The Superpower You’ve Been Hiding
You're Asking for the Wrong Thing From Your Team
There are moments in a career when you look back at something you were ashamed of and realise it was building you all along. This article is about one of those moments.
The 21st of May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a date set aside to ask who is being left out by the way we design technology, communication, and working life, and what we lose as a result. It felt like the right moment to write something personal.
The Pattern in Theo’s Story
If you know Theo Paphitis from the television, you’ll recognise the sharp, decisive entrepreneur who always seems to know his own mind. What’s less visible on screen is that Theo has dyslexia, and his path through education was genuinely difficult. He’s spoken openly about being placed in bottom sets, about teachers writing him off, about being told repeatedly that he wasn’t capable.
What those teachers didn’t see was what he was privately building: a relentless ability to problem-solve verbally, to think on his feet, to build understanding through conversation and pattern recognition rather than through text. When he moved into business, that processing style didn’t just survive. It gave him an edge that many conventionally schooled leaders simply don’t have.
Theo now talks about his dyslexia as a superpower, not because the struggle wasn’t real, but because the workarounds he built to navigate that struggle turned out to be some of the most valuable skills he ever developed. The environment created pressure, the pressure created adaptation, and the adaptation created capability. That’s a genuinely important idea, and one that sits very close to home for me.
Refusing to Hold the Pen
When I was at school, I had absolutely no idea I was processing things differently. I didn’t have a label for it. I just knew that writing felt almost impossible. I’d look at a blank page and something would seize up. Reading was hard too, but it was never reading that really held me back. The inability to put pen to paper was the thing that consistently created anxiety, embarrassment, and the kind of low-level dread that followed me through school and well into my career.
I told myself I was just a bit rubbish at English, that it was a personal failing rather than a different way of processing the world. I carried that quietly for years. It wasn’t until I was well into my thirties that I started to recognise it for what it actually was: not a deficit in intelligence or a reason for shame, but a genuinely different cognitive profile that had been present my whole life.
And once I had that shift in perspective, something else clicked too.
What the Workshops Were Actually Teaching Me
As I climbed through my career, I attended a lot of training sessions, leadership events, and workshops. A familiar format kept appearing: small groups, a task on a flip chart, and the question, ‘Who’s going to take the notes?’ For most people, that’s a logistical question. For me, it was a moment of quiet panic.
So a pattern developed. I noticed that in every group exercise there were two roles: the note-taker and the presenter. I worked out that if I moved fast enough, I could always claim the second one. ‘I’ll present.’ Confident, seemingly enthusiastic, apparently generous. The effect was that someone else always ended up holding the pen.
My motivation at the time was entirely about self-preservation. It wasn’t strategic, and it certainly wasn’t brave. But here’s what happened: by consistently volunteering to present, I started to get good at it. I became comfortable standing in front of a room. I learned how to structure a narrative quickly, how to handle difficult questions, how to read an audience and adapt.
The skills I was building were absolutely intentional, in the sense that I worked hard at them. But the reason I kept putting myself in those positions was, at root, because I was working around a difficulty. The thing I was trying to avoid pushed me directly into the roles that would shape my leadership style.
Now I host a podcast, interview business leaders and authors, speak at events, and coach others on leadership and communication. The thread that runs through all of it goes back to that moment in the workshop where I said, ‘I’ll present’, because I didn’t want anyone to see me writing.
In Enhanced Leadership, I reflect on something similar: ‘Ive always been a listener, a thinker and a talker. I learn best through dialogue and audio, not through reading or lengthy written exercises.’ The irony, of course, is that those same qualities became the foundation of a book, a podcast, and a coaching practice.
What This Means If You Lead a Team
Here’s a challenge worth sitting with. Think about the last time you asked someone on your team to produce a report or present their work as a slide deck. Completely normal requests. But ask yourself this: did you need the report, or did you need the insight? Did you need the slides, or did you need a clear recommendation?
A report is a method. Insight is an outcome. There is an important difference.
When you mandate the method, you are, often without realising it, designing out the people on your team whose thinking doesn’t move in straight lines and dense paragraphs. The person who processes brilliantly through conversation, through diagrams, or through a two-minute verbal brief can meet your outcome perfectly. But they’ll struggle to meet your method. And if you insist on the method, you may never see what they’re actually capable of.
Think of someone on your team who always seems slightly disengaged in written updates but comes alive when talking through a problem. In many cases, the format isn’t revealing their ceiling. The format is the ceiling.
So be brave enough to step back from what feels familiar. If a short voice note captures the thinking just as well as a five-page document, ask for it. Define the outcome clearly, then get out of the way and let your team use the method that works for their brains. AI is already changing this equation: for the first time, people who think brilliantly but have always struggled with written output have a genuine, practical tool to bridge that gap.
For Coaches: What to Listen For
If you coach leaders, be alert to the pattern I’ve described above. Many of the strengths your clients take for granted have their roots in something they once found difficult or embarrassing. The presenting skill, the communication instinct, the ability to think on their feet: often these didn’t come from confidence. They came from compensation.
A useful question to explore is: ‘Where in your career have you consistently volunteered for something? And what were you quietly avoiding at the same time?’ The answer frequently reveals a hidden development path that the client has never fully seen for what it was.
It’s also worth helping leaders examine the formats they demand from their teams. When a leader insists on a particular method of communication, it’s often a reflection of their own preferred style, not necessarily the most effective way to surface good thinking. Coaching them to separate ‘how I like to receive information’ from ‘how insight is best created’ can unlock real change.
The Pressure That Built the Muscle
I spent thirty-odd years thinking my difficulty with writing was something to hide, something that marked me out as less capable. It turned out it was none of those things. It was the pressure that built the muscle, and the muscle that built the career.
Whatever your version of refusing to hold the pen looks like, I’d encourage you to look at it again. Not with shame, and not with forced positivity either, but with genuine curiosity about what it’s been building in you.
And if you lead a team, ask yourself this week: where are you asking for a method, when all you actually need is an outcome? The answer to that question might just change someone’s career.
