Who Are You When No One Is Looking?

Who Are You When No One Is Looking?

There's a kind of leading that happens when you've lost the thread back to yourself. You stress-read the room. Manage the perception. Overfunction. And somewhere in all of that, you stop knowing where you end and the role begins.

Karen Horney called this the gap between the real self and the idealized self–who you actually are versus who you've had to become. The further that gap grows, the more you sense it. Not always loudly. More like ambivalence that won't resolve. Decisions that don't quite feel like yours. A low-grade frustration, like structurally unsound scaffolding on the inside.

You catch glimpses of yourself, and then you're gone again.

This kind of “interior split” isn't just a psychological problem–it's a spiritual one. And the invitation isn't to double down on what you’re already doing just better or faster or stronger (cue Daft Punk).  It's to stop pretending you're big when you're not, to discover that the ground of your being is more solid and expansive than you dared to find out.

To be loved by God (really known, not managed or performed) is the ground of your identity. Not a feeling you work up, but a reality you return to. When that's what you're standing on, uncertainty stops being destabilizing. You can tolerate and even hold the unknown without being undone by it.

That's what connected leadership looks like. Not the loudest voice or the most certain answer, Just someone who's done the slow work of allowing yourself to be known - to themselves, and to God.