--- title: "Build #115 – Self-aware yet stuck" url: https://www.simonwakeman.com/blog/2026/10/21/build-115-self-aware-yet-stuck/ description: "Consultant and fractional COO for scale-up businesses. I help founders, leaders and investors in scaling businesses create sustainably high performing organisations." published: 2026-10-21T06:00:38+00:00 modified: 2026-10-23T12:18:25+00:00 author: Simon Wakeman --- # Build #115 – Self-aware yet stuck ![](https://www.simonwakeman.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/eYgcnc7qwcZwx2Zf3Wa7Rd.jpg) ## Build #115 – Self-aware yet stuck I was out on my bike at the weekend, dodging showers for the first time in a long time. One thing you do get on a bike if you’re riding on open roads is a decent view of the weather. You can watch the next shower working its way across towards you for a good few minutes before the sky goes dark overhead and the rain starts pouring. I got soaked twice anyway at the weekend. I did see both soakings coming but kept pedalling with the jacket in my jersey pocket because stopping would have affected my average speed (I am weirdly in the zone when I set myself a target). In case you’re wondering how I’m going to weave seamlessly into an insight about what I learnt about founders from this experience, you’re going to be disappointed. I just had some thoughts when I was out cycling and I got wet. While I was out my mind was wandering through the founders I’m working with at the moment and the many I’ve worked with over the last four years as an indie COO. I found myself trying to pin down what the ones that have really stuck with me have in common. They’re not the most successful ones necessarily although there’s a fair overlap. They’re the ones who I found genuinely impressive to work with. I concluded that it came down to two characteristics they shared. And it’s very much the combination that makes them stand out rather than either characteristic on its own. The first characteristic is a really high level of self-awareness. These are the founders who actively take in what’s going on around them. They notice how a meeting actually landed rather than how they want to believe it went. They have a considered view of how they show up and what that does to the people sitting with them. And they go looking for feedback rather than waiting for it to arrive. That last part is rarer than it sounds and it’s harder than it sounds too. One of the things that comes up again and again in my work is the founder who is genuinely hungry for feedback and receiving almost none of it, because everyone around them has quietly put them on a founder pedestal. Asking for feedback isn’t the same as getting it. A slight aside – I often refer to [this article by Tasha Eurich](https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it), who ran a big piece of research on self-awareness and emotional intelligence. Apparently around 95% of us think we’re self-aware. Her team reckoned the real number was somewhere between 10 and 15%. That insight makes me chuckle inside a bit. The article also proposes a helpful separation: internal self-awareness, meaning how clearly you see your own values, motives and reactions, and external self-awareness, meaning how accurately you know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of you. The two barely correlate. Plenty of leaders are very clear about why they do what they do and have almost no idea how it feels from the other side of the table. So the founders who go hunting for the second kind are doing something genuinely difficult and I really commend them for doing that. But self-awareness on its own doesn’t get you very far This is the bit I kept coming back to on my ride. I’ve worked with founders who are wonderfully self-aware and still thoroughly stuck. They can describe their own patterns better than I can after six months of watching. They’ll tell you, quite accurately, that they jump in too early or that they leave the difficult conversation until it’s gone properly bad. They might notice that their team has stopped bringing them problems. But having done the noticing, they change nothing.The insight becomes a truism that they say about themselves. What the impressive ones do is act on it. They don’t do it dramatically and usually not all at once, but they change something and the change sticks. You may recognise this pairing as the first two of Daniel Goleman’s four domains of emotional intelligence – self-awareness and self-management. I’m not going to do the full tutorial here but you can [get more here](https://danielgolemanemotionalintelligence.com/ei-overview-the-four-domains-and-twelve-competencies/) if you want it. To be honest, I was firmly the other sort for a lot of my early career. As an MD running a digital agency a decade or so back I could have given you a pretty accurate account of my own worst habits. I knew full well I was the bottleneck on decisions and I’d have said so out loud in a leadership meeting with a typical Simon self-deprecating joke attached. **Why this shows up in your team rather than in you** Here’s