Why Insight Rarely Changes Behavior by Itself

So I held back. Probably longer than I should have.

I still think about that experience because it taught me something I have had to relearn several times over 21 years of working with and leading teams: knowing something about yourself does not mean you will do anything differently because of it. You can be very self-aware and still be stuck.

There is an idea in Atomic Habits about the difference between motion and action that has stayed with me. Reading, reflecting, journaling, taking assessments, and going through another 360 review—all of that can be useful. But it can also give us the feeling that we are making progress when nothing has actually changed. I have seen smart, thoughtful leaders spend years “working on themselves” while continuing to lead in almost the same way.

That is where self-awareness is insufficient. At some point, what you learn about yourself must connect to what matters to you, where you want to go, and what you are willing to do differently.

Discover it. Align it. Rise into it. Simple words, but much harder in practice.

Discovery needs alignment

You can know exactly what you are good at and still feel stuck if the environment around you does not need, recognize, or value that strength. I have been there—technically strong in a role where what was really expected of me was execution. Knowing my strengths did not solve the problem. In some ways, it just made the mismatch easier to see.

The same thing happens with values. Sometimes an insight tells you exactly what needs to change, but taking that step runs into something important: your family, integrity, relationships, stability, ambition, or simply the kind of person you want to be.

That is when I have learned to ask myself a different question: Is this something I have not learned how to do yet, or am I dealing with a values conflict? Is this a skills problem?

They can feel very similar when you are in the middle of them, but they are very different problems. If you confuse the two, you can spend years trying to get better at something that was never exciting for you.

Is it a skill gap or a values conflict?

That experience with new leadership helped me understand the difference. Speaking up could damage the relationship. Staying quiet could create a risk for the business. Neither option felt particularly good.

Looking back, most of my challenge was a skill gap. I had not yet learned how to communicate risk in a way senior leadership could hear without feeling that I was simply pushing back. I needed to learn how to influence when I did not have the authority to make the decision. More importantly, I needed to connect my concerns to what mattered to them, not just explain why those concerns mattered to me.

Those were skills, and skills can be learned.

But I have also experienced the other side of it: situations where the issue was not how I communicated or how well I influenced. The ask itself crossed something I was not comfortable crossing. There is not always a better script for that. Sometimes you must admit that you have reached a boundary and decide what you are willing to do about it. Occasionally, that means recognizing that a role, a team, or even an environment may no longer be right for you.

I have also learned that there is a difference between being strategically patient and simply staying quiet about something that matters. I do not think there is a perfect formula for knowing the difference in the moment. For me, patience feels like a conscious decision: I understand the trade-off, and I am choosing to wait. Compromise feels different when I realize I have slowly accepted something without ever really deciding to.

Those boundaries also change over time. I am not the same leader I was 10 years ago. Things I accepted earlier in my career might not be things I would accept today. I do not see that as inconsistency. I see it as growth.

Change needs a purpose

Not everything you discover about yourself needs to become another self-improvement project. I have become much more selective about that. The question I ask now is simple: Is this getting in the way of something that matters to me? If it is, work on it. If it is not, maybe it is okay to leave it alone.

I have watched leaders, myself included, spend a lot of energy trying to become “better” without stopping to ask what better actually means or what we are trying to accomplish. Delegation was one of those lessons for me.

Your technical ability may be one of the reasons you became a leader in the first place. You know how to solve problems. People trust your judgment. When something goes wrong, your instinct is to jump in. But that same instinct can eventually become the thing that prevents the people around you from growing.

I learned that while managing a large, experienced team in 2008 and 2009, during stretches of 80- and 90-hour weeks. I had worked for managers who responded to pressure by pushing teams harder, and I knew early that I did not want to become that kind of manager. I worked hard to build trust and create an environment where people could tell me what was really happening, especially when the news was not good.

But the hardest thing for me personally was delegation. My instinct—the same instinct that had made me technically credible—was to jump in and solve the problem. Leadership requires something different. Sometimes I had to step back, ask the question instead of giving the answer, and let someone work through a problem even when I could already see the solution. I had to allow it to take longer than it would have taken me.

Knowing I had this tendency did not magically change it. What changed it was doing the uncomfortable thing repeatedly: handing the problem back, asking another question, giving the person room, and resisting the urge to take over. Over time, it became less uncomfortable.

I still catch myself doing a version of this today. Now that I am in a more commercial and client-facing role, it is easy for me to fall back into technical or project advice. That is familiar territory. It is a muscle I have spent years building, so naturally it is the one I trust. But often, that is not what the situation needs from me anymore. Sometimes my job is to understand the customer's concern, make sure the right people hear it clearly, create the right sense of urgency, and then let the team closest to the problem own the solution. That is a different kind of leadership for me.

The insight matters only when it changes what I do. Otherwise, it is just something I know about myself.

You do not need a 20-year plan

I do not have my next 20 years mapped out, and I have stopped believing that I should. Some people have a very clear picture of where they want to be 10 or 20 years from now. That is great. But sometimes knowing the next two or three years is enough.

Start with what is actually true right now. What are you genuinely good at? What kind of work still gives you energy, even during a difficult week? What do you want next—not someday, but next? And what needs to change in you to get there? Then choose one thing and work on it.

Keep discovering yourself

I do not think this work ever really ends. New responsibilities show you different parts of yourself. New people challenge assumptions you did not even realize you were carrying. New environments expose gaps that were invisible in the last one.

Kellogg did that for me more than I expected. I walked in with roughly two decades of experience and a lot of confidence in what I knew. Then I found myself sitting next to leaders from completely different industries, functions, countries, and backgrounds. We could look at exactly the same business problem and see completely different things.

That experience did not make me question everything I knew. It made me much more curious about what I did not know.

One phrase I have carried with me is, “You do not know what you do not know.” And the longer I have been doing this, the more I also believe another version of it: the more you know, the more you realize how much you do not know.

That is one of the biggest shifts Kellogg created for me. I am less interested now in proving that I know the answer. I am more interested in understanding what I might be missing.

That mindset has also mattered as I have moved from engineering leadership into a more client-facing and commercial role. I am learning about a different side of business: customers, relationships, commercial decisions, influence, and problems that cannot always be solved with technology. After more than 20 years, I am a beginner again in some ways. And I like that.

Sometimes the next version of you does not come from thinking harder about yourself. It comes from putting yourself in rooms with people, problems, and experiences that force you to see something you could not see before.

From insight to deliberate action

After enough years of getting some of this wrong before getting it right, I have come to a fairly simple conclusion: insight by itself does not change much. It is information. It becomes useful when you connect it to something you care about, understand what is really standing in your way, and decide what you are going to do differently.

That is how I think about Discover, Align, and Rise.

Discover what is true about you—your strengths, patterns, blind spots, and sometimes the uncomfortable things you would rather not admit. Align that understanding with what actually matters to you and where you want to go. And then Rise by doing something with it.

Not someday. In the next conversation, the next decision, or the next uncomfortable moment when your old instinct tells you to do what you have always done.

You will not have every answer before you start. I have stopped expecting that. You need enough clarity to take the next step and enough honesty with yourself to understand the trade-off you are making when you take it.

So maybe the question is not, “What have I learned about myself?”

Maybe the better question is: What is one thing I already know about myself that I still have not done anything about?