This coincides with me also contemplating an upcoming two-week vacation back home to New Zealand. I leave on Saturday.

As we were talking through her adjustment to this new role, we discussed the fact that she is in this golden time when she isn’t yet locked into expectations, habits, and ideas that can easily become the handcuffs that keep you trapped in the future.

I realized I was also in this phase here with Leadership Lately. The commitment is new, and the expectations and norms aren’t fully set, either with myself or with you, my reader.

And it got me thinking - this is one of the easiest times you will ever get to consider one simple question that can impact a whole lot.

What do I mean by Human Sustainability?

In a workshop I’ve given many times over on human well-being, stress, and how to avoid burnout, I have a slide of a simple burnout continuum.

If we’re simply unconsidered and don’t actually think about managing our well-being, we’re prone to running right through any of the warning signs that we’re tiring, and we’ll keep on going, falling further and further down the continuum until the only outcome is burnout.

I often use the analogy of our emotions being like warning lights on the dashboard of our car. If we can check in with how we feel, interpret the signals, and, more importantly, act on them, then we’re much more likely to stay in a healthy zone, which ultimately helps us maintain and sustain our contribution.

We don’t want to wait until the emotional exhaustion phase before we start taking actions that put us back into the engaged and well end of the scale. The aim isn’t to do something amazing once, and then flame out in a blaze of glory.

The aim is to show up well over a long period of time, delivering consistently and feeling good, because you’re functioning in your zone of human sustainability.

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Three Simple Considerations that Make Our Lives Easier

But how do we actually stay in this optimal zone, where we are regenerating our resources (or energy), and not overgiving of ourselves before it is too late?

Here are three simple thoughts I left my client with, and also reminded myself of today, that can help ensure we stay in the zone of sustainable ongoing contribution.

You Teach People How to Treat You

This is one of my favorite personal mantras. We teach people how to treat us.

We are constantly giving people signals about what we will and will not accept. Of course we usually do this completely unconsciously. But through our actions, asks, and boundaries, we teach people what we consider okay and not okay, and what we will and will not tolerate.

This is an essential lesson to learn when we’re talking about building our own sustainable well-being. We are the only ones who can monitor how we’re feeling from the inside, and it is our job to ensure that we push back early (albeit politely) when the asks of us are getting too great.

Don’t resentfully keep pushing through your own boundaries when you can politely hold a line that protects your well-being.

What does this look like at work? Maybe you’d prefer to shut off in your evenings, and want your team to do so too. So simply communicating that you won’t be checking email or Slack after hours, and if someone needs you, they will have to call you, is a simple, clear, and yet kind way of saying - I’m available, but only if you really need me.

That isn’t locking people out or refusing to do your job. It’s putting up a flexible boundary, much like a fence with a gate in it - “You can get to me, and I’m here, but you have one little hurdle in order to reach me.” And it is amazing how many people will check themselves before phoning, but will shoot off a Slack or email without giving it a second thought. Yet both may equally throw you off kilter after work hours.

You teach people what they can expect from you. And if you do this thoughtfully and consciously, you’re much more likely to set healthy limits that allow you to bring your best self to the fore in the longer term (and as a bonus, give others permission to too).

Calm before Chaos

I typically project calm on the outside, but my nervous system is not at all wired to be calm. I’ve been a sensitive soul for as long as I can quite honestly remember. I trigger easily on the inside, and stress and overwhelm most definitely rattle me. In understanding myself, Dr. Elaine Aron’s concept of Highly Sensitive People, or HSPs, really helped me make sense of this.

Along with this sensitivity, when I’m really feeling stretched, I can become a chronically chaotic version of myself. I call it the panic monkey. And if I let the panic monkey into the driving seat of my life, I can have a tendency to jump into a crazed way of attending to whatever is in front of me.

Thankfully, now I realize that frenzied action is never the most efficient or effective way to take care of anything.

Panic spreads panic. And the flip - considered calm spreads thoughtful action.

