Closing the Gap to the Leader You Already Know
You Could Be
Almost every leader I have worked with carries a private knowledge.
There is a leader they know they are capable of being. They can describe this leader. They can almost see them. They know exactly what that leader would have said in the meeting. The call they did not make. The moment they avoided.
And there is the leader they are showing up as. Most days. Most meetings. Most decisions.
The gap between those two is the most uncomfortable knowledge in a leader’s life. And it is the knowledge most leaders do everything they can not to look at directly.
I want to name that gap. I want to name why it persists. And I want to name what closes it, because the answer is not what most leadership development has told you it is.
The gap is not a motivation problem
The first thing to say is that the gap is not where you think it is.
It is tempting to read the gap as a motivation problem. I am not pushing myself hard enough. I am not committed enough. I am not driven enough. If I wanted it more, I would close it.
This is the explanation most leadership culture rewards. It locates the problem in your willpower, which is something you can be told to summon. It makes the gap feel actionable. It also keeps the gap exactly where it has always been.
Because the gap is rarely a motivation problem. Most leaders I work with are extraordinarily motivated. They are working hard. They want it desperately. The wanting has never been the issue.
The gap is not a skill problem
The second tempting explanation is that the gap is a skill gap. You need more training. Better coaching. The next leadership development program. The next book. The next framework.
This is the explanation the leadership development industry sells you, because it is the only one with a product attached.
Sometimes this is true. Sometimes there is a genuine skill missing, and acquiring it closes the gap. But more often, the leader has already acquired the skills. They have done the programs. They have read the books. They can describe the principles fluently. They know what they should do.
And they still do not do it.
When a leader knows what to do and still does not do it, the gap is not a knowledge problem and it is not a motivation problem. It is something else entirely.
What the gap is
The gap between who you are as a leader and who you know you could be is, almost always, a blindspot problem.
There is something specific in your current leadership behaviour that you cannot see clearly enough to change. Some pattern. Some reflex. Some reaction. Some default reaction when things get hard.
It is doing work in your leadership that you are not aware of. And until you can see it, no amount of effort will close the gap, because the effort itself is shaped by the very pattern you cannot see.
That is what I mean when I call something a billion dollar blind spot. Not a hidden weakness. A specific, behaviourally encoded pattern in your leadership that operates outside your awareness and quietly costs you the version of yourself you most want to be.
And, more painfully, quietly costs the people trying to grow under your leadership the version of you they most needed you to be.
What organisational psychology has been telling us for decades
This idea is not new. The field of organisational psychology has been naming it for a long time, in a thousand different vocabularies.
Chris Argyris called it the gap between espoused theory and theory-in-use. What we say we value, and what our behaviour reveals we value. Leaders almost never close that gap by trying harder. They close it by becoming able to see the gap in the first place.
The Johari Window, developed by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in the 1950s, names a specific quadrant of human awareness. The blind quadrant. What others can see in our behaviour that we cannot see in ourselves.
This is not a flaw. It is a feature of being human. We all have it. The question is whether we have built the conditions in our leadership life that allow it to be revealed.
That is the billion dollar blind spot inside almost every leader who knows they could be more and cannot quite seem to become it. The thing in the way is the thing you cannot see. And the systems most leaders are operating inside are specifically designed to ensure they never see it.
Why the systems hide the gap
Most leadership cultures actively prevent the blindspot from being revealed.
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety shows that people only speak honestly about what they see in others when the environment makes that safe. In most leadership cultures, telling the senior leader the truth about their behaviour is professionally dangerous. So the truth does not get told.
The leader is surrounded by people who can see the pattern clearly and have learned not to mention it.
Performance reviews. Three sixty feedback. Coaching engagements. All of them are theoretically designed to surface the gap. Most of them are too political, too sanitised, too filtered to actually do so.
The leader walks away with a report full of strengths and one or two safe development areas. The actual blindspot, the one everyone in the building can see, never gets named.
Leadership culture calls that respectful feedback.
Organisational psychology calls it the slow conspiracy that keeps the leader from ever seeing the very thing standing between them and who they could be.
What positive psychology contributes
Here is where positive psychology becomes essential, because the gap cannot be closed by negative analysis alone.
Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset is the most useful starting point. The difference between leaders who close the gap and leaders who do not is not talent. It is what they make the existence of the gap mean.
