Our Work Is to Clean Our Colour, Not Change It

We are colours of nature.

Unique in many ways, yet blend in many ways.

No two people are quite the same shade. Each of us carries a particular mix of temperament, history, strengths and instincts that nobody else has in exactly the same proportion. And yet we sit alongside one another, work together, belong to the same families, teams and communities. We are distinct, and we blend.

Both of these are true at once. Most of the trouble starts when we forget one of them.

The real work

Our work is to identify impurities and remove them, so our colour truly shines clean.

Impurities are the things that cloud the colour without being part of it. The habits we picked up without choosing them. The fears we carry from an old failure. The beliefs we borrowed from someone else and never checked. The ego that wants to be seen as a different colour than the one we are.

None of these is who we are. They settle on top of us over time, the way dust settles on glass. And like dust, they dull the colour so gradually that we stop noticing it was ever brighter.

Removing them is slow, ordinary work. It means noticing a reaction and asking where it came from. It means letting go of a belief that no longer holds. It means being honest about the parts of ourselves we have been protecting rather than examining.

That is the work. It is enough work for a lifetime.

What the work is not

It is not, however, to change our true, authentic colour and become someone else.

To copy, compete, look like someone else.

This is the easier path, and that is why it is so tempting. Changing colour looks like progress. We see someone succeed, and we take on their style, their language, their way of working. We see another organisation praised, and we adopt its structure, its strategy, its system. It feels like improvement, because we are doing something.

But copying does not remove impurities. It adds a new layer on top of them. Now there is the old dust, and a borrowed colour painted over it. The result is neither us nor them.

And competing to look like someone else is a contest nobody wins. They will always be a better version of themselves than we can be of them.

A familiar pattern

Consider a manager promoted into the role of a well-respected predecessor.

The predecessor was loud, decisive and quick in meetings. The new manager is quieter. She thinks before she speaks, and she prefers to work through problems one conversation at a time. Those are real strengths.

But she has watched the predecessor praised for years. So she tries to lead the same way. She speaks first in meetings, decides faster than she is comfortable with, and keeps her doubts to herself because the predecessor never seemed to have any.

It does not work. The team can tell it is a performance. Her decisions are quicker but weaker, because they skip the thinking that made her good. And she is exhausted, because she is spending her energy holding up a colour that is not hers.

Now imagine she does the other work instead. She keeps her quieter way of leading. What she removes is the impurity: the fear that her way is not good enough, borrowed from years of watching someone else get the credit. She lets the team see how she actually thinks. Within a year, they trust her judgement more than they trusted the noise.

Same person. Same role. The difference was whether she cleaned her colour or tried to change it.

Organisations do the same thing. A smaller organisation looks at a larger, admired one and copies its operating model, its governance structure, its choice of system. Not because it examined its own nature and found a match, but because the other one looked successful. Years later it is running something built for a different organisation, and wondering why it never quite fits.

Know the colour, then find the light

It is about fully understanding the colour we are, and finding opportunities that will give us the chance to show our true colour clearly and vividly.

Two parts, in that order.

Understanding first. We cannot clean what we do not understand. That means knowing our strengths without inflating them, and our limits without hiding them. It means knowing what we are at our best, and what we become under pressure.

Then opportunity. A colour shows differently depending on where it is placed. The same shade can disappear against one background and stand out against another. Some roles, rooms and problems will bring out our colour. Others will wash it out, however hard we try. Part of the work is choosing, where we can, the places where our colour is needed rather than the places where it has to be disguised.

This is not about avoiding difficulty. It is about not wasting a lifetime trying to shine as someone else’s colour in someone else’s light.

The questions that remain

Here are some questions to ponder.

What impurities have settled on your colour over the years, and which of them have you started to mistake for who you are?

Where in your work or life are you copying someone else’s colour, because it looked successful on them?

And do you know your own colour well enough to recognise the opportunity that would let it show clearly and vividly?