103. Most Women Leaders Are Focused on the Wrong Thing: How to Track Your Growth and Build Self-Trust
Many high-achieving women are excellent at noticing what still needs to change, but they struggle to recognize what has already changed. You may still be making decisions from an outdated version of yourself, carrying around an old identity that no longer reflects your experience, accomplishments, or leadership.
In this episode, I’m sharing why tracking your growth is one of the most important leadership practices you can build. Instead of only analyzing your mistakes, shortcomings, and what needs to improve, you’ll learn how to study your wins, your challenges, and your experiences as data that helps you understand yourself and build self-trust.
I walk you through the Self-Empowered Leadership Formula: Context, Curiosity, Choice, and Commitment. This framework will help you separate facts from interpretations, understand your patterns without judgment, decide who you want to become, and commit to the practices that move you toward that identity. Tune in this week to learn how to stop arguing with your own growth, collect evidence of the leader you’re becoming, and build the self-trust that comes from knowing yourself more deeply.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why high-achieving women often focus more on what needs to change than the growth they have already created.
How operating from an outdated identity can keep you from recognizing your current leadership, experience, and capabilities.
Why studying your wins and successes is just as important as learning from mistakes and challenges.
How to use the Self-Empowered Leadership Formula to turn experiences into useful leadership data.
How building awareness of your own growth helps you strengthen self-trust and make more empowered choices about who you want to become.
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Full Episode Transcript:
What if the biggest thing holding you back right now isn't that you haven't grown enough? What if you've already changed, but you're still making decisions based on an outdated version of yourself? You still tell yourself, I don't speak up. I overthink everything. I'm bad at boundaries. I lose confidence around senior leaders. I'm not good with money. But what if that's old data? Because one of the things I constantly see with incredibly accomplished women is this: you are excellent at tracking what needs to change and terrible at tracking what already has. And when you don't register your own growth, you keep leading from an identity you may have already outgrown.
Today, I'm going to teach you how to fix that. By the end of this episode, you'll have a four-step framework you can use in less than five minutes to turn any experience—a win, a mistake, a rejection, a difficult conversation, even a failure—into useful leadership data. I call it the Self-Empowered Leadership Formula. And if you practice this consistently, you will stop simply hoping you're growing. You'll know exactly how you're growing, what is creating the change, and what you want to practice next. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, I am so excited to have you in today's episode. One of the things that I think is amazing about the Command container and the coaching that I do with women is that I underline and have you understand the growth and the change that you've made, right? We are very bad often times, right, as accomplished women of remembering what we did well. And we narrow in and focus, and this comes from our survival mentality, right, on what needs to change, right?
So I want you to notice this. I was actually just coaching a client today and she was just like, I'm just not a very good leader. And I was like, what are you talking about? You have totally turned around your delivery team. You have totally created powerful relationships with these people. People see your delivery. You've been able to sustain yourself and gotten promoted into the senior leadership team because of your leadership and your voice. And just notice where your brain is going to, I'm not a good leader. I don't speak up enough. I don't have great ideas, right? This is where our brain likes to take us, especially when we're stressed, especially when we're feeling disconnected, especially when we're feeling unsettled, right?
So I really want you to notice it because our brains can often times take us to some place that is telling us that our identity is not what it is in the here and now. And if you cannot see yourself in the here and now with real clarity and real groundedness, then you may be unconsciously operating from an old version of yourself that has less experience, less accomplishments, and less know-how. You're starting to treat yourself as somebody who doesn't know it.
So, I want you to notice because you may be carrying around a resume of who you used to be. The woman who was terrified of conflict three years ago. The woman who needed everyone else's approval. The woman who spent two days recovering from one executive disagreeing with her. The woman who wouldn't speak until she had every fact and was super prepared. You may not be her anymore. But if you haven't consciously registered that change, your self-concept hasn't caught up, right? Your identity is not so solidified.
And when you're in those stressful moments, you go back to, I don't speak up, I'm bad at boundaries, I'm really bad at relationships and conflict. I always overthink. Even after those statements, you have to notice yourself and slow down and say, is that actually true? Because if you take into account what your mind is feeding you when you're feeling stressed, and you take it as fact and truth, and not just in the moment thoughts, right, and you start to attach to it, it will start to inform how you show up for that problem, for that thing that's happening in your life.
