April 2026: ‘I just want to be me!’

This month’s topic: 
‘I just want to be me!’

Not from the books, but from behind the scenes of coaching conversations with real people!

1. All Personal Coaching Backstage: ‘I just want to be me!’

2. Motivation Moment: Game On: Coaching Question Friday Raffle #54 and monthly awards!

3. Just One Learning Bite: a book about a different kind of courage.

What’s a struggle or a topic you want me to talk about next month?

Game On: Lead Different!

All Personal Backstage:
‘I just want to be me!’

In my 10+ years of coaching leaders in different industries and at various seniority levels, I’ve noticed a pattern/
The number one theme that comes up, consistently, almost without exception, is this:

Am I enough? What will they think of me? What if I fail them?

The backstage stories behind those questions when people unpack them are key phrases we are all familiar with:
Imposter syndrome and not being ‘enough’.
Worry about what others think.
Fear of letting people down.

So we unpack that in our coaching sessions.
We unpack the:
– not enough vs the enough and what the Imposter does;
– how others value them vs how they value themselves;
– what letting others down means to them, etc.

And, once we’ve done that, we explore who they are when they feel confident, motivated, purposeful, valued.

I ask something like:
When you feel confident, motivated, purposeful, who are you then?

And after a pause (there’s always a pause), what comes back is almost always some version of:

‘I am just me.’
(of, if more future oriented, ‘I just want to be me!’)

Not a polished version.
Not the version that performs for the room. Just… themselves.

So that becomes the work.

And across all those different conversations, with all those different people in all those different situations, there’s one common denominator.

The Voice.

Yep, THAT one!
The one that second-guesses before you’ve even started.
The one that replays the meeting after it’s over.
The one that convinces you to stay small, stay quiet, stay safe.

The one they desperately want to hush. 

I call it Buzzkill, because it kills my buzz. 
You might have a different name for it.

So here’s what we explore together, and what I invite you to sit with today:

• What permission do you need to give yourself?
• What have you done before to tone that voice down, and what actually worked?
• What could you replicate now?
• What is that voice actually trying to say?
• What’s important about letting it get louder for a moment?
• What happens if it doesn’t?
• And, the big one: what’s really stopping you from hushing the critic (Buzzkill) and turning up the volume on your inner cheerleader (which I call Buzzbuild, because it builds my Buzz)?

Because what’s also 100% valid is:
The Cheerleader Voice is also always there. It doesn’t need to be built from scratch.

It just needs permission to speak. To ‘unsilence’.
If you let it speak louder, what would it be saying?

Last coaching question from me, but not least:

What permission would you effortlessly give yourself, if that critical voice got quieter, and the cheerleader got louder today?

Lead Different. Choose the voice you want to listen to!

Just One LEARNING Bite

I’ll be honest. I picked this book up because of the title.:)

‘The Courage to be Disliked‘,
by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitaro Koga.

It REALLY intrigued me.
Because, as I was saying earlier, in 10+ years of leadership development coaching, the number one thing I hear is some version of: what will people think of me?

So a book that answers that with ‘it’s not your problem’, you bet I was intrigued!

Written as a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man, it draws on Adlerian psychology to offer one quietly radical idea: other people’s opinions of you are their business, not yours.
(how many times have you heard that before and said ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’?)

This one doesn’t do it in a ‘I don’t care’ way.
But in a ‘I can only own my intentions and actions’ way.

And here’s a quote I want to share.
Because my first reaction was
‘oh, another theory about happiness.’

And then: wait, what does it have to do with being disliked?
And once I got to ‘things of lightness’… I was even more intrigued.

“The courage to be happy also includes the courage to be disliked.
When you have gained that courage, your interpersonal relationships will all at once change into things of lightness.”

‘Things of lightness‘. That’s still with me.

Because that’s exactly what I see in coaching conversations when people stop performing for the room and start showing up as themselves.
Something shifts.
And ‘stuff’ (whatever it is) feels lighter.

So if you’ve ever held back, stayed quiet, or made yourself smaller to avoid disappointing someone, this one’s for you.

It won’t tell you to stop caring about people.
It will invite you to care about the right things. 🙂

Of course, coaching question to ponder on:
if being disliked was simply not your ‘business’, what would you do differently?

Game On: Lead Different. Build THAT courage!

Roxana

What’s a leadership bite you’d like to share?