The Trap of False Choices

I was sitting in a conference room with a group of leaders, the kind of meeting where strategy and vision were supposed to be the focus. But the real conversation was not about vision at all. It was about performance.

“Do you want to be taken seriously,” someone asked me, “or do you want to be liked?”

The question landed like a trap. Heart or ambition. Authority or authenticity. Strategy or spirit.

The truth is, I had already been choosing for years. When I softened my words to sound palatable, I chose likability over clarity. When I swallowed my instincts to follow the louder voices, I chose ambition over alignment. Every time I split myself into compartments — the “professional me” and the “real me” — I was living inside the myth that success required the sacrifice of the self.

That is the lie of either/or. It keeps us hustling for worth, shaving down our edges to fit the mold. And I believed it, until I didn’t. Because the moment I stopped choosing between heart and ambition, I found something bigger: integration. Not either/or. Both/and. That was when leadership started to feel like mine again.

The False Choices We Inherit

From the earliest moments we learn what it means to “lead,” most of us are handed a binary. A rigid system of opposites: