Your calendar is stacked, your inbox is loud, and your mug is full of tea strong enough to cut through the fog. You’re in the kinds of meetings you used to want an invitation to. The comp is solid. The title looks good on LinkedIn. You worked hard for all of it. You are feeling pretty damn good.
On paper, you are the kind of “successful leader” your younger self dreamed of becoming.
Hell, even 5 years ago, this was still the dream.
And yet.
After a recent tough decision, a thought bubbled up from somewhere you don’t usually let speak:
“I don’t like who I’m becoming to keep succeeding here.”
Not “I hate my job.” Not “This company is evil.” Not burnout or even fatigue necessarily.
Something deeper is trying to get your attention. Something closer to “I do not recognize myself in the choices I am making. I’m selling myself out little by little.”
That isn’t you being dramatic. It’s data from deep within working to get your attention.
There’s an unspoken narrative inside many corporate systems: to rise, you have to trade pieces of yourself away. Over time, the belief—“To be a great leader here, I have to betray my own values”—becomes entrenched. It shapes how you lead.
So you adapt. You mute your convictions to match the “dominant” leadership style. You swallow dissent to avoid being labeled difficult or “not strategic.” You rationalize misalignment because “that’s just how things work here.”
You learn where it’s safe to be honest and where silence protects your career.
Layer in being a person of color, or from any historically scrutinized group, and the pressure doubles. Silence offers even more protection. You’re not just managing performance. You’re managing perception, stereotype, and the very real risk that one misstep confirms someone else’s bias. With enough practice in sacrificing self for success, self-protection and self-betrayal get tangled.
This piece is about that tangle. Where the belief comes from. Why it feels so convincing. And what it costs you—and the people you lead—when you accept it as truth.
To be clear: we’re not talking about the organization’s values statement on the wall. We’re talking about your values. The internal code that shapes how you make sense of risk, loyalty, fairness, ambition, and care. The part of you that knows when you’re in integrity and when you’re not—whether you admit it or not.
Because how you show up for yourself shapes your capacity to show up for others. What you believe or were taught about “strong” leadership or survival at work may not be true. The work now is to unlearn and relearn what it means to lead from your values, not around them.
The aim isn’t perfection. It’s to move from self-betrayal to self-ownership, one decision at a time.
The Quiet Cost of Self-Betrayal
Let’s start with a scene you might recognize in your own way.
A senior VP is told to announce a restructuring. They didn’t design the decision. They had no input into the process. They disagree with parts of it. They also know that pushing back could cost them political capital they’ve spent years earning. The script is already written. Their job is to deliver it, hold the Q&A, and “keep the team focused.”
So they do it. They stand in front of people they care about and repeat language they’d never use unprompted. They use phrases that smooth over impact to keep things “positive”—mastering double-speak that softens hard truths into palatable, less-sueable messaging. After the meeting, they’re congratulated for being “calm,” “steady,” and “on message.”
Later that night, they replay the conversation in their head. They’re not ashamed of the decision itself. They understand the business realities. What stays with them is how they dimmed their own voice to appear “aligned.” They feel complicit in something that doesn’t match how they say they want to lead.
That’s self-betrayal—repeated micro-choices to sideline your own values so you can keep your access, your bonus, and your seat at the proverbial table.
Your body already knows this. Research backs it up: personal values aren’t window dressing. They shape how leaders interpret their environment and what choices they see as acceptable—with direct impact on organizational performance.[1]
When you consistently act against your own values or make choices that cut across your internal code, you’re not “taking one for the team.” Several things start to happen.
You’re:
- Training yourself not to trust your own judgment
- Normalizing emotional numbness as “professionalism”
- Broadcasting to your team that survival here requires the same self-abandonment
You might still hit targets and earn praise. But under the surface, your leadership integrity is eroding—showing up as cynicism, resentment, numbness, or the feeling that you have to leave the industry just to like yourself again.
Leadership Means Leaving Yourself At The Door
This belief didn’t come from nowhere. There’s a reason it has teeth.
Much of modern corporate leadership still echoes an older “my way or the highway” model—rooted in hierarchical control and compliance that prizes control over curiosity.[1] In that world, the leader’s job is to move numbers, enforce decisions, and keep things stable. Who they are as a human being is almost irrelevant.
When you develop under leaders who:
- Used fear or humiliation to drive results
- Rewarded people who mirrored their style and background
- Punished challenge, nuance, or dissent
…you learn fast that safety depends on fitting the mold. Safety quietly becomes assimilation.
