How a Bad Leader Changed My Career || Episode 21

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You know what you meant. Do you know how it landed?

In this episode of The Private Leadership Reset, Ryan Watts looks at the distance between a leader's intent and their impact, and why closing it takes more than looking inward. Leadership self-awareness grows less through introspection and more through structured curiosity: asking "what" instead of "why," and letting someone outside you ask the question too. That is what coaching is built to do.

In this episode:

  • Ryan's first coaching conversation, and the question about productivity that opened something deeper
  • How one manager's verdict ("you don't have any successes to speak of") led him to disengage, and how a new leader's question changed the outcome within a week
  • Internal negotiation: the ongoing back and forth between what you know and what you let yourself act on
  • A personal story about negotiating his marriage against his job, and the limiting belief underneath it
  • What it feels like when the negotiation stops: momentum without force
  • Presence as the starting point for awareness
  • Attention deficit trait, Dr. Edward Hallowell's term for the overload modern work produces
  • Tasha Eurich's research on internal and external self-awareness, and why seniority makes self-assessment less accurate
  • The Dunning-Kruger effect, and why feeling self-aware is not evidence that you are
  • Why "why" questions tend toward rumination, and how "what" questions lead to insight

Mentioned in this episode:

  • Edward Hallowell, "Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform," Harvard Business Review (January 2005): https://hbr.org/2005/01/overloaded-circuits-why-smart-people-underperform
  • Tasha Eurich, "What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It)," Harvard Business Review (January 2018): https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it
  • The Dunning-Kruger effect

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