We Were Never Meant to Lead Like This

It is easy to forget how recently in our history women have been allowed to lead at all. A century ago, most women could not sign a mortgage, manage a bank account, or walk into a boardroom without an escort. Today, women hold roughly 32 percent of executive roles in the United States, according to McKinsey’s 2024 Women in the Workplace report. That is progress, yes, but it is also proof that most of us are still newcomers in rooms built by and for someone else.

We are often the minority at the table.

We know it.

They know it.

And we learn to perform accordingly.

From an early age, girls are taught to read a room before they ever learn to trust their own voice. We are rewarded for making people comfortable, praised for being adaptable, and quietly punished when we are not. By the time many women arrive in leadership, performance has become muscle memory. We have learned how to be palatable, how to manage perception, how to hold authority without appearing “too much.”

“We inherited a leadership script written for someone else, and the cracks are showing.”

As a woman who has spent her career in senior leadership, I have watched brilliant women fracture themselves trying to fit inside systems that were never designed for them. They perform strength in cultures that reward stoicism. They soften their truths to stay likable. They translate empathy into data just to be heard.

It is exhausting.

And it is unsustainable.

We inherited the wrong script. One that equates leadership with control, authority with volume, and composure with worth. A script that says feelings are liabilities and intuition belongs at home, not in the boardroom.

But the cracks are widening, and light is getting through.

The Day I Realized I Was Performing, Not Living

There was a time in my life when I could walk into any room and become whoever I thought was expected.
At work, I was competent. At home, accommodating. In friendships, endlessly agreeable.
I didn’t even notice the shape-shifting at first. It just felt like survival.

But one night, sitting at my kitchen table after everyone else had gone to bed, I caught my own reflection in the dark window and realized I didn’t recognize her. Not because she had changed, but because she had disappeared.

That was the night I understood something quietly devastating. I had built a life that looked right from the outside but didn’t feel like mine on the inside.

I was performing. Not living.

For years, I believed being “good” meant being easy. Easy to work with, easy to love, easy to rely on.
I said yes when I wanted to say no. I smiled through exhaustion. I apologized for wanting space.
I told myself it was maturity. That this is what adults do.

But what it really was, if I’m honest, was fear.
Fear of disappointing people. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of being seen as selfish or ungrateful.
I had mistaken acceptance for belonging.

And it worked, for a while. Until the pretending became heavier than the truth I was hiding from.

Awareness rarely arrives with fireworks. It creeps in softly, disguised as discomfort.
You start noticing that certain conversations drain you.
You start feeling like a guest in your own life.
You start resenting the very things you once called “blessings.”

That’s when you know a script is cracking.

Mine began to crumble the day I realized I couldn’t remember what I actually wanted anymore.
Every decision and every reaction was filtered through someone else’s expectation.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped consulting myself.

The hardest part wasn’t admitting that I had been performing.
It was deciding what to do with that truth.

Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
You can’t go back to playing a role that no longer fits.
You start to recognize that all the versions of you that people love are only half-truths.

And you start to grieve the life you built for applause.

But underneath the grief is something fierce and alive. A whisper that says, you were never meant to keep pretending.

That whisper becomes the first act of courage.

Today, I don’t perform as much. I still catch myself sometimes, slipping into old habits of pleasing or performing, but I notice faster.

I pause. I ask, “Is this me, or is this who I think I should be?”

That one question has changed everything.

It’s uncomfortable, yes. People notice the difference when you stop editing yourself.
But the relief of being real outweighs the risk of being misunderstood.

Because the truth is, you can’t live fully and perform at the same time.

One will always suffocate the other.

Reflection Prompt:
Where in your life do you still feel like you’re performing?
What might happen if you stopped?

When the Quiet Voice Becomes Your Compass

The quiet voice inside you never rushes. It doesn’t demand attention or compete with noise. It waits for you to stop performing calm long enough to notice what is real. Beneath the urgency and expectation, that voice is your compass, steady, honest, and always ready to lead you home.

There was a time when I believed the loudest voice in the room was the one that mattered most.
The voice that spoke first. The one that carried weight through confidence, data, and volume.
I mistook authority for noise and believed that leadership required projection.

