Owning your strengths while openly acknowledging where you are still growing builds the humble confidence that transforms how you lead, connect, and make an impact.
There's a particular kind of quiet that comes with a big promotion. It’s subtle. You're doing fine on paper, but something feels off, and you're not quite sure how to name it, let alone say it out loud.
That's where James found himself when he came to me. He'd just been promoted to VP at a financial services firm. And while he looked steady in every meeting, something underneath wasn't. He had deep finance experience, and on top of that, he brought something a lot of finance leaders don't: real emotional intelligence, the kind that made people actually want to work for him. But he wasn't giving himself credit for any of that. All he could see was how much he still had to learn.
He was impatient with himself about it, wanting to feel confident and knowledgeable right now, not eventually. What he was feeling had a name, even if he never used it out loud: imposter phenomenon, that nagging sense that any minute now, someone's going to figure out you don't belong here. And here's the part I want to name directly: a lot of people feel this. Fewer admit it. Men especially tend to carry this quietly, because somewhere along the way they learned that competence and certainty are supposed to arrive together, immediately, no lag time allowed.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works. And it's not a flaw in James. It's just what a real learning curve feels like from the inside.
The Strengths You Take for Granted Are Often Your Greatest Ones
The strengths that come most naturally to you are usually the ones you dismiss fastest. You think, well, anyone can do this. They can't. The fact that you find something “easy” is often an indication of something that may be relative strength.
I use an analogy with my clients here. Think of a diamond ring. A jeweler carves facets into the stone, and it's those facets that catch the light and make it sparkle. You have facets too: your values, your skills, your experience, your way of being with people. When you can actually name your facets, you stop hiding them without realizing it. You let them catch the light instead.
James hadn't stopped to take inventory of his in a long time, maybe ever.
Naming Them Changes Everything
I use the Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment with most of my clients. It's a helpful starting point for putting words to what already comes naturally to you. When James and I worked through his, we found a real mix: some strengths around getting things done, some around big-picture thinking, and a few genuinely rooted in how he builds relationships with people. He wasn't just a numbers guy, and he wasn't just a people guy either. He had range, and none of it was accidental.
But he hadn't thought of any of it as leadership strength, not really. He'd assumed leadership meant having all the answers, and since he didn't have all the answers yet in this new seat, he figured he wasn't leading. That's a hard, common trap.
So I coached him to do something that felt exposing at first. Take each of his top strengths and write a real story, a specific example from his career, that showed that strength doing its job.
And then I asked him to go further: share those strengths, and his non-strengths, with his CEO and his team. I say non-strengths on purpose, not weaknesses. Weakness carries a negative charge that doesn't belong here. No one is good at everything, and calling something a non-strength simply names reality without any shame attached.
Here's what's worth naming: this isn't normal in most team or organizational cultures. Most leaders don't stand up and talk openly about what they're good at and where they still struggle. It takes real preparation to do it well, and it takes courage to do it at all. So we didn't just wing it. James thought through why he was sharing this and said it out loud to his team: "I want us to know each other faster and work better together, so I'm going to tell you where I'm strong and where I need you." That context mattered. Without it, the moment could have landed as oversharing or insecurity. With it, it landed as leadership.
He was nervous about it. He did it anyway.
Humble Confidence Is the Whole Point
Here's where a lot of leaders get strengths wrong.
Owning your strengths can sound like a setup for arrogance if you're not careful. It's not, as long as you're holding it right. Think of humble confidence as a continuum with a failure mode on each end. On one side, you have the leader who can't name a single strength without deflecting, who shrinks in the room, who apologizes for taking up space. Lean too far that way, and people start seeing you as a doormat.
On the other side, you have the leader who thinks their strengths are the only ones in the game, who runs over everyone else and calls it decisiveness. Lean too far that way and people start seeing you as a bully, or just plain arrogant.
Neither of those is leadership. And most of us, if we're honest, have stood too close to one end or the other at some point in our careers.
The sweet spot is humble confidence, and it lives in the middle of that continuum, in the shades of gray, not the all-or-nothing extremes on either end. I know what I'm good at. I know where I'm still growing. And I'm genuinely curious about what you bring that I don't. Humble Confidence sounds like a contradiction or oxymoron, the way jumbo shrimp does, until you actually sit with it. Humility without confidence gives you a leader who can't make a call. Confidence without humility gives you a leader nobody wants to follow.
This is exactly what let James do the vulnerable thing. He wasn't performing confidence he didn't feel, and he wasn't hiding behind false humility either. He named what he was good at and named what he wasn't, in the same breath, to the same room. That's humble confidence in action, not theory.
What Happened When He Stopped Hiding
The conversation opened something up in the team, more than James expected. It also modeled something that gave others not only permission to share, but encouragement and inspiration to do the same.
When he named his strengths out loud, it gave others permission to talk about theirs, too. His honesty about where he was still learning made him more credible, not less. His team didn't need him to know everything. They needed to know who he actually was.
In the weeks after, a few things started happening on his team:
• People started coming to him just to talk through their own strengths.
• Others asked him questions about his, or offered to help in the areas he'd named as non-strengths.
• The team started having real conversations about matching projects and tasks to people's actual strengths, not just their titles.
• Communication opened up faster across the board, and people got to know each other more deeply in a fraction of the time it usually takes.
He stopped performing certainty and started showing up curious instead. He asked more questions. He leaned into his relationship-building strengths to draw out the best thinking from the people around him, and into his strategic strengths when the room needed direction. He influenced not by having every answer, but by being fully, visibly himself, right there in front of everyone.
All of this happened within the first three months of us working together.
He told me: "I'm more consistently aware of my strengths now. I'm not taking them for granted, I'm leaning into them. I feel more appreciated for what I bring to the team. I go home feeling proud of the work, and I know I'm in the right place to make a difference. I feel more confident now than I have in years."
That's not a small shift. That's a leader finding his footing, right where he's standing.
What This Looks Like in Practice
You don't need a promotion to start this work. If you're leading right now, here are three places to begin.
1. Know your strengths by name. An assessment can give you language for what you already do naturally, but you can also just ask yourself: what do people consistently come to me for? What feels effortless to me that looks hard for everyone else?
2. Build a story for each one. A strength without an example is just a word sitting on a page. Go find the moments in your career where that strength actually showed up and did something.
3. Share them, strengths and non-strengths both. With your boss. With your team. With yourself, on the days you forget. Naming your strengths out loud isn't arrogance. It's clarity, and it's a gift, not just to everyone around you, but to yourself too.
The facets of your diamond are already there. You just have to stop walking past them like they're ordinary.
Ready to identify the facets of your diamond? Let's talk.
Michelle Sanford
Executive Leadership Consultant
Michelle Sanford is a certified executive coach who has spent her career working with senior leaders and their teams to reach peak performance in both their professional and personal lives. With over 25 years of corporate experience, Michelle has held a variety of leadership roles and industries, working in sales, marketing, product development, operations and management. She built her operations and innovation expertise as an Innovation Analyst and an Operations Director before taking a role as the Director of Product Marketing. For the past two decades, Michelle has leveraged her organizational and management knowledge to help CEO’s and executives across the United States, to help them achieve maximum results and sustain life-changing behaviors. Michelle holds a BA in Individual and Organizational Leadership from DePaul University, is certified in career and education advising from CAEL & Indiana University, and is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC) and a Professional Certified Coach (PCC). Michelle is comfortable in the boardroom, the conference room or on the front line and brings a solid performance focus and a heart of compassion to every client interaction.