I don't know about you, but this is one of my favourite times of year. Summer tends to be the one time where you genuinely step away from everything. It usually takes me a couple of days to wind down, and I imagine it is similar for most of us. The most important decisions become what book to read first, beach or pool, and where to eat that evening. The heart rate drops a little. The blood pressure follows. And somewhere in that space, you start to reflect.
You find yourself thinking about the first half of the year, about the people in your team and whether they have settled into their roles the way you hoped they would. You think about how you have been showing up as a leader, whether you have given people what they need to do their best work, and whether the decisions you have made over the past few months were the right ones. A week or two away from the day-to-day has a way of bringing these things to the surface, and I think that is a genuinely valuable thing.
The more time I spend working with leaders, the more I see this kind of reflection as one of the most important habits they have. That willingness to take a step back and look at yourself openly, to ask whether you are getting it right and where you might need to adjust, is something the research backs up in a way that I think is worth sharing with you.
Consider asking yourself what and not why
Organisational psychologist Dr Tasha Eurich has spent a significant amount of time studying self-awareness, and her findings are worth sitting with for a moment. She found that 95% of people believe they are self-aware. The actual figure, based on her research, sits somewhere between 10 and 15%. That is a significant gap, and it suggests that most of us are going about our day with blind spots we do not know we have.
What I find particularly useful about her work is the way she breaks self-awareness into two parts. There is the internal side, which is about understanding your own values, your natural strengths, and the areas where you are likely to struggle. Then there is the external side, which is about understanding how other people experience you. How your communication lands with your team, how your leadership style feels to the people on the receiving end of it. Dr Eurich found that many leaders are strong in one of these areas and weaker in the other. You might have a very clear sense of what drives you and still be surprised to learn that your team finds you difficult to read. Or you might be very tuned in to how people perceive you and yet have very little clarity on your own core motivations.
She also makes a point that I have found practical in the work I do. When we reflect on our own behaviour, our instinct is usually to ask ourselves "why." Why did I react that way. Why did that conversation go the way it did. Dr Eurich suggests that asking "why" often leads to overthinking and does not move you forward. Asking "what" is far more productive. What triggered that reaction. What would I do differently next time. It is a small shift, but it changes the direction of the thinking entirely and moves you toward something you can work with.
Self-awareness in practice
I have been using The Predictive Index for over six years now, and during that time I have had the opportunity to work with many of you managers and leaders who have taken the behavioural assessment. It is something I find genuinely valuable, because it gives people a way to see themselves clearly without the subjectivity that usually comes with self-reflection. It paints a picture of how you are naturally wired. The drives that shape how you communicate, how you make decisions, how you respond to pressure, and what energises or drains you in your working day.
Most of us have been on the receiving end of feedback at some point that felt difficult to act on. You know something needs to change, but the feedback itself does not give you a clear picture of where to start. I used it recently to support someone interviewing internally for a C-level role.
There was concern that they needed to develop a stronger executive voice in meetings, and that feedback had understandably created a degree of anxiety. It is one of those pieces of feedback that can feel overwhelming when it lands without any context around it, because it is difficult to know where to start. What does "executive voice" even mean in practice, and how far away from it are you?
When we worked through the behavioural assessment together, the picture became much clearer. This person is naturally wired to collaborate, to bring people into decisions, to lead through connection and relationships. These are genuine strengths, and they are qualities that serve a leader well in many situations. The C-level role, though, was asking for something additional. It needed more independent authority, more directness, more willingness to assert a position and hold it in a room full of senior people. The assessment gave us the language to see that this was not a flaw in how they were wired. It was an adaptation, a stretch from where they sit naturally to where the role needed them to be.
That distinction made an enormous difference. Instead of feeling like they were not enough for the role, they could see the specific areas where they would need to flex and how far that flex would be. We could talk about it without judgement, plan for it, and build their confidence around it. The anxiety did not disappear overnight, but it became something they could work with rather than something that sat on their shoulders without shape or explanation.
If you have found yourself doing a bit of this kind of thinking over the past week or two, you are in good company. The fact that you are reflecting on how you lead, how your decisions are landing, and whether the people around you have what they need to succeed, says a lot about the kind of leader you are. Self-awareness is not something you arrive at and tick off. It is something you keep building, and every role you take on, every team you manage, asks you to understand yourself a little better than you did before.
Final thoughts
We all adapt in our roles to some extent, and most of the time we do it without realising how much energy it is taking from us. Whether you are stepping into something new, growing into a role you have been in for a while, or simply trying to lead your team in a way that feels right, the behavioural assessment gives you the reference points and the language to understand where that adaptation is happening, and from there we can work through what it means for you, your role, and the people around you. If you would like to experience it for yourself, you can take the assessment here
And if any of this has sparked something you would like to talk through, or you are curious about how it might apply to your own situation, reply to this email.
Best of luck with the rest of 2026.
Dave Crumby
Founder at 360 Talent Solutions | Certified PI Practitioner