About

I was sitting in a boardroom, the only woman at the table, listening to a group of men circle the same issue for the third time. Nobody was actually trying to solve it. They were trying to win it.

I knew the answer. I’d known it for twenty minutes. And I sat there, quiet, waiting to see what everyone else thought first.

I told myself I was being diplomatic. I was being the good girl.

That wasn’t the only meeting where I knew the answer and didn’t say it. Once I saw the pattern, I couldn’t unsee it. It wasn’t a confidence problem. I wasn’t unsure of what I knew. I was managing how I’d be received for knowing it.

I spent years trying to understand why capable women who had already proven themselves still walked out of rooms having said less than they knew.

Corporate leadership had taught me how to lead. Executive development had taught me how to perform leadership. Neither one taught me how to lead from who I actually am.

I kept trying to close that gap with more of the same — another framework, another programme, another way of managing how I came across. None of it held. Nobody was asking why the delivery needed managing in the first place.

Eventually I stopped asking how to become a better leader.

I started asking why so many capable women had stopped trusting the leader they already were.

That question is what led me to Human Design — not because it had all the answers, but because it gave me a language for what I’d been sensing for years. It helped me see that so much of what gets trained out of women in leadership isn’t a flaw being corrected. It’s a natural way of leading being overridden.

That’s the gap With Carrie exists to close.

I write here every week because that boardroom moment happens constantly, in some form, to women who are otherwise doing everything right. A meeting where she waits to see what everyone else thinks first. A decision she talks herself out of trusting. A version of herself she puts on before she walks into the room, and takes off again once she’s home.

That’s why I write these essays. I want women to recognise themselves in the stories before they assume they’re the only one living them.

For those who want to go further, The Inside Practice is where the conversation continues.

I don’t help women become leaders.

I help them stop performing leadership.

Because the leader they’re looking for is often the one they’ve been taught to ignore.

If you’ve spent years managing how you come across instead of trusting what you know — you’re in the right place.