As part of this, if I can feel a sense of overwhelm increasing, I now recognize this is an invitation to calm my body so that I don’t get caught in an emotionally driven spiral. From there, I can reconnect with my thinking brain (i.e., executive prefrontal cortex) and actually start to thoughtfully attend with a bunch more logic to what is in front of me.

So my personal reminder is to start with calm. It can feel like delaying action in a moment, but 5 min of calming my body through breathing, movement, or writing brings me that much more focus in return.

Get a Plan

I have no idea who said it, but it’s brilliant.

You can do everything, just not all at once.

And there is only so much one human can create, output, or quite honestly do in a period of time. Being realistic about this will make your life infinitely easier in the long run.

I see having a plan much like creating a map through the chaos that is overwhelm and stress so that you can come back to it when you need regrounding. Map the route through before you start walking.

The benefit to this is that it should really start to become clear whether or not there is a path through the maze of obligations. And if it’s completely unrealistic, you can call in help or flag that earlier than the eleventh hour. We can get to everything, just not all at once.

It matters less to me how my clients like to approach their planning and organizing, and more that they simply do plan.

My personal practice isn’t rocket science. A simple glance at the beginning of my week, then I grab a piece of paper and write a list of daily tasks. Ultimately, I consider which one is the highest priority, and work around it from there.

Many tasks end up being transferred to the next day’s list because that reflects a busy person who only has so many resources to give.

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Human sustainability may make it sound like we’re a bunch of resources, but I think it is how we need to be thinking about our well-being.

What is going to be sustainable for me is a simple question that, if you ask yourself frequently enough, can gently reorient your commitments and actions toward what actually supports your well-being in the long term.

For my client, maybe that is to thoughtfully consider what job responsibilities she absorbs from the get-go, what really should fit in the role of her team members, what daily planning habits she needs, and how she wants to be communicated with.

And for me, asking that one question led me to decide that with Leadership Lately, if I am on vacation (or holiday in Kiwi-lingo), then writing here is also on hiatus. Because that will allow me to show up well and consistently in the longer term. So you can expect to see me back here in your inbox in just a couple of weeks, post-vacay! Practicing what I preach you might say.

It’s been years since I’ve written with any real consistency or created on a frequent schedule. My podcast was a regular commitment back in the day, which is exactly why I know that creation is like a muscle: the more frequently you train and the more reps you get in, the easier it gets.

Well what I can tell you is - my creation muscles have atrophied, big time.

And since the last time I actually was using this creative brain of mine consistently (looking back at my recordings, it really was pre-COVID, so let’s give or take 7 years), the world has changed in quite a curious way. We now have these phenomenal artificial intelligence tools that can do a lot of knowledge-generating at the touch of a button.

I’m a big fan of AI, and I do believe that all savvy leaders are actively exploring how to best utilize these tools and how they can augment and extend their capabilities. AI is clearly not going away, and there are real advantages we can gain from these amazing tools.

But there are also downsides and traps we ought to be aware of if we are, in fact, going to be savvy.

And I walked straight into a pothole of a trap... let me tell you.

The Allure of a Shiny Short Cut

I opened up my new Substack editing screen for the first time. Full of promise and the excitement of bringing Leadership Lately to life, I was met only by a cursor blinking back at me, begging me, borderline demanding me, to put some words on the digital page… and I had nothing.

Blank and completely lacking any inspiration.

My first thought was, “Oh my gosh, I have no idea what I should write about? This is hard!”

It is. Writing and creativity are hard. And they always have been.

But rather than allow myself to sit in the discomfort of that thought, and allow it to pull me deeper into my own thinking muscles, I decided almost instantaneously to divert my own thinking and look for an alluring shortcut.

My second thought quickly followed, and internally sounded something like: “Yay for AI! It can tell me.”

Now, one promise I will make is that AI will never ever write my Substack posts. This is me. In my voice. Typing at a screen. And it always will be.

But the allure and promise of AI is that it is supposed to make everything easier, right?

