“Rebecca, I need more gravitas,” Andreas said to me at the start of our first coaching session, “but I want to be myself. I don’t want to pretend to be someone else.” As an organizational psychologist at the London School of Economics, teaching leadership development in executive education programs and coaching professionals globally for 20 years, I’ve had the privilege of hearing the development goals of hundreds of professionals. They regularly describe wanting to be valued and respected — but they fear that to do so they need to betray their own personality or values.