There’s something strange about these times, and suddenly it seems everyone has to be a leader. It’s no longer enough to work, strive, or try to live with a certain dignity, because now you also have to inspire, make an impact, influence, and leave a mark. We are surrounded by messages that repeat that if you don’t stand out, if you don’t embark, or if you don’t develop your “leadership,” you’re falling behind, and you end up asking when this obsession began with turning every person into a kind of marketable brand.
The problem isn’t leadership itself, but the business built around it, because they have managed to transform a human quality into an artificial necessity. People are paying absurd sums to have someone teach them to “maximize their best version,” as if living were a perpetual competition against oneself.
Everything is filled with grandiloquent phrases, empty speeches and characters who talk about success while generating frustration in those who listen to them, because most don’t leave motivated; they leave thinking they aren’t doing enough, that they aren’t valuable enough, or that they’re missing something to measure up.
Are they commercializing our self-esteem?
Meanwhile, there is a huge, difficult-to-resolve contradiction, never before have we talked so much about leadership, and never have so many people been emotionally drained, unable to rest because they feel they should always be growing, improving, or proving something. It seems that even self-esteem has become a market, and if before they sold us products for the body, now they sell us identities for the mind.
Perhaps that’s why many people are starting to distrust, because they sense that behind certain speeches there is more commercial strategy than humanity, because true leadership seldom needs to announce itself, it usually doesn’t carry a microphone or a stage. It is in the person who keeps their word, in the person who doesn’t step on others to advance, or in the person who knows how to support their own when things go badly, but that doesn’t generate millions of views or fill arenas.
The problem of this era is that admiration has been confused with showmanship, and we applaud more the one who knows how to market himself than the one who actually contributes something. And so we have ended up surrounded by experts teaching how to lead lives that many times they themselves cannot sustain in silence, with a lot of talk about success, a lot of punchy phrases, and very little truth.
Perhaps the question isn’t whether leadership exists, of course it does! The question is whether we still recognize it when it doesn’t come wrapped in marketing, applause and hollow words, because some of the best leaders have never given a leadership keynote, nor sold you a fancy ticket to tell you what to do in life from their well-lined pockets and hammering reels on social media that are shared again and again.
Ismael Dorado. Psychologist and Criminologist. Professor at UNIE University, San Pablo CEU University, and the International University of La Rioja (UNIR). Director of the Center for Health Psychology, Clinical and Forensic Psychology.
