If leadership self-doubt is quietly running your leadership, the gaps in your diagnostic won’t close with another course. Here’s what will actually work.
You’ve taken the assessment. You know where your gaps are. Maybe it’s executive presence. Maybe it’s building trust. Maybe it’s strategic thinking, or developing your team, or holding people accountable.
And you’ve probably tried to close those gaps with a communication workshop, a leadership book there or a new approach to your one-on-ones. Yet, the gap persists.
A self-coaching question – What do you believe the causes to be?
Write them out and sit with them. Circle which one hits hard.
Here’s what I want to offer you: the gap isn’t persisting because you haven’t found the right skill yet. It’s persisting because you haven’t found the fear underneath it.
THE FEAR–GAP CONNECTION
In 18 years of coaching over 400 executives, I have yet to encounter a leadership gap that didn’t have a root cause for it. An experience, event, or situation that ingrained a fear within you.
It’s not a skill deficit. Stop trying to convince yourself it is.
Be open to confronting the reality that it is actually a deeply held internal belief about worth, capability, belonging, or safety that is expressing itself outward as a measurable leadership deficit.
Leadership self-doubt is the most common of these fears. But it doesn’t show up as one thing. It shows up as five distinct inner fears, or what we call bitches in our world, each producing a recognizable pattern of leadership gaps:
The Imposter — the fear of being discovered as inadequate produces gaps in self-awareness and executive presence. Not because the leader lacks skill in these areas, but because accurate self-awareness is threatening when you’re afraid of what it might reveal. And presence collapses when you don’t believe you’ve earned the room.
The Failure Avoider — the fear of getting it wrong and being criticized for it produces gaps in strategic thinking, decision-making, and psychological safety. When a leader is afraid to fail, they over-analyze, under-decide, and unconsciously create an environment where their team is equally afraid to take risks.
The Control Freak — the fear of becoming irrelevant produces gaps in team development, delegation, and trust. The leader who can’t let go can’t develop the people around them, because developing them feels like diminishing themselves.
The People Pleaser — the fear of not being liked produces gaps in accountability, communication clarity, and authentic leadership. When being liked is the goal, honesty, directness, and difficult feedback all become casualties.
The Approval Seeker — the fear of inadequacy requiring external validation produces gaps in team development, psychological safety, and genuine connection. When a leader’s worth is externally sourced, their team becomes competition rather than leverage.
They are each discussed in detailed this week on the podcast: HERE
WHAT THE THREE LEADERSHIP IDENTITIES TELL US
The Three Leadership Identities framework describes three ways leaders show up: Borrowed, Performed, and Owned.
A Borrowed Identity is built entirely on external markers — titles, results, validation. It collapses the moment those markers are removed. The Imposter and the Approval Seeker both live here.
A Performed Identity has internalized some leadership behaviors but remains inconsistent between public and private moments. It creates a trust ceiling because the people around the leader sense the gap between who they are on stage and who they are off it. The Failure Avoider and the People Pleaser often live here.
An Owned Identity is built from internal values and is consistent regardless of who’s watching. It’s the only identity that holds under pressure. And it’s the only one that doesn’t require fear management to maintain.
Most leaders with significant diagnostic gaps are leading from a Borrowed or Performed identity. The fears are what keep them there.
Take your own leadership gap diagnostic HERE
WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
You have to CONFRONT it — the second step of the 5-step leadership transformation process. It’s not about fixing the gap. It’s about naming the fear creating it so you can move on to Shed it.
Here are three moves you can take today to start that shift:
- Name the fear specifically. Not ‘I have self-doubt.’ But what is the specific fear that you experience? The Imposter. The Failure Avoider. The Control Freak. Name it precisely, because vague inner noise has unlimited power over you and named inner noise has a target that you can aim to shed.
- Trace where it came from. These fears didn’t start in your career. They came with you. So, take time to dig really deep into your past, no matter how far back you have to go, and identify the experience or event that created the fear.
- Own that fear without becoming it. There is a difference between having a fear and being defined by it. You are not your self-doubt. You are the leader who is willing to look at it honestly and re-write it. That separation is where real leadership growth begins.
Let me share a brief story. I was ten years old when i went sobbing to my mother to ask her if I was adopted. I was a middle child of twelve. I was the one who didn’t look, sound, act, or anything like my eleven siblings. So, I was teased relentlessly that I was adopted, was the milkman’s daughter, and more.
My mother giggled when I asked, which made me feel even worse, as if she wasn’t taking my fear and pain seriously.
Fast forward into my twenties and my family traits, characteristics, behavior, and appearance, were very similar to my siblings.
Yet, I carried that fear of not belonging to my family around with me for decades, until my late forties, when I realized my desperate need to control, lashing out, and micromanaging, was all about convincing other’s I belonged and worthy.
It ended my career and nearly destroyed me. But, it also forced me to face my inner bitches of fear and insecurity to realize I had been living with a lie. That fear wasn’t real.
WHERE CAN YOU START?
If you haven’t yet identified your specific leadership gaps, the Leadership Gap Diagnostic is the place to start. It’s 25 statements across five areas — self-awareness, communication and trust, team performance, executive presence, and accountability, and it will show you not just where your gaps are, but which inner fear is most likely creating each one.
👉 Download it free at balloffirecoaching.com/opt-in
Once you have your scores, Both Episode 1 and 2 of our new 5-part self-coaching series: From Stuck to Leading goes deep into discovering and confronting those fears. We name all five inner fears, showing you exactly how each one maps to your diagnostic gaps, and walk you through the three-step Confront framework.
Watch it here: https://youtu.be/O_V77MVWYQ8
And if you’re ready for the real work, the kind that closes gaps that workshops haven’t touched — a complimentary Leadership Discovery Call with me is the next step. Book it HERE
Bernadette Boas is an executive coach, speaker, author, and founder of Ball of Fire Coaching. She has coached 400+ executives across Fortune 500 organizations and hosted the Shedding the Corporate Bitch podcast for 7+ seasons.