If you’re a person of color, or someone from any historically marginalized identity, this pressure compounds. You’re often managing both visible performance and invisible scrutiny. The message you receive is blunt:
You can lead here, but not as yourself.
Most leadership articles about “values alignment” focus on the organization’s side—stronger trust, clearer decisions, higher engagement.[2] All true.
But what happens when personal and organizational values don’t line up? It’s even more confusing when you share values with your organization on paper and still betray them in practice.
Most leaders I work with don’t want to torch their company and walk away. They want to do right by their people, pay their mortgage, keep their reputation intact—and not live in permanent inner conflict.
So they compromise. A little at a time.
They soften feedback to avoid conflict. They hire for likability over courage. They accept processes that quietly undermine their stated values because “this is the system we have.”
And because these compromises are incremental—sometimes over months or years—they rarely name them as self-betrayal. They call it realism. Maturity. Strategy. Each decision is defensible. The pattern is not.
The line between “I’m being strategic” and “I’m abandoning myself” becomes harder to see.
Your people can feel the gap between what you say you value and what you actually tolerate. Values alignment at the organizational level depends on values alignment at the individual level. When leaders’ actions diverge from their own stated values, trust erodes long before performance metrics catch up.[2]
Values As Compass, Not Decoration
Values-aligned leadership isn’t about turning yourself into a walking manifesto or forcing your team to adopt your worldview. It’s about telling the truth—to yourself first—about where you’re out of alignment, and then taking responsibility for what you choose next.
Not to judge. To understand the gap between who you intend to be and how you’re actually showing up.
Research on leadership values suggests that personal values influence both how leaders read their environment and the methods they use to create value.[1] They don’t just shape what you care about—they shape which trade-offs feel acceptable and which lines you refuse to cross.
Emotional intelligence adds another layer: effective leaders aren’t those who feel less, but those who notice and work with their emotional data. Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management aren’t soft skills—they’re the infrastructure for acting in alignment under pressure.[3]
Courage research reinforces this: bravery at work is usually not a single dramatic moment. It’s the sum of small, repeated choices to act in line with what matters, even when the consequences aren’t fully predictable.[4]
Organizationally, values alignment only matters when it’s embedded into daily practices—how decisions get made, how people are evaluated, who gets promoted, what gets tolerated.[2] The same is true for you as an individual leader. If your values live only in your head—not in who you hire, who you protect, what you name, and what you refuse to normalize—your team will believe your behavior, not your language.
When you combine values, emotional intelligence, and everyday courage, you get a different frame:
- Your values define what integrity looks like for you
- Your emotional intelligence helps you notice when you’re drifting from that integrity
- Your courage determines whether you do anything about it
Values-aligned leadership isn’t perfection. It’s the muscle you build every time you choose to stay in integrity, one decision at a time. It’s the practice of saying, with honesty:
“This is who I am. These are the lines I won’t cross. When I do cross them, I’ll own it, repair it, and choose differently next time.”
Where the Gap Shows Up
Before you turn all of this into a personal indictment, know this: you probably don’t need another exercise to “discover” your values. You likely already know, at least in broad strokes, what matters to you.
The task now is to notice where your behavior consistently diverges from those values.
Here are a few places those gaps tend to show up:
Growth vs. Protection
You say you value developing people, yet you hoard stretch opportunities for a small inner circle who feel “safe.” Everyone else gets told to “keep proving themselves.”
Candor vs. Harmony
You say you value honest dialogue, but you shut down dissent in executive meetings because it makes other stakeholders uncomfortable. Your team learns to smile in the meeting and vent in private.
Care vs. Performance At Any Cost
You say you value well-being, but you routinely reward unsustainable heroics and quietly sideline those who set boundaries.
Gaps don’t automatically make you a “bad” leader. They do, however, reveal places where your leadership is currently out of sync with your own stated values.
The key is to treat these discrepancies as diagnostics, not indictments. Instead of “I’m a hypocrite,” ask “Where am I out of sync? What pressures, fears, or narratives are driving that?”
You may be trying to live out a clear internal code inside a system that’s vague, contradictory, or driven by quarterly pressure. None of that absolves you of your choices. But it does explain why self-betrayal can start to feel like the only way to survive.
Your work is to see the system clearly and still decide who you will and won’t become inside it.
And yes, that can be hard.
Side note: If you find yourself stuck identifying your values, you can explore this free online core values assessment: personalvalu.es—or get in touch with me if you’d like support naming what truly matters for you as a leader.
Why This Matters For You And The People You Lead
When you operate in tension with your own internal code, chronic self-abandonment carries risks:
Compounded emotional strain. Chronic self-betrayal is exhausting. It drains energy you need for strategic thinking, creativity, and presence.
