She arrived with a two-page list.
Handwritten. Every problem her team had brought her that week, the miscommunication, the missed deadline, the person who kept running to her with decisions he could have made himself. She wanted systems. She wanted frameworks. She wanted to stop being the answer to every question in the building.
She did not expect to spend the first session talking about why she believed she didn’t belong in the room.
The Gap Between Expertise and Identity
If you’ve been promoted into a leadership role, especially in an industry like energy, construction, or government, you know how it feels to be technically excellent at what you do. You were promoted because of that excellence. You earned your place.
And yet.
There is a version of you that still walks into high-stakes rooms and holds its breath. That second-guesses whether the insight you’re about to share is sharp enough. That defaults to solving instead of asking, because solving feels safer. More concrete. More like what got you here.
The problem isn’t your expertise. The problem is the story you’re running underneath it.
“The problem is almost never what they walk in with. Underneath every leadership challenge is a story the leader is telling about themselves.”
Most leaders, brilliant, committed, results-driven leaders, are leading from a belief that hasn’t been examined in years. A belief about what strong looks like. About what they’re allowed to claim. About whether who they are is enough for the role they’re in.
That belief is running the show. And until you name it, no system, no framework, no delegation model will land the way you need it to.
The Belief Underneath the Behaviour
In leadership coaching, we call this the identity gap, the distance between the leader you are and the leader you believe yourself to be.
It’s not imposter syndrome in the pop psychology sense. It’s something more specific and more structural. It’s the operating system your leadership runs on, built from years of watching what ‘strong’ looked like in your industry, your family, your culture. And it’s running, often without your awareness, in every meeting, every difficult conversation, every moment you hold back when you should step forward.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
A leader manages up beautifully but goes quiet in peer-level rooms, convinced at some level that she hasn’t yet earned the right to push back. A manager who is trusted completely by his team steps back the moment a senior stakeholder enters, collapsing into deference before a word has been spoken. A VP with 20 years of results still prepares three times harder than her peers because some part of her believes she needs to justify her presence in a way they do not.
The behaviour changes. The belief underneath it doesn’t. Not until someone names it directly.
The identity gap doesn’t close through achievement. It closes through examination.
What Shifts When the Belief Shifts
Beth came into coaching as a senior manager in the public sector. She was, by every external measure, ready for the next level. Politically astute. Technically excellent. Trusted by everyone around her.
She was also about to remove herself from the succession list because she had decided, quietly and without questioning it, that she wasn’t the right fit for the ADM role.
In our first session, the two-page list sat between us. We spent twenty minutes on systems. And then I asked her one question: what story are you running about who you are as a leader?
She didn’t answer immediately. She sat with it.
And then she told me about the revolving door, the way she had been cycling through the same pattern for years. Move forward. Excel. Get close to the next threshold. Pull back. Convince herself it wasn’t the right time, the right fit, the right her.
Eighteen months later, through a process of examining that belief rather than compensating for it, she was navigating COVID as an executive leader, managing a team and a mandate that would have overwhelmed the version of her who walked in with the list. And her words, unprompted, were: ‘I’ve got this.’
Three promotions. The revolving door, closed.
Not because she became more technically excellent. Because she changed the story she was running.
The One Question to Ask Yourself This Week
You don’t need a 360 assessment to start this. You need one question and ten minutes of honest attention.
What story am I running about who I am as a leader?
Not what your results say. Not what your manager’s last feedback said. What story, underneath all of that, are you telling yourself about whether you belong, whether you’re ready, whether who you are is enough?
Write it down. Three sentences. Don’t edit it into something that sounds better than it feels.
Then ask: where did I learn this? And is it actually true?
That’s the starting point. Not a framework. Not a system. A story, named, examined, and for the first time, questioned.
What Becomes Possible
The leaders I’ve watched do this work, in energy boardrooms, government departments, construction sites, and public sector leadership teams, don’t suddenly become different people. They become clearer versions of who they already were.
The quiet one who everyone trusted but who never quite trusted herself. The technical expert who stopped apologizing for being in rooms he’d earned. The manager who had been solving her team’s problems for years and finally understood why, and what to do instead.
The work starts with the belief. Everything else, the delegation, the communication, the psychological safety, the team culture, comes after.
If you recognize this pattern in your own leadership, let’s talk.
A 30-minute IMPACT call. No pitch. Just clarity on what’s actually running your leadership and whether IMPACT is the right next step. Click here to schedule
