Your greatest strengths might be holding you back: Blindspotting with Dr Martin Dubin.

What if your greatest strengths are secretly holding you back as a leader?  

In this illuminating conversation with Dr. Martin Dubin, we uncover the hidden blind spots that prevent even the most successful leaders from reaching their full potential and making forward progress.  

We all have blind spots, patterns we don’t notice in ourselves that limit our growth.

In this episode of Change Wired, Dr. Martin Dubin, clinical-psychologist-turned-entrepreneur-turned-leadership coach, and author of Blindspotting: How to See What’s Holding You Back as a Leader, shares why blindspots are often the flip side of our greatest strengths, and how leaders can build self-awareness to avoid getting stuck in default behaviors that no longer serve them.  

🔑 Main Takeaways  

• The 6 Blindspots Leaders Face:  
  1. Identity – when your role evolves but your self-concept doesn’t  
  2. Motive – not seeing the true drivers behind your decisions  
  3. Traits – overplaying strengths until they become weaknesses  
  4. Emotions – failing to recognize and regulate your own or others’ emotions  
  5. Intellect – relying too heavily on one type of intelligence  
  6. Behavior – blind spots in communication, influence, and priorities  
• Strengths become blind spots when they’re overused in the wrong context.  
• Metacommunication (communicating about the communication) is a powerful way to clear misunderstandings and align intentions with impact.  
• Five things only a CEO can do: select the team, shape culture, set strategy, decide priorities, and manage key relationships.  
• Small tweaks matter more than big transformations - like adjusting decisiveness with guardrails or changing the timing of important decisions.  

📚 What You’ll Learn  

• How to uncover blind spots in your leadership and career.  
• Why emotions are data and how to use them to guide decisions.  
• The four kinds of intellect leaders should balance in teams.  
• Practical strategies to align identity, behavior, and motives with the roles you aspire to.  
• How to use the Blindspotting framework inside your organization to build more effective teams.  

📝 Resources   

• Book: Blindspotting: How to See What’s Holding You Back as a Leader  
• Blindspot Assessment: https://www.blindspotting.com/assessment  
• Website: martindubin.com  
• Connect with Marty on LinkedIn  

👤 Marty's Bio:  

Martin Dubin is a clinical psychologist, serial entrepreneur, business coach, and adviser to C-suite executives and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. He founded and sold a multimillion-dollar health-care company, served as Vice President at Anthem BCBS, and later became a partner at RHR International, working with Fortune 500 leaders and top venture capital firms.  

Marty’s latest book, Blindspotting distills decades of experience into a practical framework for identifying and overcoming leadership blindspots.   

Want to grow as a leader faster? Been stuck and not sure why?
Tune in and start blinspotting!  

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Change Wired & Dr. Martin Dubin
• 6:07 Martin's Journey from Psychologist to CEO Coach
• 11:23 Understanding Blind Spots in Leadership
• 17:42 Identity Blind Spots: When Role and Self Misalign
• 24:15 Motives: Uncovering What Truly Drives Us
• 34:19 Emotions as Data: Enhancing Awareness
• 40:21 Metacommunication: Speaking About Speaking
• 47:52 Intellect: 4 Types and Their Blind Spots
• 54:49 Traits: When Strengths Become Weaknesses
• 1:01:09 Five Things Only CEOs Can Do
• 1:06:40 Implementing Blind Spotting in Organizations