But over the years, I’ve learned that the voice worth listening to is rarely the one commanding the most space. It’s the quiet one. The one that sits just beneath the surface. The one that speaks in tension, intuition, and knowing before words ever form.

The quiet voice doesn’t compete for attention. It doesn’t perform. It waits.

And when you learn to hear it, everything changes.

When Clarity Crosses a Line

I’ve always known what my strongest gifts are: clarity, vision, and truth. They’re the things I’ve leaned on most of my life. They’ve opened doors, built trust, and helped me make sense of complex, often chaotic situations. They’re also the gifts I’ve been praised for—over and over again.

But gifts always come with edges. And when you lean too hard on them, or wield them without care, they can cut both ways.

This post is about one of those times.

The Leadership Gift of Space: Finding Clarity Beyond the Busyness

Making room for clarity, energy, and authentic leadership

I used to think the best leaders were the busiest ones. The ones who could glide from meeting to meeting, answer emails at lightning speed, and keep their calendars crammed so full that every square inch of the week looked like a game of Tetris. Busyness felt like proof: proof of value, proof of commitment, proof that you were doing leadership “right.”

But the truth? Busyness doesn’t always mean impact. More often than not, it means exhaustion.

When our days become a blur of back-to-back commitments, we confuse motion with meaning. We fill every gap, squeeze in one more call, say yes when we should have paused. It looks productive from the outside, but inside it drains clarity, erodes presence, and leaves us leading on fumes.

The gift—the secret we’re rarely taught—is that leadership actually expands in space.

Stop Performing, Start Integrating: A New Way to Lead

There’s a moment in nearly every leader’s life when the outside doesn’t match the inside. On paper, you’re checking all the boxes. Your performance is solid, maybe even exceptional. You’re responsive, polished, quick on your feet. You’ve learned how to carry the weight of expectations with a steady smile. And yet, beneath the surface, something doesn’t line up.

I call it the ache.

The ache is that quiet tug in the body, the restless dissonance you feel when the version of yourself the world rewards doesn’t match the truth you carry inside. It doesn’t roar; it whispers. And for a long time, I ignored it. I mistook it for stress, or fatigue, or just the cost of being a high-achieving professional in a demanding world. But over time, I realized the ache wasn’t a flaw to be fixed. It was a compass.

Looking back, I see how hard I worked to outperform the ache. I believed that if I just rehearsed more thoroughly, prepared every possible scenario, smiled a little brighter, polished a little harder, I’d finally feel the alignment I craved. But performance never brought peace. It only deepened the fracture.

The truth is, most leadership models were designed inside the very systems that create the ache in the first place. They emphasize productivity over presence, polish over honesty, endurance over wholeness. They train us to wear resilience like armor and call it success.

For years, I lived inside that paradigm. And for years, I grew more tired, more restless, more disconnected from myself. The ache became my teacher. It pointed me toward a different kind of leadership—one not built on performance, but on integration.

That’s where the Integration Compass was born.

The Integration Compass doesn’t promise to map every step of the journey. Instead, it orients you. It reminds you where true north lies when the landscape of leadership feels confusing or overwhelming. Its four quadrants—Presence, Power, Purpose, and Alignment—offer simple, repeatable moves you can make in real time, in real rooms, with real stakes. They are not performance hacks. They are un-performance practices.

And that distinction matters. Because while performance fractures us—splitting who we are from who we think we need to be—integration restores us. It brings the whole self back into the room.

This blog is my invitation to you: to stop performing, and start integrating. To notice the ache, not as a weakness, but as your own internal compass pointing toward a truer way forward.

Breaking Scripts I Didn’t Write

There’s a strange moment of realization when you look at the path you’re on and think, Wait. Who wrote this story? Because it doesn’t sound like me.

For a long time, I thought I was following my own script. I had the lines memorized, the cues down, the gestures polished. But somewhere along the way, I slipped into a role that had been written for me—or worse, a role no one actually wrote at all. It was cobbled together from expectations, “shoulds,” and the invisible pull to do things the way they’ve always been done.

The problem with those scripts is they don’t leave much room for your own voice. They keep you busy performing, but not alive creating.

The Cost of Always Being On

Last Saturday, I did something unusual for me: I stopped.