I want to dive into first sharing with why high achievers don't notice their own growth, right? This is super important because again, as somebody who coaches a lot of high achievers, as a high achiever myself, we want to notice why we override these things. Most people will override, you know, you're trained to track the gap between your promotion, the revenue, the feedback, your next level, mistakes, what needs to prove. This is useful, right? Like, of course it's useful to understand where you are and where you want to be.
But if you continue to do this over and over, it becomes the only thing you see, and you narrow into not enoughness and you narrow into really focusing on where you're missing out versus where you're progressing, right? And that self-talk is actually really critical to your continual growth and momentum and your resiliency.
So notice just this. When I speak more in executive meetings, I'll know I've grown. And you start speaking, but yeah, you might not be concise. Maybe you stutter, and you're still learning. But just notice where you go, yeah, but I still get nervous around executives. So what, right? You're taking the move, you're doing the rep, right? You improve the relationship. So just notice where your brain is constantly saying, yeah, but I haven't gotten promoted, or people are not really seeing me. And you're almost arguing with the growth that you have experienced, and you're kind of, there's like a part of us that often times we want to protect ourselves by staying where we are versus expanding into who we actually are in the moment.
And when I say expanding into who we actually are, if you are somebody who like hears from other people where they're like, you're incredible. You are so good at this. I actually had a client who, somebody was sharing with her what an amazing leader she was, how good she was at AI, all of these things. And she literally when she heard this person talk, she was like, oh, who is she talking about? This person sounds amazing. I can't wait to meet her. And she then found out like, oh, she's actually talking about me. And she didn't register. This is you going on to yourself and realizing, wow. The cost of what it is where people see you at a certain level, they see your identity, they see your leadership, and you don't see it. If you don't see it, and you don't operate from that level, right? Your part of your consciousness is kind of pushing you back into your old identity versus expanding yourself, versus seeing yourself differently.
You know, for me, right, as a coach, like before being a coach, I was a corporate leader, and I had so many accolades as being a corporate leader, right, getting promoted, running a half a billion dollar portfolio, all of these things. But as a coach, like I had to build my credibility, right? I had to say, I'm on the TEDx stage. I'm on the cover of Brains Magazine. I'm a Forbes contributor. All of these things like I built, and I have to see myself as a thought leader, not just a corporate citizen, right? This is part of my identity expansion. This is part of me seeing myself in the here and now of who I've become and who I'm becoming.
I can't think of myself constantly as this corporate executive. I'm no longer a corporate executive. I am an entrepreneur leading a big coaching practice and inviting powerful women inside of Command. I have to see myself that way in order to be able to have more and more alignment into who I'm becoming and build that momentum. I can't just be oscillating between, well, this is who I was in corporate. This is what I was doing in corporate. No, that version of me has long gone. There's a new version of me that I'm embracing and that I continually consciously move towards.
So I'm going to share with you this framework because it's important when we're starting to notice ourselves and when we're starting to notice our thinking, you have to go to school on yourself in order to track your progress, trust yourself, believe in yourself, understand yourself deeply. It's important to almost be obsessive over your thinking because if we can understand our thinking and how we operate, and we can shift it into more powerful ways of being, this is everything. This is emotional freedom. This is our freedom in life to think of things expansively. This is us really taking the reins of our life and the way that we see ourselves and the way that we see the world.
All right, let's dive into the framework because it's pretty simple, but if you can slow yourself down and you can actually walk yourself through this self-empowered leadership framework, you will be self-empowered. It will come to you because you are taking care of yourself and slowing down and not just taking everything your brain is giving you as facts of who you are. We need to slow down.
So the first thing is context. What actually happened here? Separating facts from interpretation. What happened? Not, I completely blew that meeting. That's an interpretation of what you thought happened, right? The context could be, I gave my recommendation, the VP challenged it, I started explaining. I spoke for another four minutes and left the meeting feeling frustrated. Now, you have something to work with, right? Or in a win, right? It's not, I was so confident today. No, the context is I stated my recommendation in the first 10 minutes and I stopped talking after I made my point. That's the fact. This is important because you want the behavioral evidence, not the vague labels.
