How You Think You Are Coming Across, And How You Actually Are

The Business & Leadership Coaching Company

May 2026 I Series: Executive I Theme: Visibility

Read Time: 9 Minutes

You have a working theory of how you come across.

Most senior leaders do.  It has been developed over a long career of feedback, observation, and self-correction.  You believe you are, broadly, calm under pressure, decisive when decision is required, open to challenge, attentive to the people who report to you, and clear-eyed about the strategic terrain in which you operate.  You have evidence for each of these claims.  You can name moments in the last 12 months where you have exhibited each of these qualities under conditions that tested them.

The working theory is, in most cases, materially different from how you are actually being read.

This is not a comfortable observation, and it is not meant unkindly.  It is the single most consistent pattern across the senior leadership careers I have watched closely.  The leader's self-assessment and the read of them held by the people around them are different documents, often substantially different.  The gap is not because the leader is deluded.  It is because the data that informs self-assessment is different from the data that informs how others perceive you, and the people around you have access to data you do not.

Consider what informs your self-assessment.  You have access to your own intent.  You know what you were trying to do in a given moment, what consideration you weighed, what you chose not to say.  You have access to your internal emotional state.  You know whether you were calm or whether you were managing significant pressure, and you know, retrospectively, that you handled it well.  You have access to the moments you would describe as your best, and you remember them clearly because they are the moments that confirm the working theory.

What you do not have access to is how any of this landed.  You cannot see your own face during a difficult exchange.  You cannot hear the tone in your voice when you are tired.  You cannot read the body language of the people in the room as they processed what you said. You cannot observe the conversation that happened after you left the room, where your colleagues compared notes on how you handled the moment.  And you cannot, except in rare cases, hear the assessment of yourself that the people around you are actually holding, because almost nobody will tell you.

The people around you are working with different data.  They have access to your behaviour as observed from the outside, your tone, your timing, your micro-decisions about who to address and who to skip, the moments where you intervened and the moments where you let something pass.  They have access to patterns across many such moments, because they have been observing you for months or years.  They do not have access to your intent; they only have access to the behaviour they experienced.  Their assessment of you is therefore an assessment of your behaviour, with intent imputed from the pattern.

This is the structural reason why the gap forms.  Your self-assessment is built on intent and best moments; the read others hold is built on behaviour and pattern.  The two assessments use different evidence and produce different conclusions.  And because almost nobody at senior level will tell you honestly how you are being read, the gap can sit, unexamined, for years.

There are three places where the gap is most likely to be widest, and most likely to be costing you something.

The first is in how you handle pressure.  The working theory is almost always that you handle pressure well.  You can name moments where you remained calm in difficult conditions.  You believe yourself to be, on balance, steady.  The read others may be holding is different.  They have observed not only the moments you handled well, but also the smaller moments where the pressure showed in ways you did not notice.  A sharper tone in an email sent late at night.  A subtle shortness with a colleague who asked a question at the wrong moment.  The way your jaw set during a meeting that you remember as having gone well.  None of these moments contradict your working theory in your own mind, because each of them, individually, is small.  Across a year, however, informed by multiple interaction with you, they accumulate into a pattern, and the pattern is what others see.

The second is in how you handle challenge.  The working theory is that you are open to it, that you welcome dissent, that you build a team that can disagree with you.  The read others may be holding is more nuanced.  They have noted not only the times you have welcomed challenge, but also the smaller, harder-to-name moments where you have subtly closed it down: the body language when somebody pushed back in a meeting, the time you said you would think about it and then quietly moved on without thinking about it, the way certain voices have learned not to bother because the cost of being heard is higher than the value of being heard.  You will remember the moments you handled openly.  The team will remember the pattern.

The third is in how you handle people whose work or whose presence you do not particularly value.  The working theory is that you are even-handed, that you give everybody appropriate attention, that you make decisions about who to invest in based on substance rather than preference.  The read others may be holding is different.  They have noticed who you make eye contact with in meetings, whose questions you answer at length and whose you cut short, whose ideas you build on and whose you politely shelve.  The pattern is rarely as even-handed as you believe it to be, and the people on the wrong side of it have noticed in ways you have not.