I didn’t mean to. It just happened. The day unfolded with no big agenda. I met a friend at the dog park in the morning. I came home and napped in the afternoon. That evening, my husband and I went to see a scary movie — The Conjuring: Last Rites — where I clutched his hand through every jump scare and let out one very real, very loud scream. Later, I poured a bourbon, settled onto the deck, and listened to Norah Jones while the sky faded from blue to black.

It sounds ordinary. And maybe that’s the point. It was one of the best days I’ve had in months.

The Cost of Saying Yes: Why Leadership Requires Aligned Boundaries

I used to think saying yes made me valuable.

Yes to the extra project. Yes to the late-night email. Yes to the request that came five minutes before I was supposed to walk out the door. Each yes was a way of proving I was dependable, capable, the kind of leader who could carry anything. And for a while, it worked. I was praised for being calm under pressure, for always coming through, for never wavering.

Presence Over Performance

We live in a culture that rewards performance—polished presentations, quick answers, the appearance of fearlessness. But lately, I’ve been noticing something different: the leaders who actually shift rooms don’t do it with polish. They do it with presence.

This week, I’ve been sitting with the difference between performance and attentiveness, force and steady strength, and what it means to choose presence instead of polish.

The Frequency of Presence

We’ve been taught that leadership is about having the right words, the polished delivery, the confident smile that makes people lean in. But anyone who’s been in a room where the energy suddenly shifted knows the truth: presence has a frequency. People feel it.

And the irony? Most of us are so busy performing leadership that we miss the chance to actually embody it.

The Myth of Either/Or: Why You Don’t Have to Choose Between Heart and Ambition

How many times have you been asked—explicitly or silently—to choose? Be respected or be liked. Be strategic or be soulful. Show strength or show kindness.

The myth of either/or runs deep. It whispers that leadership is a binary game and your belonging depends on picking the “right” side. But here’s the truth: the choice is false.

What the Quiet Ache Is Really Telling You

It doesn’t usually announce itself loudly. The ache creeps in quietly — in the pause before you walk into a meeting, the email drafted at midnight, the long sigh as you open your calendar on a Sunday night.

From the outside, everything looks fine. Your résumé is solid. Your calendar is full. People describe you as “reliable,” “calm under pressure,” or “the one who holds it all together.”

But inside, there’s a hum. A restlessness. A whisper you can’t quite name.

That’s the ache.

And here’s the part most leaders get wrong: the ache isn’t weakness. It’s direction.

Naming the Ache

I’ve felt it in moments that no one else noticed.

Like the time I sat in a boardroom, notes ready, clarity in my chest, but when the moment came to speak I swallowed my idea. On the outside, I smiled. On the inside, my jaw tightened as the conversation moved on without me.

I’ve felt it in performance reviews where I was praised as “steady” and “composed.” My boss meant it as a compliment. I heard it as confirmation that the polished version of me was rewarded — while the whole of me remained hidden.

And I’ve felt it in the quiet of my own kitchen table. Laughing at the right moments, passing the salad, nodding at stories. But I wasn’t really there. My body was present; my mind was still at work, bracing for tomorrow’s to-do list.

The ache isn’t burnout. Burnout is collapse. The ache shows up before collapse — as a breadcrumb trail, a messenger. It’s the signal that something inside you is misaligned.

Why Leaders Ignore It

We’ve been taught to push past the ache. To override it with more work, more grit, more polish. We tell ourselves:

• If I can just get through this quarter, it will ease.

• If I hit the next milestone, I’ll feel steady again.

• If I can perform my way into belonging, maybe the ache will quiet down.

But it never does.

Because the ache doesn’t want you to push harder. It wants you to pay attention.

The Ache Isn’t Here to Break You

What if the ache isn’t failure, but feedback?

What if it’s not a flaw to be fixed, but a compass pointing you back toward yourself?

This is the shift that changed everything for me: realizing that the ache wasn’t weakness — it was wisdom.

It wasn’t trying to derail my leadership. It was trying to save it.

Introducing the Integration Compass

When I began listening to the ache, I discovered I didn’t need another five-step plan or another leadership framework designed to squeeze out more productivity. I needed a way to come back to myself, again and again, even inside systems built on performance.

That’s where the Integration Compass was born.

The compass has four quadrants:

• Presence – The Reset. Am I here, or am I performing?

