Why Competent Professionals Are So Often Misread Despite Clear Intentions
If you are like many people I work with, at some point in your career (or personal life, for that matter), you may have asked yourself: Why am I misunderstood at work, even when I know I am a good communicator?
My clients are capable, articulate, and conscientious. Being successful professionals, they prepare carefully, communicate thoughtfully, and act with clear intent. Yet despite this, their words and actions are often misinterpreted. A client recently shared that they are often perceived as abrupt when trying to be clear. Another felt colleagues read them as sceptical about a proposed change when, from the client’s perspective, they were just thinking things carefully. A team manager was perceived as defensive when attempting to assert a reasonable boundary.
What makes these experiences particularly striking is that they exist even among individuals who are demonstrably capable and successful. But for my clients, this ushers in confusion and sometimes, distress. Even in the mildest of cases, it causes a loss of confidence. Sometimes, the slow erosion of belief and trust in one’s communication skills has led to a gradual decline in capability. In short, things can quickly spiral out of control if left as they are.
So what is it that goes wrong here?
At the moment they see me, and we begin working together, my starting point with clients is to inform them that the issue is rarely a lack of skill, intelligence, or effort. And to introduce them to the idea, something more fundamental is interfering between intention and impact – something conventional explanations around confidence or communication rarely address.
The Common Workplace Pattern Nobody Names
In professional environments, feedback from management often centres on the same themes: be more confident, communicate more clearly, and manage how you come across. These observations are usually well‑intentioned, but they fail to explain why professionals who are already capable and articulate continue to encounter the same misunderstandings. Additionally, they are truly unhelpful, as they provide the receiver with very little guidance on how to improve one’s presentation and communication.
As a result, individuals attempt surface‑level adjustments – changing language, tone, posture, or delivery – without resolving the underlying issue. The pattern repeats, and frustration grows. On both sides.
What I See Repeatedly in the Coaching Room
To understand this problem more closely, it helps to observe how it presents in practice.
In a foundational exercise, during our coaching sessions, my clients are asked to re‑enact or role-play a situation in which an unwanted reaction or behaviour arose – for example, a meeting where they felt misunderstood by their team.
The interaction is recorded and played back immediately.
What follows is often a moment of genuine surprise. Clients see themselves as others might see them – sometimes for the first time. In some cases, this realisation is emotional, even painful, because it exposes a significant gap between intention and impact.
Responses such as “That’s not how I meant it to come across,” or “I thought I was being direct, but I look tense and defensive,” are typically shared, almost immediately. Insight arrives alongside awareness. Clients realise that there is a misalignment between what they thought and felt they were doing and what they actually did in the moment.
When Awareness Changes the Nature of the Problem
What is striking about these moments is not simply the emotional reaction, but the shift that follows. Once individuals can see the misalignment between their internal state and their outward behaviour, the problem becomes intelligible.
At this point, many professionals realise that the issue was never a lack of confidence or competence. It was a lack of access to how their internal experience was shaping their external behaviour in real time.
Why This Is Not a Confidence or Communication Problem
Confidence and communication skills are often treated as the primary drivers of professional effectiveness. Yet both assume that intention translates cleanly into behaviour. The language and frameworks of leadership and management in organisational settings do not account for this phenomenon. This is why leaders and managers often cannot enable and facilitate behaviour change in their teams.
In reality, behaviour and expression are shaped by emotional and physiological processes that operate beneath conscious awareness. When these processes are misaligned with intention, no amount of articulation or motivation can reliably correct the outcome.
This is also why capable professionals can continue to be misunderstood even after extensive management and executive training.
Inside and Outside: The Misalignment Professionals Rarely See
My work focuses on helping professionals achieve alignment. In other words, I show my clients how to connect intention with effective behaviour and action.
To understand how my approach works, it helps to consider the architecture of emotion and behaviour. By way of simple demonstration, imagine that every professional interaction contains two components.
The internal component consists of subjective experience: emotion, physiological response, and thought.
The external component consists of observable behaviour: voice, posture, gesture, facial expression and timing.
When these components are aligned, communication feels grounded and coherent. When they are not, misunderstanding arises – even when the individual believes they are being clear or appropriate.
Without awareness of this internal-external relationship, attempts to change behaviour tend to be superficial if effective at all. Conventional leadership & communication techniques do not address the nature of the processes that generate behaviour. Consequently, when applied, they fail to produce consistent or powerful behaviour shifts.
Why Awareness Precedes Behavioural Control
Through repeated observation of this pattern in my practice, a simple principle became clear: awareness precedes behavioural control. Once awareness is established, alignment becomes possible. Without it, change remains fragile.
This insight would later be formalised into a structured methodology that now guides the creation of the material and the nature of the instruction across the full range of EMS services we offer, from the 1:1 Development Programs to the Business Workshops. Its origins lie in these moments of recognition – when professionals finally see what has been getting in the way.