the part I think really matters for founders and it’s roughly where I’d got to by the time I was home and starting to dry out. Your team can see the gap. They’re not stupid. They see more than you think they do but they don’t often tell you what they see. They’re a lot less interested in how well you can describe the problem than in what happens in the fortnight afterwards. When a founder calls out something about themselves and then visibly changes it, even a small tiny version of it, people learn that saying the difficult thing to you is worth the effort. So they do it again, a bit earlier and a bit more honestly. Yet when a founder names something and nothing changes, they learn the opposite. The next time you ask you get the polite version. Which is probably how you end up as the founder who is desperate for feedback and getting nothing useful back. This is where the team-building bit comes from. The founders I’ve watched build genuinely high-performing teams around them weren’t the most charismatic or the cleverest in the room. They were the ones who had demonstrated, repeatedly and in small ways over and over again, that telling them something hard actually led somewhere positive for the person doing the telling. **So what do you actually do about it?** Based on the founders I work with who’ve got better at this, here are a few things that seem to help: - Ask for feedback in a way that is easier for the person to respond to – “_Any feedback for me?_” puts all the onus on them including taking the risk to raise something. Naming your own suspicion first is much easier to answer – for example “_I think I shut that conversation down too early on Tuesday, did it look that way from where you were sitting?_” They only have to agree or correct you (and it signals to them that you can survive hearing yes). - Give the insight an owner and a date. If “_I need to stop taking decisions back_” doesn’t have one specific first action attached to it by the end of the week, it’s more likely a statement about yourself rather than a real promise of change. Treat it exactly like any other accountability you’d expect someone else to hold. - Change one thing, visibly and pick the smallest easiest version of the thing you want to change. Don’t shoot for the full personal transformation overnight. Visible matters more than big here because the point is partly that other people see it happen. - Tell someone what you’re working on and give them permission to call it in the moment. The most effective version I’ve seen is a founder asking their number two to say “_you’re doing it_” in the room in front of people. It’s uncomfortable for about a week and then it’s the most useful visual signal in the business. It also does wonders for how much that person trusts you generally (one team I worked with had a special hand signal for when I was going off at a tangent – I’ll leave it to your imagination). - Make sure the insight has somewhere to land that isn’t just in your own head. Think about using a coach, a peer group or a decent number two – it doesn’t matter as much who as long as you’ll get some genuine pushback. Most founders don’t have a single place where they get challenged and that’s a sham. A word of caution on all this because I’m aware this might feel like another stick to beat founders with, but that’s not my intention. Nobody does this on everything at once. The founders I’m thinking of weren’t changing five things about themselves all at once. They were good at picking one or two that genuinely mattered and left the rest alone. And some of what you notice about yourself isn’t worth acting on. It’s just the shape of who you are and the better answer is to hire around it rather than grind yourself into a different person. Be realistic with yourself about which of these are actually worth the fight. So as usual, here are a few of the things I’ve found myself asking founder clients off the back of these musings: - What’s the thing about yourself you’ve described accurately to someone in the last six months and done nothing about since? - When you last asked your team for feedback did you get anything back you didn’t already know? And if not, what do you think that’s telling you? - If I asked your number two what you’re currently working on changing about how you lead, would they be able to answer? This is one of my favourite things to work on with founders, mostly because it’s the bit that compounds – every other change in the business gets a bit easier when the person at the top can see themselves clearly and actually does something with it. Always happy to talk it through if any of this feels that bit too personal. SPONSORED BY MONSTEROPS [![](https://www.simonwakeman.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/o1Ronvqykp2mbAu4a97foJ.jpg)](https://monsterops.io/en?r=sim) ### Bring instant structure, visibility and accountability to your organisation Your whole company on one operating system, intuitive enough that everyone can use it without any training. And we handle the migration for you. 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