I must have been involved in hundreds of career development conversations over the years.

You know the sort. Someone sits down with their manager, they talk about how things are going, what they’d like to work on and develop, and eventually the question comes up.

Where do you see yourself in three to five years?

It’s a perfectly reasonable question and I’ve asked it plenty of times myself.

However, looking back, there is something rather funny about asking someone to map out their career five years into the future when the organisation they are working for is constantly restructuring and doesn’t know what the next five years look like. But that’s okay, let’s get that development plan completed.

I’m making light of it, because I do think there’s value in thinking about where you want to go. Having a sense of direction helps you make decisions about what to learn, which opportunities to pursue and where to invest your energy.

But how much do we assume about the direction someone should take?

If someone is doing well in their role, the conversation quite naturally turns to what comes next. A bigger job, more responsibility, perhaps a move into management or if they’re already managing people maybe it’s time to think about the next level.

Before long, there's that development plan with some stretch assignments and a conversation about what they’ll need to demonstrate to be considered ready.

It’s all very sensible. I’ve spent a large part of my career helping organisations do this well. Career pathways give people something to work towards. Succession planning helps organisations prepare for the future. Having a manager who sees your potential and encourages you to grow can make an enormous difference and I don’t want to lose any of that.

I do wonder, though, how often the conversation starts with what someone actually wants, rather than what seems like the obvious next step.

I remember people who were very good at their jobs and were naturally seen as candidates for promotion. They were capable, dependable and respected by the people around them. Their managers wanted to recognise that and offering them the next opportunity seemed like a good way to do it.

Sometimes it was exactly what they wanted. Other times, I think the expectation arrived before the ambition did.

I’ve seen capable women become very good at doing what was expected of them. They delivered, took on challenges, built their reputations and earned the confidence of the people around them. They were often the people managers wanted to invest in, and because they were good at meeting expectations, they could become equally good at pursuing the opportunities that came with them.

I understand how that happens. When you’re building a career, you learn to recognise the signs that you’re doing well. Good performance reviews, more responsibility, being trusted with important work and getting noticed by senior people all matters.

It can be genuinely satisfying when you’ve worked hard to earn these. If you’re ambitious, why wouldn’t you want to keep progressing?

The interesting thing is how easily progress becomes associated with moving in one particular direction.

We talk about climbing the career ladder, moving up and getting to the next level. Even our language suggests there’s a fairly obvious route and that the aim is to keep going.

But careers don’t always work that way.

Some people want to manage large teams. Others want to become deeply knowledgeable in a particular area. Some want to influence bigger decisions without necessarily having direct reports. Others are excited by building something new, moving into a different field or taking on a challenge that doesn’t come with a more impressive title.

Those ambitions can change. What you wanted at 25 might not be what interests you at 35 or 45. You learn things about yourself along the way. You discover work you enjoy more than you expected and sometimes find that an experience changes the way you think about your future.

Yet once you’ve been identified as someone who’s going places, it can feel surprisingly difficult to question where those places are.

There were times in my own career when I knew exactly what I was working towards. I wanted the challenge, the responsibility and the opportunity to make a bigger contribution. I enjoyed being stretched, and I still think there’s something enormously satisfying about discovering you’re capable of more than you realised.

But looking back, I can also see how easy it was to assume that the next logical step was the one I should be aiming for. When you’ve spent years building your experience and doing your job well, progressing can begin to feel like the natural thing to do.

I don’t think I always stopped to question that assumption as carefully as I might have.

One of the things about career conversations is that we’re often much better at discussing readiness than desire. We can spend a lot of time identifying the experience someone needs, the capabilities they should develop and the opportunities that would help prepare them for a future role.

We’re less likely to spend the same amount of time exploring what genuinely interests them about tat future. What would they enjoy doing more of? What kind of problems would they like to solve? Where do they want to have an impact?

Those questions don’t always have an immediate answer. It’s much simpler to identify the next position on an organization chart than to work out what someone wants form the next stage of their working life, especially when that person isn’t entirely sure herself.

I think this is particularly important for women who are beginning to see themselves as leaders.

They may have spent years proving they’re capable, taking feedback seriously and making the most of opportunities. They’ve learned how to succeed within the organisation they’re part of and there’s real value that that experience. But, as they take on more responsibility, they also have more decisions to make about where they want to direct their abilities.

Sometimes the opportunities that interest them will fit neatly with what others expect. Sometimes they won’t. They may want to pursue a more senior role, move into a different area or take on work that gives them a kind of influence they haven’t had before. Sometimes they may need to explore a few possibilities before they know what they want.

There is no more authentic answer hiding in any particular choice. Wanting a senior role is just as valid as deciding you want to do something differently. What matters is whether you’ve given yourself the chance to work out what you want.

That doesn’t mean you have to know exactly how you’ll get there.

You may discover what interests you by trying something, paying attention to what happens and being willing to change course. An unexpected project or a conversation might open up an interest you didn’t know you had or a possibility you never considered.

You can have a sense of direction without knowing every step in advance. Given how much can change in an organisation between now and next Thursday, that seems like a fairly practical approach.

Organisations have an important part to play here too. We can still identify talent, offer development and encourage people towards opportunities. But perhaps we need to become a little more interested in the direction people want to take, rather than assuming the direction we’ve prepared for them is the one they’ll choose.

We should consider something in our own career decisions.

It’s possible to spend years working towards a goal, becoming more capable and successful along the way, without remembering when you decided that goal was yours.

That doesn’t mean you’ve wasted your time. The experience, relationships and capabilities you’ve built are still yours. They may be exactly what enables you to do something different next.

I think back to those career development conversations and the plans we so carefully put together. Some will have helped people achieve things they genuinely wanted. I hope a lot of them did.

I wonder, though, how many people walked away with a clearer idea of what the organisation thought they should do next, without being any clearer about what they wanted themselves.

If you’re approaching another career decision, perhaps it’s worth setting side the development plan for a moment and considering the direction you’re heading.

If nobody expected you to take the next logical step, would you still want to take it?

I spent a lot of my corporate career sitting in rooms where we talked about people’s potential.

Talent reviews, succession planning meetings, leadership development discussions. We’d spend hours talking about who was ready for the next role, who needed more experience and who probably wasn’t going to make it into management.

Sometimes the conversations were thoughtful and genuinely useful. Other times I’d sit there listening to people make very definite statements about someone’s future and wonder whether anyone had actually asked that person what they wanted.

I also remember how much weight could be placed on an assessment. We’d spend a considerable amount of money trying to understand someone’s capabilities, personality or leadership potential, and I’d find myself reminding managers that the results were one piece of information. Something to consider alongside everything else we knew about the person.

Sometimes that message seemed to get lost somewhere between receiving the report and sitting down to discuss it.

An assessment might suggest someone preferred to think things through before speaking, worked best independently or wasn't particularly comfortable making decisions without enough information. All potentially useful things to understand, but somehow those observations could become reasons why someone wasn’t considered for a leadership role.

The report might have been gathering dust in a filing cabinet, but apparently its conclusions had aged remarkably well.

I wasn’t only interested in the judgement being made. It was the assumptions sitting underneath it.

We’d developed a fairly clear picture of how a leader should behave, and we were assessing people against it. There were good reasons for that. Organisations needed ways to make decisions about capability and readiness. Competency frameworks, assessments and development plans helped make expectations clearer and gave people something practical to work towards.

I’ve seen those tools help people grow. I’ve also seen them become a rather narrow definition of what good leadership looks like.

You should be confident, but not overconfident. Assertive, but not aggressive. Collaborative, but decisive. Strategic, but close enough to the detail to know what’s going on. Preferably all before lunch.

The difficulty wasn’t that these qualities were unimportant. It was that we could become so focused on how someone was expected to demonstrate them that we overlooked other ways of achieving the same result.

I’ve met women who were already leading projects, influencing decisions and taking responsibility for other people’s work, yet still questioned whether they were leadership material.

Often they were looking at the leaders around them and seeing people who operated quite differently.

They noticed who spoke up in meetings, who seemed comfortable making decisions on the spot and whose opinions carried weight. They paid attention to what got recognised and rewarded. Naturally, they began to think that progressing meant learning to behave more like those people.

That’s where I think something important can get lost. When you’re constantly looking for the qualities you believe you’re missing, it’s easy to overlook the ones you’re already using.

Someone might be particularly good at bringing people together, noticing what others have missed or making sense of a complicated situation. But if she’s been told she needs to be more assertive or more visible, she may spend far more time thinking about how to demonstrate those qualities than recognising the value of what she’s already contributing.

I remember conversations with people who’d been told they needed to speak up more, make decisions faster or show greater confidence. Sometimes that was useful feedback. There were skills to develop and situations where a different approach would help.

I was always interested in what happened next.

Did they learn to communicate their views more clearly, or did they simply start talking more? Did they become better at making decisions, or did they start making them faster because that looked more confident? Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Most of us learn to navigate a workplace by observing what’s expected and adjusting our behaviour. It’s sensible to listen to experienced people, take feedback seriously and understand how things work. I wouldn’t have got very far in my own career without doing some of that.

But there’s a difference between advice that helps you become more effective and advice that simply makes you more like someone else. I think that distinction becomes important when you’re beginning to see yourself as a leader.

If you’ve spent years being recognised for doing things well, meeting expectations and delivering what other people need, it can feel quite natural to approach leadership in the same way. You identify what a good leader is supposed to look like, work out where you fall short and set about closing the gaps.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve. The difficulty comes when you start treating every difference between yourself and the leaders around you as something that needs correcting.

Someone who prefers time to think doesn’t need to become impulsive to make good decisions. They may need to learn how to make decisions within a tighter timeframe, but that’s not quite the same thing. Someone who works well independently doesn’t need a personality transplant to build good relationships.

Understanding how you naturally operate doesn’t remove the need to develop. It gives you a more useful place to begin.

I’ve become interested in what happens when people stop approaching their development as a list of things they need to fix. Instead, they begin to look more closely at what they’re already good at and where it makes a difference. They can still ask what they need to learn, but they’re no longer assuming that every expectation they’ve absorbed is worth pursuing.

That doesn’t always produce comfortable answers. A strength you’ve relied on for years might be getting in your way in certain situations. Or something you’ve been trying to change might turn out to be useful once you understand when and how to use it.

Trusting yourself doesn’t require you to believe you’re already doing everything well. You can recognise where you need to develop without treating every shortcoming as evidence that you’re not suited to leadership.

That becomes especially important as you take on more responsibility.

There won’t always be a process to follow or a manager who can tell you what to do. You’ll encounter situations where the information is incomplete, people disagree and the sensible option isn’t immediately obvious.

You can spend a great deal of energy trying to work out what a more experienced leader would do. Sometimes asking for their perspective will be exactly the right thing. But eventually, you’ll need to decide what you think is right.