The more you can get clear on that what I used to call sensory grounded detail, like of what you actually did and what you experienced in the room, the better you're going to be able to separate the facts from the interpretation.
So here's another example, right? Instead of saying, I was more assertive, you said, I said I disagree without adding three disclaimers. That's more clear data. It's not just saying a feeling that I was having. It's really breaking down what you did, and the more you understand what you did and the facts in the moment, this is where you can get more curious. So curiosity is really the next step of this framework. This curiosity is really about understanding our thoughts and our feelings of the facts.
So, this is the heart of going to school on ourself. No judgment. No, what is wrong with me? No immediate self-improvement. This is just interesting. Why did that work? Why did I react that way? Why didn't that work? What was I believing in that moment? What changed? Where did I lose trust in myself? What made me more effective this time? This work with failure and success, that distinction matters because this is how you start to learn, right? Most people analyze the hell out of their failures and barely study their wins. You want to study both. You want to celebrate your growth and you want to learn from your mistakes in a really compassionate way. This is resiliency. This is how you build this muscle to command yourself, self-command, to empower yourself in that moment.
So, just notice, if you had the best executive meeting of your career yesterday, don't just celebrate it. You've got to slow down to study it. Did you prepare less? Did you decide your recommendation before you walked in? Did you speak sooner? Maybe you got coaching on it. Maybe you coached yourself on it. Did you stop over-explaining? Did you get really clear on the context and the purpose of what you were speaking on? Why did it work? Get really clear on why it worked.
Because once you know what you created, how you created that result, you can recreate it. Even when you are noticing things like sometimes I'll have arguments with my husband, but I'll be like, that was a really good argument. We got really clear. What happened? Oh, I told him the truth about how I felt. And I separated my facts from my feelings. And he took responsibility for the places he wasn't, you know, being as responsible, where he was blaming me for stuff. And then we could move forward in a really clear way and share with each other how that made us feel and how we want to move forward together and our own partnership.
So again, studying it. It's not just like, oh, I had a really great conversation with my husband. It's like, no, why? Be curious. Understand that context. Go to school on yourself. That's when you can start being like, wow, I'm growing as a partner. I'm growing as a leader. I know what I'm doing. This is that self-trust muscle. But if you don't slow down to actually analyze what you're doing and how you're doing it, whether it's mistakes or whether it's celebrations, then you miss out on your own growth and tracking this growth and seeing the progress and celebrating the progress. Even celebrating when I've made a mistake, I'm like, now I exactly know why I made that mistake. I know where my mind was taking me and I understand why I interpreted that way, which wasn't helpful for me. That is still a win. You can still celebrate being like, that was a mistake, and yes, I learned from it. And I don't feel great in my body about the outcome, but I feel great about the learning.
This is what we do in Command with each other. This is how I support my clients to see themselves, observe themselves, celebrate themselves, learn from their mistakes, learn from their celebrations, from their accomplishments. This is such a powerful, powerful tool.
So, you want to do this because the third thing is in the self-empowered leadership model is choice. Who do I want to be now, right? What choice do I have? When you want to slow yourself down and you are dealing with something, really being able to get that context and be curious and then making a choice to decide, you know? I want to be someone who disagrees without immediately trying to persuade other people. I want to give the recommendation first. I want to be the first to speak up in the leadership team meeting. I want to stop after my point is made. I want to wait before saying yes to everything. I want to let someone be disappointed.
Again, you're making a conscious choice because you're studying yourself and you're like, this is what growth is. I actually was talking to somebody about learning how to embrace boundaries and how the feeling of it is likely her feeling more selfish because that's typically the byproduct. If you're somebody who's used to saying yes, learning to say no will likely create a feeling of selfishness in you. And if you know that, then when somebody says to you, oh my gosh, you're so selfish, you can say, thank you. I've been working on that. I've been really working on taking up space, saying no, and being more selfish, right?
And I'm not saying like for this person, they're so anti-selfish that learning how to be selfish actually brings them in the middle ground. It's actually not like you're a selfish person. Maybe in their family system, people see them as selfish because they're so used to having their way with this person. Kind of having this person do whatever they want. So they're like, you're really selfish. But like in normal terms, if you're just like, oh, this person says yes to some things and no to other things, you're just a normal person. But you've got to go to school on yourself to understand this.
