Self-Awareness: the mother of leadership skills

The mother of leadership skills

Self-awareness: the mother of dragons leadership skills

www.bolster-consulting.com

In Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen is the Mother of Dragons. Powerful, awe-inspiring, and, when mishandled, slightly terrifying.

In leadership, there’s another “mother” that doesn’t breathe fire but is just as consequential: self-awareness.

It doesn’t look as spectacular. No dramatic soundtrack. And yet, without it, most leadership skills either misfire, backfire, or quietly erode trust. With it, even imperfect leaders become credible, grounded, and influential.

Self-awareness is the mother of all emotional intelligence skills. And if you want to lead, inspire, or coach others, it’s where everything starts.

Clients often come to me asking to work on improving vision, communication, decision-making, execution. But coaching leaders, I’ve come to believe that’s often backwards.

Before you can lead others, you have to lead yourself.
Before you can inspire, you have to understand what drives you.
Before you can coach, you have to notice what you bring into the room, especially under pressure.

That capacity is self-awareness. And it is not just another leadership skill. It is the meta-skill that makes all the others possible.

The beauty of self-awareness is that it doesn’t stop at the office door. It reshapes how you show up in your life, your relationships, and the impact you have on others.

What self-awareness really is (and what it isn’t)

At its core, self-awareness is the ability to:

• Notice your internal state (thoughts, beliefs, emotions, bodily signals, fears)

• Understand how that state shapes your behavior (e.g. if you feel threatened you are likely to react in a defensive mode and with bias)

• Recognize the impact of that behavior on others

• Create enough space to choose your response rather than defaulting to habit (“choice” is my coaching mantra: the work of leadership is developing your repertoire of responses to the system, not just reactions to the moment).

In leadership terms, self-awareness is the difference between:

• Reacting vs responding
  Reacting is letting the moment drive you; responding is noticing the moment and choosing how you want to show up in it.

• Intent vs impact
  Intent is what you meant to convey; impact is what others actually experience, and leadership lives in the gap between the two.

• Authority vs presence
  Authority comes from role or title; presence comes from how grounded, attentive, and credible you feel to others, especially under pressure.

Self-awareness in the leadership landscape

I’ll quote two bodies of work that I find particularly helpful in understanding why self-awareness matters so much for leaders.

1. Emotional intelligence (Goleman)

American psychologist Daniel Goleman placed self-awareness at the foundation of emotional intelligence decades ago. In his framework, it precedes self-regulation, empathy, and social skill, because without awareness, regulation is impossible, and empathy is projection rather than perception.

In other words: you cannot manage what you do not notice.

What I like in the Goleman’s model is that self-awareness is not about introspection for its own sake. It is functional. Leaders who lack it tend to:

• Overestimate their clarity and underestimate their impact

• Confuse confidence with certainty

• Attribute problems to others’ competence rather than their own behavior

By contrast, leaders with strong self-awareness:

• Notice when emotion is hijacking judgment (when the amygdala in our brains takes control over the pre-frontal cortex)

• Catch themselves before escalating tension (choosing a conscious response rather than letting emotion take the wheel)

• Stay open to feedback, even when it’s uncomfortable (because you’re curious about what others have spotted in us that we have not)

From a coaching perspective, this is often the turning point: the moment a client shifts from “Why don’t they get it?” to “What am I doing that makes this harder?”

2. Self-mastery (Peter Senge)

Peter Senge (MIT Sloan School of Management) places self-mastery at the heart of learning organizations. Not discipline as control, but discipline as practice. A lifelong commitment to seeing reality more clearly and aligning one’s actions with deeper intentions. I personally love this and see it as my own lifetime goal.

Self-mastery requires:

• Awareness of the gap between current reality and desired outcomes

• Tolerance for discomfort and uncertainty

• The ability to sit with tension rather than rushing to premature solutions

In leadership roles, this is critical. The higher you go, the more your work shifts from technical problem-solving to adaptive challenges, i.e. issues with no clear answers, conflicting stakeholders, and emotional charge.

One of my favorite areas of work with leadership teams is helping them truly learn how to brainstorm, not as an idea-generation technique, but as a collective capacity. It’s about strengthening their ability to hold diverging perspectives, stay together in the uncomfortable space of disagreement and “not knowing,” and resist the impulse to escape that discomfort. Teams often do this by either fighting, so the loudest or most senior voice wins, or by rushing to agreement, because an imperfect decision feels safer than lingering in the tension of collective thinking. Real brainstorming is the discipline of staying with that discomfort long enough for something better to emerge.

