The Trait Running Your Company
A CEO I coach has one word she uses on herself, intense. It costs her more than any competitor ever has.
Last week she lost an entire day to it. She’d sent out a partner proposal, gotten a lukewarm reply, and by lunch she had spiraled. I pushed too hard. I misread the room. I’m too intense. I always do this.
It’s not that she was wrong about her behavior, but no matter how hard she punished herself for her intensity, she never got a handle on it. Because the moment she says “I am intense,” she’s turned a thing she sometimes does into a thing she permanently is.
Almost every CEO I work with is in some version of this. “I’m a control freak.” “I’m conflict-avoidant.” “I’m too much.” They sound like self-awareness. Each one is really an act of surrender. The moment something you do becomes something you are, you lose control over it.
When a behavior becomes an identity, it stops having an off switch. You spend your energy keeping it covered, bracing for it, apologizing for it after the fact, and never actually learning to work with it. As long as you think you are a control freak, you’ll keep over-managing, keep paying for it in turnover and resentment, and never find a way out of the cycle. If a trait is permanent, so are its consequences.
It doesn’t stop at you. Every time you say “I’m conflict-avoidant” or “I’m a control freak” out loud — to your team, your cofounder, your investors — you’re giving them instructions. You’re telling them this part of you is fixed and they shouldn’t expect it to change. So they learn to work around it.
Run a company long enough this way and your team will build the entire operation around the trait you were trying to be free of. One repetition at a time, the CEO from earlier had built a world where she really was too intense.
Then one day you look up and the trait is running the company, not you. Your head of ops is six weeks from quitting because you can’t release the decisions you hired her to make. The cofounder conversation has been on hold nine months. Every “I’m too much” is a partner meeting you walked out of with a smaller deal than you should have closed. Every label is a future move you’ve already taken off the table.
The trait isn’t the problem. The “am” is. That CEO doesn’t know this about me, but my word is the same as hers: intense. Ask anyone who’s worked for me. I can spot the pixel that’s off. I’ll tell you when you’re not keeping up, and I don’t soften it. But “intense” doesn’t hold me back, because I don’t treat it as something I am. It’s just one of the many things I do. I know exactly when my intensity is the best thing in the room and when it’s not. “Intense” is one of my skills, and I’ve got my hand on the volume knob.
This change starts with one sentence. Every time you catch yourself saying “I am [trait],” rewrite it as: “I default to [behavior] when [condition].” “I’m too intense” becomes “I default to intensity when I feel rejected.” “I’m a control freak” becomes “I reach for control when I don’t trust the plan.”
This isn’t about being gentler with yourself. The reason “I am intense” keeps you stuck isn’t that it’s harsh. It’s that it’s empty. It doesn’t contain any information for you to use. The rewrite gives you actual information to work with. Look at everything “I default to intensity when I feel rejected” tells you that “I’m intense” hid.
It hands you a trigger. For the CEO from earlier it was rejection. It can be anything, but it’s never everything. Which means you can see the behavior coming instead of only recognizing it in the wreckage afterward. It hands you a behavior instead of an identity, something you’re doing in a moment, which means it has a beginning and an end and a thing to watch for. And it hands you the control. A behavior happens by degrees, and you can choose when to use the high end and when to use the low end.
“I am” is harsher than “I do.” It’s also easier. “I’m just intense” gets you off the hook in a way “I defaulted to intensity in that meeting and it cost me” never can. If it’s who you are, you don’t have to look at the specific moment you chose it. A fixed self never has to do anything different tomorrow. Watching for the trigger, catching the behavior mid-climb, owning the moment instead of the eternal flaw, that’s harder.
That CEO didn’t have an intensity problem. She had a skill she kept deploying in the wrong room, at the wrong volume, almost always the moment she felt rejected. Once she changed how she named it, the spiral finally had somewhere to go. The lukewarm reply stopped being proof of who she was and became a condition she could name while it was happening: there’s the rejection, here’s the intensity climbing, I can bring this down.
This week, catch one sentence. The next time you reach for “I’m just a [blank] person,” stop and ask three things. What’s the behavior? What triggers it? And what would it look like at half the volume? That’s the readout the verdict was hiding.
Reply with one “I am” you’ve been carrying, and the “I default to [ ] when [ ]” version you’d put in its place. I read every one.
-Christine
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