I’ve known good leaders who were quite willing to admit they weren’t sure. They’d listen to different views, make the best decision they could with the information available and reconsider it when something changed.

There’s another change I’ve noticed as people move into leadership, especially those who’ve built a reputation for being capable and reliable. They can find it surprisingly difficult to stop being the person who does everything.

They’ve become accustomed to being the one who sorts things out, takes responsibility when something goes wrong or steps in when a job needs doing. Often those are the very qualities that helped them progress. There’s something reassuring about knowing you can handle things yourself. But being capable of doing something doesn’t mean you’re the person who should be doing it.

I’ve seen managers become so busy solving problems for their teams that they barely had time to think about the work only they could do. They were working incredibly hard, and often doing a very good job of the things they took on, but they were also making themselves responsible for decisions and tasks that other people could have learned to handle.

Sometimes the more valuable contribution would have been to ask a question, provide some guidance or give someone else the opportunity to work it out. That can be difficult when being the capable one has become an important part of how you see yourself. If you’re used to demonstrating your value by being helpful, dependable and getting things done, stepping back can feel rather like you’re not doing your job.

Yet leadership often asks you to use your capability differently.

You still need to know when to step in. There will be difficult decisions to make and moments when people need you to take responsibility. But leadership also means recognising when someone else is better placed to take something forward.

I think this is something women who are beginning to lead can find particularly difficult. They’re capable, conscientious and used to being relied upon. They want to do well and they take their responsibilities seriously, but they’re also paying close attention to what other people expect, where they think they’re falling short and whether they’re doing enough to be seen as leadership material.

That’s a lot to carry into a role before you’ve even begun dealing with the actual work.

Perhaps part of becoming a leader is learning to be a little more discerning about what deserves your attention. Not every piece of feedback needs to become a development goal. Not every strength needs to be demonstrated in every situation and not every problem needs you to be the person who solves it.

None of this means ignoring advice or pretending there’s nothing you need to improve. It means being a little more selective about what you take on board, rather than assuming that every piece of feedback is another reason to question yourself.

I often think back to those talent discussions and wonder about the people we talked about so confidently.

How many were already demonstrating leadership in ways we hadn’t fully recognised? How many had become so focused on developing the qualities we thought were missing that they’d stopped noticing what they were already good at?

We need to be more curious about the different ways people can lead.

Perhaps we need to extend some of that curiosity to ourselves.

If you’ve come to believe that you’re not quite the sort of person who makes a good leader, it might be worth thinking about where that belief came from.

What have you been paying attention to when you think about your own development and how much of that attention has gone towards trying to become somebody else?

I became a mother at 40, so by the time my daughter came along I’d already spent a good twenty years working.

I was pretty good at work. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. I mean I knew how to work. I knew how to get things done, how to step up when something needed doing, how to stay late if we were up against a deadline. I travelled when I needed to travel. If something changed at the last minute, I moved things around. Work needed something and, generally, I found a way to make it happen.

Then I had a child and suddenly there was this other person in my life who really didn’t care if I had an important meeting. It didn’t make me care less about my work. That’s the thing. I think we sometimes talk about becoming a mother as though your priorities change overnight and suddenly work doesn’t matter anymore. That wasn’t my experience. I still wanted to be good at what I did. I still wanted to contribute and be the person people could rely on. I just had a lot less room to move things around.

School holidays are probably the most obvious example. They still make me laugh because the maths is ridiculous. Your child gets weeks and weeks of school holidays, you get considerably less annual leave, and somehow you’re supposed to make those two things work together. Of course you do. You take some leave. Your partner takes some. You find a holiday programme. If you have family nearby, maybe they help. You make deals with other parents. You look at your calendar and your child’s calendar and start moving things around like some sort of deranged game of Tetris. Then you go to work.

I’m making light of it, but I think there’s something in that. Because I was good at making things work long before I became a mother. Most of us who’ve spent any length of time in organisations are. We learn quite quickly that being someone people can rely on is a good thing.

It is a good thing and I don’t want to throw that out. I like working with people who care about what they do. If we’re in the middle of something difficult, I want to know that the people around me will step up. I want to be one of those people too. I get a lot of satisfaction from doing something well, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with working hard. I certainly don’t want us to get to a place where every time work asks something difficult of us we decide it’s an infringement on our wellbeing. Sometimes work is hard. Sometimes life is hard.

The bit I’m less sure about is what happens when you become so good at making it work that nobody, including you, stops to ask whether it’s actually working.

For years, if an opportunity came along I would ask “Can I do this?” Can I manage the role, handle the responsibility, make the logistics work? Often the answer was yes. It has taken me a lot longer to realise that there’s another question: do I want the life that comes with doing this? Those are not the same question at all.

Motherhood make it much harder for me to ignore because suddenly my choices didn’t only affect me. It wasn’t just a question of whether I was willing to stay late or prepared to catch another plane. I could still do those things, and I did. Sometimes I wanted to, and the opportunity was absolutely worth it. But I was now much more conscious that there was a life happening around the work.

Honestly, there had always been a life happening around the work. I just hadn’t paid as much attention to it.

That’s what I’m seeing differently when I think about leadership too. When you’re leading people, the ones you worry about tend to be the ones where something is obviously not working. They are not delivering or they are missing deadlines. The person who keeps dropping balls will eventually get your attention.

It’s surprisingly easy to pay less attention to the person who keeps catching them. Give her something and it will get done. If something goes wrong, she’ll sort it. You know you can rely on her, which is wonderful when you’re the person who has to get a whole lot of things done through other people. And because everything keeps getting done, there isn’t necessarily anything telling you to look more closely.

I’ve been there. Of course I gave important work to the person I knew would deliver. Why wouldn’t I? But I’m not sure I always thought about what it took for that person to keep delivering. That’s different.

Someone can be excellent at her job and be moving heaven and earth behind the scenes to stay excellent. You don’t necessarily see that because the work keeps arriving on time. I think working mums can be particularly good at this. We make plans and backup plans. Sometimes we have backup plans for the backup plans. We know which meeting absolutely cannot move and which one might. We get good at appearing in one part of our life while quietly managing the other part somewhere in the background.

That doesn’t mean every working mum is struggling, by the way, and I don't want to turn it into that story either. I love being a mum and I’ve loved a lot of my work. Sometimes the juggle is fine and sometimes it isn’t. I think the difference is much easier to see when you actually know the person.

It sounds obvious, but I’m not sure the workplace has always worked that way. We’ve been very good at knowing people professionally: what they are good at, what their goals and gaps are, what they need to develop for the next role. All useful things to know.

There’s another kind of knowing that’s less tidy because it doesn’t fit quite so neatly into a development plan or performance conversation. It means knowing something about the person who has the goals and the gaps, and what else might be going on in the life around their work. That doesn’t mean we need to know everything. I don’t particularly want to tell my colleagues every detail of my private life, and I’m sure they don’t want to tell me theirs. But there’s a difference between having privacy and having to pretend that the rest of your life has no bearing on the person who turns up at work.

Maybe it’s simply knowing someone well enough that there’s space for them to say, “Look, I can do this, but I can’t keep doing it like this,” without you immediately thinking they’re not committed. Or someone can say, “School holidays are a nightmare this year. Can I work differently for the next few weeks?” and you don’t quietly wonder if she is still serious about her career.

It doesn’t mean you have to say yes to either of those things. There is still work to do. Customers still need things and deadlines exist. Other people in the team have lives as well. If one person puts something down, somebody else may have to pick it up. That matters.

We lose something important if we forget that work is an exchange. I give something, you give something and we rely on each other. There are times I’ll do more because you need me to, and hopefully there are times when you’ll do the same for me. What’s changing, I think, is that we need to be able to talk more honestly about that exchange. Not just, “Are you getting the work done?” but, “How is this actually working?” Those can have two completely different answers.

That’s where my own view of leadership has changed. I used to think a leader needed to know how to get the best out of people. Even writing that now feels slightly odd, as though the best is something sitting inside them that I need to extract.

I’m interested now in creating the kind of relationships as a leader where we can be honest about what good work requires. I can expect a lot from you and you can expect things from me too. We can care about the work, do it well, step up when we need to and still be able to say something isn’t working. None of that means there’s less commitment. It just asks more of the relationship.

I still like being relied upon, and that’s not going anywhere. I like knowing that if I say I’m going to do something, people believe me. I want my daughter to grow up knowing that working hard and becoming good at something can be enormously satisfying.

I just don’t want her to think that because she can carry something, she has to keep carrying it. I don’t want to be the leader who looks at someone doing everything beautifully and assumes that I don’t need to ask how she’s doing.

Maybe what makes work worth it isn’t only the work. Maybe it’s being able to do work that matters to you, with people you can rely on, without having to disappear from the rest of your life to prove that they can rely on you.

I’ve spent more than thirty years around organisations, leaders and leadership development, and after that long you start to see the same things get read as “leadership” over and over again.

Confidence is a big one. Being articulate. Having an answer when someone asks a difficult question. Being able to walk into a room and take charge of it without looking remotely uncomfortable about the fact that twenty people are staring at you waiting to hear what you think.

I’ve watched people get promoted on the back of those things. I’ve been in plenty of conversations about who has potential, who’s ready for the next role, who needs more development, who has that slightly mysterious thing we call “executive presence”.

At some point, though, I think we start confusing the signals of leadership with leadership itself.

That’s not to say those qualities don’t matter. Being able to take something complicated and explain it in a way that helps everyone understand what is going on is a hugely valuable skill. I’ve worked with people who could walk into a completely muddled situation, listen for a while and somehow find the three sentences that made everything clearer.

The problem comes when sounding like you know becomes part of the proof that you should be leading.

I’ve been part of that world too. I’ve spent a large chunk of my career in HR and senior leadership, inside the systems that identify and develop leaders, and I’ve absorbed plenty of the messages that come with it.

One of them is that the more senior you become, the more you’re supposed to know.

Nobody actually tells you that. There isn’t a little card tucked inside your promotion letter saying, Congratulations, from Monday onwards please have an answer for everything. It just sort of seeps in.

People start coming to you for answers. The decisions get bigger. There are more eyes on what you say. Saying “I’m not sure” can start to feel a little more uncomfortable than it used to.

So you learn how to answer. You learn how to make the recommendation, present the strategy, hold the room and give people confidence that there is, in fact, a plan.

Sometimes there is. Sometimes you’re also standing there thinking, God, I hope this works.

I’ve certainly done both.

Confidence and certainty aren’t the same thing.

You can be confident enough to make a decision without being certain it’s the right one. You can give people direction without pretending you know exactly where you’ll end up. You can know enough to take the next step without knowing steps seven, eight and nine.

There are plenty of situations now where steps seven, eight and nine simply aren’t available to us yet.

