The Leader as Self-Coach: Seeing Is Believing

I have a brilliant client. I know you can relate.

Not just smart. Brilliant in a way that comes from years of paying attention, communicating, listening and thinking deeply about other people. She has tremendous insight for her team, and that insight has matured over years of communicating with them. She has learned how to see what is happening for other people and find a way to say what needs to be said so that it can actually be heard.

That is one of the things I particularly appreciate about her. She can say something difficult without making the other person defensive. Her ideas are valuable and innovative, and she has developed a way of delivering them that is both direct and thoughtful.

Recently, she was talking about how enjoyable and transformative our coaching had been. As she described what she was experiencing, I had a sense that she had not often had people reflect this particular side of her back to her.

After years of coaching, I have learned that it does not matter as much as we think where a coaching conversation begins. We might start with a difficult conversation at work, a decision that needs to be made, a problem with a team member, or something that has been bothering the client for weeks. If we stay curious and keep listening, we usually find our way to the same place: the place that is next for them.  It's like clearing out the hose in spring, the leaves have to come out before clear water.

That was where this conversation went, too.

I could see something in her that I wanted her to see in herself.

So I suggested something a little unusual...to make speaking videos of herself!

Not for LinkedIn. Not for her personal brand. Not because she needs more content. For herself.

I used to do something similar. I would make recordings for myself that I could listen to at night. I would talk about who I was, what I was doing, what I was learning, and where I was going. Sometimes I needed to hear something positive about myself that I could not quite believe yet.

There is something different about hearing your own thoughts outside of your own head. When you listen to yourself later, you are no longer caught up in the moment. You can hear your confidence, your uncertainty, your assumptions, and sometimes the wisdom that gets lost when everything is happening inside your own mind.

That is what I wanted for my client.

I suggested that she make videos where she could talk through her thinking, her ideas, her observations, and the things she was learning. Then she could watch them again later, when she was removed from the moment. She could hear herself as if she were listening to someone else.

And something else happens when you go back to the video. You begin to hear your own ideas the way your team might hear you.

When we are inside our own heads, we hear all the qualifications. We know the uncertainty behind the idea. We remember the times we got something wrong. We anticipate the questions someone might ask. We can become so familiar with our own thinking that we stop hearing the value in it.

Your team does not have access to all of that internal commentary. They hear you articulate the idea.

You may go back to your video and hear an idea that is actually quite brilliant. You may hear the experience behind it. You may hear how clearly you explain something that feels completely obvious to you because you have been thinking about it for years.

And you get to practice speaking, too.

The more you hear yourself articulate your ideas, the more comfortable you can become with your own voice, your own thinking, and your own authority.

This video exercise is not a replacement for other people's voices. We need other people. We need coaches, colleagues, mentors, friends, and people who know us well enough to reflect things back to us that we cannot see for ourselves.

But hearing ourselves can change how we hear the voice inside our own head.

And when you go back to the video, you may begin to hear your brilliant ideas the way your team hears you, without all of the deflection and doubt that you add when you are inside your own head.

This is one of the reasons I love coaching leaders. Most accomplished leaders already have plenty of people willing to tell them what they should do differently. What I find much more interesting is helping someone notice what is already there.

A strength they have discounted because it comes easily to them. A capability they have stopped seeing because they have been focused on the next thing they need to accomplish. A way of thinking that is unusual and valuable, but that feels completely ordinary to the person who has it.

And there is something else about this particular conversation that stayed with me.

After I suggested that my client make these videos, I realized that maybe I should do the same thing.

It is much easier to coach someone else. I can sit with a brilliant executive and see something she cannot quite see. I can help a leader understand what is happening in a conversation. I can ask a question that changes the way someone is looking at a problem. I can see possibilities in other people that they have not yet considered.

Then I turn the same lens on myself, and somehow the picture gets a little less clear.

Maybe that is because we are simply too close to ourselves. We know all the things we have not done yet. We remember the mistakes. We know where we hesitated, where we got tired, where we could have done something better. We have a remarkable ability to take everything we know about ourselves and use it as evidence against ourselves, while rarely giving the same weight to the things we have done well.

So I made the video.

I do not know yet whether it made me feel better. Maybe that is not really the point. I think the value may come later, when I can watch it from a different place and hear what I was trying to say to myself that day.

If you want to try this yourself, I would keep it very simple.

Making your Video

1. Talk to yourself as if you were coaching someone you care about.

Pick one thing you are working through right now. It could be a difficult leadership situation, a decision you are struggling with, or something about yourself that you have been questioning. Turn on your camera and talk about it without trying to make the video good. You are not creating content. You are creating a record of your thinking.

2. Say the things you would say to someone else.

If a client or colleague came to you with the same situation, what would you notice about them? What strengths would you remind them of? What would you challenge them to consider? What would you tell them that they might have difficulty seeing for themselves? Give yourself the same generosity and directness you would give someone sitting across from you.

3. The Debrief

Give yourself some distance and then watch one of your videos. Watch the video when you are in a different space and listen objectively. How would you hear this person if you were coaching her on your team?  What did she say that you can reflect back? What strengths did she reveal without realizing it? What do you notice about her that she didn't know in the moment? And listen to your ideas without immediately trying to improve them. You may be surprised by what you hear.

There is some interesting research behind the idea that hearing our own voice is different from simply hearing another person's voice. Studies have found that our brains distinguish our own voice from other voices and that processing our own voice is connected with self-monitoring and self-awareness. Other research has examined the role of hearing our own voice in monitoring what we are saying, and a more recent neuroimaging study looked specifically at self-talk using a person's own voice and its relationship to self-referential processing, memory, and emotion regulation.

I would not suggest that science has proven that hearing yourself on video will transform your thinking. It is more interesting than that. The research gives us some reason to think that hearing our own voice engages processes that are different from simply thinking silently.

And the coaching insight is simple: sometimes you need to hear yourself.

The goal is not to become better at performing for the camera. It is to become better at seeing yourself.

That, to me, is part of what it means to be a leader as self-coach. Eventually, the person you are coaching needs to be able to ask themselves the questions, recognize their own thinking, and see possibilities that were difficult for them to see before.

The coaching relationship will end at some point. The questions can stay.

And sometimes, seeing is believing.

Research Notes

Self-voice and self-monitoring: Research has found that people distinguish their own voice from other voices and that self-voice processing is associated with self-monitoring and self-awareness.
Read the study on self-voice processing

Hearing your own voice and semantic monitoring: Research examining auditory feedback from one's own voice suggests that hearing ourselves speak contributes to higher-level monitoring of what we are saying.
Read the study on auditory feedback and semantic monitoring

Self-talk in your own voice: A 2024 neuroimaging study examined self-talk delivered in a person's own voice and found relationships with systems involved in self-referential processing, memory, and emotion regulation. The study was small, so these findings should be considered suggestive rather than definitive.
Read the 2024 study