So when sometimes people would come up to me when I was really practicing my leadership, learning how to be direct, they would say, whoa, you're so bossy. And I would be curious, like, okay, tell me more. They're like, well, you're like, really direct about what you want. You're holding people accountable and you're moving things forward. And then I'm like, great, I'd love to be bossy. I love that answer, right? But if it's like, you're super bossy, you scare people, nobody likes it, they feel intimidated by you, then maybe there's some discerning to do, right? Maybe there's parts of me that's like, okay, well, you know, sometimes it's good to be intimidating. People hear me, right? Do I get the outcome that I want? Oh, but people are scared of me. Maybe that's not so good. This just gives you richness of how to work on things and be curious with yourself and grow and track yourself growing.
Now, the last piece of this is commitment. What will I practice? What are you going to commit to? Because part of this is the commitment to becoming who you want to become. I want to be somebody who is heard in rooms where I speak once without over-explaining. I want to be someone who can say no and say it powerfully and not have to justify my reasons. I want to be somebody who is able to hold herself as convicted and clear and mission-driven. So what does that look like? That's the commitment. You want to know what your bigger why is. Like, who are you moving towards? Because this is what is going to support you in that framework as you look at self-empowered leadership. You want to again, understand context and curiosity, the choice you're going to make, and committing to that choice over and over because of who you want to become.
I always tell people, if you want a commanding presence, like part of all of this is you're going to get pushback. People are going to feel intimidated by you. People might not like you having a commanding presence. You might get rejected. You might feel exposed or vulnerable. This is all part of that learning process. And as you go to school on yourself in that learning process and you understand the outcome that happens when you have more of that commanding presence, then you learn to be like, oh, okay, I understand the growth path. I get that when I get pushed back, it actually doesn't mean that I've done something wrong. It actually means I'm more powerful.
Do you see how powerful that is? It's like a totally different frame of mind. One has you contracting because you're like, I'm getting pushback and that means it's bad. I need to reign in my leadership. And another part is like, I'm getting pushback because I'm powerful and I'm seeing things that people have a reaction to because it is innovative. It is disruptive in a good way. And I'm actually in the leadership conversation. I'm not just standing on the sidelines waiting to play the game. I'm in the game because I am getting pushback. Then you start seeing it all very differently and you start understanding your growth in a very different way. This is what I'm inviting you into.
So, I want you to take a look at that and really think about this. Here's a new way of looking at this because I do want to give you one more example before I leave you today, which is you walk out of a leadership meeting thinking, ugh, I over-explained again. So the old way of thinking is, I always do this. I have no executive presence. I'm a terrible leader. Why can't I just stop talking, right? So there's shame, there's that identity, nothing changes. The new way is, my recommendation was challenged. I felt tightness in my chest and I spent four minutes adding context after I already answered the question.
Curiosity, what happened? I interpreted her question as evidence that she didn't trust my expertise. I started trying to prove myself and defend myself. Oh, wow. What's the choice? Next time someone challenges me, I want to remain connected to the fact that a question doesn't mean I'm being discredited. They're not punishing me. They're just asking a question. So my commitment to myself is, my practice is going to be to pause. And if they want more, then I'll answer it, that I don't have to justify it. And the growth for me, you know, it's not being more confident. It's actually learning how to handle myself and understand myself and interrupt the patterns that are holding me back from being heard.
Okay, that is why this is so powerful. You slow down, you talk to yourself, you understand yourself. This is self-trust. You do this over and over. Self-trust isn't something you convince yourself to have. You collect evidence. I made the ask. I tolerated the no. I dealt with the rejection. I allowed disagreement. I recovered. I told the truth. I spoke up sooner. I held the boundary. I changed my mind. I stayed with myself.
So you really want to notice this is the talk track that I want you to inhabit in order to expand your own leadership potential and how you see yourself. And this is exactly what we do inside Command.
All right. So, I want you to go out this week and as you notice great things happening or terrible things happening using the framework. Go to school on yourself. Don't abandon yourself. Don't just like beat yourself up. Really slow down and say context, what actually happened? Curiosity, what can I learn from this? What were my thoughts and feelings? Choice, what do I choose to be now, right? How do I want to move forward? And commitment, what will I practice next? That's it.
