Former taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said he was not good at "performative empathy" while in the head office and often "used to feel fake", but said he is actually quite a "warm person".
Mr Varadkar, who recently launched his new memoir, said when other children were interested in sports and football, he was interested in politics and elections, having gone down with his mother when she was voting in the 1987 election.
The 46-year-old said he is shy and "a bit reserved" which he said was "often mistaken for being cold".
Speaking to RTÉ's Brendan O'Connor, Mr Varadkar said: "I think people interpret it as being a bit cold but I don't think I'm cold at all, I'm actually a pretty warm person once you get to know me.
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"I have got better but I've had to train myself to be better at sticking out the hand first, introduce myself first, be more friendly."
He said for people such as his predecessor Enda Kenny, this came more naturally.
The former Fine Gael leader said that growing up his family kept their feelings "more private" than other families, which led to him being quite reserved.
He said there are advantages and disadvantages to it.
"When you are working as a doctor, and that was the job I was doing for seven years, I had to deal with a patient that was dying in front of me and had to speak to their family and ten minutes later look at somebody's sore throat ... and treat them.
"There are disadvantages too. I know one of the criticisms of me as a politician was that I lack empathy. I don't think I lack empathy but I'm not good at performative empathy ... where you need to reflect the mood of the nation," he said.
"It took me a long time to learn that. I used to feel I was a bit fake ... I was well into my first term of taoiseach before I really understood that it wasn't contrived, that sometimes you have to show that you care, otherwise people will think that you do not," Mr Varadkar said.
Mr Varadkar, who grew up in the Blanchardstown area in Dublin 15, said being bi-racial and gay, he was very keen in his early years to be "very nomal, fit in, be standard and conservative".
"I knew I was a gay man but didn't want to admit it to myself," Mr Varadkar said.
He said that at the time, he did not think it was the core of who he was while growing up.
"I remember when I did that interview in RTÉ with Miriam O'Callaghan when I told the nation I was gay. I remember saying things that I can't believe that I said now," he said.
"One was that it's just part of who I am, it's just another thing, it's not part of my identity. I can't believe I said that because it is so much a part of who I am, it has to be."
He said writing his book has provided a platform to say the things he could not say.
In the book, he called former chief medical officer Tony Holohan "arrogant" and "inflexible", however, he added on the programme that he was a "great public servant".
Mr Varadkar said that looking back, he felt he allowed the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) to become "too powerful".
"I think in the first stage of the pandemic it wasn't a problem because we were all aligned... where it became more of an issue was later on, eight months, nine months into the pandemic," he said.
"Certainly, my views and some of the views of cabinet members were starting to diverge," Mr Varadkar added.
He said he would have liked for it to be dissolved earlier and replaced with a different body with expertise in other areas, such as education or children's health.
Mr Varadkar said he thought schools were closed for too long
However, he added that in the first instance of going against advice from NPHET, the Government got it wrong, which made them a bit "afraid".
On his biggest regrets during his career, Mr Varadkar said he regrets having a lack of optimism on the extent of how the Irish economy would bounce back on multiple occasions, referencing the end of austerity, post-Brexit, as well as post-Covid.
"Had we known ... we would have ramped up capital investment quicker. Investment in things like housing, transport, new schools, new buildings, infrastructure.
"Some of the problems that we have now would be less worse had we known what we do now but hindsight is twenty-twenty," he said.
Mr Varadkar said his government did not succeed in fixing the housing crisis, which he described as an "understatement", adding that he thought "we could have done better had we made some of the decisions we made earlier".
"I think it is the worst and the most serious and most acute problem that we face as a country, for a country that is doing well," he said.
When asked if being taoiseach was worth it, Mr Varadkar said: "It was great and I loved it and it was a real privilege ... and it was great to be able to make a difference.
"But I also knew the point where I didn't enjoy it anymore."
On why he quit politics, the former Fine Gael leader said he felt he had "probably passed his peak" in terms of what he could achieve.
"You only have so much political capital ... as time goes by and you make unpopular decisions, that became depleted.
"I felt that that had become depleted to the point whereby a new leader would be able to do new things that I couldn't do and would be able to get a better result in the forthcoming elections," he said.
On the topic of threats to Simon Harris, Mr Varadkar said he had his own bomb threats and protests outside his home, as well as numerous death threats of varying degrees of credibility.
"I always asked my staff and the gardaí not to tell me about it. I didn't want to know about it unless there was a typical reason I should know about it because I did not want it to affect my particular performance," he said.
He recalled how one time, there was a garda car with two big bags of fluid with water, which was there because somebody had threatened to acid-attack him if he went out canvassing.
"I think what Simon is doing is right now that he is speaking out against it. I also think it is different for him, he has a wife and kids, the nature of the threats are different to what it was to me," he said.
"I'm actually glad that he is speaking out against it."
Mr Varadkar added that he will be giving his number one vote in the upcoming Presidential Election to his former colleague Heather Humphreys.
"I think she would be a great president if she is elected," he added.
