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It's hard to polish your shoes or press your clothes, when you are neck deep in an alligator swamp; and it is hard to think about developing yourself, when you are busy fighting fires and holding things together. And yet: finding time and space to work on developing the best version of yourself is critical if you want to progress in your career.

Birkman.me creates a space and a conversation to allow you time for constructive reflection, in the midst of everything else you are doing as a manager or leader. More than that, and unlike most programmes you may have participated in before, it starts by giving you a deep understanding of a person you probably know less well than you think: yourself.

The biggest challenge we face as people is getting past our own self-perception and self-expectations. Those things matter, but they also constitute a big part of what will trip us up as we try to make progress. We all assume that we are self-aware, but often that just means we are aware that we can be a little reactive and unhelpful at times; there isn't anything useful we can do with that knowledge.

Real self-awareness goes deeper, to the factors that drive unconscious, reactive responses; and it includes the knowledge of how to manage ourselves more effectively. Birkman.me gives you that activated self-awareness, that allows you to actually make sustainable changes in the way you operate.

So instead of walking you through a standard set of "leadership competencies and behaviours", Birkman.me covers the same territory, but with an accurate map of how you sit within that model - and what you can do to arrive at meaningful changes that last, that can be implemented fast, and which can plug you into your true reservoir of strength.

And that may have little or nothing to do with your surface understanding of who you are.