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A Note from Dr. Ashley | March 31, 2026

What Knowing Yourself Makes Possible

First off, I want to thank you for reading. I know your time is precious, so I really appreciate you giving some of it here every week. Two months in and I'm still evolving this newsletter. So, if there are things that you like or don't like about it, I want to know. It helps me a lot to get your quick feedback at the bottom of each issue or hit reply if you have more to share. Without your feedback, I don't know what's working and what's not. Please help me make this as useful for you as possible.

For March, the theme was Know Yourself First and we explored what that means. As a reminder, for every month with a fifth week, I send you a Note issue like this one instead of a standard issue.

We started the month with how emotions are already leading your decisions, named or not. Part of the exploration was how those emotions don’t stay contained and how they ripple into your team from day to day through tone and energy. The values you say you have and the ones your behavior actually exhibit was also covered. The last standard issue of the month ended with the difference between performing leadership and leading with presence.

That’s what we did. Four weeks of internal self-awareness (two inner, two outer), momentum questions, and opportunities to face it ‘til you ace it.

Writer and activist Audre Lorde wrote, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

It’s not a luxury to know yourself. It’s a necessity for how you lead. But it’s just a starting point.

Internal clarity alone can’t answer the second question that self-awareness asks:

Do you know how you land?

By this point, you may be aware of your emotions, values, triggers and behavioral patterns. But internal self-awareness is only half the picture that allows you to lead with presence instead of performance.

Know How You Land is April’s theme. It’s a shift from the internal dimension to the external one. We're starting with the gap between how you see yourself and how others experience you. Also, why does power and seniority worsen that gap instead of improving it? Does self-awareness include your strengths and your flaws? Then we'll end the month with this question: once you know how others perceive you, what do you do with it?

For most people, there’s usually a gap between internal and external self-awareness. The external part will be the focus for April.

See you next week.

Here are three resources I’ve curated that relate to what we’ve been doing.

Read: What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It) by Tasha Eurich (Harvard Business Review). Dr. Eurich explains the 95% statistic and the two dimensions of self-awareness. In the article, she asserts why asking “what” instead of “why” leads to better insight.

Listen: Finding Your Edge with Laura Huang (The Meaning Movement podcast). Dr. Huang talks about perception and bias. She also addresses what it means to empower yourself from the inside out, even when the system wasn’t built for you.

Watch: 3 Steps to Better Connect with Your Fellow Humans by Amber Cabral (TED). Inclusion strategist Amber Cabral encourages us to practice our privilege awareness, empathy, and active listening skills daily to create small shifts in attention that reshape how we connect to each other.

Kind regards,