Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

It’s time to fire your "work self" and show up as your true self.

26 Apr 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:37

Leaders who stopped performing a fake work self report stronger relationships with their teams. The speaker urges you to identify which parts of your professional persona feel inauthentic and ask why you present them. Authenticity fosters mutual understanding and openness.

Chapters

We invite people in our book to do what the generator leaders did that we heard from, which is to really do some inner reflection about who you are and who you wanna be as a leader and manifest your actual self at work. Think about the parts of your work self, as we call it, that you'd like to fire. Uh, when are you showing up in ways that are not actually you and why, and how can you get to be more yourself? The big thing that we heard from the folks that we interviewed was that when people fired their work selves, uh, they got so much closer to their leaders because they felt that they understood them as people and they felt like they could be more open and honest in return.