When Sam was promoted to Director, he looked every bit the successful leader. He managed a capable team and had established a healthy work-life balance. As we began our coaching journey, he wanted to become a better listener, communicate with greater impact, build stronger relationships with senior leaders, and learn to delegate with more trust.
As we explored these goals, a pattern began to emerge.
Unpacking fear
Years earlier, one of Sam’s team members had resigned. During the exit conversation, he received feedback that stayed with him. His tendency to micromanage had contributed to the decision. Around the same time, he noticed a similar pattern at home. With his children, he was often directing rather than guiding, correcting rather than exploring. His intentions were good, but he could see that his need to be right was limiting the growth of those around him.
“I have improved,” he reflected. “Maybe by fifty percent.”
“So what might help with the other fifty percent?” I asked.
After a thoughtful pause, he replied, “I think I am afraid.”
As we unpacked that fear, he spoke about losing his reputation, making mistakes, or even losing his job. Yet as he said the words aloud, he smiled. He had just been promoted. The evidence suggested these fears had very little basis in reality. Fear, we realised, is often rooted less in facts and more in stories we have carried for years.
Discovering roots to patterns
Over the next few sessions, we became curious about where those stories had begun. Sam described himself as a teenager who often felt unsupported and unsure of himself. He had learned to rely entirely on himself, and over time, being right became more than a strength. It became protection.
He captured it perfectly when he said, “It feels like I have been wearing an armour.”
That metaphor became central to our conversations. Armour serves an important purpose. It protects us when we need protection. But if we continue wearing it long after the danger has passed, it also keeps people at a distance and limits our ability to grow.
Rather than trying to change everything overnight, Sam experimented with small behavioural shifts. During meetings, he consciously stayed on mute longer, scribbled down his thoughts instead of immediately voicing them, and challenged himself to listen more than he spoke. Slowly, he noticed something surprising. His team members were fully capable of solving problems without his intervention. Sometimes, their ideas were even better than his own.
As his awareness deepened, another pattern surfaced. He realised he had a habit of over-explaining. The more we explored it, the more he recognised that it came from the same underlying need—to convince others that he was right. That same need also fuelled his perfectionism. Mistakes, whether his own or someone else’s, felt deeply uncomfortable.
Perfectionism, he realised, was not simply about high standards. It was another way of protecting himself from uncertainty. Sam noticed that his perfectionism showed up much more strongly with his family than at work.
“What are you afraid will happen if your children make mistakes?” I asked.
His answer came without hesitation.
“I do not want them to struggle the way I did.”
The shift
In that moment, everything connected. He was not trying to control his children because he doubted them. He was trying to protect them from the uncertainty he had experienced growing up. As he developed greater compassion for that younger version of himself, he found it easier to extend the same generosity to others.
Sam described “being right” as his shield.
I offered him a different image.
“What if your children do not need your shield? What if they need a safety net instead?”
A safety net does not prevent every fall. It creates the confidence to take risks, knowing someone will be there if things do not go as planned.
The idea immediately resonated with him. Instead of trying to ensure his children never made mistakes, he began thinking about how he and his wife could create clear boundaries while giving them the freedom to explore, fail, learn and recover. He realised the same principle applied to leadership. His role was not to protect people from every challenge, but to create the safety that allowed them to grow through those challenges.
Learning
Often, the behaviours we label as perfectionism, micromanagement or over-explaining are not flaws in our personality. They are protective strategies shaped by earlier experiences. They once kept us safe, but over time they can begin to limit both our own growth and that of the people around us.
Perhaps the question is not, “How do I stop being a perfectionist?”
Perhaps it is, “What is my perfectionism trying to protect?”
Because when we understand the fear beneath the behaviour, we create the possibility of choosing differently. Sometimes, the most powerful shift we can make—as leaders and as parents—is replacing our shield with a safety net.