Take AI. We’re all talking about what it means for work, jobs, teams and organisations while simultaneously trying to work out what it means for work, jobs, teams and organisations. There isn’t a leadership manual hidden away somewhere with the answers in the back.

The same is true of a lot of organisational change. I’ve been around enough restructures to know that however lovely the new boxes look on the PowerPoint slide, nobody really knows how the organisation is going to work until actual human beings start working inside it.

Then there are all the much smaller things that don’t make it into articles about “the future of work” but are sitting on a leader’s desk on a random Thursday morning.

A team that isn’t quite working. Someone who was brilliant six months ago and suddenly isn’t. A new boss. A role nobody has properly defined. A decision where both options have consequences. A change that’s perfectly sensible on paper but isn’t landing with the people who are supposed to make it happen.

That’s leadership too, and most of the time there isn’t a neat answer.

The person worth following in those moments might not be the one who can make us believe they know exactly what happens next. Maybe what we’re looking for changes when certainty isn’t actually available.

The ability to explain still matters. Experience and judgement definitely still matter. Perhaps we’re also looking for the person who can help us move when there isn’t a perfect answer. Someone willing to begin somewhere and find out what happens next.

It might be the person who can say: Here’s what I know. Here’s what I don’t know yet. Here’s what I think we should try. What are you seeing?

I like that, because you’re not pretending to know something you don’t, but you’re not leaving everyone floundering either. You’re saying, this is what I can see from where I’m sitting, this is what I think we should do next, and I might be missing something, so tell me what you’re seeing.

I’d follow that person.

I don’t mean I want leaders wandering around saying they haven’t got a clue. Experience and judgement still matter enormously. It’s more about being able to recognise the difference between what you genuinely know and what you’re pretending to know because being the leader makes you feel as though you should.

I want someone who has enough judgement to take a thoughtful first step when there isn’t enough information to construct the perfect ten-step plan, and enough humility to pay attention to what happens after they’ve taken it.

Otherwise we simply replace the leader who has all the answers with the leader who has the big new idea, and everyone is still expected to follow along. I’m not sure that’s much of an evolution.

Once you’ve actually started, all sorts of things happen that you couldn’t have known when you made the plan.

You find out that the team heard something completely different from what you thought you’d said. The process that looked sensible doesn’t work in practice. Someone closer to the customer sees a problem you couldn’t see from where you were sitting. The person you thought would resist the change becomes the person who makes it work.

So you listen. You change something, and you try again.

That sounds incredibly obvious written down, but I’m not convinced it’s how leadership has always felt from the inside.

We’ve spent a lot of time teaching people how to be credible leaders. How to communicate with impact, influence, make decisions, have difficult conversations and think strategically.

All useful things. But if credibility gets tangled up with certainty, we create another problem.

What happens if you’re naturally someone who wants to think before you answer? Or you’re the leader who notices things rather than announces things? Maybe your strength is asking the question that changes the conversation rather than being the person with the fastest response.

What if you’re very good at listening, but you’ve spent years thinking you need to talk more because that’s what senior leaders do?

This is where I think the problem might be less about whether we’ve chosen the right leadership qualities and more about the fact that we’ve been looking for the same combination of qualities in everyone.

We build the picture of what a good leader looks like, then assess people against it, find their gaps and start working on them. Not strategic enough. Not visible enough. Needs more gravitas. Needs to speak up. Needs to delegate. Needs to be more decisive.

Some of that feedback will be completely valid and useful, but I wonder how often we ask something much simpler:

How does this person actually lead well?

Not how could we make them look more like the person who got promoted before them. Not which bits of the competency framework are still missing. This person.

Maybe that changes our relationship with “I don’t know yet” as well.

Leadership doesn’t require you to know everything. It might require you to know yourself well enough that you don’t need to perform knowing. That feels like a much more useful place to start.

So I’m going to try something.

Over the next little while, I’m going to pay attention to the people I instinctively recognise as leaders. Not necessarily people with leadership titles. I’m more interested in the people I trust, whose judgement I seek, who I’d choose to work with again, and who I’d be prepared to follow into something when none of us quite knows how it’s going to turn out.

I want to notice what I’m responding to.

Maybe it is confidence or experience or the way they speak. Perhaps it’s also the way they listen. Whether they can make a decision without pretending it’s guaranteed to work. Whether they can change their mind without treating that as some kind of leadership failure. Whether they create enough direction for people to move while leaving room for other people to contribute to where they’re going.

I’m not particularly interested in replacing one leadership mould with another. We’ve spent long enough trying to squeeze people into those. I want to know what happens when we widen what we’re prepared to recognise as leadership and start with the individual human being doing the leading.

Perhaps the question isn’t How do I become the kind of leader I’m supposed to be?

It’s How do I lead well as me?

Sometimes that might mean being the person who’s comfortable enough to say, “I don’t know yet. But here’s where I think we could begin.”

I’ve spent most of my working life inside organisations, and for most of that time we’ve developed leaders in pretty much the same way.

First, we decide what good leadership looks like. We build the framework, define the competencies and behaviours, and then assess people against them.

I’ve watched this happen from the inside more times than I can count. Often it starts by looking at the people who’ve already succeeded. What do they have in common? What do they do well? Add some research, interviews, maybe an external consultant, and eventually you have your leadership model.

Then, because organisations are organisations, we operationalise it. The competencies become rating scales. The rating scales become calibration conversations. And before long, something that started as a description of good leadership is influencing who gets the stretch role, who makes the succession list and who gets promoted.

Now, there’s plenty about this that makes sense. Of course organisations need standards. Of course there are things we should expect from people who have responsibility for other people’s careers, livelihoods and working lives.

But I think somewhere along the way we confused having standards with believing there was one best way to meet them.

I’ve also seen what happens when someone doesn’t naturally resemble the model. She gets told she needs more polish. More visibility. More strategic presence. More of whatever the organisation has decided leadership should look like.

Sometimes that feedback is absolutely right. We all have things we need to work on. But sometimes a very capable person ends up spending an enormous amount of energy trying to look more like somebody else’s idea of a leader.

Consistency has a way of slipping into conformity before anyone notices.

And now we’re doing it again

Every conversation about leadership and AI seems to produce a list sooner or later. Adaptability. Curiosity. Empathy. Digital fluency. Critical thinking. Systems thinking. Comfort with ambiguity. “Human skills” - as if we’ve just discovered that empathy exists.

To be clear, I don’t particularly disagree with any of it. Curiosity matters when the tools beneath us keep changing. Judgement matters when AI can generate options faster than we can evaluate them. Nobody really has this figured out, so being able to operate without certainty matters too.

It’s not really the list that bothers me. It’s what we’re going to do with it, because I can already see the frameworks coming: the assessments, the development programs, the new definition of the “future-ready leader” that everyone can start measuring themselves against.

The language shifts. The system stays the same

I think that misses something much more interesting about what’s happening.

AI isn’t simply another technology leaders need to learn. It’s starting to change the work itself. Things that once took a considerable amount of time, expertise and effort can increasingly be done in minutes. Information can be summarised, data interrogated, options generated, plans challenged and communications drafted.

None of that was ever the whole job of leadership, obviously. But it took up a lot of our time, and being good at it gave people a certain amount of credibility.

When AI can produce ten reasonable options in the time it once took us to develop two, generating the options becomes less valuable. Knowing which one makes sense for this organisation, this team and this moment becomes more valuable. If the first draft becomes easy, knowing what the draft is missing matters more. As information becomes abundant, discernment matters more.

That doesn’t make expertise irrelevant. But I do think it starts to change where some of the value sits.

That leaves me with a much more interesting question than whether leaders can learn to use AI:

When more of what leaders can produce becomes easier to produce, what becomes more important about the person doing the leading?

Leading through what AI changes

There’s another part of this conversation that I think we need to talk about too. Leaders aren’t only being asked to adopt AI. They’re going to have to leave people through what it changes.

Some of it will be exciting, and some of it will be anything but. Roles will change and some will disappear. Expertise that took years to develop may suddenly feel less scarce. There will be people wondering what they are still valued for when technology can do in seconds something they spent years learning to do.

There will be leaders sitting opposite those people - leaders making decisions about jobs, leaders implementing restructures, leaders who know their teams are frightened and who cannot truthfully sit there and promise that everything is going to be okay.

That isn’t simply a change management problem with a communications plan attached.

If you’re worried about whether your job will exist in twelve months, you probably don’t need another slide about the opportunities ahead. You might need someone to be honest with you. To listen without immediately trying to make you feel better. To tell you what they know, what they don’t know and what happens next.

AI doesn’t make that part of leadership less important. If anything, I think it makes it easier to see how important it always was.

Some things really do still matter

One of the things I find slightly frustrating about the conversation around AI is this idea that everything has changed, so everything we knew before must somehow be out of date.

I just don’t buy that.

I’ve been around leaders for a long time now, and some things matter whether AI is in the room or not. Judgement still matters, and so do integrity and trust. Being able to sit with someone in a difficult conversation without rushing to make the discomfort go away matters. Leaders still have to take responsibility for their decisions.

AI can help with almost everything around a decision. It can lay out the options, model possible consequences and surface something you might have missed. It can’t own the decision. It doesn’t sit in the room afterwards and answer for what happens next.

You’re the one who does.

That’s what I mean when I talk about leadership foundations. Not another list of traits every leader needs to possess, but the things underneath how we lead that remain important even as the context around us changes.

The expression of them might change. What good judgement asks of you might change. What trust looks like in a workplace full of AI-generated information might change. The conversations requiring courage will certainly change.

But the foundation underneath them doesn’t suddenly disappear because a new technology arrived.

What have we already built?

This is the part I find particularly interesting when I think about experienced women.

Sit down with a woman who has fifteen or twenty years of working life behind her and ask what she brings to a role, and chances are she’ll start telling you the things that belong on her CV: roles, projects, qualifications, results.

But there’s so much underneath that which never appears on a CV.

Over time, she’s learned how an organisation actually works, rather than how the organisational chart says it works. She can walk into a meeting and sense who’s really deciding, who isn’t convinced and where the resistance is likely to appear in a corridor conversation afterwards.

She’s learned when a no needs to be said plainly and when something needs time. She knows the difference between a fight worth having and one that’s going to cost more than it achieves - often because she’s got that judgement wrong before.

She’s watched strategies meet reality. She’s sat with failure. Not the neat version we all package up for an interview when somebody asks about our biggest learning experience, but the real kind, where something she built or believed in didn’t work.

And over all those years she’s learned things about timing, relationships, politics, judgement, and people. Maybe she’s become brilliant at taking something complicated and making it understandable. Maybe she can hold a difficult relationship together when somebody else would walk away. Maybe she spots a pattern because she’s seen a version of it three times before.

A CV tells you what she did. It rarely tells you what she learned about people while she was doing it. I think of all of that as leadership capital.