To one leader, the gap is evidence that they are failing. To another, the gap is evidence that they are growing. Same gap. Completely different psychological relationship to it.
Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build theory adds another layer. Positive emotional states broaden cognitive capacity. They expand what we can hold, what we can consider, what we can face.
A leader who is grinding themselves down in shame or self-criticism literally has less capacity to examine their own behaviour than a leader who is operating from a place of stability and self-respect. You cannot examine yourself well from a state of contraction.
This is why positive psychology is not the opposite of facing hard truths. It is the precondition for being able to face them.
Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework gives us the conditions under which the kind of self-examination this requires becomes possible. Positive emotion. Engagement. Relationships. Meaning. Accomplishment.
The leader who has these in their life can hold the discomfort of seeing themselves clearly. The leader who is depleted on all five usually cannot, no matter how much they say they want to.
This is the part of the leadership conversation that almost nobody names. You cannot close the gap from a position of exhaustion, isolation, or self-criticism. The internal conditions matter as much as the external ones.
What behavioural psychology adds
There is one more piece, and it is the most practical.
Behaviour does not change because you understand it should. Behaviour changes when the environment around it changes. This is one of the most well-established findings in behavioural science, and it has been understood for almost a century.
If you want to close the gap, seeing what is in the way is not enough. You have to redesign your environment so that the new behaviour is the easier one. The reinforcements have to change. The cues have to change. The people in the room have to change.
The structures that make your current behaviour the path of least resistance have to be deliberately altered.
A leader who tries to close the gap through willpower alone, inside the same environment that produced who they currently are, will fail. Not because they are weak. Because behavioural science has known for a long time that the environment will win.
What the gap requires
If you are a leader sitting with the gap between who you are and who you know you could be, three things have to happen in sequence.
You have to build the conditions that let you see the blindspot. This means deliberately creating relationships where someone will tell you the truth about your behaviour. It means asking for the feedback that does not get given by default. It means making it safe enough for the truth to surface, then making it safer still when you do not love what you hear.
You have to build the internal conditions that let you face it. This is the positive psychology work. PERMA in your own life. The relationships that hold you. The meaning that orients you. The accomplishments that anchor your worth so the feedback does not break you.
You cannot do this work from depletion.
You have to redesign the environment that produced the gap. This is the behavioural psychology work. New cues. New rewards. New people. New structures. The pattern that produced who you currently are will continue producing it until the conditions change.
Awareness alone will not be enough.
What I have learned about this
I have done my own version of this work over the last decade. The person I am as a strategist now is not the person I was before the accident. But she is not someone different either.
She is the same person, integrated.
The leader I am now is built from the dressage athlete and the hospital patient and the founder and the consultant. Each of those identities had blindspots. Each one taught me something the next one needed. I did not close the gap by replacing who I was. I closed it by integrating who I was with who I was becoming, and being patient enough with the process to let the integration happen.
The leaders I work with who close their own gaps do the same. They do not become someone new. They become the integrated version of who they always were, with the blindspots seen, the conditions adjusted, the behaviour redesigned.
That is what closing the gap looks like. Not transformation. Integration.
The gap is not a problem
If you are a leader who has been carrying the private knowledge of a gap between who you are and who you know you could be, I want to offer one final reframe.
The gap is not evidence that something is wrong with you.
The gap is the most useful thing you have access to as a leader. It is the most precise indicator of where your next growth lives. It is the map. The thing standing in the way is the thing telling you exactly where to focus.
You cannot close it through more effort, more grit, or more wanting. You close it through the deliberate practice of seeing what you cannot currently see. Building the internal conditions to face it. Redesigning the environment that produced it.
That is the work. That is what closes the gap.
And the leader who does that work does not close a gap. They become the person other leaders point to as the proof that this kind of growth is possible.
They become the leader the people around them needed all along.
The billion dollar blind spot in your leadership is not your failure.
It is your invitation.
We are in a moment when the world needs leaders who have done this work. Who have closed the gap between who they were and who they knew they could be. Who show up whole, human, and capable of holding the humans they lead with the same depth they hold their strategy.
I believe you are one of them. This is the work. It is worth doing.
Hacia Atherton is the author of The Billion Dollar Blind$pot, a three-time Amazon bestseller in Strategic Management and Behavioural Psychology. She works with leaders and organisations to build the behavioural clarity that drives both psychological safety and commercial performance.
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