The Inheritance of “Good”

From our earliest years, we absorb the subtle cues of approval. We discover what earns affection, what avoids rejection, and what keeps us safe. This process — known as socialisation — forms what I call our socialised self: the version of us that knows how to play by the rules of belonging.

For women, that often means over-functioning — performing competence, care, and perfection.
For men, it can mean over-protecting — performing strength, certainty, and control.

Different costumes. Same play.

These patterns aren’t personal flaws. They’re systemic strategies for survival — adaptive responses to patriarchal power structures that reward predictability and punish vulnerability. They help us succeed within the system, but they also tether us to it.

Achieving Awareness

Psychologist Lisa Miller calls this mindset achieving awareness: a state where our energy goes toward managing, controlling, and perfecting life. It’s useful — until it becomes the only awareness we have.

When our worth is measured by what we achieve, we lose access to the quiet knowing beneath it. Over time, the self that performs “goodness” drowns out the self that feels True.

The result is a subtle disconnection — from our own emotional landscape, from others, and from the possibility of shared humanity across gender lines.

Because if I must always perform competence to be loved, and you must always perform control to feel safe, neither of us can ever really be seen.

Being Loved vs Being Love

When I wrote the essay True You in The Leader’s Ecosystem, I described a realisation that changed everything for me:

Being Loved and Being Love are not the same thing.

Being Loved kept me compliant — achieving, pleasing, and earning my place in the world.
Being Love asked me to be visible — whole, imperfect, and self-anchored.

That shift is not gender-neutral.

For many women, Being Loved is the unspoken goal — a lifetime of doing what’s required to be accepted.
For many men, Being Love feels almost forbidden — tenderness framed as weakness, compassion mistaken for compliance.

When we begin to integrate the two, something radical happens.
We stop performing safety and start creating it.

The Gendered Cost of Belonging

bell hooks once wrote that patriarchy deforms all of us.

Women learn to self-abandon in the name of care.
Men learn to self-protect in the name of strength.

Both cost us connection.

The tragedy is not only personal; it’s systemic. Organisations mirror these dynamics in how they value behaviour: women rewarded for harmony, men rewarded for dominance, and everyone quietly punished for being human.

As leaders, we replicate what we’ve been rewarded for — until we consciously choose otherwise.
That choice requires courage.
Because leaving the script of “good” means risking the belonging it buys us.

Returning to True

In the research that underpins my work, I describe True as more than honesty. It’s an embodied alignment — the felt sense of rightness that hums through us when our thoughts, emotions, and actions line up.

True is not a thought; it’s an experience.
It’s the moment our body relaxes without instruction, our mind clears without effort, our heart opens without permission.

We don’t think our way back to True; we remember our way there.

It begins when we stop outsourcing our sense of worth to the system that shaped it.
When we listen more to our bodies than to our conditioning.
When we hold ourselves accountable not for being perfect, but for being present.

From Compliance to Courage

To lead from True is to hold paradox: strength with softness, clarity with compassion, ambition with awareness.

It’s not rebellion for rebellion’s sake — it’s repair.
Repairing the split between masculine and feminine energies within us.
Repairing the disconnection between performance and presence in our systems.

And it begins personally, quietly, internally.
With the decision to stop performing the version of ourselves that feels safest — and to start inhabiting the version that feels most real.

The Work Ahead

Being True isn’t about rejecting gender, achievement, or ambition.
It’s about reclaiming agency.

It’s how we outgrow the old scripts without turning against ourselves or each other.
It’s how we build cultures where accountability and compassion sit side-by-side — as partners, not opposites.

Because when leaders act from their True, not their training, we create workplaces where everyone can belong without performing.

Reflection

What would it look like for you to lead from your True this week?
To replace performance with presence — and compliance with courage?

And if you’re ready… to create safety and lead from your true, I’d love to help, let’s talk.

With truth and love