There’s a point in every leader’s journey when self-awareness stops being a strength, and quietly becomes a performance.
You start reflecting to grow… and end up reflecting to look like you’re growing. The mirror becomes a stage. Humility becomes a script. Awareness becomes image-management.
That’s where Jeff Matlow steps in.
A three-time founder and the writer behind The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever, Jeff has spent years helping leaders confront the hardest thing to manage: themselves.
He has a gift for naming the performance we don’t even realize we’re giving: the therapy language we hide behind, the curated “authenticity,” the brand of self-awareness that sells better than real change.
In this conversation, we get honest about the shift leaders don’t like to admit:
When does knowing yourself stop helping you grow… and start helping you perform?
Jeff breaks down:
• why modern “authenticity” often reveals nothing
• how post-pandemic introspection turned into a public persona
• the difference between self-awareness and self-editing
• how to separate the talkers from the doers in an AI-driven world
• why change (not just insight) is the only real metric of maturity
This episode is for anyone who’s ever caught themselves narrating their growth instead of living it.
Anyone who has felt their truth harden into a persona. Anyone who wants their leadership to feel human again: flawed, funny, honest, and still worth getting right.
Clarity Over Noise — One question, one take, and the courage to look beneath the story you tell.
There’s a moment every creator and every leader eventually hits; a moment no dashboard warns you about.
The metrics dip.
The visibility fades.
The signals you once relied on start to disappear.
For creators, it looks like declining reach.
For leaders, it looks like stalled momentum, quieter rooms, fewer wins to point to.
Different worlds, same fear:
What if the numbers mean something is wrong with me?
Most people panic.
Diandra Escobar didn’t.
As the founder of Distinctiva.io, she’s helped some of the most trusted voices online build systems of clarity and trust.
And her turning point wasn’t when she went viral...it was when her metrics collapsed.
Because the work often gets truer when the numbers get smaller.
In this episode, we explore:
Whether you lead a team or build online, the threshold is the same:
your metrics fall before your meaning becomes real.