I wasn’t looking for AI to write a piece, but I did think AI could tell me what to write

To be honest, it felt like a genius move in the moment. “Let me use these amazing tools to give me insight and make this whole process of writing something meaningful quicker,” was what was running in the back of my mind.

So I decided to use AI as a research assistant of sorts, and to work out what the “Current Leadership Trends” my Substack readers might want to know about really were.

I went back right now to see how I had managed to tie myself up in knots. Gosh, no wonder! Even my prompt was a lesson in overwhelm!

I’d used one of those prompt generators that you throw ideas into, and then it creates an “expert prompt”. Processing it through Perplexity, it came back to me with a several-page report titled "What Leaders are Really Thinking About in 2026." Here is just a snippet of the crazy I was trying to digest all before writing a single word on a page.

The Great Flattening. Quiet Cracking. Manager Squeeze. Emotional Interior of Decision Making. Do you feel inspired reading that? I certainly did not.

So what did I do? Well, I used another AI tool to see what it would spit back out at me, all while holding out hope that somewhere in something, I would find a thread of usefulness that would miraculously inspire creativity in me.

Instead, I became completely lost in flat words and concepts that meant nothing, and found myself drowning in dry, meaningless information.

Cognitive Load

This is the "I should have known better" section.

Our minds can only process a handful of pieces of information at once in working memory. Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental effort we need to use to process information. When we get flooded with too much information, it can exceed our brain’s processing capacity, and much like a computer, our minds seize up like they’re frozen from having too many tabs open.

Once we get to that point, we’re on a path to struggling to make any decision and dealing with a mental fatigue that starts feeling like mind-fog. Ultimately this also impacts our ability to retain anything. We’ve fried the circuits and roll right into shutdown mode.

I can clearly remember sitting in a psychology lab during my undergrad studies, studying memory and testing each other to see how many numbers we could keep in mind at one time, and all the memory tricks needed to lengthen that string. It was considered about 7 back in the day. And it was bizarrely hard to do.

Here, with the “help” of AI, I had absolutely overwhelmed myself with an outrageous amount of information that was not easily processable, and with no clear signal or criteria to evaluate it. This “useful” report was full of data and trends, but they all felt meh to me. It was information for information’s sake that led me absolutely nowhere.

Could I have made this task better by writing a better prompt? Probably. For sure, the “expert prompt generator” (oh the irony) overengineered a prompt that made this whole exercise bizarrely useless and overwhelming, producing pages of unanchored information.

I didn’t need more information. I needed one idea that meant something to me. A thought that could spur my creativity, and that made me as a human connect with it. Not 100 more facts on the current state of leadership.

The Generation Effect

Looking out for the AI traps, and something that is perhaps even more relevant here is the generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). Put simply, we understand and retain far more of what we ourselves have created than what we’re handed.

We know this inherently. When we wrestle with an idea, it lands better. We’re able to make more sense of it and find our connection with the material.

I experienced this on my podcast. I would interview authors and discuss the ideas from their books. Like a good podcaster, I would do my research and at least glance through their books (reading everyone is a lot!), and I’ll never forget once asking an author about a model she had discussed in her book that I found quite intriguing.

As I referenced it, I could tell she was completely blank and had no connection to the material whatsoever. I literally had to talk her through the entire model before she could speak to it.

It was clear as day that she had no idea what she had written about. She didn’t “know” her stuff. She had regurgitated a model she obviously never really used from Google or some other knowledge base. It wasn’t hers. She had no real relationship to the material. And because of that, she wasn’t able to make it come to life.

This is the risk we face. We’re moving into an age where we’re drowning in information, but risk starving for real knowledge. Information can’t become meaningful until we’ve metabolized it and made it our own.

The report I got back from Perplexity was pretty, yet utterly meaningless to me because it wasn’t generated by me. It was piles of ungrounded information. So instead of creating, I set myself up for a fishing expedition, glancing through pages and pages of information, trying to find something that hooked me, spoke to my experience, and I could write about meaningfully. Extra, and fully unnecessary “work”.