I wonder if we’ve been undervaluing quite a lot of it, because much of that capital doesn’t become less useful as AI takes on more analysis, drafting and coordination. Some it may become more useful.

AI can analyse what the numbers say. It doesn’t carry twenty years of experience of what happens when a particular kind of decision meets an actual organisation. It doesn’t know this team the way you know this team. It doesn't have your relationships, your credibility or the history sitting behind the conversation you’re about to. have.

You’re the one who does.

I keep coming back to why so many development conversations begin with what someone lacks. I think part of the answer is simply that our systems are very good at finding gaps. If you compare somebody with a model, the distance between the two becomes the obvious thing to talk about.

Spend enough years inside systems like that and eventually you start doing it to yourself: What do I still need to work on?

There’s nothing wrong with that question. I’ve asked it plenty of times myself. What if it wasn’t the only question? What if we also asked: What have I already built that may become more valuable now?

I don’t think moving forward means throwing away everything that came before. Discipline still matters. Mastery matters. Commitment matters. So do focus, clear communication, relationships, courage, boundaries and knowing how to contribute without exhausting yourself.

There is real wisdom in what we’ve already learned, and it’s worth carrying forward. We might need to get better at recognising it.

We still need to change - that part hasn’t gone away

I don’t want this to turn into one of those comforting arguments that says just be more human and AI can’t touch you. I don’t think that’s true either.

There are things leaders genuinely need to learn. We need enough understanding of AI to know where it’s useful and where it isn’t. We need to know when to hand something over and when to hold it tightly. We need to get better at recognising the difference between something that sounds convincing and something that deserves to influence a decision.

Beyond that, I think there’s another question: what does this changing context ask of this particular leader?

Think about the leader who has always been the expert in the room. She’s spent years building that expertise and it’s probably a big part of why people trust her. Now she has access to technology that can produce the analysis faster than she can.

That doesn’t make her expertise worthless. Far from it. It might change what people need from her. Perhaps her development is about using that expertise differently - bringing more judgement, asking better questions, knowing what to challenge and becoming more comfortable when she isn’t the person providing every answer.

Think about the later whose natural strength is empathy. She’s the person people go to because she listens, understands and makes space for what’s difficult. What happens when she has to lead an AI-driven restructure and make a decision that she knows will hurt people?

More empathy probably isn’t her development edge. She may need to become more comfortable making a difficult decision while still remaining humane.

Then there’s the leader who is brilliant at moving quickly. She reads a situation, makes the call and gets everyone going. There will be moments when that is exactly what her team needs. There will be others when a frightened team doesn’t need another fast decision; they need to feel involved in what happens next.

None of these women needs to become the other one. They may just need to understand where their existing way of leading serves them brilliantly - and where this changing context is asking them to stretch.

That’s what I mean by emerging possibilities.

Not a new list of things every leader needs to become good at, but possibilities. For one person that might be greater personal agency - taking ownership of what is hers to influence, decide and change. For someone else it might be relational openness, or trusting her judgement rather than continuing to gather information long after she already knows enough.

It could be communicating more in the moment instead of rehearsing the perfect response, using her capability more purposefully rather than pushing simply because she can, or having the courage to initiate something when it matters.

The point isn’t that everybody needs all of them. The development edge isn’t the same for everyone because the starting point isn’t the same for everyone.

I think we lose something important when we pretend otherwise.

What if we started with the person?

If I were building leadership development for this moment from scratch, I don’t think I’d start with another model.

I’d start with the person.

I want to understand what is already there, what is already working and what she has built over years of experience that perhaps neither she nor the organisation has properly valued.

Then I’d separate three conversations that we have a habit of bundling together.

What remains fundamental? These are her leadership foundations - the things underneath how she leads that continue to matter, even if the way she expresses them changes.

What has she already built that is worth carrying forward? This is her leadership capital - the wisdom, experience and ways of contributing she has accumulated over time, including some things she may barely notice anymore because they come so naturally to her.

What might be worth becoming curious about next? These are her emerging possibilities - not gaps on a scorecard, not a prescription for who she needs to become - just the places where the changing context might be asking something new of her.

Those feel like very different conversations to me.

If we treat everything as development, we end up trying to fix things that were never broken. If we ignore what someone has already built, we miss things that may be becoming more valuable. If wee turn the last part into another generic list of future-ready skills, we’re right back where we started.

I’m not suggesting we throw standards out of the window. We shouldn’t. Leaders need to be trustworthy. They need to make sound decisions, take responsibility for outcomes and be capable of leading other people well.

But standards don’t require standardisation.

Two people can meet the same standard through completely different strengths and very different ways of leading. Maybe that difference is about to matter more than we think.

If analysis and information become abundant, then a genuinely different way of seeing a problem becomes valuable.

Think about a leadership team. One person sees the strategic pattern. Another notices the person who hasn’t spoken. Someone understands the history behind the resistance. Someone else sees the possibility nobody has considered. One knows when to move. Another knows the organisation isn’t ready yet.

You don’t want to develop all of that difference out of them. You want to understand how to use it.

Which makes me wonder if we’ve got this slightly backwards. Maybe the organisation that’s genuinely ready for what’s coming doesn’t need its leaders to become more alike at all. Maybe it needs to become much better at recognising, developing and combining leaders who are different.

That brings me back to the belief underneath almost everything I’m building in With Carrie:

There is more than one way to lead well

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn. It doesn’t mean every way of leading is equally effective. And it certainly doesn’t mean AI changes nothing.

It just means I don’t think development always has to start by showing someone the distance between who she is and who we think she ought to be. I’d rather start by understanding what’s already there, what remains fundamental, what she has built that is worth carrying forward and then, yes, where she might need to grow as the world around her changes.

I’m less interested in asking women whether they have the skills to become a future-ready leader. My question is much simpler:

What might become more important about the leader you already are?

A small, personal invitation

I’ve been turning that question into something practical.

Your Leadership in the Age of AI is a private, personalized reflection for women navigating a changing world of work. It looks at what may remain fundamental about the way you lead, what you’ve already built that may be worth carrying forward, and what might be worth becoming curious about next.

No score, type or ranking. No generic list of AI-era leadership skills.

Just a different way of seeing the leader who is already there.

I’ve been thinking recently about what all my years working in HR actually taught me.

There are the obvious things, of course. Employment relations, organisational change, recruitment, leadership development, the intricacies of policy and process. I’ve spent a lot of my career sitting somewhere in the middle of organisations, where business decisions and people’s lives have a habit of meeting.

When I think about what has stayed with me, though, I keep coming back to judgement. More specifically, the kind of judgement that develops when you’ve spent years dealing with situations where there isn’t an obvious answer.

I don’t think I understood that earlier in my career.

Back then, being good at your job seemed to involve knowing. Knowing the legislation and policy, understanding the process, being across good practice. There was a certain comfort in that. If you knew enough, surely you could work out what to do.

Except people rarely arrive in neat, policy-shaped situations.

Two people can walk away from the same conversation with genuinely different experiences of what happened. A manager can be convinced they have a performance problem and, once you start asking questions, discover there is much more going on. A decision can be entirely reasonable from a business perspective and still be handled in a way that causes unnecessary damage.

Over time, I became much more interested in the space between what initially appeared to be happening and what was actually going on.

Employee relations will teach you that fairly quickly. You learn to listen to the first version of events without settling on a conclusion too soon. Sometimes one conversation reveals a piece of information that shifts your understanding of the whole situation. Sometimes the context changes how you see something you thought was reasonably clear.

One question has stayed with me from those years: What do I actually know here?

It’s surprisingly useful. It creates a little distance between the information in front of you and the conclusions you’re beginning to form. It gives you room to notice where you’ve filled in a gap yourself or accepted somebody else’s interpretation as fact.

That small amount of space can make a considerable difference to the decision that follows.

Organisational change brought a different version of the same question.

A restructure can make perfect sense on paper and still be led poorly. There are times when organisations have to make decisions that people won’t welcome. Roles disappear or change. Work moves. The business rationale may be completely sound.

How people are treated while that happens stays with them.

People remember whether someone was prepared to answer a difficult question properly. They notice when communication becomes vague because managers are uncomfortable with what they have to say. They know when consultation feels meaningful and when everyone in the room suspects the decision has already been made.

There is no way to make every organisational decision easy for the people affected by it. But the way you go about it matters enormously. You can be clear about what is happening and thoughtful about how you communicate it. You can make a difficult decision while remaining conscious that somebody else has to live with the consequences.

And that was often where leadership became much more visible to me.

Organisations can spend an enormous amount of time defining what good leadership looks like. Yet some of the clearest examples I’ve seen have happened in fairly ordinary workplace conversations.

A manager has to talk to a previously strong employee whose performance has changed. Someone is deeply disappointed about missing out on a role. A team is unsettled by change and wants answers their leader doesn’t yet have.

Those situations reveal a lot about how someone leads. Can they listen properly while still holding their position? What happens when the other person becomes upset or angry? Can they take responsibility for a difficult decision without retreating behind HR, policy or “the business”?

Those conversations have probably shaped my understanding of leadership more than any competency model. They showed me that judgement isn’t only about reaching a sound decision. It is also present in what happens once another person is sitting across the table from you.

Hiring raised another set of questions.

We form impressions of people remarkably quickly. Someone seems confident or senior. Another person feels as though they would fit easily into the team. A candidate reminds us, consciously or otherwise, of people we’ve worked successfully with before.

The interesting part is what happens to those impressions once we have them.

I’ve heard comments like, “They didn’t feel senior enough.” Or, “I’m not sure they’d fit here.” Sometimes, “The other candidate had more presence.”

Whenever I hear language like that, I want to know more. What did we actually observe? What does “senior enough” mean for this particular role? What are we seeing in one candidate that we’re overlooking in another?

Fair hiring depends on good process, but the quality of the thinking within that process matters just as much. Judgement is always present. Becoming more conscious of how we’re using it gives us a better chance of making a considered decision.

Maybe that’s what experience has changed most for me.

I used to assume that the longer I worked, the more certain I would become. I thought experience would eventually make decisions easier because I would have seen enough to know what to do.

I’m less convinced of that now.

Experience gives you a considerable body of knowledge to draw from. You remember what happened when an organisation avoided the difficult conversation for six months. You’ve seen a seemingly straightforward performance issue become much more complicated once someone asked a better question. You know how differently a decision can play out once it leaves the meeting room and reaches the people affected by it.

All of that becomes part of how you read a situation.

I’ve also come to understand that experience doesn’t guarantee we’ll always feel confident about what we see.

There can be periods in a career when we question our read of things more than usual. We hesitate where we might once have spoken. Something we would previously have said without too much thought stays in our head instead. We can know a great deal and still wonder whether we’re the person who should say it.