• Power – The Root. Am I grounded in my authority, or hustling to prove it?

• Purpose – The Filter. Am I saying yes because it matters, or because it looks good?

• Alignment – The Check. Did I act from wholeness, or fracture myself for belonging?

Each quadrant comes with a simple, repeatable move you can use to reorient.

It’s not about perfection. It’s about practice.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

Take Maria, a department chair I worked with. By her own description, she was “successful but exhausted.” The ache was everywhere in her life: the endless email chains, the late-night prep for meetings, the creeping resentment at home.

I invited her to try one simple tool: the Presence Reset.

Every day for one week, before she responded to anything — email, question, meeting — she took one conscious breath and asked: Am I speaking from clarity, or from fear of being misperceived?

Here’s what happened:

• On Monday, she rewrote a difficult email with less defensiveness.

• On Wednesday, she declined a committee role after realizing her gut said no.

• On Friday, she ended a meeting with a grounding question instead of rushing through.

By the end of the week, she said: “I didn’t get less done. I felt more like myself while I did it. And people noticed.”

The ache didn’t vanish. But it softened.

Why the Ache Matters Now

Leadership culture is loud with urgency. The unspoken rule is: stay busy, stay polished, stay performing.

But here’s the cost: leaders are burning out, organizations are hemorrhaging talent, and entire generations are refusing to contort themselves into scripts that were never written for them.

The ache you feel in your jaw, in your Sunday-night dread, in your silence at the table — it isn’t just personal. It’s cultural.

And that’s exactly why your ache matters. Because when you begin to listen to it, you don’t just reclaim your own wholeness. You model a new way of leading.

Three Practices for This Week

If the ache has been visiting you lately, here are three ways to respond:

1. The Presence Reset. Before you answer, breathe. One conscious breath, then ask: Clarity or fear?

2. The Purpose Filter. At the end of the day, name one choice that was urgent and one that was aligned. Notice the difference.

3. The Micro-Return. In the middle of the day, when you catch yourself performing, place a hand on your chest and whisper: Come back.

Small, ordinary practices. But together, they create the muscle of wholeness.

A Final Word

The ache isn’t here to break you. It’s here to bring you back.

Back to presence.
Back to rooted power.
Back to purpose.
Back to alignment.

Back to yourself.

And when you lead from that place, you don’t just survive leadership — you embody it.

Call to Action

If this resonates, subscribe to my weekly newsletter for deeper practices and reflections. And if you’re ready to stop performing leadership and start embodying it, stay tuned — Lead Like You Mean It is coming soon.

Stop Performing, Start Leading

I spent years chasing a finish line that never seemed to arrive.
The title changed, the business card changed, the salary changed — but inside, I felt the same quiet ache. I thought that if I worked hard enough, polished long enough, achieved enough, then I would finally feel like I belonged.

But the truth was harder to admit: I wasn’t really leading. I was performing.

Performing leadership is when you walk into the room already calculating how your words will land. It’s the late-night email you send because you don’t want anyone to question your commitment. It’s the yes you give when your body is screaming no — because that’s what a “good leader” would do.

It looks strong on the outside, but it feels hollow on the inside.

The problem with performance is that it never satisfies. No matter how much you achieve, it demands more. The bar keeps moving, and the ache keeps growing.

That’s why I wrote Lead Like You Mean It.

This book isn’t a list of tricks to help you “look” like a better leader. It’s a compass for becoming one. I call it the Integration Compass, and it’s made up of four points:

• Presence: Staying with yourself in the room, instead of managing yourself for others.

• Power: Reclaiming authority as something you choose, not something you wait to be given.

• Purpose: Uncaging purpose from legacy, sacrifice, and “shoulds” and grounding it in daily alignment.

• Alignment: Returning, again and again, to wholeness instead of performance.

These four points aren’t abstract ideas. They’re daily practices. They’re the difference between saying yes out of guilt and saying yes because it’s aligned. Between collapsing into burnout and leading with joy and clarity. Between shrinking yourself to fit the role and rewriting the role to fit your truth.

And here’s the good news: you don’t have to wait until you “arrive” to lead like this. You can begin right now, exactly where you are.