The alluring shortcut was never a shortcut. Information for information’s sake is not helpful. “Utilizing” AI in this context was merely a distraction that threw me, hook, line, and sinker, into cognitive overload and a disconnected data review. Thinking I was doing something useful led to a literal hours-long diversion

And after all that?

I had to walk away from my computer and the blinking cursor, to do a mind-numbing task for a couple of hours just so I could reset and clear my cluttered thinking, before being able to finally return and sit yet again in front of a blinking cursor, but this time only with my own mind and the need to dig deep.

Finally, I started writing about authenticity and how it went too far at work (which you can read here: Stop Bringing Your Whole Self to Work) . Just me with my raw ideas, needing to be molded into something on a page.

There is no doubt that AI can help us in so many ways. But it can also easily, and sneakily, become an exercise in collecting meaningless information that does nothing more than overwhelm and underdeliver, soaking up our precious energy in the process.

For something to matter to us, and really land, we need to have a hand in it. We have to feel connected to it and be a part of generating it.

Thoughtful leaders need to find this fine line with the AI tools they use. We want to stay connected enough to keep hold of the work, and avoid drowning in meaningless information that does nothing but make the work harder, not easier. That defeats the entire point of what we hope this technology can add to our lives.

Because information overload is not better thinking. It's just more data.

Post thought… I wanted to have a space to make a special mention of the dreaded em-dash. You know, this one —.

This is one of my greatest pet peeves and a total AI “tell” if you ask me! Do you agree? let me know in the comments below.

And the reason I feel like it is such a tell is that who even knows how to do an em-dash?! I had to Google-search it, and it proves my point. Who is actually pressing Option+Shift+Hyphen all at once to get an em-dash in the middle of a sentence just to make their point? No one. AI is.

It personally grates my gears not because I don’t like it, but because I’ve always written with dashes! But now, people probably think my writing is AI-generated because of that?! Ugh. So it goes.

So a note - you will see dashes in my writing. But not the em-dash kind, just the hyphen kind. Which is probably not grammatically correct, and if I write a book one day, I’m sure an editor will fix it. But for now… that is just how I write.

From my perspective, I’ve noticed a marked decrease in the number of organizations looking to talk about burnout. A few years ago, I was booked month after month for short talks on burnout, well-being, and how organizations could help their people take care of themselves and, hopefully, avoid burning out. It was definitely the trend of the moment. But I haven’t had this topic requested once this year.

Much of that initial boom was definitely born out of the COVID pandemic, when care-minded organizations were scrambling to come up with whatever they could to support their people. It was an urgent need, and in many cases, a well-being workshop probably felt like the best band-aid most had at the time. It made sense. Doing something is better than nothing at all.

But where is burnout in the conversation now? In my world, it feels like it evaporated into thin air.

I found myself wondering if it was simply a case of bigger fires burning that have diverted attention in a new direction? Or then again, maybe it was time to move on from burnout being a key part of our organizational vernacular, and it had simply done its dash?

Did the Business World Actually Move on From Burnout?

It feels like the question used to be - how do we balance all the important things? But that it has shifted to feel a little something more like: how do we ensure we keep up in a world that will probably never slow down again?

Pulling out the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends series for the last three years is fascinating fodder for my hypothesis.

• In 2024, Deloitte was addressing burnout directly, identifying work stress as a top concern, and using framing including “human sustainability”.

• In 2025, they moved to talking about workplace stress and declining manager mental health as part of a broader set of “tensions” that leaders must navigate between business performance and human well-being, and how leaders need to find the right balance between each of these polarities.

• And by 2026 (the report was released in March), the narrative has shifted strongly to speed, nimbleness, and maintaining competitiveness in an AI-powered world. There is a brief mention of “change exhaustion” as they highlight that the pressure on leaders is intensifying, but, notably, it feels like burnout and well-being have fallen off the agenda and been replaced by the need to keep up.

