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Self-Awareness, Part 2: Becoming Your Own Observer

9 Expert Questions and one handy Diagram for Building great Self-Awareness

The best starting point for any development and growth at work, whether as a leader, a team member or just as your individual self, is the place of “self-awareness”.

And I’m talking here of self-awareness in a wide sense.

If you’re looking at self-awareness just as an emotional intelligence tool, then you’ll be focussed too narrowly, just on the awareness of your own feelings. What I want you to get, is a self-awareness about the whole you. That’ll include your drives, flaws, experiences, ambitions, assumptions, patterns of behaviour, values, resourcefulness and more. But also, and maybe more importantly, the big picture of what it’s like to be you. And what’s it like to experience who you are.

This kind of deep self-awareness really is essential to any kind of development. It’ll answer questions right down at a tactical level about what you want to be doing with your time and effort and how best to interact with the world. And it’ll act as a kind of beacon, keeping you heading towards the more important, bigger picture of what you’re about.

Sometimes this kind of self-awareness is forced upon us when something we’re trying to achieve goes wrong. Then we have to re-assess things on a personal level. And at other times, self-awareness comes out of a ‘gap’, a sense that something’s missing or unfulfilled.

Overcoming the uneasiness and discomfort around this kind of self-knowledge is important both to make sense of what’s happened so far and to move forward.

If you wanted to get some more self-awareness without being forced into it by that kind of circumstance, how would you go about it?

One of the best ways is to pretend to be your own observer.
Check out the diagram alongside. (If you click it and then right-click it, you should be able to download a copy.)

First, imagine ‘seeing’ a version of yourself. Get a sense of who this person is, and what’s important to them.

Second, imagine you could observe how this person goes about interacting with the world about them and with other people.

There are many things you could be observing and getting a sense of, but to get you started here’s some of the things I’ll typically be asking my clients about to help them develop their self-awareness. We talk about them as if they were another person, so instead of saying “what’s important to you”, I’ll get them to practice being an impartial observer of themselves by asking, “what’s important to this person?”.

Here’s some of the aspects you might be considering as you pretend to observe yourself. It’s a fairly long and deep list, so don’t feel you have to get all of this straight away:

  1. What kind of things are really important to this person?
  2. What’s the story of how they got to where they are today? And what did they have to overcome, sacrifice or achieve to get here?
  3. What are they like, at their absolute best?
  4. What qualities do they have that make them a resourceful person? What personal attributes, skills and knowledge can they call upon?
  5. What holds them back or keeps them stuck?
  6. As they interact with the world, how clear are they about what outcomes they want?
  7. Thinking of a specific interaction that you want to understand more about, what was their intention at the outset? Did what they wanted to have happen, actually happen?
  8. How wide is the range of choices they have about how they approach things; do they have one typical way of operating or a wider range?
  9. What are some of the assumptions, hidden beliefs or ‘rules’ that they have about the world, about themselves and about others?

The Dark Strategist – Type 2

Some of the most difficult people at work aren’t disruptive or emotional. Instead, they treat others like chess pieces, objects to be moved around in the dark, in service of a grand plan.

In this short video, I talk about the Dark Strategist, Type Two in The 9 Types of Difficult People.

Dark Strategists are often insightful and ambitious. They like having a clear plan and working behind the scenes to perfect it.

Problems start when the plan begins to matter more than the people. Colleagues can be moved around without consultation, information may be withheld, and decisions taken quietly without buy-in.

The impact is often people feeling manipulated, excluded, and undervalued.

You’ll also hear what helps. How leaders and coaches can role-model inclusive collaboration, and why remembering that the map is not the territory can make such a difference. I also touch on how to influence a Dark Strategist by speaking their language and engaging with the big picture, the strategy, and the wider business model.

With the right coaching, Dark Strategists can become powerful, insightful leaders that people actually want to follow.

Article: Scary Specialist – Difficult Person Type 1

Some of the most difficult people at work are difficult precisely because they’re so good at what they do. They deliver, they set the standard and they make it very clear when others don’t meet that standard.

In this article I’ll explore the Scary Specialist: type 1 in my 9 Types of Difficult People. I’ll look at:

  • The core pattern behind the Scary Specialist
  • The paradox at the heart of their behaviour
  • Practical ways to respond, whether you lead them or work alongside them

 

Who the Scary Specialist Is

The Scary Specialist is the expert who really isn’t afraid to let you know that they’re the expert.

These are people with deep knowledge and serious capability. They care about competence, pace, quality, and they set the bar very high for themselves and for everyone else.

At their best, they can really be the engine room of your business; driving results and driving success.

When it Starts to go Wrong

But things get difficult when anything threatens their ability to deliver.

That might be a weak process or a colleague who isn’t pulling their weight. Or a change that threatens their independence or threatens their control over their domain.

And when that happens, they become even more critical and even more demanding, and they will say exactly what they think no matter how brutally honest.

The Impact on Others

So you might notice people starting to tiptoe around them, or that new joiners to their department don’t last very long, and that other people start to leave the organisation because of them.

And this is the paradox, of course.

The Scary Specialist values competence above all else. But under pressure, their behaviour creates fear and silence and withdrawal in others.

