A few weeks ago, I found myself in a pedicure chair. My wife finally staged an intervention on my gangly feet. Apparently, it was time. So there I was, soaking in lavender suds, surrounded by pastel polish bottles, when I struck up a conversation with my pedicurist. Turns out, when she’s not wrangling overgrown toenails, she’s a PhD student in psychology—and sharp as a tack. 

Naturally, we started talking shop, geeking out about the psychology of leadership. And right there, mid-foot scrub, she dropped a knowledge bomb that I wish I’d known about years ago: cognitive distortions. Apparently that’s psychology-speak for unhelpful thinking styles, mental short circuits that trip up our judgment. 

Think of these as glitches in your brain’s operating system. And while they show up in everyday life, they can be especially prevalent (and costly) in PE-backed leadership, where you’re constantly under pressure and making more decisions in a week than some people make in a month.

As we discuss in Ascend, the biggest risks to your leadership aren’t always external. Often, they’re internal—biases, mental errors, and limiting beliefs that quietly steer your leadership off course. As we say in the program, you can’t effectively lead your team or your company if you’re not first “leading yourself.” And one thing that gets in the way of leading yourself well is letting these distortions unknowingly shape how you think, decide, and lead.

So let’s bring these cognitive distortions out of the shadows and into the light. Here are five of the most common thinking traps I see PE leaders fall into:

All-or-Nothing Thinking. This is when you see things in black-and-white terms. In absolutes. It’s either a total success or complete failure—with no middle ground. For leaders, this creates unnecessary drama in your own head and in your organization because very few business outcomes are ever all good or all bad.

Example: You miss a revenue target by 2% and consequently, decide the whole go-to-market strategy is a failure—even though you’re still up 15% year-over-year. That kind of binary thinking drains team morale and can cause you to over-rotate.

Overgeneralization. Taking one event or data point, and drawing sweeping conclusions from it. One mistake becomes “I always screw this up.” One tough board exchange becomes “They’ve lost confidence in me.” It’s your brain generalizing from a single data point, which quietly chips away at confidence and judgment.

Example: An investor pushes back on your forecast, and you walk out convinced, “They don’t trust me with numbers.” It eats away at your confidence. The next time you present, you’re overly cautious and less decisive—ironically reinforcing the very concern you imagined.

Negative Mental Filtering. It is when your attention locks onto what’s wrong and filters out what’s right. Even when 90% of the picture is positive, your brain fixates on the 10% that isn’t. In this way, mental filtering has hints of all-or-nothing thinking and overgeneralization. For leaders, this drains morale and creates a culture where progress never feels like enough.

Example: Your team lands three marquee accounts, but loses one. Guess which one you talk about in the next meeting? Instead of celebrating momentum, you leave everyone feeling like they’re always behind and never doing enough. All they hear is: “We’re still not good enough,” and over time, that mindset kills morale.

Catastrophizing. This is when you take a small problem and blow it out of a proportion. You’ve made a mountain out of a mole hill. Your brain turns one smaller setback into a worst-case scenarios in seconds. That kind of thinking drives knee-jerk reactions can spread panic like a contagion. 

Example: Your VP of Sales resigns, and within an hour you’re convinced the entire commercial team is unstable and the quarter is at risk. Instead of calmly regrouping, you panic, reorganize too fast, and create the very instability you feared. 

“Should” Statements. These are rigid, internal rules about how you or others must perform. They sound noble—“I should always be prepared,” “My team should never make mistakes”—but they set unrealistic expectations that can lead to guilt, frustration, and burnout.

Example: You walk into the boardroom thinking, “I should have every answer.” When you’re faced with a tough question, that fear of not measuring up stops you from saying, “Let me get back to you,” a simple phrase that could actually build credibility. Instead, you freeze or overtalk, which erodes your credibility.

According to psychology, there are something like fifteen of these distortions. Beyond the five above, others include: magnification, minimization, discounting the positive, emotional reasoning, fortune telling, mind reading, labeling, and personalization (among others). Google them if you want a deeper dive, just as I did mid-pedicure. 

And when it comes to ways our brains can undermine our leadership, I hate to break it to you, but those fifteen are just the start. Beyond these distortions sit a broader array of cognitive biases: mental shortcuts and blind spots that subtly shape how all of us think and decide.

If you’re like me, you read through these five and thought: “Yep, guilty… and yep, that one too.” But here’s the thing: you don’t need to fix all five. For now, just zero in on the one or two that trip you up most often. Then dig in: 

When did this sneak into my leadership recently?

How did it impact the decisions I made?

What was the cost (on my team’s, my board’s confidence, or my own clarity)?

Here’s why this matters: if you’re leading a PE-backed business, your edge doesn’t come just from IQ, experience, or strategic chops. It comes from clear thinking under pressure. These distortions muddy that water, and over time, they show up in the quality of your decisions, your communication, and your leadership presence. 

It’s easy to judge executives on the visible stuff: their financial savvy, command of the metrics, board presence, among other “hard skills.” But the truth is: all of that sits downstream of what’s happening in your head. If your mental operating system is glitching, everything else will too. As we emphasize in Ascend, clean that up, and everything downstream—your decision-making, communication, and leadership presence—gets sharper.