On the other hand, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in its 2026 State of the Workplace Report listed stress and burnout as among the most pressing workplace needs. My experience doesn’t suggest this is marrying up with the market demand right now.

It feels a bit like we have a gap between what HR professionals perceive as needed to take care of people, and what the market is demanding in terms of adapting to new realities.

The Pressure Hasn’t Decreased

What we do know is that the stress itself hasn’t actually decreased. In fact, there are many indicators suggesting the challenges facing leaders are only accelerating and coming in thick and fast. COVID was a moment in time that required rapid pivoting, and while it was a really whacky moment, leaders are now facing increasing business pressure, flattening organizations, and the challenge of adopting AI in a world that won’t let them forget it.

And the middle management “squeeze” is real. This is that tough spot where it can often feel like leaders don’t have high levels of control or influence, but that is paired by high expectations, and that can feel extra tricky and icky.

Recent data supports the idea that leader stress hasn’t abated. DDI’s 2025 survey found that 71% of leaders reported increased levels of stress, which is up from 63% in 2022.

Another recent stat based on Gallup’s Future Forum 2025 data (as reported by BTS) stated that 45% of middle managers report burnout, which is higher than any other employee group. And only 21% say they’re thriving.

So what is clear is that stress, and its exhausted equivalent, burnout, haven’t actually disappeared. But we also haven’t somehow become immune.

Maybe Moving on from a Burnout Fixation is Healthy?

I’ve always had a problem with how we’ve framed stress as a society. The pendulum swung so far that we’ve literally reached a point where people get stressed about the risk of being stressed. We collectively built up a fear around something that is a very natural, even adaptive, and helpful human response.

I’m not advocating for pushing people to unsustainable levels for unreasonable amounts of time. I am absolutely an advocate for employee well-being and building workplaces that value human contribution in a way that is sustainable. We need healthy businesses and healthy human contributors.

But I am also here to say that being uncomfortable, feeling a little overwhelmed maybe even stressed at times, having some constraints put on us, and pushing ourselves outside our comfort zone isn’t something we should be afraid of. In fact, it’s the very thing that can help us thrive as humans.

Eustress is the side of stress we don’t talk about enough. It’s the fact that most things we do that feel truly worthwhile and like a real achievement are intimately interwoven with stress.

When I ask people about what they are most proud of, they will always look back at things that stress cannot be separated from - raising children, completing college, or a huge work project that they initially thought might be beyond their capabilities. Every single one of those things is stressful, and that is part of what also makes it feel fulfilling and meaningful.

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Naming burnout so readily did give us a label for a problem that had long been overlooked - and that was overdue. But it can also keep us stuck in the predicament. Labeling almost everything as feeling burnt out can trap us, purely because it casts stress as an enemy.

And an ongoing fixation on avoiding stress is like looking straight into a black hole and trying not to be sucked in. We tend to do better if we focus on what we do want and seek, rather than on what we want to avoid.

Just like self-care was never going to be a one-way track out of burnout-ville, nor is a workplace with no pressure ever going to be realistic.

And, ironically, this is what I’m now being asked for by organizations and very much aligns with Deloitte’s 2026 Trend Report. I call it adaptability; Deloitte calls it nimbleness - but I’m pretty sure we can all appreciate that is just a game of semantics.

Burnout appears to have had its moment in the sun, but great organizations will keep doing the work of building healthy workplaces and creating environments that support well-being. I’m confident that it won't fall off their agenda.

And it also feels timely to put the focus somewhere else - into building the skillsets and mindsets that will help us thrive in a world that will keep throwing challenges our way. That is taking a future-focus and building toward what we all need.

We can all benefit from being more aware of our stress mindsets and focusing on flexing with ebbs and flows of life and work. But according to the stats, leaders have the most to gain, not just because of the example you can set, but also the payoff to your own well-being.

It’s shown up in comments and questions like:

“I want to build trust, but what am I supposed to do with the direct report who is constantly in my office spilling their guts? It’s exhausting.”

