ME02a: Beyond the Bullshit - The Self-Help Trap
What if Leadership Development Was Built on Bullshit?
Maya was a leadership development success story. She showed up to every session, notebook in hand. Did the pre-read. Took her strengths seriously. Reflected on her values. Chased feedback. Tried to grow.
For a while, it worked.
Those early tools felt like clarity. Type profiles gave her language. Strengths frameworks gave her confidence. Purpose statements gave her a story. She was told to lead from within; to know herself, play to her edges, and stretch toward the best version of who she could become.
And she did. Until the system she was leading in stopped making sense.
Suddenly, her type didn’t help her navigate three reporting lines and zero decision rights. Her “strengths” contradicted each other by project. Her “purpose” couldn’t compete with strategic incoherence and silent restructures.
The more she tried to lead from within, the more she felt like she was drifting, out of context, out of power, and out of air. It wasn’t just that the tools no longer worked. It was that they had never been designed for this.
Growth Mindset. Grit. Achievement Drive.
Next came the motivational science. Growth mindset. Grit. The will to achieve.
Maya embraced them. She didn’t need to be convinced. She believed in effort, resilience, and learning from failure. But over time, she noticed something off.
She was told to grow through discomfort. But discomfort was constant. And it wasn’t developmental. It was incoherent.
She was told to see failure as feedback. However, the system punished vulnerability, rather than rewarding it.
She was told to stretch. But no one named the stretch. They just kept raising the bar.
Eventually, “growth mindset” started to feel less like empowerment and more like gaslighting.
And grit? Even worse. Because grit wasn’t a lever. It was a trap.
The grittiest leaders she knew weren’t thriving. They were exhausted. Grit didn’t correlate with success. It correlated with staying too long in roles that were quietly breaking them. It was the conscientious ones who suffered most. The high performers. The loyal. The hopeful.
Grit didn’t fix broken systems. It just stopped people from leaving them.
The Virtue Turn
When the science started fraying, Maya reached higher.
Transformational leadership. Authenticity. Servant-hearted integrity. She studied the classics. Attended the programs. Memorised the four I’s. Reflected on her ethical stance. Tried to lead with humility, empathy, transparency, and care.
And for a while, that helped too. Until she noticed something chilling. The more virtuous she became, the more exposed she felt.
Trying to lead from service in a performance culture? Vulnerability became risk.
Trying to inspire in a directionless strategy? It rang hollow.
Trying to enable others while shielding them from systemic harm? It wasn’t leadership. It was triage.
These weren’t bad ideas. They were good ideas ripped from context.
No one told her what to do when “being real” made people nervous. Or when “caring too much” was read as weak. Or when the system quietly rewarded speed, spin, and sacrifice, no matter what the values deck said.
What Maya once saw as ideals, she now recognised as performance. Leadership had become a sincerity ritual. A language of aspiration. And a burden to carry alone.
Bullshit, Named
Then one night, unable to sleep, Maya found herself doomscrolling through leadership blogs. That’s when she stumbled onto Leadership BS by Jeffrey Pfeffer.
“If the system is ruthless,” Pfeffer asked, “why are we training leaders to be kind?”
She ordered the book instantly. Read it in one sitting. Pfeffer didn’t just criticise the models. He exposed the industry. How we sell inspiration and reward obedience. How we train for authenticity and promote those who play the politics. How we blame the leader, not the system, when the frameworks fail.
Then came Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. A smaller essay, but sharper.
Bullshit, he argued, isn’t a lie. It’s a performance of meaning that doesn’t care if it’s true. That’s when it all snapped into place.
Maya wasn’t burned out. She was betrayed.
She’d been given a map that didn’t match the terrain. Asked to lead with tools that weren’t meant to work. Encouraged to “grow” inside a system that punished growth and called it resilience.
And when it broke? They told her to dig deeper. Be more authentic. Lead from within. But there was no “within” left. Just a woman staring into the wreckage, finally seeing clearly.
This Wasn’t Failure. This Was Revelation.
Maya wasn’t the problem. The problem was believing that self-development could outpace structural contradiction. That if you just stretched far enough, gritted hard enough, and cared sincerely enough, you could lead anything.
But she couldn’t. And she shouldn’t have to.
Because leadership isn’t a personality. It’s a performance inside a system. And no matter how pure your mindset, no matter how brave your purpose, no matter how authentic your heart, if the system punishes the very things it praises, the problem isn’t you.
It’s the bullshit you’ve been taught to swallow.
And Maya? She’s done swallowing.
Coda
Maya wasn’t angry anymore. She’d named the gap. Not just between promise and practice, but between who she’d been asked to become and what the system actually required. It wasn’t her mindset that had failed. It was the frameworks that had ignored reality.
But disillusionment, she was learning, wasn’t an ending. It was an opening. If self-development had reached its limits, maybe the next step wasn’t inward. Maybe it was outward. Toward role, toward context, and toward system.
She didn’t need another trait to optimise. She needed a truer map. And for the first time, she was ready to go looking for it.
Self-Reflection
What frameworks or leadership models have shaped the story you tell about yourself?
And are they still serving you in the conditions you’re currently facing?
Where have you mistaken pressure for growth?
What signals tell you when development has tipped into distortion?
Have you ever blamed yourself for something that was actually structural?
What might shift if you stopped doing that?
Role-Reflection
What does your role quietly expect you to carry—emotionally, relationally, politically—that no formal description ever names?
System-Reflection
Where is your organisation rewarding traits it claims to critique, or punishing values it claims to uphold?
What does that tension reveal about how the system really works?
Read the next Maya Essay: Leadership Beyond the Mask
I'm so glad I've got the essays to sharpen my thinking. Many of the things Maya is experiencing I've been experiencing too, but never quite had the clarity or the words to see and articulatw the connections, I only felt that it didn't work for me. Thank you for writing this.
In some respects, this echoes my piece about Unoptimization....https://coachingphilosophia.substack.com/p/the-philosophy-of-unoptimization