limiting beliefs Archives | The Glasshammer

Most senior women we speak to have done the work. The MBA, the stretch assignments, the careful navigation of rooms where they were the only woman at the table. They have developed sharp strategic instincts, learned to read organizational dynamics, and built reputations on delivering results.

But even with all that experience, there can be a moment where a promotion goes sideways, a team isn’t performing, or a stakeholder relationship never quite clicks. Where the question stops being what do I need to know and becomes what do I need to understand about myself?

That is where coaches who are skilled and qualified in psychometric assessments can be particularly useful as there is value in triangulating this data as a third piece to add to “you, according to you” and formal or informal feedback from others.

Why Self-Awareness Is a Strategic Necessity, Not a Soft Skill

Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, whose research involved studies with nearly 5,000 participants, found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only about 10 to 15% actually meet the criteria when objectively assessed. In leadership, that gap has direct consequences for the people you lead and the outcomes you are responsible for.

For women in senior roles, the stakes are compounded. Catalyst’s well-documented research on the double bind describes a dynamic many readers will recognize: behaviors that read as confident and decisive in a male colleague are routinely perceived as aggressive or abrasive in a woman, while collaborative and approachable behaviors can be coded as lacking authority. The margin for misreading your own impact and for having your intentions misread by others is narrower.

Self-awareness, in this context, is political and strategic intelligence and creates an opening for situational awareness. Understanding how your behavioral tendencies are landing, and to learn to watch if there is a gap between “your intent and your impact” is the growth work in coaching. What you default to under pressure is integral to separating leaders who plateau from those who keep growing.

The good news is that this is not guesswork. At Evolved People Coaching, the four tools we use most often each answer a different question and we work with you to identify which one is the right fit for where you are right now.

Four Questions Every Leader Needs to Answer:

1. How do I naturally behave — and how is that landing in different situations with different people?

Tool: DISC Assessment

DISC maps your behavioral tendencies across four dimensions: Dominance (how you respond to challenges), Influence (how you engage with people), Steadiness (how you respond to pace and change), and Conscientiousness (how you approach detail and process). It is not a measure of intelligence or potential; it is a map of your default operating style.

What makes DISC particularly powerful is what it reveals about the distance between how you experience yourself and how others experience you. Consider a senior leader who describes herself as direct, efficient, and results-focused. Her DISC profile confirms a high Dominance pattern. Her feedback tells a different story: her team finds her unapproachable, and two high performers have quietly started looking elsewhere because they feel that their leader cannot hear their ideas and it is not worth it to bring up risks. She isn’t doing anything wrong by her own logic, but without understanding how her style lands with others and adjusting accordingly, she creates an impact she never intended.

This is the gap DISC is designed to close. Not by changing who you are, but by making your behavioral defaults visible so you can choose when to lean in and when to flex.

2. Is my team actually working — or just coexisting?

Tool: Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team

Individual self-awareness will only take you so far if the team around you isn’t functioning. The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team, based on Patrick Lencioni’s widely used model, assesses team health across five dimensions: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results orientation.

The tool operates at two levels. For intact teams, every member completes and debriefs the assessment together. What typically surfaces is a shared picture of where the team is genuinely cohesive and where it is performing a version of cohesion that is actually conflict avoidance or surface-level commitment masking real misalignment. For leaders who have inherited a team, are navigating a restructure, or aren’t getting the performance they expect from talented people, this version provides data where there was previously only intuition.

For individuals, a separate assessment helps you understand how you personally show up as a teammate regardless of whether your whole team is participating. This is valuable for leaders stepping into a new environment, those who have received feedback about their collaborative style, or anyone who wants to be more intentional about their contribution to team dynamics. Rather than waiting for the whole team to be ready, this version puts the insight in your hands immediately.

3. How am I actually landing with the people around me?

Tool: Qualitative 360 Assessment

A qualitative 360 goes directly to the source: the colleagues, direct reports, peers, and senior leaders are all stakeholders who experience your leadership every day. Conducted through structured confidential interviews rather than numerical ratings, it surfaces the specific behaviors that are building your reputation and the ones quietly working against you — patterns that no behavioral profile can predict, because they are grounded in the specific context of your organization and your relationships. There is huge psychological safety for the feedback givers because the data collected is anonymized and themed by topic so no comments can be attributed to anyone.

Used well, a qualitative 360 is not an appraisal. It is a rare opportunity to hear, in a safe environment, what people genuinely think and what they wish they could tell you directly. Given the depth of work involved, this is an assessment we typically offer as part of organizational engagements, but for the right leader at the right moment, it is one of the most powerful development investments available.

4. How can I change the behaviors that are hindering my highest potential?

Tool: Immunity to Change Mapping

The Immunity to Change Map process is a tool to uncover any hidden constructs in your subconscious mind that might be covert to you and therefore stopping you from doing the things you need to do to achieve your goals (that are overtly set in a goal setting exercise).

Nicki Gilmour, Founder of Evolved People coaching and theglasshammer.com states,

“Truly, this map is so useful early on in any work with our clients because it skillfully surfaces any or sometimes many implicit constructs that form a type of operating system or deep structure that left untouched, would result in most people wondering why they cannot do the day to day behaviors that would easily enable them to achieve their goal. This applies to any area of change, from working out to delegating work, to speaking up at meetings and even changing careers.”