I’ve become curious about the gap. Judgement accumulates over a career. Our confidence in expressing it seems to be much less constant.

And perhaps that’s part of what leadership evolution asks us to pay attention to. What we carry forward from all those years of experience matters too.

There’s a lot of conversation about how leaders need to keep developing, and of course we do. There will always be things worth reconsidering and ways of working that no longer suit us.

But I wonder whether there are also times when the more useful question is what we already know that we’ve stopped trusting.

A long career leaves us with a considerable body of knowledge, much of which becomes so familiar that we barely recognise it as expertise anymore. We notice things because we’ve encountered some version of them before. We know when the first explanation probably needs another question. We can sometimes sense when a process has become more important than thinking properly about the situation in front of us.

We’ve also lived through the consequences of decisions that once existed only on a piece of paper.

That experience accumulates quietly, and I’m paying more attention to it these days.

There will always be situations where reasonable people look at the same information and reach different conclusions. Experience doesn’t remove that complexity, and it certainly doesn’t make every judgement correct. What it gives us is a deeper well to draw from when we have to decide what we think.

Perhaps the question I’ve landed on is slightly different from the one I started with:

What have I learned to see that I no longer notice I know?

I’m not sure I have a complete answer yet, but it’s a question I’m interested in keeping.

There is plenty about leadership you learn over time, and much of it matters. At some point, though, you have to recognise what was already yours before any of that began.

No one steps into a senior role knowing how to do it. You pick things up as you go. You learn how to run a meeting, handle a difficult conversation, read the politics in a room, and make a call when there is no clear answer. You work out when to push and when to leave something alone. You notice that what someone says and what they mean can be two different things. You learn how to manage upwards, bring people with you, deliver bad news without causing unnecessary panic, and stand behind decisions you would not have made yourself.

Those lessons take time. They matter. I would not discard them.

I have never believed that dissatisfaction at work means you should reject everything you have learned and go searching for some hidden version of your “real self.” Decades of work teach you things you cannot learn anywhere else.

The issue is not that we learned how to lead. The issue is that many of us started to assume that everything important about leadership had to be learned. I do not think that is true.

Long before the programs and the reviews, you already had your own way of operating. You noticed things other people missed. You made sense of people in a particular way. You had your own pace for reaching a decision. You recognised when something was off. You could get to the heart of a problem. You created trust. You saw connections that were obvious to you and invisible to others.

Most of that felt natural, so you did not treat it as valuable. We tend to pay more attention to the things we had to work hard to learn than the things we have always done without effort. The result is predictable. We invest in the skills we had to build and overlook the ones that were already there.

Work adds its own expectations. Be more visible. Speak sooner. Have an answer. Move faster. Think strategically. Build your profile. Delegate. Network. Show confidence. You are capable, so you learn to do those things. Some of them help. That matters.

I have had feedback that improved the way I communicate. I have learned from people who were better at certain things than I was. I have developed skills that did not come naturally. That is part of becoming good at your job.

There is a difference between developing yourself and slowly editing yourself out. Many women only notice that difference late.

Adaptation works, and that is the uncomfortable truth. If it did not, you would have stopped doing it years ago. It often works well. You become polished. People rely on you. You learn what gets rewarded. You figure out which version of yourself lands best in each room. You adjust your tone when you need to. You make something sound more certain than it feels. You prepare for every possible question because being caught without an answer once stayed with you. You become the person people hand problems to because they know you will sort them out.

Over time, the things you naturally do start to sit further in the background. No one takes them from you. Other ways of operating simply seem more useful, more professional, more senior, more like leadership. After enough years, the learned version becomes so familiar that it is hard to see where it ends and you begin.

Change has a way of revealing things you did not notice before. A promotion, a restructure, a new boss, a larger team, or a role that looked right on paper but feels harder than it should. Sometimes nothing dramatic happens. You simply reach a point where you are tired of spending so much energy making everything work.

When something shifts, the approach that carried you for years does not land in the same way. You start second-guessing decisions that once felt straightforward. What used to feel like diligence now feels like over-preparation. Being the reliable one stops feeling flattering. You wonder if you. have lost confidence.

So you do what capable people tend to do. You look for the gap. You ask what you need to improve, what you are missing, what you should change. Those questions make sense.

There is another question that belongs earlier. What have you stopped using? Not what you failed to learn. What have you stopped trusting because it did not look enough like the leadership around you? That is a different place to begin.

I have spent a long time thinking about this. Two women with the same experience and capability can walk into the same situation and handle it well, yet in completely different ways. One sees the decision quickly. Another takes time, thinks it through, and returns with the question no one else considered. One creates momentum. Another notices that the momentum is heading in the wrong direction. One can bring a room with her. Another speaks rarely, but when she does, people pay attention. One thrives on constant activity. Another does her best work in focused stretches followed by space.

We flatten these differences when we talk about leadership. We build lists of competencies and behaviors and measure everyone against them. After years of watching people lead, I do not think the interesting question is whether a woman has enough of the approved characteristics. I care more about how she works when she is not trying to demonstrate any of them.

What does she notice? How does she reach a decision she trusts? Where does her influence come from? What does she see that others miss? What responsibility is genuinely hers to carry? What happens to her judgement under pressure? What lets her do excellent work without spending twice the energy it should take?

These things matter. Not because work should feel easy. Leadership never does. There will always be difficult conversations, impossible decisions, politics, deadlines, disappointing outcomes, and days when everyone wants something from you at once. Knowing yourself does not remove any of that. It changes how you meet it.

A different kind of authority comes from something quieter. It does not come from ignoring everything you have learned, and it does not come from assuming your natural way of operating is always right. It sits somewhere in between.

You keep the experience. You keep the skills. You keep the feedback that genuinely helped you. You keep the scar tissue as well, because twenty years at work teaches you things no framework can match.

What changes is the weight you give each part. You stop assuming that learned behaviour automatically deserves more authority than your own way of operating. You start to see the difference.

Some things you learned still serve you. Some you no longer need. Some you have been doing for years only because you thought you should. And some things were yours from the beginning.

That last group interests me the most. It is often the part a woman has been looking at the least.

We spend the early part of our careers looking outward. It makes sense. Other people have more experience, and we need skills, context, feedback, and examples. The problem is when that becomes the only direction we look. At some point, development has to turn inward.

Instead of asking what a good leader would do, you start asking a different question. Given what this situation requires, how do you lead it well? The shift is subtle. The first question begins with the model. The second begins with the woman standing in front of the problem.

Her experience. Her judgement. The way she sees. The way she decides. The things she does unusually well. And yes, the places where she needs to stretch. All of it belongs in the room.

This is the kind of leadership that interests me now. It does not mean throwing away everything we have learned or becoming a new version of ourselves. It does not mean pretending corporate realities do not exist. It is something more practical. You understand what you have learned. You understand what was already yours. You become discerning enough to know which one the moment calls for.

After years of learning how to lead, the most useful thing you can know might be what you did not need to learn in the first place.

I was in the room.

She wasn’t.

I was on the hiring panel, and she made the final cut because she nailed how to explain her background for this role.

She’d been a director. She took two years off for her family, and when she came back, she intentionally chose a Project Manager job—not a leadership role—because it fit the life she was building right then. She spelled all of that out clearly, in her own words, during the interview.

We didn’t hire her. In our debrief afterwards, the word that kept floating around was “overqualified.”

Whatever she was told afterwards, she wasn’t in the room for the conversation I’d just heard. What she received was a rejection—something short, telling her the decision without telling her the reasoning behind it.

I knew what we actually said about her. She only knew the outcome.

That gap is what sticks with me. Not how she handled it—I have no idea, and I won’t pretend I do. Just the plain unfairness of the setup. I had heard the conversation behind the decision. She just got silence where a reason should have been.

I think about how easy it is, when you’re in her shoes, to fill that silence yourself. Nobody tells you to, but a blank space like that feels impossible to leave open. So you start working backward from the rejection, searching for an explanation. And because you’re the only person in your own head, your guesses start to feel like facts you’ve uncovered about yourself.

I don’t know if that’s what she did. I just know how tempting it can be to fill that silence yourself.

To me, here’s the difference that actually matters: what you were actually told, versus what you’ve added to explain the gap.

One is what you know you were told. The other is what you may have added because you’re trying to make sense of what you weren’t told. And once you’ve built that story, it can be easy to stop seeing it as a guess and start treating it as a truth about who you are.

If you adjust how you approach things because of clear, real feedback—that’s growth. But if you change who you are just to make sense of an unexplained rejection, that’s not humility. That’s just guessing. You can end up trying to correct something about yourself that was never established as the problem.

I’m not saying you should ignore feedback. Sometimes you get real, specific notes, and the right thing to do is take them on board. But this isn’t that. This is about what happens in the quiet space where you’re given nothing at all—and you have to figure out what to do with the unknown.

So the next time you get a rejection that tells you nothing, ask yourself the simplest question first: What was I actually told?

Not what would make it make sense. Not the story that wraps it up neatly. What were you actually told?

Then notice what you may have added to fill the quiet.

If the honest answer is that they didn’t tell you enough to know why—let that be the answer. Don’t treat it like a puzzle you’re required to solve.

It’s the exact same position she was in.

She wasn’t in the room.

“I don’t know why” isn’t a failure on her part. It’s just accurate.

I was at a lunch with a group of friends recently. There was a new woman in the group, someone I had never met. I introduced myself and, as you do, I asked her what she did. She looked at me and almost imperceptibly, she hesitated before rattling off a rather impressive job title.

Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it. The conversation carried on. Someone asked about the food. Someone else laughed about work. We chatted more and she told me what her work entailed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that pause.

Maybe no-one else would have noticed that moment – but I did. As we chatted, something started nagging at me – that there might be two careers running side by side.

That hesitation, as it often is to me, is because there is the career you write on a LinkedIn summary and the career visible in what you say yes to, protect, avoid and quietly sacrifice for. These two careers are not always the same career. I don’t know if that was true for her. But I recognised the hesitation because I’d heard it in my own voice years earlier. That tiny pause stayed with me long after lunch had finished.

Funny how a tiny hesitation can make you look back over your own career.

I did the same thing. I drifted through 30 years in corporate, and my career was anything but a straight climb up the ladder. I muted myself; I tried to do what everyone told me would make me more visible and connected and ready for the next role.

Until one day I did exactly what this woman did – I introduced myself and just before I told someone my job title, I hesitated. For a moment, I felt like I couldn’t say my title out loud. For a moment, I didn’t feel like that title was truly mine. I kept up the conversation, but that moment bugged me. Was I embarrassed? Was I surprised? Why did I feel that way? The only thing I could point to was that I hesitated because that was when I realised that what I thought I had built and what I had actually built didn’t match.

I realised I’d been trading who I actually was – and the reason I went into this field in the first place – for what was expected of me to succeed. That’s when I knew I had to take a step back.