The work to close the gap begins with naming the existence of the gap.  This is the hard part for many senior leaders, because the working theory has served them well for a long time, and questioning it feels like questioning the foundation of their professional identity.  The questioning is not the work of destroying the working theory.  It is the work of updating it with information you have not previously had access to, the information about how you are actually being read.

The most reliable way to get this information is to ask for it, in a structured way, from a small number of people whose observation you trust.  Not the people who report to you, who have an interest in managing how you receive their feedback.  Not your line manager, who has their own working theory about you and limited evidence to update it.  The people whose observation is most useful are typically peers, particularly peers who have worked with you for a long time across multiple contexts, or external observers who have watched you operate in settings where the pressure is real.  A coach is one source of this kind of observation.  A trusted mentor outside your organisation is another.  A 360 review, if it is properly designed and the responses are honest, is a third.

Whatever the source, the data you are looking for is specific and behavioural.  Not "how am I doing", which invites a managed answer.  Not "what are my strengths and weaknesses", which invites a generic answer.  The useful question is "what is one thing you have observed me doing, repeatedly, that I am almost certainly not aware of".  The question presupposes that there is something, which there always is, and it asks for an observation rather than a judgement, which lowers the cost of giving an honest answer.

What you do with the answer is the substantive work.  The first answer will, in most cases, be small.  A pattern you would not have predicted.  A behaviour you do not remember exhibiting.  The instinct is to dismiss it, because it does not fit the working theory.  The more useful response is to sit with it.  To assume, provisionally, that the observation is accurate. To watch yourself for the next few weeks and see whether the pattern shows up.  In almost every case, when the pattern is named with specificity, the leader begins to see it in themselves, and with awareness, the gap begins to close.

The reason this matters at senior level is not vanity.  It is that perception, at this level, has substantive consequences.  The leader who is read as being open to challenge attracts the conversations that surface the difficult problems early.  The leader who is read as closing challenge down does not.  The leader who is read as handling pressure well is given the briefs that require steadiness.  The leader who is read as showing the pressure is given different briefs.  The leader who is read as even-handed builds a team that brings their best work; the leader read as having favourites builds a team that calibrates its engagement to the leader's preferences.  The perception shapes the conditions in which the leader operates, and the conditions shape the outcomes.  The cost of an unexamined working theory, over the course of a career, is the cost of operating under conditions that you did not realise you were shaping.

The work to close the gap is not a one-time exercise.  It is a habit of holding the working theory more lightly than instinct invites, and of seeking, deliberately and often, the information you do not otherwise have access to.  The leaders who develop this habit are the ones whose perception of themselves and the perception held of them by others converge over time.  The leaders who do not develop this habit are the ones who are still operating, ten years from now, on a working theory that nobody around them shares, and wondering why the trajectory they had imagined for themselves has not, quite, materialised.

If you would like to think it through with someone whose job is to listen carefully and without judgement and reflect what they hear, a Discovery Call is a confidential 30-minute conversation about where you are, what is in the way, what you would want to do about it, and how coaching can support you in moving from uncertainty to clarity to strategic action.

Book via the link below.

Closing the gap between how you intend to come across and how you are actually read is deliberate work, and it begins with an honest look at where you stand today.  If a Discovery Call feels like a bigger step than you are currently ready for, perhaps the Find Your Focus: Executive Strategic Audit is an easier place to begin.  It asks some honest questions that will help you take stock of how you are leading, how you are being read, and what is quietly shaping both.  It is the first step in the same direction: clarity now, a conversation when you are ready.

Download your copy via the link below.

The Business and Leadership Coaching Company partners with senior leaders and executives globally who are delivering at level and navigating real complexity. We work with you to take honest stock of how you are leading and how you are being read, sharpen the presence and judgement the current role requires, and grow you deliberately toward the leader you aspire to be at this and the level you aspire to reach. If you are carrying questions about how you arrived at this seat, what is being asked of you now, or what it would take to step into the next dimension of your role and your legacy, we would welcome a conversation.

Ready to explore this further? Book your free Discovery Call

Download your " Executive Strategic Audit" Guide: The Executive Strategic Audit

The Business & Leadership Coaching Company

Business • Leadership • Career • Life

www.the-blcc.com