Has The Things We Hide helped you put words to what you have been carrying? Would you take two minutes and leave a review on Amazon?

Here are a few of the most recent just to give you some inspiration.

Grab your copy or leave a review: Amazon.com

Now to the scoreboard.

The dangerous thing about a scoreboard is that it only answers the question you point it at.

A scoreboard only shows some of the numbers, not the entire story,

A team can win the game and yet suffer debilitating losses all at the same time.

For me, the scoreboard was limited to clients served, results delivered, or dollars in an account.

In my late thirties, I went through a 360 review. My wife could have saved everyone the paperwork, because her summary of what came back was one word, and it was not flattering.

Some people wrote about my intentions. The rest wrote about my impact, and they were describing someone I did not recognize and did not want to meet.

Initially I wanted to do what high performers do when the truth gets close: point at the scoreboard. Look at the effort, look at the results. If they could not see my intentions, the problem had to be their perception.

But by that point in my life, I had started to figure out what I saw in the mirror was vastly different than what others saw through the window.

It was my drive that caused the biggest rub and discrepancy.  My will exceeded my compassion. 

It was about this time of my life that I learned where the drive had roots. 

How I responded to the accident that claimed my brothers when I was fourteen became the way I survived any challenge:  put my head down and push. 

Pushing got me through, so pushing became who I was: the farm kid with something to prove, outworking everyone, mistaking motion for value.

My intensity was so bold, ingrained, and identifiable that I relied on it to prove my value.

Being so driven to prove, I often discounted the good-natured guidance, mentorship, and coaching from others.

Here is what took me years, because I just put it together this week, to understand: teachability requires ownership. 

Feedback I refuse to own cannot teach me anything, no matter how true it is. 

If I am unwilling to own what someone shares with me, I am automatically shut off to any lesson they have to share with me.

The person who is willing to express ownership is not only teachable, but they also gain the credibility, trust, and loyalty of others.

That willingness is exactly where this week’s conversation lives.

Podcast

Erika Alessandrini is a coach and facilitator with more than 23 years in executive leadership, over 10,000 hours of coaching, and a new book, Maybe It’s Me: Looking Inward to Create Real Change Through Conscious Choices. 

She spends most of her time with Aileron, a Dayton, Ohio nonprofit that helps small business owners professionally manage their organizations, where she just launched a program called Becoming a Leader at Peace. 

Her own 360 review came back with words she would rather not repeat, and what she did with them is the whole story.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Erika.

1. You Can’t Be Taught What You Won’t Own

Erika did not tiptoe into her 360 review; she threw the net far and wide, certain the responses would vindicate her. The people she had worked with for decades were flattering, and the rest described somebody she could not recognize. Her reaction is the one most of us would have: “I was never so sure it wasn’t me, because I kept pointing to the scoreboard.” 

The results were real, so the feedback had to be wrong. And even after she started making changes, she names the pattern that catches high performers here: under pressure we correct course, but “they only do enough to relieve the pressure. As soon as it feels a little bit better, back to normal.” 

Relief is not growth. The feedback could not teach her anything until she stopped negotiating with it and owned it, and ownership showed up not as feeling bad about the review but as staying in the deep work after the pressure lifted.

2. Fear Dresses Up as Responsibility

High performers love pressure and will tell you it makes them better, but Erika argues that pressure produces a fear we never learn to spot, because “fear dresses up to look like responsibility and caring.” 

Nobody stages an intervention for the leader who looks responsible. Unrecognized fear reaches for control, and control runs a spectrum: force on one end, caring on the other, “control wrapped in a big hug,” with manipulation in the middle, which is where Erika admits she lived. 

What exposed hers was not a work crisis but her son’s car accident, four days after he got his license, when she saw she was still managing everyone and everything around something she could never actually control. 

Her alternative is sharing power, and she is precise about the difference: “Control can’t be shared. Power can.” Sharing power means letting people own their part, and in her experience, “everyone is better off. And the results are usually better.”

3. Relationships Are the Scorecard That Catches Up With You

“You show me the quality of your relationships, and I will show you the quality of your life.” You can brush off a rough quarter and even a bruised reputation, but as Erika warns, relationship damage compounds quietly until it comes calling, and by then the price may be one you were not ready to pay.  The scoreboard that mattered and continues to matter in my life is relationships.

This is not soft; it is structural, because “influence is 100% dependent on the quality of your relationships.” Her test for self-awareness is disarmingly simple. When was the last time you asked someone for specific feedback, even for how it feels to be around you? 

Then comes the harder edge,“If people don’t feel safe with you, they’re not going to tell you what you need to hear.” So next to the scoreboard, she says, keep an honest satisfaction score, and ask what it actually feels like to be inside your life.

Maybe It’s Me

Erika titled her book with the three words every wall we build is designed to avoid, because nothing changes until we own that some of the weight we carry is ours.

That is the work of the Lead Without Hiding Challenge, August 18 through 20, live with me at 12 pm Pacific: three days on naming what you hide behind, owning how you show up, and leading from who you actually are instead of what you produce.

If you have been pointing at the scoreboard, this is where you put it down.

Save your seat: leadwithouthiding.com

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.