Distorted decision-making. When you’re in conflict with yourself, you’re more likely to over-correct, double down, or rationalize choices that don’t actually serve your goals.
Toxic inheritance. The people who watch you lead are learning what’s acceptable. They’ll inherit your compromises as their new normal.
Values-aligned leadership isn’t risk-free. Choosing self-ownership won’t always be rewarded by your current system. Sometimes it’ll cost you access, popularity, or opportunities. That doesn’t make your choice wrong—it just makes the price tag visible.
You get to decide, eyes open, which consequences you’re willing to accept to stay in integrity with yourself.
When you choose self-ownership—by naming your values, admitting the gap, and acting in alignment anyway—you’re not just doing something nice for your conscience.
You’re:
- Making yourself a more trustworthy person and leader
- Clarifying decision-making while reducing ambiguity for your team
- Teaching people around you that power and integrity need not be opposites
As a high-achieving leader, you already know how to deliver and drive outcomes. The question in this season of your leadership is: Can you pursue those outcomes without abandoning yourself in the process?
🍵 Small Sips: Practices To Move From Self-Betrayal To Self-Ownership
You don’t need a grand gesture or a full life overhaul to start this shift. You need honest reflection and a few courageous, concrete moves. Here are three practices to work with this month.
1. Map Your Self-Betrayal Moments
Go back 60 days. No editing, no justifying—write down three moments that still sit heavy. Decisions, conversations, emails, or silences.
For each one, ask yourself:
- What did I say I valued going into this situation?
- What pressure or fear was present that led me to make that decision in that moment?
- If I were acting from self-ownership instead, what would I do or say differently?
The aim isn’t revisionist history. It’s awareness of patterns, not isolated events. You’re looking for your personal “tell” when you start to abandon yourself.
2. Leadership Inheritance Inventory
Make a two-column list.
In the first column, write the names or initials of leaders who shaped how you think leadership “has” to look. Include both formal bosses and informal role models.
In the second column, capture the messages you absorbed from each person—especially about power, risk, and belonging.
Then quietly sort:
- Which inherited beliefs still serve who I want to be as a leader today?
- Which ones require unlearning because they normalize self-betrayal or harm?
You can’t lead values-aligned if you’re running on someone else’s unexamined script. Time to brew a new batch.
3. One Concrete Act Of Courage
Think about a live situation on your calendar: a hiring decision, a performance conversation, a board update, or a team meeting.
Name one specific act that would bring you closer to your values in that context. For example:
- Naming the trade-offs honestly instead of hiding them in jargon
- Backing a quieter team member whose perspective you actually agree with
- Setting a boundary around workload and modeling it, rather than apologizing for it
Then ask yourself:
- What’s the real risk if I do this—to my reputation, access, or comfort?
- What’s the risk if I don’t—to my integrity, self-trust, or my team’s trust?
Write it down. Commit to one act this month. Notice what it feels like in your body before, during, and after.
That’s courage in practice.
A Final Pour: For Leaders Who Refuse To Leave Themselves Behind
If you’re still reading, something is shifting. You’re no longer satisfied with being effective while quietly estranged from yourself. You want your leadership integrity to be non-negotiable, not nice-to-have.
You weren’t promoted to become less yourself. You’re not leading teams and budgets just to keep reenacting someone else’s story about what power requires.
Shifting from self-betrayal to self-ownership demands discomfort. Sometimes that discomfort is internal. Sometimes it’s external—consequences, slowed momentum, or relationships that end when you stop playing along.
The question isn’t whether it’s hard.
The question is: are you willing?
♨️ I’m The Executive Tea Lady™, and I believe in steeping leadership differently. If that’s your flavor too, join the conversation in The Monthly BREW™, a newsletter for those who know leadership is more than a title. Grab a cup here: https://i-matter-coaching-consulting.kit.com/newsletter
References
- Lichtenstein, S. (2012, January). The role of values in leadership: How leaders’ values shape value creation. Integral Leadership Review. https://integralleadershipreview.com/6176-the-role-of-values-in-leadership-how-leaders-values-shape-value-creation/
- BMC Training. (2023, August 2). Values alignment in management and leadership. BMC Training. https://www.bmc.net/blog/management-and-leadership-articles/values-alignment
- EI4Change. (2022). Emotional intelligence framework and competencies [PDF]. EI4Change. https://ei4change.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Emotional-Intelligence-Framework-and-Competencies.pdf
- Budak, A. (2025, August 5). 6 ways to practice everyday courage. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2025/08/6-ways-to-practice-everyday-courage