The question arrives in a specific form. You are not being asked to compromise on something obvious. You are being asked to be more polished, more political, more comfortable with self-promotion than you naturally are. The people asking are not wrong that it would help. But something in you resists, and you are not entirely sure whether that resistance is integrity or stubbornness or fear.
Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would each find a different problem inside that sentence. They would not agree with each other. That is the useful part.
Machiavelli: adaptation is not betrayal
Machiavelli would refuse the framing. He would not accept the idea that adapting to what a situation requires is the same as betraying yourself, and he would want to know who told you it was. In The Prince and his Discourses, Machiavelli was not writing a guide to corruption. He was writing an honest account of how effective people actually operate. The fox uses cunning because wolves are real. The lion uses force because traps are real. Needing both is not a sign of bad character. It is competence in a world that is genuinely complicated.
The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.
He would ask what you are adapting toward, not whether you are adapting. Becoming more politically fluent in the service of something you actually care about is different from shapeshifting out of fear. If you are learning to navigate an institution because you want to build something that matters inside it, Machiavelli would call that reading terrain. If you are doing it because staying still feels dangerous and you cannot name what you are moving toward, he would call that a different problem entirely, one you cannot solve by getting better at the performance.
Dostoevsky: the soul knows when it is lying
Dostoevsky would not find Machiavelli's answer sufficient. You can rationalize almost anything, and the rationalizations tend to arrive before you have noticed you need them. His underground man is someone who adapted so thoroughly to external expectation that he lost the thread of his own desire, while staying articulate about his situation the whole time. Dostoevsky would say consciousness does not produce honesty automatically. The mind can be very busy explaining why this is fine.
The more conscious I am of goodness and of all that is sublime and beautiful, the more deeply I sink into my mire and the more ready I am to sink into it altogether.
He would ask you to check the symptoms rather than the argument. There are specific things that happen when the soul is lying while the mind has excellent justifications: a creeping contempt for your own success, the feeling that your victories belong to someone wearing your face, a private voice that observes what you are doing from a slight distance, as if it does not quite recognize the person you have become. If those symptoms are absent, Machiavelli might be right. If they are present, no better argument will fix anything.
Horney: whose "you" are you actually defending?
Horney would step back from both and ask a question neither of them addresses. Before deciding whether adapting is acceptable or destructive, you need to know which "you" you are protecting. Her insight is that the self people defend most fiercely is often not a real self in any original sense. It is an idealized self-image built from inherited expectations, professional norms, family scripts, a whole collection of shoulds that arrived before you were old enough to interrogate them.
The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization... Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
She would want to separate what you chose from what was assigned. The industry has a version of what success looks like. Your background has a version of what kind of person you are. When you resist changing, the question Horney would push is whether you are defending something genuine, or defending a borrowed image because giving it up would feel like losing something you never actually held. That is not a small distinction.
Where they disagree
Machiavelli would say the question is tactical: what does this situation actually require, and are you adapting toward something that matters or away from something that frightens you? The terrain is not the enemy.
Dostoevsky would say the question is diagnostic before it is tactical. The soul keeps receipts. If some part of you has not believed your own explanation for a while, that evidence is already in you, and a better argument will not clear it.
Horney would say both of them are starting too late. Before you can decide whether adaptation is betrayal, you need to know what you are defending. Most people have never separated the real from the inherited. They cannot tell you which parts of their identity they chose.
None of them would tell you what to do. All of them would refuse to let you answer the question you arrived with before you have answered a harder one.
The question you came here to avoid
What you are really asking is not whether you can change your behavior without losing yourself. That question has an answer. It depends on what you are protecting and why, and on whether the thing you are protecting is actually yours. The hard part is that most people have never looked closely enough to know.
Strip away the industry's definition of success, your background's idea of what kind of person you are, and the version of yourself you perform for people whose approval matters to you. What is left? Is that what you have been defending? Or is it possible you have been protecting a version of yourself you never actually examined?