And that step back is both enlightening and frightening.

What would you notice if you stopped looking at your job title and started looking at the career you’ve been quietly building?

Something is shifting in the conversations I’m having with women right now. Not dramatically. Not loudly. Just beneath the surface of everything else — beneath the updates about work, the stories about promotions and restructures and leadership teams, the practical conversations about what comes next.

It sounds something like this: Why does a life that looks successful feel so heavy? Why am I suddenly questioning things that used to motivate me? Why can’t I just keep doing this for another twenty years?

And honestly, I don’t think these are burnout questions. Or at least not only burnout questions. Most of the women I’m talking to are still capable. Still respected. Still delivering. They haven’t lost their edge. Something else is happening. The future they’ve been working towards no longer has the same pull it once did.

And because these are thoughtful women, they immediately turn the question back on themselves. What’s wrong with me?

I feel a different question is worth asking. I think the answer lives in moments so ordinary we barely notice them.

I was sitting in a leadership meeting once. The conversation had been going for twenty minutes. Everyone was working through a proposal. The numbers were solid. The business case was sound. Nobody had raised an objection. But something felt off. I couldn’t prove it, couldn’t point to a spreadsheet, couldn’t articulate it clearly enough to say out loud. I just knew. I’d been around long enough to recognise the pattern — enough restructures, transformations, and strategic initiatives that looked good on paper and struggled in reality. My instinct was telling me the plan would fail.

I considered saying something. Then another thought arrived. I need more evidence before I say that. So I stayed quiet. Three months later the initiative struggled for exactly the reasons I had sensed. The meeting has long been forgotten. But I remember the moment I talked myself out of speaking.

The thing is, that meeting wasn’t unusual. It was familiar. I can’t tell you how many times I talked myself out of saying something because I couldn’t quite prove it yet — how many times I waited for more data, softened something I knew to be true because it felt more professional to sound certain than to sound instinctive. The strange thing is that nobody explicitly taught me to do it. I just learned what the room rewarded. And I don’t think I was alone.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned what credibility required. We learned to arrive prepared, to have evidence, to have the answer before we spoke, to trust what we could prove more than what we sensed. And because those lessons often worked, we stopped questioning them.

The women who are quietly questioning their futures haven’t run out of capability. They’ve run out of willingness — willingness to keep overriding themselves, to keep translating every instinct into acceptable language before speaking it, to keep separating what they know from what they can defend, to keep leaving parts of themselves at the door in exchange for credibility.

I think that’s why so many women find themselves at a crossroads they struggle to explain. From the outside, very little is wrong. The career works. The life works. The responsibilities are being met. And yet something feels heavier than it used to — not because they have become less capable, but because they have become less willing to ignore themselves.

The conversation about leadership usually focuses on what women need to become. More confident, more visible, more strategic, more authentic. But I’ve started wondering whether we’re asking the wrong question. Because authentic leadership often sounds like another standard women are expected to perform. Be decisive but also vulnerable, ambitious but also relatable, strong but also emotionally intelligent. It still feels like a list of requirements.

What if the future isn’t asking women to become different leaders? What if it’s asking them to stop suppressing the capacities they have always had?

The ability to sense what hasn’t been said yet — to read a room not just for what’s visible, but for what’s underneath. The ability to recognise a pattern before everyone else sees it. To hold emotional truth as information rather than distraction. To trust what is felt, not only what can be proven.

For a long time these weren’t treated as leadership assets. They were treated as things to manage and soften, to temper with evidence and certainty. So women learned to qualify what they knew, to wait for permission from the data, to trust external proof more than internal knowing. It became so automatic most of us stopped noticing..

And maybe that’s why this particular moment feels so significant. The world these women are being asked to lead in is more complex than it used to be — more uncertain, more relational, more difficult to predict. The problems that matter most right now don’t always yield to optimisation and control. They require discernment, pattern recognition, judgement, courage — the ability to sense what is emerging before it becomes obvious. The very capacities many women learned to downplay may be the capacities the future needs most. Not instead of rigour. Alongside it. Not instead of strategy. As a deeper form of it.

Perhaps the heaviness isn’t a sign that something is wrong. Perhaps it’s a sign that something is no longer true. The women I know are not questioning their lives because they have become less capable. They are questioning them because they have become less willing to ignore themselves.

Maybe the future doesn’t need you to become a better version of the woman who learned how to succeed in the old era. Maybe it needs the parts of you that never stopped knowing there was another way. The instinct you talked yourself out of. The ambition you learned to soften. The truth you learned to qualify. The possibility you kept waiting to be ready for.

And if that’s true, then the question is no longer whether you can keep doing what you’ve always done. The question is whether you’re willing to listen to what you’ve been sensing all along.

If this resonates, I’d love to know what it’s bringing up for you. I read every reply.

I came across a graduation speech recently. Eric Church walked on stage at UNC Chapel Hill with a guitar, played a few chords — some in tune, some not — and built an entire address around that one simple, honest image.

The idea was this: a guitar has six strings, and when even one drifts out of tune, the whole chord unravels. Not gradually. Not politely. The moment you strike it, you know.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Not because it’s new — most true things aren’t. But because it named something I see constantly in the women I work with. Something that often takes years to put into words.

They’re not broken. They’re not failing. They’re playing a chord that’s drifted, and somewhere along the way they stopped trusting what they were hearing.

There was a line in that speech that landed harder than the rest.

It was about the thinnest string, the one that carries the melody. The single line above the chord that everyone in the room recognises and takes home with them. Church said the world doesn’t need another cover song. It needs an original.

That’s the string I worry about most.

Not because the women I work with have abandoned themselves in any dramatic way. The drift is quieter than that. More incremental and often dressed up as sensible adaptation. You adjust your tone for the room. You soften an edge that made someone uncomfortable once. You defer to the consensus because pushing back feels like too much right now, costs too much. Slowly, without quite meaning to, you start to sound like a very polished version of what everyone around you expected you to sound like.

The difficulty isn’t that you changed. It’s that you got so good at the cover version that you forgot it wasn’t your song.

There was another thread in that speech that stayed with me. Church talked about the temptation this generation faces — performing for everyone and belonging to no one. Being globally visible and locally invisible. Thousands of followers, and nobody who actually knows where you live.

I think about this in the context of leadership a lot.

We’ve become so fluent in personal branding, in positioning, and in curating the version of ourselves that reads well. Quietly starved of the kind of belonging that actually sustains us. The kind where someone has seen you at your actual worst, not your public-facing worst, and didn’t leave.

That kind of belonging doesn’t come from reach. It comes from roots. And roots require you to be somewhere, not just everywhere. To be known, not just seen.

Here’s what I keep returning to, and what I think sits at the heart of so much of the fragmentation I see in women who are technically succeeding.

The drift isn’t the problem.

All six strings drift in their own time, their own season. Your sense of yourself goes quiet when you need it most. Your values start to feel abstract when the pressure is high. The version of you that used to feel most real starts to seem like a luxury you can’t quite afford right now.

This is what happens when you’re a complex, feeling human being living in a world that doesn’t stop to let you tune up. It’s not weakness and it’s not a character flaw. It’s just the reality of being in it.

The question is whether you’re honest enough to hear which string has drifted. And whether you trust yourself enough to make the adjustment, rather than turning up the volume and hoping nobody notices.

You will notice. That part of you that knows what the chord is supposed to sound like — she always notices. And she won’t let you go until it’s right.

That’s where I live in my work. Not in fixing what’s broken, but in helping women hear themselves clearly again. Creating enough stillness that the drift becomes audible. Rebuilding the kind of self-trust that knows the difference between adapting wisely and abandoning yourself quietly.

You have a sound that no one else has. A way of seeing, of leading, of being in a room that belongs to you alone and has never existed before you.

The world has plenty of polished cover songs.

It needs your original.

* * *

What string do you suspect has drifted lately? I’d love to hear.

It was a weeknight — nothing special. Dinner half-done, kitchen a bit messy, everyone a little tired. My husband asked me something about the week ahead — logistics, who’s doing what, where we need to be, that kind of thing.

Normally, that conversation would pull me straight into it. I’d start organising out loud, thinking ahead, filling the gaps, carrying the mental load before I’d even realised I’d picked it up. And somewhere in that, I’d feel it — that familiar tightness. Like I’d just quietly taken responsibility for everything without being asked.

This time, I didn’t.

I listened, answered what he asked, and then I stopped. There was a small pause — I could feel the moment where I would usually step in and take over, start mapping the whole week, making sure nothing got missed, holding it all so nobody else had to. But I didn’t move into it. I just stayed where I was.

He waited for a second, and then he kept going — picked it up himself, thought it through, made a couple of decisions. And I carried on cooking.

It didn’t feel like a victory. It didn’t feel like anything particularly significant at all. That was what struck me afterward — how ordinary it was, how quietly it had happened. There was no moment of decision, no conscious effort to do something differently. I had simply noticed the pull and not followed it.

That was new.

Not the noticing — I had been noticing for a while. But the not following was different. And the fact that it felt natural rather than effortful told me something I hadn’t quite been able to see before.

Something had shifted. Not dramatically, not permanently in every situation, not without the occasional slide back into old patterns. But somewhere underneath that ordinary Wednesday night, something had quietly changed.

The changes that come from understanding how you are designed don’t usually look the way you imagine they will. They’re not dramatic. There’s no single moment where everything clicks into place and the heavier version of your life gives way to the
lighter one. It doesn’t work like that.

What actually happens is quieter than that. And in some ways more permanent.

You start to notice the pulls — the moments where you would usually step in, take over, smooth something out, carry something that drifted toward you simply because you were capable of carrying it. You notice them before you move into them. And sometimes, not always but sometimes, you stay where you are instead.

Decisions start to feel different. Not easier exactly, but less like you’re arguing with yourself to get there. Not because they become simpler, but because you trust the way you are built to make them a little more each time.

The tightness that came from quietly absorbing responsibility begins to ease — not because the responsibilities disappear, but because you become more deliberate about which ones are actually yours.

None of this requires a new system or a better set of habits.

It requires understanding. How you are wired — in the meeting and in the kitchen, in the obvious moments and in the quiet ones where nobody is watching and the pulls are just as real.

That understanding doesn’t come from reading about it generally. It comes from looking at your own design specifically. The particular way you are built, which has been shaping your decisions and your energy and your leadership your entire life — whether or not you had language for it.

If any of these essays have felt close to home — if something in them named a feeling you’d been carrying without quite knowing what to call it — that recognition is the beginning of something.

Not the whole thing. Just the beginning.

It was a Friday night — the kind where everyone is a bit tired, a bit stretched, and everything feels slightly louder than it should.

My daughter was meant to cook. That’s the agreement, Friday nights are hers. But she was already off — snappy, dragging her feet, saying she didn’t feel like it.

