"I'll Just Do It Myself” | The 7 Leadership Traps: Trap #4

Your competence got you promoted, no doubt about it. But now that you’re in a leadership seat, it might be the very thing that sabotages your leadership imprint. In this episode of The Inner Edge, executive coach Janet Ioli unpacks the fourth leadership trap: an identity so fused with personal competence that it becomes almost impossible to let go of, even after the job and scope have completely changed. The habits that earned the promotion are often the exact habits sabotaging it. Success used to depend on what you could personally produce, but now it depends on the opposite skill, and nobody hands you a new operating system when they hand you the title. Janet also draws on attachment researchers John Bowlby and Dan Siegel to explain why self-reliance under pressure is a wired-in safety strategy and shares the mirror question and practice that starts to interrupt it. This is the fifth episode in an eight-part series on the seven leadership traps, based on Janet's upcoming book, Escape the Traps (releasing October 2026). Chapters: 00:00:00 The Trait That Got You Promoted Now Limits You  00:00:47 Three Leaders, One Hidden Pattern  00:04:31 The Identity Fused With Personal Competence  00:05:50 The Attachment Research Behind Self-Reliance  00:10:11 The Mirror Question: From Bottleneck to Multiplier  00:12:28 Next Episode: Trap 5 Read the first chapter of Escape The Traps (available October 2026): https://mailchi.mp/5d2dbf42009c/escape-the-traps-chapter Which trap is running you? Take the quiz and find out: https://tally.so/r/lb4Z4p Connect with Janet Ioli: Website: janetioli.com LinkedIn: Janet Ioli Instagram: @janetioli YouTube: @janetioli If you want to become more grounded, confident, and aligned with your deeper values in just 21 days, check out Janet Ioli’s book Less Ego, More Soul: A Modern Reinvention Guide for Women. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.  Select “Listen in Apple Podcasts,” then choose the “Ratings & Reviews” tab to share what you think.   Produced by Ideablossoms