You do not need to make the experience amazing or anything else or make it terrible. This is just data. The more you can see it as data, the more you can study yourself, the more you can celebrate yourself and your learnings, the better you're going to feel about your own leadership potential.
All right, that is today's episode. Go to school on yourself. It is one of the biggest things that I teach and one of the most valuable things that I do in Command because I help people see themselves and see themselves in their progress and celebrate themselves whether there was a failure, whether it was taking a calculated risk, whether it was a celebration. We need to underline this because this is how we grow. This is how we understand where we're moving.
It's like a football player, right? I'm learning how to make the moves, take the action, and I'm studying myself, whether it was a touchdown or whether it was, wow, we just got sacked, or that was a terrible play. Let's go to school and study that. I know it's football season. I'm about to go to an Eagles game with my husband, so I'm all in this like football mindset and metaphors. But have a beautiful week ahead. Go to school on yourself. Let me know how this episode hit you. I am available. I want to hear from you. Have a beautiful day. Bye. Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Today, I'm going to teach you how to fix that. By the end of this episode, you'll have a four-step framework you can use in less than five minutes to turn any experience—a win, a mistake, a rejection, a difficult conversation, even a failure—into useful leadership data. I call it the Self-Empowered Leadership Formula. And if you practice this consistently, you will stop simply hoping you're growing. You'll know exactly how you're growing, what is creating the change, and what you want to practice next. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, I am so excited to have you in today's episode. One of the things that I think is amazing about the Command container and the coaching that I do with women is that I underline and have you understand the growth and the change that you've made, right? We are very bad often times, right, as accomplished women of remembering what we did well. And we narrow in and focus, and this comes from our survival mentality, right, on what needs to change, right?
So I want you to notice this. I was actually just coaching a client today and she was just like, I'm just not a very good leader. And I was like, what are you talking about? You have totally turned around your delivery team. You have totally created powerful relationships with these people. People see your delivery. You've been able to sustain yourself and gotten promoted into the senior leadership team because of your leadership and your voice. And just notice where your brain is going to, I'm not a good leader. I don't speak up enough. I don't have great ideas, right? This is where our brain likes to take us, especially when we're stressed, especially when we're feeling disconnected, especially when we're feeling unsettled, right?
So I really want you to notice it because our brains can often times take us to some place that is telling us that our identity is not what it is in the here and now. And if you cannot see yourself in the here and now with real clarity and real groundedness, then you may be unconsciously operating from an old version of yourself that has less experience, less accomplishments, and less know-how. You're starting to treat yourself as somebody who doesn't know it.
So, I want you to notice because you may be carrying around a resume of who you used to be. The woman who was terrified of conflict three years ago. The woman who needed everyone else's approval. The woman who spent two days recovering from one executive disagreeing with her. The woman who wouldn't speak until she had every fact and was super prepared. You may not be her anymore. But if you haven't consciously registered that change, your self-concept hasn't caught up, right? Your identity is not so solidified.
And when you're in those stressful moments, you go back to, I don't speak up, I'm bad at boundaries, I'm really bad at relationships and conflict. I always overthink. Even after those statements, you have to notice yourself and slow down and say, is that actually true? Because if you take into account what your mind is feeding you when you're feeling stressed, and you take it as fact and truth, and not just in the moment thoughts, right, and you start to attach to it, it will start to inform how you show up for that problem, for that thing that's happening in your life.
I want to dive into first sharing with why high achievers don't notice their own growth, right? This is super important because again, as somebody who coaches a lot of high achievers, as a high achiever myself, we want to notice why we override these things. Most people will override, you know, you're trained to track the gap between your promotion, the revenue, the feedback, your next level, mistakes, what needs to prove. This is useful, right? Like, of course it's useful to understand where you are and where you want to be.
But if you continue to do this over and over, it becomes the only thing you see, and you narrow into not enoughness and you narrow into really focusing on where you're missing out versus where you're progressing, right? And that self-talk is actually really critical to your continual growth and momentum and your resiliency.
So notice just this. When I speak more in executive meetings, I'll know I've grown. And you start speaking, but yeah, you might not be concise. Maybe you stutter, and you're still learning. But just notice where you go, yeah, but I still get nervous around executives. So what, right? You're taking the move, you're doing the rep, right? You improve the relationship. So just notice where your brain is constantly saying, yeah, but I haven't gotten promoted, or people are not really seeing me. And you're almost arguing with the growth that you have experienced, and you're kind of, there's like a part of us that often times we want to protect ourselves by staying where we are versus expanding into who we actually are in the moment.