My husband was hovering, half-ready to step in and just get dinner sorted so it didn’t turn into a whole thing.

And I could feel that pull to just let it go. It would have been easier, faster, less friction. Nobody would have had to feel anything uncomfortable for more than five minutes.

But I also knew exactly what would happen if I did.

We’d teach her that she only has to follow through when she feels like it. That someone else will carry it when she doesn’t.

So instead of jumping in, I stayed where I was — not rigid, not annoyed, just steady.

I said something simple: “I get that you don’t feel like it. You still said you would.”

She pushed back. Of course she did — a bit of attitude, a bit of testing. This is usually where things either escalate or collapse, where I over-explain or take over or both.

But I didn’t add more words or rescue her or turn it into a lecture.

I just held it.

The kitchen went quiet. Some sighing, a bit of noise, my husband looking at me with that expression that says — are we really doing this? And I stayed steady.

Eventually, she started. Not enthusiastically, not perfectly, but she did it. And something shifted halfway through. She got into it, asked a question, took ownership in a way she wouldn’t have if I’d stepped in.

It didn’t look like leadership.

It looked like a tired family on a Friday night, and a mum who wouldn’t let things quietly collapse.

I’ve been thinking about how many moments like that one there are.

Not just the obvious ones — the difficult conversations, the decisions that have names and weight. But the quieter ones. The Friday nights. The moments where nobody is watching and nothing gets recorded and the whole thing will be forgotten by morning.

The moments where something still has to be held.

For most of my career I was taught to think of leadership as something that happened in particular places — meeting rooms, performance conversations, situations with stakes and visibility and an audience of some kind.

What I’ve come to understand is that the most consequential leadership most of us do happens somewhere else entirely.

It happens in the five seconds before you decide whether to rescue or hold.

In the silence after you’ve said the thing and someone is pushing back.

In the moment your husband looks at you and you stay steady anyway.

The skills that Friday night required were not domestic skills.

I could feel exactly what was happening with all three of us before a word was said. I knew that adding more words would make things worse, not better. I knew that stepping in would solve the immediate problem and create a larger one. I knew how to hold something without becoming rigid about it.

These are the same skills I spent twenty-nine years developing inside organisations.

I just never thought to call them that when I used them at home.

And I don’t think I’m unusual in this. Most capable women have been doing this work — the reading, the regulating, the holding, the knowing when to step in and when to stay still — in their homes and relationships for as long as they have been doing it in their careers.

They just haven’t been calling it leadership.

Because nobody told them it was.

There’s a cost to that unnamed work.

Not because it goes unappreciated — though sometimes it does. But because when we don’t recognise our own leadership, we can’t understand where our energy is actually going. We wonder why we’re tired at the end of a Friday night when we didn’t do anything particularly hard. We can’t see that we’ve been leading all day — in both rooms, often simultaneously — and that it draws from the same place regardless of which room we’re in.

Understanding how you are built to lead doesn’t just change how you show up at work.

It changes how you see yourself at home. The way you read a room before anyone’s spoken. The instinct to hold something rather than rescue it. The capacity to stay steady when everyone else is waiting for you to move.

Those aren’t habits you developed.

They’re patterns you’ve always had.

And they’re worth understanding — not so you can optimise them or do them more efficiently or find a better system for your Friday nights.

Just so you can finally see them for what they are.

Laptop closed, but I’m still at my desk. Replying to one last Teams message on my phone. Then checking email — quickly, I tell myself. It’s never actually quick.

Eventually I stand up because I have to. Usually because I can hear something happening in the house — my daughter, the TV, someone in the kitchen.

I walk out still half in work mode.

First thing I do is go straight to the kitchen — not intentionally, it’s just where everything lands. Bag on the bench, phone still in my hand, opening the fridge without really knowing what I’m looking for.

Someone asks me something. “What’s for dinner?” Or “Can you help with this?”

I answer, but I’m not fully there yet. Still somewhere in a conversation from work, or a decision I didn’t quite finish, or something that’s sitting unresolved at the edge of my thinking. I can feel it in my body — like I’m slightly ahead of myself. A bit wired. Slightly impatient. Not in a bad mood, just not settled.

The reset, when it comes, is never graceful.

It’s something small and physical. I change out of my work clothes. Or I tie my hair up. Or I put my phone down because I need both hands.

That’s when it shifts.

My body drops a gear. I start doing something practical — chopping, unpacking bags, putting washing on. And that’s when my head catches up.

By the time I’m properly into making dinner, I’m back. Present. Responding properly. Not half-listening.

I used to think of that transition as a failure of discipline.

That I should be better at leaving work at work. That a more organised version of me would have a clear handover ritual — a walk, a meditation, a specific moment where one thing ended and another began. I’d read about those rituals. I’d tried a few. They worked for a week and then dissolved back into exactly what I just described.

What I eventually stopped doing was calling it a problem.

Because when I looked at it more honestly, what was actually happening in those twenty minutes between the laptop and the dinner wasn’t a failure of transition. It was just one woman, moving through two completely different sets of demands, with the same nervous system and the same reserves she’d been drawing on all day.

The work version of me and the home version of me are not two different people.

They’re the same person. With the same patterns, the same pace, the same need for a moment to settle before she can be fully present. The same tendency to need something physical and practical before her head catches up with where she actually is.

This is what nobody says about the leadership women do at home.

It’s not separate from the leadership they do at work. It draws from the same place. The same capacity for reading a room, managing emotional temperature, holding things together when several things need attention at once. The same ability to sense what’s actually going on underneath what someone is saying. The same quiet judgement about when to step in and when to let something unfold.

At work, that’s called leadership.

At home, it’s called being a mother. Or a partner. Or just — managing the household.

But it’s the same muscle. And when it’s been in use all day, it doesn’t suddenly refill the moment the laptop closes. The depletion crosses the threshold with you. It follows you to the kitchen. It’s there when you open the fridge without knowing what you’re looking for.

The reason so many capable women feel perpetually behind at home — not doing it well enough, not present enough, not patient enough — isn’t because they’re failing at the domestic version of their lives.

It’s because they’ve been running on the same reserves all day, for both things, without ever naming it.

Understanding how you are built doesn’t make the demands lighter.

The back-to-back meetings still happen. The “what’s for dinner” still lands before you’ve properly arrived. The transition is still physical more than graceful.

But something shifts when you stop treating your own patterns as problems to fix.

When I stopped trying to manufacture a clean handover between work and home, and started understanding that my body drops a gear through physical activity — not meditation, not a walk, not a ritual I read about — the guilt about the twenty messy minutes began to ease.

Not because I fixed them. Because I understood them.

And from that understanding, something quieter became possible. I stopped arriving at dinner already behind. I stopped measuring the transition against a version of it I’d seen somewhere else and concluding I was doing it wrong.

I just let it be what it is.

A woman, moving through her whole life, with one design.

Doing the best work she knows how — in both rooms.

One afternoon I had been in back-to-back meetings. A full calendar. That slightly tight feeling that the day was running me rather than the other way around.

In the middle of it, a manager reached out. A quick “have you got five minutes?” — which, as most people know, usually isn’t five minutes.

The old pattern would have said yes immediately. Keep things moving. Be helpful. Don’t slow anything down.

But something felt off. Not wrong, just — not quite clean.

So instead of jumping on a call, I paused. And asked one question back.

“What do you need to work through?”

They replied with a long message. Lots of detail. But no real clarity.

And without overthinking it, I responded in about three lines.

I didn’t solve it for them. I didn’t give advice. I just named what was actually going on underneath everything they’d said.

Something like: “It sounds like you’ve already decided, but you’re trying to make it feel safer before you act.”

There was a pause.

Then: “Yeah… that’s exactly it.”

And that was it. No call. No follow-up. They moved.

I remember sitting with that for a moment afterward.

Not because it felt remarkable. Because it felt so ordinary. So unforced. Like I had simply done the thing that was obvious to me — and it had been exactly what was needed.

No preparation. No rehearsing how it might land. No checking whether I was being the right kind of helpful.

Just — a pause. A question. Three lines. Done.

That kind of moment used to slip past me without much notice. I was too busy measuring myself against the version of leadership I thought I was supposed to be performing — the one that was always available, always solution-ready, always moving at the pace the room seemed to require.

But this moment was different. Because I had been learning, gradually, to pay attention to the moments that felt like that. Effortless, but not in a lazy way. Natural. Like moving with something rather than pushing against it.

Most of us spend a great deal of time analysing what goes wrong.

The meeting that didn’t land. The decision that took longer than it should have. The conversation that left us feeling slightly off — like we’d said the right things but in the wrong order, or been helpful in a way that cost more than it should have.

We examine those moments carefully. We adjust. We try to do better next time.

What we pay far less attention to are the moments that go quietly right.

And yet those moments carry just as much information. More, perhaps. Because they’re not just telling us what worked. They’re telling us something about how we actually work. And that’s a different thing entirely.

That afternoon, the thing that made the difference wasn’t a skill I had practised. It was something that had always been mine. I’ve always been able to see what’s underneath what someone is saying. I don’t need to solve things to feel useful. I just never thought of those things as part of how I lead — because nobody had ever called them that.

Those aren’t habits I developed.

They’re patterns I was born with.

The problem is that for most of my career, I had been quietly trying to correct them.

Speaking sooner than felt natural because that seemed like confidence. Offering solutions because that seemed like leadership. Moving at the pace of the room because anything slower might look like hesitation.

And because I was capable, I could do all of those things reasonably well. Well enough that nobody questioned whether they were costing me anything. Well enough that I didn’t question it either — not for a long time.

What I didn’t see was that the moments that felt effortless were trying to tell me something. They weren’t accidents or flukes or particularly good days. They were the moments when I stopped performing the version of leadership I thought was required, and simply operated as myself.

It’s worth asking — not in a grand way, just quietly — when was the last time something felt like that for you?

Not easy in the sense of unchallenging. Easy in the sense of natural. Unforced. Like you were simply doing the thing that was obvious to you, and it turned out to be exactly right.

Those moments aren’t accidents.

They’re telling you something about how you are built to think, to lead, to contribute. Something that was already there, in the moments you probably didn’t stop to examine.

It might be worth examining them now.

She made it look so easy.

The Sunday night reset. A clean desk, a fresh notebook, the week laid out in careful columns before it had even begun. She talked about it the way people talk about something that has genuinely changed their lives — the clarity it gave her, the sense of control, the way it made Monday feel manageable instead of overwhelming.

I watched her and thought: that is exactly what I need.

So I tried it.

I bought the notebook. I set aside the time. I sat down on Sunday evenings with the best of intentions and attempted to do what she did. On paper, it was a sensible idea. In practice, it added pressure to the one part of the week I had been using, without fully noticing it, to quietly decompress.

