I've talked about masks before. The polished professional one. The "I'm fine" one. The people pleaser, the perfectionist, the always in control. We all have them, and we all wear them for a reason.

But there's a version of this I haven't talked about yet, and it's the one I see most in my coaching.

It's not just the mask you wear at work. It's the fact that you might be wearing a different mask at home. And a different one again when you're completely alone, no one watching, nothing to prove.

Three versions of you. And if they don't look much like each other, that's worth sitting with.

Because that gap costs something. And most leaders are paying for it quietly, every single day, without ever naming it.

A Client Story

I worked with a client, an IT manager, who'd been made redundant through a restructure. She landed a new role fairly quickly, leading a team, but a step down from the seniority she'd had before.

Overnight, she was wearing two masks. With her old peers, people who'd known her at a more senior level, she felt she had to prove she was still that person. Still credible. Still someone with authority. With her new team, the one she was actually leading, she felt she had to be someone else, someone still earning the right to lead people who hadn't chosen her.

Neither mask was dishonest. Both came from somewhere real. But holding both, all day, every day, was exhausting in a way that had nothing to do with her actual workload.

That's identity labour. Who am I allowed to be in front of this group, and who do I have to be in front of that one?

The Science Behind the Exhaustion

There's a name for this, and it's not new. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied what she called emotional labour, the effort of managing how you come across on the outside to fit a role, whatever you're actually feeling underneath. She described two ways of doing it, surface acting, where you put on the expected face while the real feeling stays buried, and deep acting, where you try to genuinely shift the feeling itself.

Surface acting, the pure performance, is the one that drains you fastest.

So if you've ever finished a day of "leading well" and felt strangely wiped out, more than the workload should account for, this might be why. It isn't burnout from doing too much. It's burnout from pretending.

Authentic Doesn't Mean Unfiltered

Here's where it gets more interesting than "just be yourself."

Herminia Ibarra, who researches leadership, calls this the authenticity paradox. Her point is that clinging too rigidly to a fixed idea of who you are can actually hold you back as a leader. Growing into a bigger role often means trying on ways of being that feel unfamiliar at first. That's not fakery. That's growth.  I am not an advocate of faking it to you make it, but I strongly believe that you have to be the person you see yourself becoming to be that person.

So this isn't a call to overshare, or bring your unfiltered thoughts into every meeting. It's something more specific. It's the difference between adapting how you show up, and knowing you are human and are growing and developing every day.

The Question Worth Sitting With and asking yourself

Who are you when you're completely alone? No audience. No expectations. Nothing to prove.

And how far is that person from who shows up in your Monday morning meeting?

That distance is usually where the exhaustion lives. Closing it, even a little, is where the relief starts.  Your 1st step here is to be aware of who you are in differernt places and with differernt people.

If you're finding yourself stretched between who you are and who you feel you need to be at work, whether that's imposter syndrome, a new promotion, or a role that doesn't quite fit the leader you know you are underneath, this is exactly the work I do one to one with clients.

Book a free call and let's explore what's underneath the mask.