Without self-awareness, leaders tend to default to what once made them successful: expertise, speed, control. With awareness, they learn to slow down, inquire, and create space for others to think.

Dual awareness: noticing self and system

As a coach, I am particularly drawn to the concept of dual awareness: the ability to track both your internal experience and the external system at the same time. This is, in many ways, the essence of coaching. We hold attention on how clients are showing up (what they say, do, and avoid) while simultaneously noticing our own internal signals as we listen. That inner data is not a distraction; when used skillfully, it becomes part of the instrument through which we sense the system and support the client’s learning. That’s the art of coaching.

In volatile environments, leaders often lose one side of the equation.

• Some become so focused on results that they tune out internal signals, losing intuition, early warnings, and the ability to sense when a different response is needed. Their repertoire narrows, and they default to what they already know, even when the situation calls for something new.

• Others become absorbed by their own stress, losing perspective on the system they lead. Perception narrows, anxiety spreads through emotional contagion, control/micromanagement reflexes take over, and trust erodes as people disengage or withhold information.

So in a nutshell, dual awareness allows you as a leader to observe:

• What is happening around you

• What is happening within you

• How the two interact

Why self-awareness becomes non-negotiable as you step up

As leaders gain scope and seniority, three things change:

1. Your emotional footprint grows
   Your mood, tone, and reactions ripple through the system faster than you realize.

2. Feedback becomes filtered
   The more power you have, the less likely people are to tell you the full truth, unless you actively invite it and can receive it.

3. Your inner patterns get amplified
   Stress, ambiguity, and visibility activate default assumptions and identity-level beliefs.

This is why so many highly competent leaders hit a ceiling, not because they lack intelligence or drive, but because their inner operating system hasn’t evolved with the role. Evolving that inner operating system is the work of executive coaching.

Also, in a world marked by rising conflict, unpredictability, and ambiguity, like the times we are all experiencing, this capacity allows leaders to stay deliberately calm, pausing long enough to reframe situations and choose responses that foster learning rather than trigger protection.

Practical ways leaders can develop self-awareness

Self-awareness is not a personality trait. It’s a practice. Here are a few approaches I often use with leaders:

1. Track patterns, not episodes

Don’t ask, “What went wrong in that meeting?”. Ask, “Where does this keep showing up?”

Patterns point to underlying assumptions.

2. Use your body as data

Tension, breath, jaw, speed of speech because these are early warning signals that surface before conscious thought. Our body contains so much wisdom and data that we don’t usually tap into!

3. Separate intention from impact

Both matter. Only one determines results. And know this: we tend to judge ourselves on our intentions, but we judge others on their behaviors.

4. Build feedback loops you can tolerate

The goal isn’t comfort. It’s clarity. Learning to tolerate discomfort and “not knowing” is a great coaching goal I often work on with clients.

5. Pause before you solve

Especially when stakes feel high. That’s usually when awareness matters most.

A closing thought

In Game of Thrones, raw power without awareness eventually turns inward and destroys the very system it seeks to rule. Leadership is no different. Influence without self-awareness may look strong in the moment, but it rarely ends well.

These are the conversations I have every day with leaders in coaching: moments where they realize that what limits their impact isn’t a lack of intelligence, drive, or authority, but a lack of awareness of how they show up, especially under pressure. When that awareness grows, something shifts. Tension doesn’t disappear, but it becomes workable. Answers don’t magically appear, but better questions do.

This is becoming even more critical in an AI-driven world. As leaders increasingly orchestrate systems where humans and AI collaborate, their value shifts away from expertise and answers toward framing, judgment, and sense-making. AI will execute faster than we ever could; leadership will hinge on the quality of attention, presence, and choices humans bring to the system. Without self-awareness, leaders risk amplifying reactivity and bias at machine speed.

Leaders who know themselves well create conditions where both people and systems can perform at their best. They don’t rely on firepower or certainty, they rely on presence, choice, and calm.

If leadership is influence, self-awareness is what makes that influence intentional.

And that’s why it is—and remains—the mother of all leadership skills.