They Both Said: This Is Me
Two people wrote to me the same week.
One runs a hospital gynecology department. The other is the CEO of a biotech company.
The doctor told me she had to put the book down because it was too compelling and too hard. Then she told me why.
“This is what people have told me so many times. And what is hurting is that I am here making sure the pregnancy goes well, saving babies, focused, intense, and I have so much love and care inside me. But what they see is the outside. The cold. The direct. The to-the-point. The intimidating. I am more than that.”
The CEO wrote after reading the introduction. “This guy is me in so many ways,“ he said, before asking if I would coach him. After chapter one, he wrote again, calling the book a mirror image of his professional and personal life, including, in his own words, the carnage that bleeds into his personal life.
Both of them read the same pages and saw the same person looking back.
Themselves.
The distance between what is happening inside them and what the people around them see when they walk into a room.
A decade of sitting with leaders like this has taught me one thing above all.
Recognition is not common. Most dominant, high-control leaders go their entire careers without ever arriving at the moment those two people arrived at. They get feedback, yes. They sit through 360 reviews. They nod at the right moments in leadership training. And then they walk out and do exactly what they have always done, because nothing in that room reached them where it needed to.
What reached the doctor and the CEO was something different. A mirror that did not flinch. Language precise enough to describe the interior experience of being them, the turbine that never stops, the face that reads cold when the heart is full, the gap between intention and impact that nobody around them knows how to name without risking everything.
That moment of recognition, when someone finally sees themselves clearly enough to want something different, is the only place real change begins.
And it is rarer than anyone in an HR department wants to admit.
This book is doing its work. And I know I am not the only one out there. Many of us carry that gap quietly, between the intensity the world sees and everything else that lives underneath it.
Are you one of us?
If you are, or if you work alongside someone who is, I can help in three ways.
ONE, work with you directly. I coach dominant, high-control leaders exclusively, one-on-one, over time, with the kind of presence and methodology that actually reaches this population. If you recognized yourself in either of those two letters and you are ready to close the gap, start here.
TWO, bring me into your organization. If you have a team where pressure and power are colliding, where a brilliant leader is creating friction that nobody knows how to address, I design and lead high-stakes team interventions that restore trust, clarity, and performance. No generic exercises. No wasted time. Learn more here.
THREE, start with the assessment. If you are trying to understand exactly where a leader falls on the spectrum from balanced to brilliant but difficult, the free assessment on my website gives you a result in under two minutes. No email required. Take it here.
More soon.
Roberto
P.S. The doctor and the CEO did not know each other. They reached out within days of each other. They used almost identical language to describe what they saw. That is not a coincidence. That is a pattern. And patterns are where the work begins.
A Letter to My Exes: How I Learned to Lead Without Being a Tyrant, available on Amazon.
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