And when I say expanding into who we actually are, if you are somebody who like hears from other people where they're like, you're incredible. You are so good at this. I actually had a client who, somebody was sharing with her what an amazing leader she was, how good she was at AI, all of these things. And she literally when she heard this person talk, she was like, oh, who is she talking about? This person sounds amazing. I can't wait to meet her. And she then found out like, oh, she's actually talking about me. And she didn't register. This is you going on to yourself and realizing, wow. The cost of what it is where people see you at a certain level, they see your identity, they see your leadership, and you don't see it. If you don't see it, and you don't operate from that level, right? Your part of your consciousness is kind of pushing you back into your old identity versus expanding yourself, versus seeing yourself differently.
You know, for me, right, as a coach, like before being a coach, I was a corporate leader, and I had so many accolades as being a corporate leader, right, getting promoted, running a half a billion dollar portfolio, all of these things. But as a coach, like I had to build my credibility, right? I had to say, I'm on the TEDx stage. I'm on the cover of Brains Magazine. I'm a Forbes contributor. All of these things like I built, and I have to see myself as a thought leader, not just a corporate citizen, right? This is part of my identity expansion. This is part of me seeing myself in the here and now of who I've become and who I'm becoming.
I can't think of myself constantly as this corporate executive. I'm no longer a corporate executive. I am an entrepreneur leading a big coaching practice and inviting powerful women inside of Command. I have to see myself that way in order to be able to have more and more alignment into who I'm becoming and build that momentum. I can't just be oscillating between, well, this is who I was in corporate. This is what I was doing in corporate. No, that version of me has long gone. There's a new version of me that I'm embracing and that I continually consciously move towards.
So I'm going to share with you this framework because it's important when we're starting to notice ourselves and when we're starting to notice our thinking, you have to go to school on yourself in order to track your progress, trust yourself, believe in yourself, understand yourself deeply. It's important to almost be obsessive over your thinking because if we can understand our thinking and how we operate, and we can shift it into more powerful ways of being, this is everything. This is emotional freedom. This is our freedom in life to think of things expansively. This is us really taking the reins of our life and the way that we see ourselves and the way that we see the world.
All right, let's dive into the framework because it's pretty simple, but if you can slow yourself down and you can actually walk yourself through this self-empowered leadership framework, you will be self-empowered. It will come to you because you are taking care of yourself and slowing down and not just taking everything your brain is giving you as facts of who you are. We need to slow down.
So the first thing is context. What actually happened here? Separating facts from interpretation. What happened? Not, I completely blew that meeting. That's an interpretation of what you thought happened, right? The context could be, I gave my recommendation, the VP challenged it, I started explaining. I spoke for another four minutes and left the meeting feeling frustrated. Now, you have something to work with, right? Or in a win, right? It's not, I was so confident today. No, the context is I stated my recommendation in the first 10 minutes and I stopped talking after I made my point. That's the fact. This is important because you want the behavioral evidence, not the vague labels.
The more you can get clear on that what I used to call sensory grounded detail, like of what you actually did and what you experienced in the room, the better you're going to be able to separate the facts from the interpretation.
So here's another example, right? Instead of saying, I was more assertive, you said, I said I disagree without adding three disclaimers. That's more clear data. It's not just saying a feeling that I was having. It's really breaking down what you did, and the more you understand what you did and the facts in the moment, this is where you can get more curious. So curiosity is really the next step of this framework. This curiosity is really about understanding our thoughts and our feelings of the facts.
So, this is the heart of going to school on ourself. No judgment. No, what is wrong with me? No immediate self-improvement. This is just interesting. Why did that work? Why did I react that way? Why didn't that work? What was I believing in that moment? What changed? Where did I lose trust in myself? What made me more effective this time? This work with failure and success, that distinction matters because this is how you start to learn, right? Most people analyze the hell out of their failures and barely study their wins. You want to study both. You want to celebrate your growth and you want to learn from your mistakes in a really compassionate way. This is resiliency. This is how you build this muscle to command yourself, self-command, to empower yourself in that moment.