Or

“We support people being authentic at our workplace, and it’s a stated value, so how am I supposed to have the conversation about spaghetti strap tank tops and ripped jeans not necessarily representing our professional standards when facing clients? Do I just not go there even though everyone knows it isn’t the right fit?”

And

“Recently, a leader who reports to me had a completely inappropriate emotional outburst at work. She’ll say she was being authentic, but the team was left shell-shocked and now they’re all walking on eggshells. So do I just allow her right to authenticity to be damaging to other people’s ability to feel safe at work?”

The dilemma for leaders is real. These are all situations that are icky, and make me want to grit my teeth, but I know these leaders aren’t alone in what they’re experiencing at work.

So how did we get here?

And what does authenticity actually need to become if it’s going to help contribute to a better workplace community?

Authenticity at work went way too far

I want to be clear - “bring your whole self to work” was a correction for something very real. For the longest time, many people felt like they had to mask up and leave large parts of themselves at the door, and were managing how much of their identity was really safe to show. Telling those people that they didn’t need to do that was a genuine gift.

But it’s a case of the fix for one problem becoming the cause of another. What led free people to stop hiding also inadvertently gave others the permission to stop filtering altogether, and turn their backs on professional standards that are also essential to stitching our workplaces together.

Then pop psychology inflated the trend into something that felt like an expression of pure freedom, speaking to our individual needs to be in control and feel valued. We took this new face of empowerment, and we went all in.

Yet we’re not just a bunch of disconnected individuals living next to each other. We’re social beings, and at work, we’re charged with working alongside one another. In this setting, we have a responsibility not only to ourselves, but to each other. We used to call meeting that responsibility character - doing what’s right even when it’s hard - and saw that as something to actually aspire to.

Authenticity itself isn’t the problem. It’s just that the authenticity we need is a demanding character-based virtue. What we’ve been sold is a flattering knockoff that is easy-peasy because it doesn’t ask anything of us. Its motto is - just show up as you feel, whatever that is.

We need a shot of “other-centeredness” to help balance out the overly “me-centered” authenticity we currently have. It is no surprise this is where it has currently landed, as it’s absolutely in lockstep with the current cultural moment.

We’ve been encouraged to take this individual focus through the self-help movement for decades now, and if you’re in the USA like me, it’s not hard to see that we live in a very individualistic society.

It’s woven into most of our psychological models, which tend to put the self right at the center. Authenticity is the modern face of self-actualization - a concept wrapped around realizing our full potential, personal growth, and self-directed authentic expression - which sat at the pinnacle of Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs, where he framed it as the ultimate aim of human psychological development. “Bring your whole self to work” is simply this concept dressed up for the office.

But late in life, Maslow himself acknowledged that he had stopped short of human potential, recognizing that self-actualization, because it was only ever about the self, was utterly incomplete. He added the concept of self-transcendence - the idea of turning your energy outside of yourself and focusing it toward others - and realized it was an essential next step, sitting higher than the individualized approach on the path to becoming truly fulfilled.

Tragically, the textbooks never updated his model. And it’s clear that the workplace has yet to get a useful updated memo, too. Instead, we’ve taken self-actualization, added a good dose of authenticity-buzz, and dressed it up as “bring your whole self to work”, wrapping our culture and leadership philosophy all around it.

As can be predicted with most fads, we’re now at the extreme end of this trend and are seeing all the ways it isn’t working. “Bring your whole self to work” tells people to turn the lens inward and to make their own self-expression the central element.

What we need is to focus that lens more on others, beyond ourselves, and on our shared commitment to each other. Or in the case of work, toward being a thoughtful contributor to a greater whole, whether that is to the task at hand, our team, or our organization.

