Can we be too nice? This is a question I’ve been carrying with me for a long time. Not because I ever doubted the value of kindness. I don't. It is one of my core values. However, because something about the way niceness  showed up in my own experience never quite settled. There were moments when being described as kind  or warm  felt slightly uncomfortable. Not wrong. Just incomplete. At times, I wondered whether it was holding me back. I noticed that people who were more di

This is a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time. Not because it isn’t important — quite the opposite. But because I needed time to properly get my own head around it first. Questions about influence, power, and what happens beneath the surface come up again and again in my work with leaders and HR professionals. Yet every time I tried to write about it, something felt off. Too neat. Too binary. As if it missed the lived complexity of what people were actually