Start by asking one simple question before your next decision:

👉 Am I leading from alignment, or am I performing for approval?

That question alone has stopped me mid-email, mid-meeting, even mid-sentence. It interrupts the old scripts and brings me back to myself. That’s what presence feels like: not perfect, not polished, but congruent.

Lead Like You Mean It is a book about remembering what leadership feels like when you stop performing and start living it. It’s about giving yourself permission to lead from your whole self — your clarity, your values, your joy — instead of the version the world told you was acceptable.

Because at the end of the day, leadership isn’t about what they think of you. It’s about who you choose to be, again and again, in the moments that matter.

And the moment you stop performing and start leading? That’s the moment you become the leader you were always meant to be.

Call to Action:
If this resonates with you, stay tuned. I’ll be sharing more from Lead Like You Mean It as we move toward launch. In the meantime, ask yourself this: Where am I performing, and where am I ready to lead like I mean it?

The Lie of Either/Or: Why Wholeness Is the Future of Leadership

If you’ve ever been asked, “Do you want to be taken seriously, or do you want to be liked?” you know the trap. It’s a false choice leaders—especially women—are handed again and again.

We’re told we can be respected or warm. Strategic or compassionate. Powerful or kind.

This is the lie of either/or.

And here’s the truth: either/or is exhausting. It forces us to split ourselves in half to survive.

The Cost of Splitting

At first, the split is subtle. You adjust your tone so you won’t be called “too direct.” You polish your emails until they sound professional—but not too emotional. You replay conversations, second-guessing whether you came across as confident or likable enough.

You tell yourself you’re just being strategic. Just adapting.

But over time, those adjustments stop feeling optional. They become the default. And slowly, you lose track of your unfiltered voice. You stop asking what you really think. You start to believe your worth lies in how well you can contort yourself to fit the room.

The cost is high: anxiety, exhaustion, burnout. Success that looks good on the outside but feels hollow on the inside.

Beyond Balance

For years, the advice has been: find balance. Balance your ambition with rest. Balance your heart with your head. Balance strategy with softness.

But balance is just another performance. Another way of managing compartments.

Balance says you can have both—so long as you keep them separate and perfectly measured. Don’t tip too far in either direction.

Wholeness is something else.

Wholeness says clarity and compassion, structure and spirit, strength and softness can exist together, without apology.

Balance measures. Wholeness reclaims.

The Integration Compass

So how do we get back to wholeness when everything around us pushes us into either/or?

I use something I call the Integration Compass: four simple practices that reorient us whenever the ache of performance shows up.

• The Presence Reset: Before responding, pause for one breath. Ask yourself, Am I speaking from clarity or from fear of being misperceived?

• Power Rooting: When you feel the urge to over-prove, press your feet into the ground and silently repeat, I am already grounded.

• The Purpose Filter: At the end of each day, ask: Did I choose urgency, or did I choose what truly matters?

• The Alignment Check: Each week, name one decision you made from wholeness. Write it down.

These practices are simple, repeatable, and doable in the flow of everyday leadership. They are less about perfection and more about returning—again and again—to your center.

Why This Matters

The lie of either/or doesn’t just drain individual leaders. It stifles teams and organizations. When leaders split themselves, they send an unspoken message: belonging here is conditional. Speak carefully. Stay in line. Don’t bring too much of yourself.

But when leaders model wholeness, they create cultures where others can show up whole, too. Presence slows down urgency. Power becomes rooted, not rehearsed. Purpose cuts through noise. Alignment makes integrity contagious.

Leadership stops being about survival. It becomes about embodiment.

Your Turn

Where are you still living by an either/or script?
What would change if you chose wholeness instead?

Try one of the Compass practices this week. Notice what shifts—for you, and for the people around you.

Because leadership isn’t about choosing between being respected or being real. It’s about integrating.

You don’t have to choose. You are both.

Today’s Compass Check: Presence at the Red Light

This morning, on my way to campus, I hit every single red light. You know the kind of drive — when you’re already running behind, and the universe seems to say, “Not so fast.” I caught myself drumming the steering wheel, muttering under my breath, and feeling the tension rise in my shoulders.

Then I remembered: this is a compass moment. Presence isn’t only for the big, dramatic leadership decisions. It’s for the small, ordinary ones too — like how I sit with three minutes at a stoplight.

