The Yoruba Ifá tradition has a concept called 'Iwa pele' — roughly, 'gentle character' — which holds that your inner quality of being is the actual source of your effectiveness in the world, not your strategy or your output. This sits interestingly alongside what psychologist Donald Winnicott called the difference between the 'true self' and the 'false self': the false self is the performed, adaptive persona we present under pressure, while the true self is what acts from genuine wholeness. Leaders under pressure almost always default to false-self performance — projecting confidence, manufacturing clarity, optimizing outputs — while the people closest to them (colleagues, family) are quietly registering the gap. Iwa pele says that character is not a tool you deploy but a condition you cultivate, and Winnicott would agree: the false self might win the meeting, but it exhausts the household.

When did you last let someone you lead — at work or at home — see you genuinely uncertain, and what stopped you from doing it more recently?

Drawing from African Philosophy (Yoruba Ifá) combined with Object Relations Psychology — Yoruba Ifá tradition (Iwa pele principle) and Donald Winnicott (The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965)