There is a premise at the center of my work: we can only see others as clearly as we are willing to see ourselves.
I didn’t arrive at that through a book or a training. I arrived at it the way most things worth knowing arrive: slowly, through experience, through the people I’ve had the privilege of working with, and sometimes on a walk the morning after. That’s exactly what happened this time.
Let me explain.
My younger self had a whole lot to prove to the world. In that proving, I discovered natural talents that I honed and developed over time into strengths. And then, as tends to happen, I pushed them too far. Any strength, when overused, can become the thing that gets in your way, or in someone else’s. I didn’t always see that about myself. I’m not sure I could have.
What coaching has given me is a lens. Not into a theory about people, but into actual people: the way they see problems differently, the way they respond under pressure, the assumptions they carry that feel like facts until someone helps them see otherwise. Every person I’ve worked with has widened that view. Sometimes dramatically. Sometimes just an inch. But every inch adds up.
Recently I attended a learning session for a tool I use with the leaders and teams I work with. I read the pre-materials the night before and something stopped me. I recognized myself in what I was reading. Not who I am now. My younger self. The one with a lot to prove. There it was, described in terms I wouldn’t have had for it twenty years ago.
That was me. That was absolutely me.
It still is, in part. But now I know it. And knowing it changes how I use it.
The insight didn’t arrive during the session. It came the next morning, on a walk, as it often does.
What I recognized on my walk was not just that I had been a certain way. It was that the journey between that younger version of myself and where I stand now, that is the work. Understanding self well enough to begin to see others.
But there is something else this journey makes possible that I did not understand until just now. When you have spent enough time seeing the world through other people’s eyes, something shifts. You begin to see the value of your own gifts differently. Not as things that set you apart or that you have to prove, but as things that others genuinely need. And you begin to understand how to give those gifts in ways that others can actually receive.
That last part matters more than most people realize. You can offer generously and still not land. The gift that reaches someone is not just the right one. It is offered in the right way, at the right moment, to someone ready to receive it. And that, always, is their choice.
Do we all have to go on this journey? I don’t know. But I think it is part of the human condition, maybe the most important part of it. To understand self. And in that understanding, to begin to see others clearly, generously, and without the interference of assumptions we haven’t yet examined.
That is the work. For leaders, for coaches, for anyone who sits across from another person and wants to truly understand who they are seeing.
