Qui suis-je ? Découvrir votre authenticité

Dec 4, 2025

The journey to effective and authentic leadership is fundamentally rooted in self-awareness. Leaders are often promoted based on technical skills and high IQ, and they spend years focusing on external performance metrics and shareholder demands. Yet, many reach a point where they feel lost, empty, or unfulfilled, realizing they’ve neglected the crucial internal question: "Who am I?".

This phase of the self-coaching cycle is not merely an intellectual exercise; it is a deep, meaningful process of self-discovery required to become an authentic leader. When a leader understands their true self, they can stop "trying to be somebody else" and begin reflecting that authenticity every minute of the day.

Unfortunately, many leaders struggle with this fundamental question; a survey found that 33% of global leaders were not clear about who they really were. Authenticity is the cornerstone of followership and sustained success.

The Pillars of Identity: Behaviour and Values

The path to discovering "Who Am I?" involves exploring two core pillars that define our unique selves: our observable behaviours and our motivating values.

1. Unpacking Observable Behaviours (The DISC Model)

Self-discovery begins by looking at our observable behaviours, which act as a gateway to communication and are distinct from innate personality. The DISC Model, first proposed in 1928, identifies four major aspects to our observable behaviour. Understanding where you rank in these aspects reveals how you interact with others and perform tasks:

Dominance (D): Relates to the need for control, decisiveness, and leading situations. Low dominance often means being more measured, inclusive, and reflective on decisions.

Influence (I): Relates to how much interaction a person needs. High influence means being energized by people and making decisions through interaction, while low influence means being content working alone.

Steadiness (S): Relates to pace and a need for high-quality, reliable work. A low score indicates a "fire-starter" who thrives on change and variety, and is less concerned with quality or being part of a team.

Compliance (C): Concerns adherence to rules. High compliance means rigidly following rules and ensuring others do too, while low compliance means being creative, bending rules, and often acting as a change agent.

Becoming aware of your unique composition of these behaviours reveals when they are helpful or unhelpful to your goals.

1. Identifying Core Values (Motivators)

While behaviours explain how we act, true values explain why we behave in certain ways, acting as daily motivators. These values drive your decision-making processes. Leaders typically have about three key values that motivate them. The modernised list of key values includes:

Aesthetic: Driving for balance, harmony, and order, wanting the team to be cohesive with little conflict.

Altruistic: Looking to help others first and ensuring that decisions benefit team members and help them fulfill their potential.

Economic: Seeking either a practical financial return (salary) or a heartfelt reputation for being successful.

Individualistic: Seeking uniqueness, promoting strong will and opinion, and needing to stand out from the crowd.

Political: Centered on the value of power and control over one's own destiny, often key for CEOs.

Theoretical: The drive for knowledge, learning, and understanding, with knowledge being essential to feeling complete.

Traditional: Promoting a system for living one's life through habits, routines, and structure.

When you are able to live in ways that align with your highest behaviours and values, you are living an authentic life. When you are forced to be someone else, you expend emotional energy, which is exhausting over time.

Conclusion: The Path to Authentic Leadership

Accepting and understanding your true self, your behaviours and your values, takes patience, vulnerability, and the practice of mindfulness. This process gives you a foundation for authentic leadership.

By sharing your true behaviours and values with key stakeholders, you can proactively seek support and negotiate how you can work together effectively, enabling you to stay true to yourself while still succeeding. The most important elements of this process are vulnerability, holding each other to account, and constantly asking for feedback, which continuously builds your self-awareness.

The "Who Am I?" discipline ensures that the direction you choose for your life is genuinely yours, preparing you for the next stages of the self-coaching cycle.

3 Essential Self-Coaching Questions

Where am I consciously or unconsciously pretending to be someone else in a key relationship, and what version of myself am I hiding?

What behaviour (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, or Compliance) is currently exhausting me because it is being suppressed or overused?

Am I allowing my core values to guide my decisions today, or am I sacrificing one of them to please others?

Additional Frameworks and Concepts to Explore

The Johari Window: A tool used to enhance self-awareness and mutual understanding between individuals in a group. It consists of four quadrants: Open (known to self and others), Blind (known to others but not self), Hidden (known to self but not others), and Unknown (not known to self or others). It is powerful for gathering feedback and building trust.

The Enneagram of Personality: A model that describes nine distinct personality types and their interrelationships, focusing on the core motivations and fears that drive a person's behaviour. It provides deep insight into why one adopts certain habits or responds to stress in predictable ways.

Cognitive Distortions: These are habitual, irrational ways of thinking that bias how an individual perceives reality and lead to negative emotions. Examples include "all-or-nothing thinking," "catastrophizing," and "mind reading." Identifying these is key to regulating emotional intelligence and reducing self-limiting beliefs.

StrengthsFinder (CliftonStrengths): An assessment tool that identifies an individual’s top talent themes, categorized into four domains: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. Focusing on applying one's natural strengths is a crucial element in building self-confidence and authentic effectiveness.

Octagon Profile: an 8-axis behavioral diagnostic tool used to map and understand individual behavioral patterns. It provides actionable insights, making it particularly valuable in employee and client-facing situations where understanding interpersonal dynamics is key. Curious? Do your assessment here.