Finding the Right Starting Point

These four tools address different levels of leadership insight: your default style, your team dynamics, your hidden limiting beliefs, and your real-world impact on the people around you. For most leaders, one will be the clear priority based on where you are in your career, what feedback you have received, or what challenge is most pressing. Our role is to help you identify which one that is, and to make sure the debrief and coaching that follows translates the data into something genuinely useful.

For organizations, our team development workshops use DISC, The Five Behaviors, and even Immunity to Change at a group level for leaders to build the shared visibility and common language that turns a group of talented individuals into a genuinely high-performing team.

The leaders who invest in this work consistently tell us the same thing: they wish they had done it sooner.

If you are ready to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader you intend to be, we would love to talk. Visit evolvedpeoplecoaching.com to explore our coaching programs and team development workshops, or get in touch directly to discuss which assessment is the right starting point for you.

For many people jumping into a new job or career path, imposter syndrome can feel like an almost inevitable side effect. As the persistent whisper in the back of your head spews insecurities about your abilities, you learn the ropes of work culture and try your best to block out those harmful thoughts of self-criticism.

For some, those feelings subside as you gradually gain confidence through experience. But for others, it can incessantly linger with no end in sight, clouding every accomplishment.

I was at a VC event in Miami while building my second start-up. The event was held in a club, and due to the VC’s pedigree, most attendees were male. The firm hosting the event hired models to walk around as eye candy to make the event feel “cooler” to the male founders.

I know this may seem hard to believe, but this was only three years ago, in 2022. I acted like I was supposed to be there, even though I didn’t feel like I was.

My inner CEO was trying to crawl into the corner and wait for the perfect time to exit, but she has goals to achieve and won’t reach them by sitting in the corner and leaving early.

Understanding Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome is when we feel anxious and can’t experience success internally, despite being high performing in objective ways. This condition often results in people feeling like “a fraud” or “a phony” and doubting their abilities. With imposter syndrome, inadequacy and competence are symbiotic. You attribute external success to things like circumstance or luck.

Limiting beliefs are intertwined with self-worth. Our programming is a culmination of things that have happened. When you haven’t done the work to understand the stories you’re telling yourself, you will operate daily from their subconscious, the 95% below the surface that we don’t see. (Picture the iceberg)

Five Steps to Increase Confidence

It can be frustrating to watch others take bold leaps of faith while you feel stuck on the sidelines, second-guessing every move. But contrary to popular belief, confidence is not something everyone is just born with, but a skill that you can build up with time. Here are five steps to start building that muscle:

Step 1: Pattern Recognition – The first step is recognizing patterns, loops, or mud that you find yourself often walking through. Create a note in your phone titled “Stories vs. Facts.” Whenever you catch yourself in a moment feeling stuck, pause and ask yourself: What Story am I Telling Myself Right Now?

Step 2: Future Casting – Close your eyes and picture that perfect day, and say it out loud as if it’s actually happening now. Sometimes it helps to picture the person you want to emulate in your life. Study them. Use them as your source of inspiration.

Step 3: Fact-finding – Look at the stories you’ve been telling yourself. It’s time to combat the stories with the facts. Think of the concrete examples that balance out your story. Acknowledge black-and-white thinking and add some gray to the mix.

Step 4: Reframe & Action Plan – Reframing is a powerful tool that examines a situation, thought, or feeling from a different perspective. In changing the framing, we change its meaning. Now that you have the facts, you can reframe your situation and add an action plan.

Step 5: Repetition Increasing – Confidence takes time and practice. You can’t expect to start playing the game of life at an expert level immediately, but these five steps will give you the practice you need to master the skills that will get you to where you want to go.

Taking Control of Your Career

In my first job out of college, my boss sat me down and told me a harsh fact: no one is ever going to look out for my career; that’s my job. “My work will speak for itself,” or that “If I just work harder, they will notice me.” That’s BS. No one can read your mind, and no one can see all the work you are doing.

I created a tool called “Managing Up Mondays,” where I send an email every Monday to the people who are in charge of my fate within my company or career. The format is simple:

Hey [Manager]! I wanted to start a weekly “what’s on my plate” email to help with three things. 1. Give line of sight into my priorities. 2. Get ahead of misalignment/strategy shifts. 3. Share any roadblocks or answers I may need from you to move faster. I also wanted to highlight a few wins from the week prior.
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When you take your career into your own hands, you will notice how much “luckier” you become. Fake feelings can lead to actual feelings. Fake confidence can lead to real confidence. Just don’t fake knowledge, experience, and connections. Those are for you to collect along the way.

Adapted from “Toxic Grit” by Amanda Goetz

By: Amanda Goetz is a 2x founder, 5x chief marketing officer, and was a single mom to three small children before finding love again. She spent two decades building and growing consumer-facing brands before shifting to writing, teaching, and coaching ambitious working parents on how to balance success and life. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Illinois and, after hustling the streets of New York City for over a decade, is now testing out every sunscreen in the world on her children in Miami. And this October she released her first book, Toxic Grit.

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com)

Tag Archive for: limiting beliefs

Beyond the Performance Review: The Assessments That Build Self-Aware Leaders