Hospicing Performative Leadership

What I learned when the masks started dropping

July 31, 2025

I used to think leadership meant having all the right answers. Smooth delivery. Perfect posture. The kind of polished presence they teach in management development programs—the Thought Leader Posture, as we’ve come to think of it.

Then one day during some leadership training I watched the instructor casually reframe their own vomiting and fainting episodes as "obstacles to power through" instead of what I had in my own healing journey come to understand as somatic alerts containing urgent wisdom from the body.

That's when I realized this kind of training creates leaders who perform power instead of embody presence, a type of masking that comes at great energetic cost.

The Great Unmasking

We're living through what feels like a collective breakdown of performative systems. The masks are dropping across industries, and many of us are finding ourselves at a crossroads between who we've been performing as and who we actually are.

I know this crossroads intimately. For years, I lived in what I can only describe as performance survival mode, copying language and behaviors to feel safe in spaces I felt I couldn't afford to leave. The performance trap became my prison: speaking to fill silence rather than add value, mirroring energy and business jargon to blend in, leading through pressure or manipulation, treating alarming stress symptoms as personal shortcomings to fix rather than signals to heed.

My nervous system was screaming, but I kept performing. Until I couldn't anymore.

When Performance Became Impossible

My awakening came through what felt like terrible timing at first. I was laid off just as I began taking Dr. Bayo Akomolafe's course at the Aspen Global Leadership Institute called "Making Sanctuary: Leadership and Change at the Edges of Human." For the first time in my professional life, I encountered a model of leadership that didn't resemble anything I'd been taught or groomed into, let alone seen in the wild.

The course brief opened with a question that wasted no time examining everything I thought I knew about leadership: "What if leadership looks nothing like the images of success that have fastened themselves to us?"

Akomolafe suggests we're living in "a time of monsters, not heroes,"and that coming down to earth requires us to live among the monsters, to think with the monstrous, to cultivate new response-abilities at the edges of conventional human understanding. This isn't leadership that rises above complexity but leadership that dwells within it.

He calls it "an animist vocation of waiting at the edges" rather than the exhausting performance of having everything figured out.

It acknowledges that we are more affected by forces beyond our control: microbial instigations, algorithmic influences, ecological disruptions… so much more plentiful and fantastical than our narratives of independence allow us to notice.

Reading this felt like returning home to a truth I'd felt but never had language for.

The Heart vs. Brain Leadership Revolution

The timing of this awakening feels crucial because as AI handles more analytical tasks, the uniquely human leadership skills become more valuable than ever. Kai-Fu Lee, former CEO of Google China, captured this transformation perfectly in his commencement speech at the Engineering School of Columbia University in 2017:

Four years ago, I was diagnosed with 4th stage lymphoma. I faced the real possibility that my remaining time here was measured in months.

During that time of ultimate uncertainty, I thought a lot about my life. I came to realize that my accomplishments, and even the arrival of AI after waiting 30 years meant nothing to me.

I came to realize that by chasing these technologies, products, investments, and my career, my priorities were out-of-order. I neglected my family. My father had passed away. My mother barely remembered me. My kids had grown up.

One of the books I read during my illness was Bronnie Ware’s book about the regrets of people on their deathbeds. She found that no one wished they’d worked harder or spent more time at the office or accumulated more possessions. People’s top wish was that they had spent more time, sharing their love of their loved ones.

Fortunately, I am now in remission so I am here with you today. I am spending much more time with my family. I moved closer to my mother. I travel with my wife, whether on business or for pleasure. When my kids come home, I would take not two or three days off from work, but two or three weeks.

My near-death experience not only changed my life and my values, it gave me an enlightened view about what AI should mean for humanity. Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have given us their view, a view where machines supersede humans completely, and we are to control them or become them.

With my near-death experience, I would like to offer an alternate ending to their prediction of the AI future. Surely AI has, or will beat us on many analytical tasks with definitive decisions and outcomes. But these tasks are not what make us human. What makes us human is that we are able to love.

The moment when we see our new-born babies; the feeling of love-at-first-sight; the warm feeling from friends who listen to us empathetically; the feeling of self-actualization when we help someone in need. We are far from understanding the human “heart”, let alone replicating it. But we do know that humans uniquely are able to love and be loved. Humans want to love and be loved. That loving and being loved are what makes our lives worthwhile.

With this belief, we now know what we must do. At a minimum, recognize and be thankful that we are loved. If we can do better, return the love, and maybe a little bit more. Finally, the highest level of love: Pay it forward. Give love unconditionally.

Coming back to our AI theme, love differentiates us from AI. Despite what science fiction movies may portray, I can tell you responsibly that AI programs cannot love. They don’t even have feelings or self-consciousness.

We’ve built many task-oriented AI that is much better than our brains. That was my dream 37 years ago. As a hard-core computer scientist, I’m proud that we’ve come so far. But now I realize that I went after the wrong organ. The most important part of the human body is not the brain, but the heart.