So, just notice, if you had the best executive meeting of your career yesterday, don't just celebrate it. You've got to slow down to study it. Did you prepare less? Did you decide your recommendation before you walked in? Did you speak sooner? Maybe you got coaching on it. Maybe you coached yourself on it. Did you stop over-explaining? Did you get really clear on the context and the purpose of what you were speaking on? Why did it work? Get really clear on why it worked.
Because once you know what you created, how you created that result, you can recreate it. Even when you are noticing things like sometimes I'll have arguments with my husband, but I'll be like, that was a really good argument. We got really clear. What happened? Oh, I told him the truth about how I felt. And I separated my facts from my feelings. And he took responsibility for the places he wasn't, you know, being as responsible, where he was blaming me for stuff. And then we could move forward in a really clear way and share with each other how that made us feel and how we want to move forward together and our own partnership.
So again, studying it. It's not just like, oh, I had a really great conversation with my husband. It's like, no, why? Be curious. Understand that context. Go to school on yourself. That's when you can start being like, wow, I'm growing as a partner. I'm growing as a leader. I know what I'm doing. This is that self-trust muscle. But if you don't slow down to actually analyze what you're doing and how you're doing it, whether it's mistakes or whether it's celebrations, then you miss out on your own growth and tracking this growth and seeing the progress and celebrating the progress. Even celebrating when I've made a mistake, I'm like, now I exactly know why I made that mistake. I know where my mind was taking me and I understand why I interpreted that way, which wasn't helpful for me. That is still a win. You can still celebrate being like, that was a mistake, and yes, I learned from it. And I don't feel great in my body about the outcome, but I feel great about the learning.
This is what we do in Command with each other. This is how I support my clients to see themselves, observe themselves, celebrate themselves, learn from their mistakes, learn from their celebrations, from their accomplishments. This is such a powerful, powerful tool.
So, you want to do this because the third thing is in the self-empowered leadership model is choice. Who do I want to be now, right? What choice do I have? When you want to slow yourself down and you are dealing with something, really being able to get that context and be curious and then making a choice to decide, you know? I want to be someone who disagrees without immediately trying to persuade other people. I want to give the recommendation first. I want to be the first to speak up in the leadership team meeting. I want to stop after my point is made. I want to wait before saying yes to everything. I want to let someone be disappointed.
Again, you're making a conscious choice because you're studying yourself and you're like, this is what growth is. I actually was talking to somebody about learning how to embrace boundaries and how the feeling of it is likely her feeling more selfish because that's typically the byproduct. If you're somebody who's used to saying yes, learning to say no will likely create a feeling of selfishness in you. And if you know that, then when somebody says to you, oh my gosh, you're so selfish, you can say, thank you. I've been working on that. I've been really working on taking up space, saying no, and being more selfish, right?
And I'm not saying like for this person, they're so anti-selfish that learning how to be selfish actually brings them in the middle ground. It's actually not like you're a selfish person. Maybe in their family system, people see them as selfish because they're so used to having their way with this person. Kind of having this person do whatever they want. So they're like, you're really selfish. But like in normal terms, if you're just like, oh, this person says yes to some things and no to other things, you're just a normal person. But you've got to go to school on yourself to understand this.
So when sometimes people would come up to me when I was really practicing my leadership, learning how to be direct, they would say, whoa, you're so bossy. And I would be curious, like, okay, tell me more. They're like, well, you're like, really direct about what you want. You're holding people accountable and you're moving things forward. And then I'm like, great, I'd love to be bossy. I love that answer, right? But if it's like, you're super bossy, you scare people, nobody likes it, they feel intimidated by you, then maybe there's some discerning to do, right? Maybe there's parts of me that's like, okay, well, you know, sometimes it's good to be intimidating. People hear me, right? Do I get the outcome that I want? Oh, but people are scared of me. Maybe that's not so good. This just gives you richness of how to work on things and be curious with yourself and grow and track yourself growing.