So I took a breath. I let myself actually notice the quiet hum of the car, the early sunlight catching on the windshield, the pause. Nothing changed outside me, but something shifted inside.

That’s the thing about presence. It doesn’t always fix the circumstances, but it changes the way we live them. And when leaders model that shift, it ripples. A pause in a meeting gives someone else the courage to speak. A breath before answering resets the room’s energy. What feels like a small personal practice is also a cultural redesign: slowing down the urgency culture that silences voices on the margins.

Presence at the red light is practice for presence at the table. It’s a reminder that leadership isn’t only measured in deliverables and deadlines — it’s in how we inhabit each ordinary moment.

Journaling Prompt:
Where in your day do you rush past yourself without noticing? What would it look like to pause, even briefly, and allow presence back in?

Integration Mantra:
“I don’t need more time to find presence — I need more presence in the time I already have.”

Today’s Compass Check: The Ache That Shows Up at Your Desk

It always starts small.

For me, it was the way I sat at my desk long after everyone else had gone home. The office was quiet, the glow of the screen still on, my shoulders tight. On paper, I was crushing it—title, responsibility, respect. But in that silence, my body was telling me something different.

That’s the thing about the quiet ache: it doesn’t usually show up as a crisis. It sneaks in through jaw tension during a meeting, a breath you realize you’re holding, or that little voice that says, “This doesn’t feel like me anymore.”

The ache isn’t weakness. It’s a signal. It’s your body whispering: Not this. Not like this. Not anymore.

Journaling Prompt

Where did I notice the “quiet ache” today—in my body, my words, or my silence?

Integration Mantra

“The ache isn’t here to break me. It’s here to bring me back.”

✨ Today’s Compass Check:
If you feel that quiet ache at your desk, don’t rush to fix it. Just notice it. Name it. That’s the first step back to alignment.

The Ache That Whispers

Have you ever hit a milestone you worked so hard for, only to realize it didn’t feel like you thought it would?

The promotion. The title. The seat at the table.

On paper, it looked like everything had lined up. But inside? A quiet hum. A tug in your chest that said: Not quite. Not like this.

I call it the ache.

It’s not burnout. It’s not failure. It’s not even dissatisfaction. It’s that subtle dissonance between how your life looks and how it feels.

Most of us don’t talk about it because it doesn’t feel “big enough” to name. We keep going, high-functioning and strategic, hoping the ache will fade with the next win. But here’s the truth: it doesn’t. It stays until you listen.

The ache is a signal, not a weakness. It’s your body whispering: You’re out of alignment.

And the cost of ignoring it? Quiet erosion. You show up polished but disconnected. You deliver results but feel invisible. You start performing leadership instead of living it.

I’ve been there. And what I’ve learned—what I write about in my book Lead Like You Mean It—is that the ache isn’t something to fix. It’s something to follow.

Because underneath the ache is wisdom.

It’s pointing you back to your center. To the place where your clarity, your intuition, your presence live. To the version of you who doesn’t need to prove or perform, but simply remembers: I am already enough.

Here’s the shift: stop asking, “How do I make the ache go away?” and start asking, “What is it trying to tell me?”

Maybe it’s asking you to set a boundary you’ve been avoiding.
Maybe it’s inviting you to speak the truth you’ve been softening.
Maybe it’s reminding you that rest isn’t a reward—it’s a requirement.

When I listen to my own ache, I find my compass again. My True North. And from that place, leadership stops being a mask and starts being presence.

So today, I’ll leave you with a question:

Where is the ache whispering in your life—and what might change if you stopped ignoring it?

Micro-Acts of Courage

Courage doesn’t always look like the big moments.

It’s easy to think of courage as the stuff of headlines—the dramatic pivot, the big speech, the leap into the unknown. But if I’ve learned anything in leadership (and in life), it’s this: the truest courage often hides in the smallest choices.

Courage is saying no when your mouth wants to say yes, but your body says otherwise.
Courage is pressing “send” on the email you’ve rewritten a dozen times because you finally chose honesty over polish.
Courage is staying in the room when your instinct is to shrink, to disappear, to make yourself small so no one notices.
Courage is walking away when you know staying would mean abandoning yourself.

