There was a season — maybe three or four years into leading a congregation — when I got very good at walking into a room and becoming whatever the room seemed to need. Confident when people were anxious. Calm when things were fraying. Decisive at meetings even when I hadn’t fully made up my mind. I told myself this was maturity. Adaptability. The seasoned kind of leadership you earn through hard knocks and close calls.
I’m not sure when I started to notice it bothered me. Probably somewhere around the third or fourth time someone told me how steady I always seemed, and I felt nothing in response — not gratitude, not pride, just a faint, quiet unease, like a sound you can’t quite locate.
Performance isn’t always dishonesty. I want to say that plainly, because I think leaders often flog themselves too hard over this. There are times when the room genuinely needs something you don’t fully feel, and you offer it anyway — not as pretense, but as service. A surgeon who is tired still operates with precision. A teacher who had a terrible morning still shows up for her students. That kind of professionalism is not the same as inauthenticity.
But there’s a line. And I think the line is crossed when the performance stops being for the people you serve and starts being for your own sense of control. When you’re no longer managing the room — you’re managing what the room thinks of you. That’s where I was. And it’s a lonelier place than it looks from the outside.
What helped me, slowly, was learning to be wrong out loud. Not dramatically, not as a kind of performed humility — which is its own trap — but in small, ordinary ways. Saying I don’t know in a meeting and letting the silence sit for a second. Admitting to a deacon I trusted that I’d made a pastoral call I regretted. Letting people see the rough draft of my thinking instead of only the finished product.
None of this came naturally. I had to practice it almost the way you’d practice a new habit, which felt strange — practicing being genuine. But that’s the paradox: authenticity, like most worthwhile things, takes some deliberate cultivation before it starts to feel like your own.
I still catch myself performing sometimes. Probably I always will. But I’ve come to think that noticing it — really noticing it, without immediately rushing to fix it — might be the more important skill. What you do with the noticing, I’m still working out.