Toxic authenticity is the belief that a leader owes every room full access to their inner life. It mistakes exposure for integrity. Authenticity in leadership is choosing which version of you each setting receives, based on the trust it has earned, while the whole of you stays intact and protected.

If you're similar to me, you've sat through at least one offsite where someone at the front said "bring your whole self to work," and everyone nodded, and nobody moved.

I understand why the phrase caught on. Plenty of leaders ran on a thin, polished version of themselves for decades, and it cost them. Somewhere along the way the invitation became an expectation. Show up fully, to everyone, in every meeting, or you must be hiding something.

And if you've lost a parent, gotten the diagnosis, signed the papers, or burned out so badly you stopped recognizing yourself, that expectation gets heavy fast. You're changed. You're running the same company. And the culture is telling you the brave move is to put all of it on the table.

I don't think that's bravery. I think it's a setup.

They got the uniform

Before Driven Livin', before the show, I wore a badge. People told me, to my face, what they were going to do to my children and to my mother, with no idea whether I had either. I was spit on.

None of those people got April. They didn't get the woman who loves music and dancing and her husband. They got the uniform: composed, professional, trained. And when I got home, I took a shower, every single time, and let the day run down the drain before I walked back into my own life.

That uniform was never a lie. It was a decision about access, made in advance, by someone who understood what the person in front of her could and could not be trusted with.

When Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, author of On Combat, came on The Wellness Driven Life Show, he told me about the cops he trains. He has them keep Tootsie Rolls in the glove compartment, and they only get one when somebody is ugly to them. The candy pulls the body out of fight or flight. Then he said: "You lose your temper, you didn't lose it. You gave it away."

That sentence is the entire authenticity debate, in a glove compartment.

A great deal of what gets called openness at work is a leader giving something away to people who didn't earn it and can't give it back.

The gallery and the vault

In some museums, the painting on the wall is a high quality duplicate, and the original is kept downstairs in a climate controlled vault. The duplicate takes the camera flashes, the humidity, and the breath of the crowd. The original stays whole.

The room gets the gallery print. The people who've earned it get the original.

Think about the rooms you walk into in a given month. The board. The all-hands. The dinner with the peer who used your candor against you once and would do it again. They get the gallery print, and a good gallery print is accurate and generous, and it is you. It was just never meant to be the original.

The original goes to the people who have shown, over years, that they will protect it. They guard your reputation in rooms you're not in. They're straight with you in private and loyal to you in public. They're unimpressed by your title and unbothered by your worst day. And not one of them ever demanded the key.

When you're in the storm

There's a second reason the original stays downstairs, and it has nothing to do with anyone else.

Sometimes you're not fit to be on display. Grief comes in waves. Anger comes up hot. For a window of time after a loss or a diagnosis, you are a person inside a storm, and full transparency in that window doesn't serve anyone. It just puts the storm on the agenda.

That's what the shower was for. For you it might be a journal, the one friend who can hear the raw version, a therapist, or a long walk before you go in. Process it somewhere made for that, and then walk into the meeting.

Restraint isn't the opposite of authenticity. For a leader, it's what makes your authenticity survivable for the people who report to you.

Before you open the vault

Grossman's cops get one Tootsie Roll per ugly encounter. I'd offer you something just as small.

The next time a room pushes you to open the vault, pause long enough to ask one question before you speak: have these people given me any reason to trust them with this? If the answer is no, give it the gallery print, and give it well. Then, before the day is over, take the original to someone who has earned it.

The one person who gets the original

I said this out loud before I wrote it down. The video version went up on the channel on September 24.

Watch the video