What if I lose my edge?

There’s a reason why you’re so good at what you do. So why is it getting in the way everywhere else?

In a recent interview with David Marchese of The New York Times, Chris Rock described how he has spent the last few years in therapy after being diagnosed with NVLD (non-verbal learning disorder).

It’s not quite Asperger’s, he clarified, but similar in having difficulty picking up on body language, hints, and the cues which others would notice and respond to in interpersonal interactions.

He then explained that in learning more about NVLD, he noticed that many of the tendencies that were associated with a “disorder” were actually beneficial for his work as a comedian.

Behaviors like catastrophizing and black-and-white thinking, as well as being excitable rather than sitting still and listening, served him well on stage, telling animated stories and taking a definitive, clear-cut point of view on topics.

In other words, the same preferences in thinking, communication, and behaving led to tremendous success in his professional setting while creating problems in his personal relationships.

Listening to him share this example, I wondered about a question that can affect any of us:

How willing are we to change something we associate with our success?

Many of us have habits that are hard to break, but when we see that they haven’t really benefited us, we know that it’s at least worth working on shedding them.

But what about habits that we can honestly say have led to the promotion, the career success, and the business opportunities we earned?

Are you ready to let them go, and if so, why? And if not, what if the day comes when not letting them go costs you?

Success makes certain habits hard to question

Consider the leader who has built a career by always being prepared. She anticipates objections, checks the details, and stays up late making sure nothing has been missed.

As a result, people trust her. They count on her, which feels good to her. And so she has very good reason to believe that being prepared always matters greatly to her success.

But at some point, her preparation becomes an activity without an endpoint. People start wondering why she needs to spend three hours revising a document that needed twenty minutes. She may be able to handle it (to a point), but others are suffering because of her stubbornness in this fixed approach.

And here’s the challenge: even when she comes to realize her style of preparation is costing her, when people tell her to ease up, she easily defends herself by saying they won’t be the ones having to answer for mistakes like she will. At the same time, if everything goes well, she will use that as another reason to stay the same.

Unfortunately, success in itself doesn’t necessarily tell us which parts of our approach were essential. And often it makes us reluctant to question any of them.

But when does it become a limiter? And wouldn’t it be smart to do something about it before success runs out and failure inevitably takes its place?

Can you relate?

I started to notice a version of this in myself, and I wonder if you can relate when it comes to your success in any aspect of your professional or personal life.

For me, I’m a professional coach, so I deeply value listening carefully, holding multiple interpretations open, and giving someone room to arrive at their own answer. Those are practices I’ve spent decades developing.

But writing or filming content and speaking at keynotes ask me first to decide what I believe and put it on the page and on the stage.

In those settings, I can feel myself hesitating, wanting to qualify the argument before I’ve fully made it. Or wondering whether the topics I’ve chosen are landing. (As a coach, I’m taking cues from the leader so I can adjust as needed.)

In this way, the two-way dance and immediate feedback that I trust in a coaching conversation can make it difficult to film a topical video with absolute conviction or commit to a long speech of me doing all the talking. After all, I’ve made a career out of being relentlessly open-minded with my clients, embracing opposite sides of an issue, and being careful not to dole out my opinions as advice.

And yet, I see the limitations of operating only in coach mode, both for my career and for the impact I can have in the future.

I’ve also come to see that my longtime clients don’t just want coaching with deep listening and “holding the space” as it was defined in many ways when it first became a professional practice more than 20 years ago. They value hearing about best practices in their industries and an active stance from me on what I’m observing relative to objective leadership competencies and assessments.

So for me, I’m personally working on becoming more comfortable taking a stance. But I also want to preserve the thoughtfulness that makes me good at listening. And often, I do catch myself treating those desires as though they are mutually exclusive.

I suspect those who are professional speakers or corporate leaders may have a similar feeling and desire for growth, just in the opposite direction.

Perhaps, like Chris Rock, they realize they want to be better at sitting still, listening, and holding space for their teams or family members when they have been paid for so long to have an opinion and broadcast it en masse.

But doing so doesn’t come without its fears and a need for intentional practice.

The fear of losing your edge

In another interview, this time on The Breakfast Club, Rock mentioned that as he was working on himself, he wondered whether it would change anything about his natural comedic strengths.

He jokingly said he’s always thinking about whether he’ll end up back working at Red Lobster like he did pre-fame.

I think many of us can relate to a certain part of such “catastrophizing”, even if to a smaller degree, about losing our so-called edge in one area when developing other aspects of ourselves.

For example, that careful, constantly prepared professional may fear becoming careless if they try to work on themselves. Or the always dependable friend may fear becoming selfish if they start setting boundaries.

And the highly ambitious person may fear that feeling satisfied at some point would remove the motivation to chase more, having always relied on Reese Bobby’s famous Talladega Nights mantra: “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”

Growth doesn’t have to mean giving up your strengths

But here’s where I’d invite you to challenge the belief that developing a weakness automatically means losing your advantage in the process.

Instead, try treating growth as an experiment rather than a replacement.

For the over-prepared professional, that might mean choosing one routine, low-stakes meeting, setting a reasonable preparation limit, and seeing what happens. Before the meeting, they can write down what they predict will go wrong. Afterward, they can compare that prediction with what actually happened.

For me, it might mean publishing a clear argument along with its most important qualification, then allowing readers to respond. I can practice making a claim without assuming I’ve lost my ability to listen.

The point of these experiments isn’t to prove that the old habit was wrong. It’s to find out whether it is as necessary as we’ve come to believe.

Where might you be over-indexing on a strength, to the point that loosening your grip on it and diversifying your capabilities might help you get better at other aspects of your life?

Can you consider some small experiments that help you expand your range, even if it means pulling back from the things in which you naturally excel?

Sure, it’s not the most pleasant thing to work on a weakness while also walking away, even temporarily, from strutting your stuff in the areas you’ve mastered.

But perhaps that’s the point.

You don’t have to give up the thing that made you successful in order to become more capable somewhere else.

There may be real strengths inside the habits we’re reluctant to change. And they deserve to come with us.

But we also deserve to discover what becomes possible when those strengths no longer have to do all the work.

The threshold question

What do you fear would happen if you eased up on one habit you credit with your success, and how could you safely test that prediction?

Until next week,

Nihar

Nihar Chhaya coaches senior leaders on navigating the transitions that come with business, leadership and personal success. 

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