Owning Your Shadow to Own Your Greatness as a Leader

Take a moment to think about what you consider your greatest strengths as a leader - your personal “superpowers” - the 20% of your personality that’s created 80% of your results.? These are the traits you're known for, that others count on you for, and that give you a sense of identity and validation. Is it your work ethic, your analytical mind, visionary thinking, people skills, or something else??

Whatever the personal qualities that make up the cornerstones of your success, there’s something very important to know as an ambitious leader: each of these super powers also contain a flip side of the coin - a shadow aspect.?

And it’s this shadow that will be both your biggest limiter and your biggest opportunity for growth, evolution, and Greatness as a leader.

However, because shadows are by definition kept out of the “light” of our conscious awareness by your Subconscious, you’re likely only mildly aware of yours, or not at all.?

And the tricky thing about shadows is that they get projected outwards onto the people and circumstances around us - causing us to mistake the symptoms (manifestations or side effects as our shadow) as the actual problem.

The Illusions of Shadow Projections

As a leader you might experience shadow projections and manifestations as thoughts like:

“No one can keep up with me or is at my level”

“I don’t have the talent, budget, resources etc. I need to do this”

“The people around me can’t be trusted with important things”

“There are too many politics to make a difference”

Or feelings as feelings like frustration, resentment, judgment, or superiority.

This is because until you become aware of and intimate with your Leadership Shadows, you’ll continue to buy into the illusion that your problems are “out there” and spin your wheels while wasting time, energy, and money on the wrong things.?

And this is why Unconscious-Self Awareness is so crucial: while some problems truly are outside of us, 95% of the time - both root causes of our problems and their solutions are within us.

The Universal Gap

Within fifteen minutes of talking to a leader, I can usually identify what I call their Gap - both the biggest blocker and biggest bridge to their growth/Greatness.? This is because while every leader has a completely unique set of challenges, circumstances, and obstacles they're dealing with, one thing is always the same: their biggest leadership strengths also contain the roots of their biggest limitations.

Let’s look at an example of a client I worked with - “James” to examine the Shadow-Superpower connection.

James was an executive whose good nature and people skills allowed him to easily earn trust, build relationships, and excel with clients, and had been a key reason he was fast-tracked into his role. But on the other side of being the guy who’s impossible not to like was a deep fear and aversion to doing anything that might be what he perceived as “conflict.”? It kept him from creating boundaries, giving constructive feedback, and having difficult conversations.

Instead of addressing issues directly, James would sugarcoat or avoid sensitive topics altogether while silently harboring resentment. This left his team without true leadership, limited their growth and performance, and perpetuated a draining and frustrating cycle for James.? He complained of his team’s recurring issues and mistakes, their under-performance and complacency, and the excessive amount of time he spent picking up others' slack that kept him from focusing on strategic leadership and innovation.

Occasionally James would hit his limit and blow up seemingly out of nowhere, or fire a bewildered team member who’d been given no previous feedback or warnings, and then rebound into guilt and embarrassment.

While James knew he wasn’t great with conflict, it wasn’t until he got intimate with the shadow of his Superpower that he could the see the deeper cause behind his external problems.

And it wasn’t until he owned his shadow, that it could finally stop owning him.

As we worked through the fears, beliefs, and stories that had kept this shadow alive, and implemented new mindsets, tools, and strategies to integrate it - James’ leadership blossomed and became a powerful leader who called his team forward into their greatness, and freed up time and energy for high-level strategic tasks that drove them forward.

While you might not relate to James' specific story, here are couple more examples that might sound familiar:

The founder-CEO whose cutthroat mentality got his company off the ground and drove exceptional revenue growth, but that also created a toxic culture, high employee turnover, decreased morale, and long-term damage to the company’s reputation and success.

Or the director who was the driving force behind her company's most successful product launches, but whose visionary skills also came with perfectionism and an inability to delegate that bottlenecked her team’s productivity, stifled innovation, demotivated the people around her, and ultimately limited the overall success and growth of her projects and company.

The Opportunity Before You

It can be easy for the ego to become attached to the way we’ve always been and done things, and for our subconscious to resist change because of the survival-based roots of our behaviors - good and bad.

But to quote one of my favorite adages, "What got you here won't get you there."

It's in being willing to do this sometimes challenging and uncomfortable work - to build your Unconscious-Self Awareness - that you can finally see and evolve beyond the things that have been holding you back.

And it's in accepting both the light and “dark” aspects of your personal traits that you can begin the process of integrating them and unlocking true Leadership Greatness.

That you will start illuminating previously hidden blind spots.

That you will identifying and working at the level of true root cause instead of symptom.

And that you will start becoming the leader who can do both.

The leader who's both great with people and has rock-solid boundaries; who's contagiously passionate and has the room for other people’s contribution; or who's both audaciously driven and compassionate.

Owning and integrating your shadow is the single biggest difference between leaders who are good, and those who self-actualize and unlock their true Leadership Greatness. The question now is: are you ready to embrace it?