What are the key takeaways from this Coaching for Leaders episode?

Key insights include: **Identity-Role Alignment:** Leaders must align their core identity with their current role, not past training. An engineer promoted to manager who still identifies as engineer will focus on technical work rather than team development and management responsibilities.; **Calendar Analysis Method:** Review three months of calendar data to identify where time is actually spent versus role requirements. This concrete exercise reveals identity-driven priorities and filters that unconsciously direct attention away from critical new responsibilities and toward comfortable past roles.; **Act-As-If Technique:** Embody new identity through consistent small behaviors before feelings catch up. Speaking up in meetings instead of offering ideas privately afterward creates visible change that shifts both self-perception and how others perceive leadership capability over time.

What did Marty Dubin discuss on Coaching for Leaders?

Marty Dubin explains how identity mismatches between who leaders see themselves as and their actual roles create blind spots that limit effectiveness, using his experience as a psychologist-turned-CEO to illustrate practical solutions. Key topics include: **Identity-Role Alignment:** Leaders must align their core identity with their current role, not past training. An engineer promoted to manager who still identifies as engineer will focus on technical work rather than team development and management responsibilities.; **Calendar Analysis Method:** Review three months of calendar data to identify where time is actually spent versus role requirements. This concrete exercise reveals identity-driven priorities and filters that unconsciously direct attention away from critical new responsibilities and toward comfortable past roles..

How long is this episode of Coaching for Leaders?

This episode is 36 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Coaching for Leaders

765: How to See What’s Holding You Back, with Marty Dubin

January 12, 2026

36 min episode · 2 min read

Marty Dubin

Episode

36 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Productivity, Health & Wellness

AI-Generated Summary

Published Jan 12, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Identity-Role Alignment: Leaders must align their core identity with their current role, not past training. An engineer promoted to manager who still identifies as engineer will focus on technical work rather than team development and management responsibilities.
✓Calendar Analysis Method: Review three months of calendar data to identify where time is actually spent versus role requirements. This concrete exercise reveals identity-driven priorities and filters that unconsciously direct attention away from critical new responsibilities and toward comfortable past roles.
✓Act-As-If Technique: Embody new identity through consistent small behaviors before feelings catch up. Speaking up in meetings instead of offering ideas privately afterward creates visible change that shifts both self-perception and how others perceive leadership capability over time.
✓Seven Common Identity Patterns: Rebel, imposter, independent thinker, rule follower, unworthy, entitled, and peacemaker identities often cause blind spots during role transitions. Identifying which pattern applies enables targeted adjustments rather than attempting wholesale personality transformation that feels inauthentic.

What It Covers

Marty Dubin explains how identity mismatches between who leaders see themselves as and their actual roles create blind spots that limit effectiveness, using his experience as a psychologist-turned-CEO to illustrate practical solutions.

Key Questions Answered

•Identity-Role Alignment: Leaders must align their core identity with their current role, not past training. An engineer promoted to manager who still identifies as engineer will focus on technical work rather than team development and management responsibilities.
•Calendar Analysis Method: Review three months of calendar data to identify where time is actually spent versus role requirements. This concrete exercise reveals identity-driven priorities and filters that unconsciously direct attention away from critical new responsibilities and toward comfortable past roles.
•Act-As-If Technique: Embody new identity through consistent small behaviors before feelings catch up. Speaking up in meetings instead of offering ideas privately afterward creates visible change that shifts both self-perception and how others perceive leadership capability over time.
•Seven Common Identity Patterns: Rebel, imposter, independent thinker, rule follower, unworthy, entitled, and peacemaker identities often cause blind spots during role transitions. Identifying which pattern applies enables targeted adjustments rather than attempting wholesale personality transformation that feels inauthentic.

Notable Moment

A high-performing number two executive described herself as the invisible glue holding the organization together, then wondered why she was never considered for promotion to president despite her strong desire and qualifications for the role.

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Episode Transcript

Whenever I ask leaders what's getting in the way of you moving forward, the most common answer I hear is myself. In this episode, what's likely holding you back and how you can take the first steps to get traction. This is coaching for leaders episode 765. Produced by innovate learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren't born. They're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. A conversation that comes up a lot in my work is with leaders, especially leaders who have hit an inflection point recently on trying to figure out what is holding them back. They have a title, a role, things on the outside seem to be going okay, and yet something doesn't quite feel right yet. Today, a conversation about how we can better see what's holding us back and be able to move forward to be so helpful to, certainly our own work, but more importantly for our teams and our organizations to help others thrive. I'm so pleased to welcome Marty Dubin. Marty is a clinical psychologist, serial entrepreneur, business coach, and advisor to c suite executives and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. He has founded several companies, including a multimillion dollar health care company where he also served as CEO. He is the author of blindspotting, how to see what's holding you back as a leader. Marty, what a pleasure to have you. Thank you, Dave. Really looking forward to the conversation. Me too. You talk in the book about cofounding a company, and you've had several iterations of your career. And in the company you cofounded, things were going great for a long time over fifteen years, and then they weren't. And you write on this. I later realized that my blind spots were part of the reason for our failure. The biggest one concerned my identity. When you think about that, what did you run into around identity? So I started out I'm a clinical psychologist by training, and I started out that way. And I had a private psychotherapy practice for a dozen years or more and then moved into the business world. And we manage the mental health, behavioral health for large insurance companies. And we would bid on a contract and then pay all the bills and manage all the doctors and hospitals and so on. And had as you said, I've been doing that quite well. And then we bid on a new contract. And after maybe four or five months into the contract, we realized we were losing money month after month. And our bidding bay was based on they would give us data of their historical experience, and then we would look at it and decide if we could, help them. And we realized that they had actually given us some bad data, not, you know, any fault, but it was just our …

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