Start With You: Why Self-Awareness is the Key to Leading Challenging Situations

Self-Awareness: The Foundation of Confident Leadership

Challenging situations will test your patience, your confidence, and your communication. Without self-awareness, you risk defaulting to reactive habits—controlling, avoiding, or over-talking instead of truly leading.

But when you have insight into how you naturally think, feel, and behave—your unique leadership fingerprint—you can choose responses that align with your values, your team’s needs, and the outcomes you’re working toward.

This is where the CliftonStrengths® framework becomes a game-changer.

Focus on What’s Right With You

At the heart of CliftonStrengths is a simple but powerful idea:
Let’s stop obsessing over fixing what’s “wrong” with people—and start building on what’s right.

Everyone has natural talents—recurring patterns of thinking, feeling, or behaving that can be productively applied. When these talents are refined with awareness, practice, and intention, they become strengths.

Far too often in leadership development, we focus on remediating weaknesses. But strength-based leadership invites a shift: what if we invested our energy into the areas where we already have potential for excellence?

Myth-Busting: Weaknesses vs. Lesser Talents

A common misconception is that a “lesser talent” is a weakness. But not having a strength in a particular area doesn’t make you deficient—it just means that’s not your natural go-to. It’s not a flaw. It’s an opportunity to:

• Partner with others who do have those talents
• Strategically manage tasks that fall outside your zone
• Double down on the strengths you do have, to bring your best every day

A weakness, in CliftonStrengths terms, is anything that gets in the way of your success—this could even include an overused strength in the wrong situation.

The key is not to be everything to everyone. It’s to know where you shine, use that deliberately, and build a team where diverse strengths are celebrated.

Strengths That Support Leading Through Challenge

For leaders navigating internal team dynamics and challenging moments, certain strengths can be especially powerful:

• Self-Assurance – Brings composure and confidence to complex or uncertain situations
• Empathy – Listens beyond the words and connects with others emotionally
• Harmony – Calms tensions and builds bridges when friction arises
• Communication – Articulates the message with clarity and emotional intelligence
• Analytical – Cuts through noise and focuses the team on what’s real and measurable
• Developer – Encourages growth in others, even in difficult conversations

And for driving performance with people at the centre:

• Activator – Turns talk into action and helps teams move quickly from discussion to delivery
• Achiever – Models consistency, stamina, and productivity
• Individualization – Recognizes and responds to the unique value each person brings
• Connectedness – Keeps everyone aligned with the bigger picture and purpose

People First. Performance Always.

The best leaders know that high performance doesn’t come despite investing in people—it comes because of it.

When every voice is heard, when strengths are used purposefully, and when leaders are confident in who they are, teams become more engaged, more committed, and more resilient.

Final Thought

Before you manage others, learn to manage yourself.
Before you change the culture, start with curiosity.
Before you act, reflect.

You have strengths. Use them on purpose.

Do you know your personal strengths – aka “superpowers”? Find out more about GoodSense’s Clifton Strengths programme: Clifton Strengths Coaching Programme