When Your Superpower Starts Getting in the Way

When receiving some personal coaching recently, the coach I was engaging with casually talked about everyone’s personal strength also being a potential weakness. It was something that I took and placed somewhere in my head, and that I have been cogitating upon since.

Some life changes of late have gotten me thinking about how we act, what we bring to an interaction, be it personal or business, and how we can give space for our strengths to shine, but not at the expense of others.

As is often the case in these situations, my mind drew a connection to a recent evaluation that has been occurring for a board on which I serve. In that evaluation, the consultant spoke to me about the way individuals generally, and yours truly specifically, engage with others. How do we best get our perspective across, while still leaving oxygen for others in the room? It’s a topic close to the heart of anyone who happens to share my middle-aged white guy demographic, a demographic that isn’t known for its backwardness in coming forward.

Those three paragraphs sat on my screen for a while longer than I care to admit, blinking at me like an unfinished to-do item. They’ve also been rattling around in my head for weeks now, usually at inconvenient moments. Like when I find myself leaning into a conversation a bit too hard, getting a little too passionate about a subject arguably a little too early. or mentally composing a rebuttal while someone else is still mid-sentence. Or when I walk into a room and immediately notice the one thing that’s not quite right, and feel an almost physical urge to fix it or comment on it or, worse, explain why it matters.

Not long ago, I had a coffee with someone I hadn’t seen in a while. It was one of those catch-ups that you expect to be pleasant but forgettable, and instead leaves you quietly rearranging your internal furniture for days afterwards. We started with the usual talk about work, but it quickly drifted into the territory I seem magnetically drawn to these days, purpose, intent, legacy, the big why questions that are equal parts profound and faintly indulgent.

What struck me was how openly he talked about his own intensity. He’s a detail person, a systems person, someone who likes things to be right. That quality has served him extraordinarily well professionally. It’s helped him build things, fix things, and lead things. But, as he reflected, that same intensity can be corrosive in other parts of life. At home, for instance, a misplaced pot or an unfulfilled expectation can become a trigger rather than a triviality.

Listening to him, I had an uncomfortable sense of recognition. The very traits we reward and celebrate in work life, decisiveness, clarity, rigour, a bias to action, can become blunt instruments when applied indiscriminately elsewhere. At home, or in relationships, or even in boardrooms, those same traits can crowd out nuance, emotion and, critically, other voices.

He talked about the work he and his life partner have done to create a space where those tensions can be named without becoming explosive. A space where someone can say, “I understand why this matters to you, but can we pause and ask whether it really matters right now?” That idea of pausing has stuck with me. Not suppressing who you are, but inserting a moment of reflection between instinct and action.

At one point, he mentioned a sentence he keeps on his phone, something he refers to several times a day. A simple prompt to consider whether the thing he’s about to say is necessary, and whether the thing he’s focused on deserves that focus. It’s not a call to silence, or to self-erasure. It’s an invitation to discernment.

That framing feels particularly relevant in shared spaces, whether that’s a family dinner table or a governance meeting. Many of us, especially those of us who’ve spent decades being encouraged to speak up, to lead, to have an opinion, are very good at filling silence. Less good, perhaps, at creating it. Yet silence, or at least space, is often where other people’s strengths emerge.

The paradox is that making space for others doesn’t require us to abandon our own strengths. It requires us to wield them with more care. Intensity can become attentiveness. Confidence can become reassurance. A love of detail can become a gift when it’s offered rather than imposed.

We even laughed about the way younger versions of ourselves used to approach relationships with an implicit checklist, as if humans were a procurement exercise. Does this person meet my criteria, tick, tick, tick? With the benefit of hindsight and a few hard lessons, it’s obvious how flawed that approach is. People, like situations, are messy and contextual and wonderfully inconsistent. The richness is in the totality, not the ticks.

I left that meeting thinking about my own checklists, the mental ones I still carry into rooms and conversations. About how often I’m focused on getting things right, when perhaps getting them human would be enough. About how strength, left unchecked, can quietly turn into dominance, and how easily good intent can slip into overshadowing.

Which brings me back to those opening paragraphs, and to that coach’s throwaway comment that has proved anything but. Our greatest strengths are often the very things we need to hold most lightly. Not because they’re wrong, but because they’re powerful. And power, as we’re endlessly reminded, comes with responsibility.

These days I’m trying, imperfectly and inconsistently, to notice the moment before I speak. To ask whether what I’m about to contribute adds light or just volume. To leave a little more oxygen in the room. I don’t always succeed. Old habits have a way of asserting themselves. But I’m learning that making space for others isn’t about diminishing myself. It’s about recognising that the room is almost always richer when more than one voice gets to breathe.