And here’s the thing - the individuals who are over-authenticating and overexpressing themselves at work aren’t to blame. This is the very narrative that has been encouraged for the last several decades. They’ve been given a permission slip. Because we’re the ones who jumped on the bandwagon, listened to a bunch of leadership gurus, took authenticity and self-actualization, and have effectively built a workplace religion around it. We did that together. But the thinking was incomplete. We have ignored that Maslow himself spent the end of his life saying he got the top of the pyramid wrong. We just need an idea reset.

The Diamond Metaphor

So how do we bring authentic self-expression back into lockstep with what it means to be professional, collegial, and considerate of those who work with and alongside us?

When I was trying to explain to an executive coaching client a couple of years back how we can be authentic without showing every part of ourselves, I landed on the metaphor of a diamond, and I've continued to find it helps illustrate my thoughts. We can be authentic without necessarily having to show every part of ourselves, but by instead finding the part of ourselves that meets the moment just right and bringing it forth.

A traditionally cut diamond has many facets, and depending on where the light hits, that area will reflect light and “shine”. We, too, are like diamonds. We are made of many parts, and we can consciously choose which parts of ourselves we bring forward to face the light, and which parts are better left in the background, so we can best meet the moment.

So if self-transcendence tells us that our focus should also be on what is outside of us, the diamond is how we direct our light. This is what thoughtful, character-based authenticity looks like. It allows us to be both real, and considered.

For example, I’m naturally shy, but there is a part of me that is a performer at heart. If I were to walk into a workshop and let the shy part of me lead, I would do a terrible job. That is a space where I need to hold a room, and so I need to dig deep and find the part of me that is a performer. She is in there; there is still me, but I do have to consciously bring that part forward. It is a facet of myself I have to bring into the light. Default-me would be shy. But performer-me is not a role I play, but an authentic part of me I can bring forward when I need to.

And this is useful authenticity. We all have parts of ourselves, and not every part needs to be shown at every point in time.

The Reframe

It’s bigger than the unhelpful behaviors we’re currently seeing in the workplace. The very concept of authenticity and the way it has been sold is actually the problem. We’ve drifted culturally toward a me-centered version of the concept, and we need to shift it toward a me-and-others-centered, balanced expression. Authenticity at work needs to be redefined. From self-actualization-focused to self-transcendent-focused.

We can value authenticity, and value professionalism and care for others. We can still be authentic and real, while also considering the impact our behavior has on others. They do not have to be mutually exclusive.

We need to rebrand authenticity so we all understand it is about bringing out the right parts of ourselves to meet the responsibilities of the moment.

Famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl pointed us toward this self-transcendent approach decades ago. His reframe was to flip the question we ask from “What do I want from life?” to “What is life asking of me?"

We can do the same. At work, we can ask not, “How do I feel like expressing myself?” but rather, “What is this moment asking of me now?”

Our professional self should be the one coming to work, not necessarily our whole self. And leaning into our professional selves doesn’t mean we have to mask up; it just means we should be considerate about which parts of ourselves we’re bringing forth and ask ourselves whether they are the most effective for adequately responding to what the moment is asking of us, ensuring that they respect the freedoms and take care of others too.

Spilling our guts is a great match for a therapy session.

Sharing our thoughts, concerns, and maybe even frustrations, while also looking for solutions, is a better match for a discussion with our leader.

Ripped jeans are a good fit for a weekend with friends, but polished clothing is a better match for client-facing work when we’re representing a professional brand.

Leaders shouldn’t be afraid of clearly and explicitly redefining what authenticity looks like at work. We can’t expect our people simply to know when our cultural discussion has been so one-eyed (or self-focused) for so long.

But people are adaptive, and they will relearn and refocus if they know what is expected of them, and can see that they don’t have to give up being real and true in order to also be considerate of those they work alongside and of what the environment requires of them.

The simple message is that we need to recognize in ourselves, and highlight to our teams, that we can discern and choose which parts of ourselves to bring onto center stage at any given time.

You can still be real, but you should also be considerate. So maybe it’s time for us to stop encouraging people to bring their whole selves to work, and instead bring the parts of us that the moment actually needs.