On the One Life Coaching podcast, Biran made a point worth sitting with: the discomfort so many of us feel switching between our work self and our private self isn’t really a behaviour problem. It’s a clarity problem. If you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and you know who you want to be as a leader, the gap between those two versions of you starts to close.
That doesn’t mean you behave identically everywhere. You adjust, naturally, depending on the room you’re in. What changes is what sits underneath the adjustment. As Biran put it, you’re “the same person living the same values in different contexts.” The behaviour flexes. The core doesn’t.
Why this matters more than it sounds
For a lot of the people we work with, academics and professionals who’ve spent years being one way in a lecture theatre or a lab and another way everywhere else, that split can feel exhausting without ever being named. It shows up as a kind of low-grade vigilance: managing how you’re perceived, bracing for the moment someone clocks the difference.
Biran’s point is that when you’re clear on what you stand for, that vigilance mostly disappears. You’re not performing two people. You’re one person, adjusting register, not identity. And that’s what makes it easier to navigate complexity, manage conflict, and be comfortable in situations that would otherwise put you on edge.
There’s a knock-on effect too. If people only ever see the persona you’ve built for a particular room, they never get the chance to be surprised by the rest of you, and you never get the benefit of being fully known. Biran’s example was blunt: nobody says “I thought you were a bit boring at work, but you’re fabulous at this party.” They just see the same person, because that’s what’s actually there.
We’ve written before about how your values can end up working against you rather than for you, particularly when a value like humility stops you doing something that would genuinely help. The same logic applies here. Knowing your values isn’t a nice-to-have for a leadership workshop. It’s what lets you stop managing a divide that was never necessary in the first place.
If you want to try this yourself, ask what you’d need to know about your own reasons and your own values before the version of you at work and the version of you everywhere else stopped feeling like two different people.
Be sure to check out more from Biran at: Biran’s website and Biran’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/biranyilancioglu/
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