And so the overall performance of the organisation, your organisational competency starts to suffer.

Leading a Scary Specialist

So if you are leading a Scary Specialist, you need to be very clear about any negative impacts they’re having.

Vague feedback or hoping they’ll somehow get nicer rarely works.

Above all, as a leader, you need to demand that your Scary Specialist continues to raise their level of competence. But not just their technical skills or their know-how, but also their competence in their own leadership and their competence in how they relate to other people.

Working with a Scary Specialist

If you’re working for, or alongside a Scary Specialist, two things really matter.

  1. Raise your own standards where you genuinely can. Become really good at your job. That’s all they really want from you;
  2. Be clear about your boundaries and be prepared to stand up for your boundaries.

 

Scary Specialists, respect, drive, and independence. So just tell them directly whenever their behaviour crosses some kind of a line for you. And the more direct you are in this, the more likely you are to get a good result from them.

At Their Best

At their best, Scary Specialists are not really scary at all.

They’re the experts whose drive and standards lift everyone around them.

But that only works, of course, when their expertise serves the whole organisation and not just their small patch of it.

About Me

I’m an executive coach helping leaders and senior teams turn challenging dynamics into great working relationships.

My first full-length book, The 9 Types of Difficult People, published by Pearson, is an Amazon and WHSmith best-seller. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1292726067

My new flagship programme The Shift is a team development experience for senior leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together, maybe not firing on all cylinders, even if no one has said it out loud. https://www.nickrobinson.org/the-shift-leadership-team-development

The Rock – Type 8

That “stubborn” colleague slowing everything down? They’re not blocking progress – they’re protecting the foundations.

Meet the Rock – Type 8 in The 9 Types of Difficult People

Rocks are the calm, steady figures who keep everything running smoothly… until change threatens the stability they’ve built. Their resistance isn’t negativity – it’s caution born from responsibility.

In this short video, I explain:

🎯 Why Rocks hold back when others want to move fast

🤝 How to earn their trust and turn them into allies

🏗 The leadership moves that make progress possible without breaking what already works.

You’ll learn how to lead through trust, not pressure – and how to build teams that balance safety with change.

From my book The 9 Types of Difficult People – helping leaders and teams turn challenging dynamics into great working relationships.

Connection Overload

Is conflict at work happening because people are overwhelmed by all the relationships they need to manage?

Talking with a client recently about the number of connections with customers and team members that he was dealing with gave me an insight into a problem I’ve been seeing more of just recently. The problem is this:

Sometimes, people who are great leaders, who are brilliant at their job and whose teams are delivering great results, can simultaneously have really poor relationships with their peer group of other leaders.

Why is that?

It seems weird to me that people with the interpersonal abilities to lead and manage so successfully aren’t also able to get on well with their colleagues. Somebody with those skills would be capable of great influencing, of good listening, of super coaching. So why weren’t they always being welcomed around the boardroom table as well?

Thinking about what my client had been saying, and about the sheer volume of connections he mentioned, made me wonder about this question:

Can people be overloaded by the amount of interpersonal connections they need to manage, so that their ability to have successful relationships in all areas is impaired?

In trying to answer that question, I remembered some research I’d seen around Dunbar’s Number and Compassion Fatigue…

Readers are probably familiar with Dunbar’s Number:

the cognitive limit to the number of people we can maintain stable social relationships with

The limit is thought to be around 150 people – for relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. (For those people we don’t have a ‘persistent’ relationship with – don’t interact with them that often –  the number could be higher.) I wonder how close some of us get to the limits of Dunbar’s Number, when we consider all of the client, supplier, colleague and team-member relationships we need to focus on? 150 isn’t a huge number. If you added up all the people you need to regularly connect well with, what does it come to?

Research also shows that there are limits to Empathy too.

Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feeling of others.

Empathy is limited in a number of ways, two of which are significant here:

  1. Empathy is limited in that it depletes our mental resources – the effort of keeping information in mind is mentally and physically draining. This is why people in caring professions are warned about the dangers of compassion fatigue.
  2. Empathy is also limited in that it’s a finite resource until refreshed. Using empathy in one area of our work and lives reduces the amount available for other areas. This was shown by a study (click here) in which people who reported taking time to listen to colleagues’ problems and worries and helping others with heavy workloads felt less capable of connecting with their families. They felt too emotionally drained and burdened by work-related pressures to also be empathic at home.

Putting together the Dunbar’s number data and this sense of empathy as a limited resource, made at least part of this issue clearer for me. This is why some clients – often those who are otherwise great leaders – might sometimes struggle to be effective in relating to their wider peer-group. It’s quite possible that they are overwhelmed by the volume and range of relationships they need to manage.

If you’re at the head of an organisation, and you notice that some of your team leaders don’t seem to be getting on with each other, this idea of connection-overload might be one place to look.

Some questions to ask might include:

  • Are some of your team leaders having to spread their cognitive powers too thin, having to ‘know’ the preferences etc of too many people?
  • Is their empathy overloaded – their ability to relate well to others simply depleted?

Tell me about connection-overload in your organisation or for you personally. Where are the limits of your empathy? What’s your own Dunbar’s Number?