Being Yourself: The Radical Power Of Authentic Leadership

To truly know me, you must know Liza Arnason.

Not just her name. Not just her work. You have to feel the gravity of a soul that refuses to accept the world as it is.

Liza has spent her life at war with oppression. Not in the abstract, but in the marrow. She has built, fought, healed, and demanded. A lifelong architect of social justice and human rights, she has carved out spaces and pathways where none existed and held up a mirror to systems that would rather remain unseen.

A dear friend and mentor, Liza is one of the few people I feel safe enough to vent to.

Not just about the exhaustion of challenging the status quo, but about the hypocrisy of preaching authentic leadership within systems predicated on conformity and compliance. About how power tolerates difference—as long as it doesn’t disrupt.

After pitching my latest startup to a New York-based venture capital firm, I felt a deep disgust—not just at the lopsided power dynamics in the room, but at the unsettling optics of a son of an Indian mother seeking capital from those whose wealth was built on the legacy of British imperialism. I needed to vent to a fellow advocate, someone who understood the tightrope walk of existing in hostile spaces. Someone who knew what it felt like to wear skin that doesn’t fully belong in rooms where decisions are made (often about us, without us).

So I spoke to Liza about deep acting while carrying the burden of generational trauma. About the heaviness of translating unspeakable pain into palatable presentations, of being expected to remain diplomatic and compassionate in the face of metastasizing injustice.

I needed Liza’s ear—not to validate, but to balance. Because I felt it happening: the subtle pressure to tone it down. To be the bridge. To make my message digestible for those who stand to benefit from the way things are.

To sing for my supper.

Like the time the Texas Senate wielded policy like a muzzle, eradicating DEI offices from universities—and, a week later, a university in Texas asked me to erase the words diversity, equity, and inclusion from my keynote. (To their credit, the event organizers were embarrassed and courageously supported my choice to keep the message intact—just wrapped in euphemism.) Nevertheless, the cascade was clear—policy to institution to stage. Erase the work. Erase the words. Erase me.

A state-sanctioned onslaught.

Liza listened. Steady, unwavering. Then, with the fire of someone who has witnessed too much to waste words, she said:

“Being yourself is an act of resistance.”

I nodded. I understood. (Sometimes you gotta pop out and show…)

I had just written about the meticulously recorded link between work and slavery—the way exploitation adapts. How chains became contracts, plantations became boardrooms, and forced labor became something more insidious, more sanitized, but no less controlling. Yet even with all my research, I felt disconnected, like a historian staring at artifacts behind glass.

I could perceive the weight of inauthenticity. The tension of preaching authentic leadership to audiences who merely tolerate difference.

Authentic leadership means bringing your whole self to the work—leading with values, integrity, vulnerability. It’s what builds psychological safety, fuels engagement, and sustains motivation. Yet, in too many organizations, authenticity is nothing more than a branding exercise—a slogan plastered on a machine that still demands quiet obedience.

I was starting to feel it too.

That creeping instinct to self-edit. To soften the truth about the future of leadership.

And that’s when Liza hit me with it:

Apprenticeship.

In Canada, apprenticeship was never just a trade—it was a tool. A mechanism of control. After slavery was abolished in 1834, former enslavers found a loophole: Black children, instead of being set free, were forced into long-term apprenticeships, their labor still owned, their futures still dictated. Indigenous children, too, were placed under settler families or institutions, their hands trained for servitude under the pretence of education. These were not pathways to prosperity. They were indentured servitude by another name, designed to preserve the power structures that abolition was supposed to dismantle.

This diabolical practice lingered well into the 20th century, overlapping with residential schools, labor camps, and the generational theft of autonomy. Though the laws changed, the legacy remained. You can still see its imprint in the economic disparities, the systemic erasures, the way some lives are still considered disposable while others are groomed for leadership.

Oppression thrives in the shadows. It mutates. It erases its own tracks, obscures its own history, and in doing so, it makes you question yourself—your worth, your belonging, your right to take up space. It tells you to make yourself smaller. To assimilate. To erase yourself before it has to do it for you.

It whispers that survival depends on silence.

That’s why being yourself—fully, unapologetically, without dilution—is an act of resistance.

Not because identity alone is enough to dismantle systems, but because every act of self-assertion is a crack in the foundation of oppression. Every refusal to be erased, every insistence on existing loudly, is a disruption. And if enough of us disrupt at once, the whole structure begins to shake.