Most of us underestimate these micro-acts. They don’t come with applause or recognition. Sometimes no one notices at all. But our nervous systems do. Our spirits do. These small acts are how resilience is built—not through sheer endurance, but through a steady pattern of choosing ourselves, moment by moment.

Resilience isn’t about becoming unbreakable. It’s about learning you can bend without disappearing. It’s about showing up for yourself in tiny ways until the weight of self-trust grows stronger than the weight of external approval.

I think about the times I’ve been most tired, most worn down, most tempted to numb out or default to performance. And almost always, the turning point wasn’t some grand act of bravery. It was something quiet. A whispered no. A hand over my chest in a meeting, just to remind myself I was still there. A walk around the block before responding to a request. A micro-act of courage that no one else saw, but I knew.

And that’s what matters.

Because each time we choose those small acts, we’re re-patterning our lives. We’re teaching ourselves that we don’t have to abandon our truth to keep leading, to keep living, to keep being worthy. We’re reminding ourselves that courage is not a performance. It’s a practice.

So if you’re carrying the weight of resilience right now, let me offer you this: stop looking for the big moment to prove it. Start noticing the micro-acts you’re already living.

The pause before you agree.
The breath before you speak.
The choice to stay. Or leave. Or rest.

These are not small. They are everything.

And if no one else tells you today: I see your courage.

The Cost of Splitting Yourself

Most of us learn early how to perform. We learn which parts of us are welcome in the room and which ones are better left at the door. We learn how to adjust our tone, soften our words, and carry ourselves in a way that feels safe.

And at first, it even works. We get praised for being professional. For being composed. For being adaptable.

But here’s the truth we rarely say out loud: every time you split yourself, it costs you something.

The Little Edits That Add Up

Splitting yourself doesn’t always look dramatic. It often shows up in the little edits:

• The moment you stop mid-sentence because you worry your words will “land wrong.”

• The email you rewrite three times to sound agreeable instead of clear.

• The gut instinct you silence because it doesn’t match the data everyone else wants to see.

Each edit feels small. But over time, they add up. And what they add up to is disconnection.

The Internal Math

When you split yourself, you start to do invisible math:

• How much of me is safe here?

• How much truth can I show before I get labeled difficult?

• If I show too much emotion, will it cancel out my authority?

That constant calculation isn’t free. It costs energy. It costs clarity. It costs your sense of self.

And eventually, it can cost your trust in your own voice.

The Body Keeps the Score

This isn’t just emotional. It’s physical.

Your nervous system learns the rules. It learns what’s safe and what isn’t. And when your body keeps swallowing back truth, it carries the weight.

• The tightness in your shoulders that never quite goes away.

• The 3:00 p.m. fatigue that shows up no matter how much coffee you’ve had.

• The feeling of leaving a meeting where you said all the “right” things but walk out feeling hollow.

That’s the cost of splitting yourself. Your body notices before your mind admits it.

What It Steals from Leadership

Here’s the part we don’t talk about enough: splitting yourself doesn’t just cost you. It costs the people you lead.

When you flatten your voice, they miss your clarity.
When you mute your intuition, they lose your perspective.
When you edit yourself into something palatable, they don’t get the full leader you could be.

Your leadership becomes performative instead of present. And even if no one else can name it, they feel it.

The Invitation Back

The opposite of splitting isn’t oversharing or being unfiltered. It’s integration.

It’s allowing yourself to bring more of your real voice into the room.
It’s trusting your gut as much as your spreadsheets.
It’s choosing presence over polish.

It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in small, daily choices:

• Saying no clearly and kindly.

• Naming an emotion as data instead of weakness.

• Pausing before you answer to check what feels true instead of what sounds safe.

Those little acts of integration begin to undo the cost. They restore trust in yourself. They give your body a chance to exhale.

A Question for You Today

Where are you still splitting yourself to fit the room?

And what’s one place — today — where you could bring just a little more of yourself back in?

Micro-Practice: The One-Breath Check-In

Before your next meeting, email, or conversation:

1. Pause and take one slow breath.

2. Ask yourself: What feels true for me right now?

3. Whatever your answer is — bring at least one piece of that truth into the room.

It doesn’t have to be everything. Just one breath’s worth of presence.