That’s a lesson that took me, I confess, too long to learn. My hope for all of you, as your careers blossom and your lives take shape, is that you will approach your lives with all the brains you certainly have, but also, above all, with all the heart you can muster.

This realization led me to examine what we're actually optimizing for in our professional lives, and accounting for in our various systems of worth and value.

Financial planners help clients plan for early retirement, addressing one of the five most common hospice regrets: "I wish I hadn't worked so hard." But what about the other four deathbed regrets that rarely get addressed in any kind of professional or leadership capacity (let alone investment portfolio)?

  • "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

  • "I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings."

  • "I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends."

  • "I wish that I had let myself be happier."

These aren't considered relevant or even appropriate for most professional contexts today. Some have returned to high-risk levels for many among us.

But it's sobering to think about what actually matters when time runs out. (The heavy presence of the passive voice on that last regret speaks volumes.)

Yes, these could largely be categorized as personal concerns, but excluding them from a professional context when work is literally made of, with, by, and for people feels like less of a massive oversight and more of a long-term liability.

Especially when you examine these graphs Lee includs in his sci-fi short story collection AI 2041, which predict the AI-impacted human labor reshuffling of the near future:

The way the graph is set up is already telling: if the upper-right quadrant favors humans, and lower-left favors AI, this suggests human strengths are our social and creative capacities, and that anything routine and asocial is best suited for AI.

Doesn’t quite match current usage and trends, does it?

While the physical perspective doesn’t quite take into account both humans with disabilities and the potential that AI could pose for humans with disabilities to cyborg new adaptations, we do see dexterous replacing creative in the human-favoring quadrant, which looking at the specific jobs used as examples might be read better as “sensitive” instead:

Lee envisions the human of tomorrow as one who is more social than antisocial, more creative than routine, more dexterous or sensitive than mechanical.

That means this is the time to really, really invest in what it means to be human, especially if those qualities have been underdeveloped up until now.

That means leaders at human companies are going to need to get really fluent in the language of love, even — especially — at work.

Leadership at the Margins

So who the skills we need right now? Bayo suggests we look for leaders who've found home in the margins: people with disabilities, those who've navigated uncertainty their whole lives, anyone who's learned to perceive and manage gaps or blocks because they've encountered them constantly and have learned to successfully adapt.

They have more experience with the kind of terrain we're all entering now.

During my own breaking point, when my nervous system was so shredded that I was reacting as if I had an extreme allergic reaction to anything performative, I began to understand this viscerally. The performance of leadership as approved by power-over paradigms was literally making me sick. My body was rejecting the mask I'd learned to wear so well. After a point, my body seemed to reject the capacity to mask at all.

The Ripple Effect of Authentic Presence

The ripple effect of our choices matters more than we realize. Through performance, we uphold status quo systems that prioritize appearance over substance, metrics over meaning, control over connection. We disappear into seas of noise and irrelevance when overly focusing on our own influence and ego satisfaction.

But through presence, we create something entirely different. We encounter, engage with, and validate a diversity of possibilities when we show up as our perfectly imperfect selves. We begin to heal as we see and agree to step away from ancient, subtle ways of wounding through dominating others. This is the space where the vulnerability Brene Brown speaks of can evolve into its siddhi frequency, bravery.

This isn't about having all the answers or eliminating all performance from professional life. As Lee predicts, humans are going to need a lot more social skills, creativity, and sensitivity to thrive in a world alongside AI.

But it’s time to identify when performance has become a substitute for authenticity and slowly, carefully, courageously choosing presence over pretense.

Questions to Guide the Shift

Real leadership today means presence over performance, as we navigate a what-is-real world in which intention has more influence than charisma. It means creating containers for contradiction without collapse, being both sovereign and sacred, visible and vulnerable. It requires understanding your place not just in the context of an organization but in history, ecology, and relationship with all living systems.

The questions I’m finding useful for this transformation are simple but profound:

  • Where are you speaking from reaction versus resonance?

  • What truth do you know in your bones that you haven't been honoring in your professional choices?

  • If you stopped trying to be relevant, what would you actually say?

  • Are you leading to serve or leading to be seen?

These are objectively uncertain times, which means the leaders we need now acknowledge this uncertainty instead of pretending to have certainty. They must listen to as many voices as possible rather than amplifying only their own. They need to develop exceptional emotional intelligence in environments that have carefully avoided this through branding, behavior, and codes of all kinds. They create larger tables for gathering diverse perspectives, inspiring dynamic harmony over static unity.

They can not only imagine a life beyond the Thunderdome, but help us get there.

The world doesn't need more polished performances. It needs people willing to lead without pretending, influence without manipulating, and inspire without performing.

The future we are facing needs leaders with exceptional emotional intelligence operating in a world increasingly full of AI, who understand that humans are emotional and spiritual creatures, not just analytical machines, and that this is a unique asset to invest in and develop, not ignore or stamp out.

The masks are dropping. The question is: what will you reveal when yours falls away?