Authentic Leadership and The Power of Both/And Thinking

I used to be a black and white thinker and had no idea until a therapist pointed it out.

Our brains are processing an enormous amount of information every second, and one of the ways they cope is by creating shortcuts — categories that help us sort the world quickly. Good or bad. Right or wrong. In or out. Black and white thinking, dualistic thinking, dichotomous thinking, all-or-nothing thinking — these are just different names for the same pattern.

For a lot of us, it runs in the background without us even knowing we're doing this.

There's a term I have found really useful — paradoxical thinking - to help me navigate black and white thinking.

The concept sounds deceptively simple: two things can be true at once — both/and. Holding two seemingly contradictory truths without forcing one to cancel out the other. But if you've spent most of your life thinking in black and white, it takes some work to get there.

Knowing that helped me make sense of something I'd carried for a long time without really understanding it — an underlying feeling of being a fraud. Because when things get tense at home, I don't always communicate in the ways I know I'm capable of. And yet there I am, coaching leaders in emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and communication, while some of my own, less than desirable patterns still show up at home, and I will avoid difficult conversations with my family. And then feel inauthentic.

Now I understand that the difficult conversations aren't the real problem. My assumptions were. I had assumed that struggling to communicate at home meant I was a fraud at work — that one difficult moment with the people I love was somehow evidence that I wasn't as capable as I thought professionally.

Having an understanding that I can be genuinely effective at coaching communication and still find some of my own conversations really challenging has reduced my either/or (black/white) thinking. Exploring that with curiosity and compassion has, on many occasions, stopped me from turning one hard moment into a sweeping verdict about who I am and heading down a very unhelpful hole.

The same either/or trap shows up for many of the leaders I work with.

Someone will describe feeling torn between being authentic and being adaptable. Between staying true to what they believe and succeeding inside an organisation that doesn't always share those beliefs. Between holding their ground and being a team player.

Authenticity isn't about being the same in every room.

It's not about saying everything you think or refusing to flex. It's about knowing what you genuinely value, and making sure your actions stay connected to that — even when the situation is messy, even when you're asked to support something you'd have done differently. Sometimes your team or your organisation moves in a direction you wouldn't have picked. Supporting that doesn't mean you've lost yourself — it means you understand the difference between a preference and a value. Sometimes it means accepting that you can disagree with how something is unfolding and still contribute to it genuinely.

That's not inauthenticity. That's just what it looks like to be human in a leadership role.

And when leaders can hold that — really sit with it — something shifts. You stop performing a version of yourself that you think the situation requires, and start leading from somewhere more real.

That's what both/and thinking does. It doesn't soften your values or make you a pushover. It just gives you more room to be human inside your role — and to recognise that being human is the most authentic thing you can bring to it.

To let ourselves be confident and nervous. Capable and still learning. Clear on our values and flexible in how we live them. Vulnerable and courageous, audacious and humble.

Maybe that's what authentic leadership actually looks like, up close. And maybe it starts with something most leadership programs don't teach — paradoxical thinking, or more importantly, how to embed it into leadership.

It takes self-awareness first, then practice, and if you're lucky, someone in your corner will call you out when you're stuck in either/or.