kr. on the standard price.

Interested? Reply to this email or write to authenticleaders@outlook.dk If you know someone who would benefit from this programme, please do pass it on.