Now, the last piece of this is commitment. What will I practice? What are you going to commit to? Because part of this is the commitment to becoming who you want to become. I want to be somebody who is heard in rooms where I speak once without over-explaining. I want to be someone who can say no and say it powerfully and not have to justify my reasons. I want to be somebody who is able to hold herself as convicted and clear and mission-driven. So what does that look like? That's the commitment. You want to know what your bigger why is. Like, who are you moving towards? Because this is what is going to support you in that framework as you look at self-empowered leadership. You want to again, understand context and curiosity, the choice you're going to make, and committing to that choice over and over because of who you want to become.
I always tell people, if you want a commanding presence, like part of all of this is you're going to get pushback. People are going to feel intimidated by you. People might not like you having a commanding presence. You might get rejected. You might feel exposed or vulnerable. This is all part of that learning process. And as you go to school on yourself in that learning process and you understand the outcome that happens when you have more of that commanding presence, then you learn to be like, oh, okay, I understand the growth path. I get that when I get pushed back, it actually doesn't mean that I've done something wrong. It actually means I'm more powerful.
Do you see how powerful that is? It's like a totally different frame of mind. One has you contracting because you're like, I'm getting pushback and that means it's bad. I need to reign in my leadership. And another part is like, I'm getting pushback because I'm powerful and I'm seeing things that people have a reaction to because it is innovative. It is disruptive in a good way. And I'm actually in the leadership conversation. I'm not just standing on the sidelines waiting to play the game. I'm in the game because I am getting pushback. Then you start seeing it all very differently and you start understanding your growth in a very different way. This is what I'm inviting you into.
So, I want you to take a look at that and really think about this. Here's a new way of looking at this because I do want to give you one more example before I leave you today, which is you walk out of a leadership meeting thinking, ugh, I over-explained again. So the old way of thinking is, I always do this. I have no executive presence. I'm a terrible leader. Why can't I just stop talking, right? So there's shame, there's that identity, nothing changes. The new way is, my recommendation was challenged. I felt tightness in my chest and I spent four minutes adding context after I already answered the question.
Curiosity, what happened? I interpreted her question as evidence that she didn't trust my expertise. I started trying to prove myself and defend myself. Oh, wow. What's the choice? Next time someone challenges me, I want to remain connected to the fact that a question doesn't mean I'm being discredited. They're not punishing me. They're just asking a question. So my commitment to myself is, my practice is going to be to pause. And if they want more, then I'll answer it, that I don't have to justify it. And the growth for me, you know, it's not being more confident. It's actually learning how to handle myself and understand myself and interrupt the patterns that are holding me back from being heard.
Okay, that is why this is so powerful. You slow down, you talk to yourself, you understand yourself. This is self-trust. You do this over and over. Self-trust isn't something you convince yourself to have. You collect evidence. I made the ask. I tolerated the no. I dealt with the rejection. I allowed disagreement. I recovered. I told the truth. I spoke up sooner. I held the boundary. I changed my mind. I stayed with myself.
So you really want to notice this is the talk track that I want you to inhabit in order to expand your own leadership potential and how you see yourself. And this is exactly what we do inside Command.
All right. So, I want you to go out this week and as you notice great things happening or terrible things happening using the framework. Go to school on yourself. Don't abandon yourself. Don't just like beat yourself up. Really slow down and say context, what actually happened? Curiosity, what can I learn from this? What were my thoughts and feelings? Choice, what do I choose to be now, right? How do I want to move forward? And commitment, what will I practice next? That's it.
You do not need to make the experience amazing or anything else or make it terrible. This is just data. The more you can see it as data, the more you can study yourself, the more you can celebrate yourself and your learnings, the better you're going to feel about your own leadership potential.
All right, that is today's episode. Go to school on yourself. It is one of the biggest things that I teach and one of the most valuable things that I do in Command because I help people see themselves and see themselves in their progress and celebrate themselves whether there was a failure, whether it was taking a calculated risk, whether it was a celebration. We need to underline this because this is how we grow. This is how we understand where we're moving.
It's like a football player, right? I'm learning how to make the moves, take the action, and I'm studying myself, whether it was a touchdown or whether it was, wow, we just got sacked, or that was a terrible play. Let's go to school and study that. I know it's football season. I'm about to go to an Eagles game with my husband, so I'm all in this like football mindset and metaphors. But have a beautiful week ahead. Go to school on yourself. Let me know how this episode hit you. I am available. I want to hear from you. Have a beautiful day. Bye. Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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