The Sundays I managed it, I felt vaguely fraudulent. Like I was performing productivity rather than actually feeling clearer. The Sundays I didn’t manage it, I felt guilty. Behind. Like someone who couldn’t even maintain a simple habit that everyone else seemed to find transformative.

I tried the monthly version too. End of month reflections. Goal reviews. Intention setting. Same result. The same guilt when I missed it. The same hollow feeling when I did it.

And underneath all of it, the same quiet conclusion.

Maybe the problem was me.

It wasn’t.

But it took me a long time to understand why those systems kept falling away. Not because I wasn’t trying hard enough. Because they had been built for a completely different way of operating — and I had never stopped to consider that mine might be different too.

The woman whose Sunday reset worked wasn’t more disciplined than me. She was simply wired differently. Her energy renewed through structure and forward planning. Mine renews through space. Through processing time. Through allowing the week to settle before I reach for the next one.

When I imposed her rhythm onto my own, I wasn’t being productive.

I was working against myself.

The same pattern ran through almost everything I tried.

The morning routines that worked effortlessly for someone else. The decision-making frameworks from leadership courses. The planning systems a colleague swore by. The parenting approaches that looked seamless on someone else and felt slightly forced the moment I tried them.

None of them failed because I was inconsistent.

They failed because they weren’t built for me. They were built by someone with a specific way of operating, and handed over as though that way of operating was simply how people work.

For a long time I didn’t question that assumption. I just kept trying, kept adjusting, kept accumulating the quiet evidence that I was the one who couldn’t make things stick. And I kept arriving at the same place.

Something must be wrong with me.

What gradually shifted wasn’t finding a better system.

It was beginning to notice my own patterns. Not as flaws to correct. As information.

The way I make better decisions when I’m not rushed into them. The way I do my clearest thinking at the edges of the day rather than in the middle of it. The way I restore myself — which looks nothing like a Sunday night reset and everything like an unplanned hour of quiet.

None of that was laziness. None of it was poor discipline.

It was simply how I am built.

And the moment I began to understand that — really understand it, not just accept it as an excuse — the guilt about the systems I couldn’t sustain began to loosen. Not because I found better systems. Because I stopped measuring myself against someone else’s natural rhythm and started paying attention to my own.

If any part of this feels familiar, it may be worth sitting with a quieter question than the ones you’ve been asking.

Not what you should be doing differently.

But what your own patterns are already telling you — if you stop trying to correct them long enough to simply notice them.

The moments when something felt effortless. The decisions that came without the usual effort. The days when your leadership felt completely natural rather than carefully held together.

Those moments weren’t accidents.

They were you, moving with your own design rather than against it.

And they’re worth paying attention to.

She was standing very still in the cereal aisle.

Not frozen, not dramatic. Just that particular stillness that comes from holding too many things at once. The trolley, the list, the conversation she was half-managing with the small person beside her, and underneath all of it, that low hum of awareness that other people were starting to notice.

Her daughter wanted more ice cream. They had already had ice cream after lunch. The answer was no. Her daughter understood the word but not the reasoning, and was making her case with the kind of focused persistence that three-year-olds deploy without embarrassment.

From the outside, it probably looked like a small moment.
From the inside, it was a referendum.

I know because the woman in that cereal aisle was me.

And while my daughter argued her point with impressive conviction, I was doing something I had become very good at. Rapidly scanning everything I had read, watched, and absorbed about the right way to handle this. The parenting books. The reels. The advice about staying calm, holding firm, not negotiating, not over-explaining, maintaining authority without shame. I was trying to remember the correct version of myself for this moment.

And somewhere in the middle of all that searching, a familiar feeling arrived. That maybe, despite the reading, despite the preparation, despite the genuine effort, the problem was me.

It is a feeling most capable women know.

It doesn’t only happen in grocery stores. It shows up in performance reviews that tell you to be more visible, more assertive, more strategic. In meetings where you’ve prepared thoroughly and still leave feeling slightly off. In the slow realisation that the leadership programme your organisation invested in, the flexible working arrangement you finally negotiated, the mentoring relationship you were grateful for, none of it quite reached the thing underneath.

In the marriage, the team, the school gate. The role that asked you to be slightly more, slightly less, slightly different from what you actually are.

The support wasn’t wrong.

The flexible working wasn’t wrong. The leadership development wasn’t wrong. The manager who genuinely wanted to help wasn’t wrong. The parenting reels weren’t wrong. These things exist because someone understood that capable women needed more support, and they were right.

But here is what nobody said.

All of that support, every programme, every framework, every well-meaning piece of advice, was built for a version of you that doesn’t quite exist. A standard model. A woman who thinks, decides, and leads the way the system assumes women think, decide, and lead.

And when you are not that woman, when your wiring runs differently, when your energy works differently, when the way you make decisions and hold responsibility is fundamentally different from the template, even the best support in the world lands slightly beside the point.

So you adapted. Because you are capable, and capable women adapt.

You learned the room. You became what was required. You read more books, tried more systems, attended more sessions. And because you are intelligent and determined and genuinely committed, you did it well enough that nobody questioned whether it was costing you anything.

Including you.

Until you found yourself in a cereal aisle. Or a boardroom, or a kitchen at the end of a long week, trying to locate the correct version of yourself, and wondering, quietly, whether the problem had always been you.

I want to tell you something I wish someone had said to me in that grocery store, and in every version of that moment that came before it.

You’re not the problem.

Not in the organisation that rewarded a leadership style that never came naturally to you. Not in the kitchen when your child pushed back on a boundary you held for good reason. Not in the relationship, the team, the role that asked you to be someone you had to work very hard to perform. Not in the gap between all the support you were given and the fact that none of it quite worked.

You were never the problem.

The problem is that nobody ever helped you recognise what you already know.

Not as a concept. Not as a personality type or a quiz result. But in the specific, structural way that shapes how you think, how you make decisions, how you use your energy, and how you lead. At work, at home, and in the quiet spaces in between where nobody is watching and the weight of everything is most apparent.

When you understand that, really understand it, something shifts in a way no programme, no framework, and no amount of good support can reach.

Because the issue was never your confidence, your ambition, your discipline, or your capacity.

It was that you were trying to operate from everyone else’s answers instead of your own.

This publication exists for the woman who is tired of being handed solutions that assume she is the thing that needs fixing.

You are not.

What has been missing is not more effort or better strategies. It is a genuine understanding of how you are wired, so that the way you lead at work, the way you parent, the way you make decisions and hold boundaries and show up in your relationships, finally comes from you. Not from a template. Not from what was rewarded. Not from what everyone else seems to find effortless.

From you.

The essays here are not more leadership advice.

They are an honest account of what women like you actually experience — and what becomes possible when you stop being handed solutions that assume you’re the variable.

You were never the variable.

If something you read here lands in a way you haven’t been able to name before — I’m here. There is somewhere further to go when you’re ready.

I remember standing in the middle of a Saturday that had somehow already disappeared.

The weekend was full in the way weekends get full — laundry, meals, sport, getting everyone where they needed to be. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I noticed that everyone was looking at me. Not unkindly, and not with any real awareness of what they were doing. Just in that easy, habitual way that people look at the person who keeps everything running. I hadn’t decided to be that person. I just was.

I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to take it all on. There was no single moment, no deliberate yes. It just kept building without me really noticing. Something needed doing, so I did it. Someone needed a plan, so I made one. Someone was having a hard time, and I was there for them. Someone was off, and I dealt with it quietly before it became a thing. None of it felt like a choice at the time. It just felt like what you did when you were capable, and when the people around you had come to count on that.

And I suspect, if you’re reading this, some version of that feels familiar.

Maybe it’s your weekends that disappear the way mine did. Maybe you’re the one everyone leans on — at home, at work, probably both. The one who’s just there, for all of it, for everyone. The one who takes on more and more without anyone really asking, including sometimes yourself. Because you can handle it, and because you’re good at it, and because it’s easier to just deal with it than to leave it undone.

That’s the thing about being capable. It attracts more. And because we do it well, and because we just get on with it, nobody stops to ask whether we actually chose any of it.

The weight of it is real, but it’s also hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it. Because from the outside everything looks fine — it all gets done, life keeps moving, nobody’s complaining. But underneath that there’s a kind of tiredness that doesn’t go away after a good night’s sleep. A Sunday evening feeling of having been busy all day without the day ever really feeling like yours. A sense that you’ve been there for everyone without anyone — including you — stopping to ask how you actually are.

What I want to say to you is that this isn’t about time management, or learning to say no, or any of the other things you’ve probably already tried. It’s something simpler and quieter than all of that. It’s what happens when you spend years just taking care of everything and everyone, and gradually stop noticing the difference between the life you’ve built and the life you actually chose.

That’s not a failing. It’s just what happens when you’re the capable one.

And the truth is, most of us don't even realise how much we've taken on until we stop for long enough to actually feel it. Which doesn't happen very often, when you're the capable one. Because there's always something next. Always someone who needs something. Always a reason to just keep going.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand — and what changed things for me. When you can finally see it clearly, something shifts. Not in a dramatic way. Just in the quiet sense that when you understand how you’ve been living, you get to start making different choices about how you lead your life going forward. Not someone else’s version of it. Yours.

And that’s really where it begins.

When most people hear the word leadership, they think about work.

They picture organisational charts, titles, teams, and performance conversations. Leadership, in that sense, is something that happens inside companies and is usually tied to a role someone holds.

But over time I’ve come to think about leadership very differently.

Because the most consequential leadership decisions most of us make aren’t the ones attached to our job titles. They’re the ones that shape the structure of our lives.

How we decide what matters. How we navigate responsibility. How we respond when something in our lives no longer fits quite the way it once did.

Those decisions rarely happen in boardrooms.

They happen in the ten minutes between finishing a work call and starting dinner. In the moment you realise you’ve been managing the emotional temperature of your team all day and now your daughter needs the same steadiness from you and you’re not sure you have it left. In the Sunday evening when the week ahead is already assembling itself in your mind before the current one has finished.

The leadership doesn’t stop at the door. It never did. We just called it something different when it happened at home — patience, or organisation, or simply being a good mother. We didn’t call it leadership because nobody told us it was.

Most capable women are very good at adapting to what life requires. We step up when things need to be carried. We learn quickly. We adjust to what the moment asks of us.

That ability is often what allows us to build meaningful careers and stable lives.

But adaptation has a subtle side effect.

When we adapt long enough, it can become difficult to tell the difference between what is natural to us and what is simply well-practised. The habits that once helped us succeed quietly become the way we operate everywhere.

We develop patterns in how we make decisions, how we take responsibility, and how we respond when something needs to be handled. Many of those patterns serve us well.

Some of them quietly exhaust us.

Leadership, in the sense that interests me most now, isn’t really about managing other people. It’s about learning to see those patterns clearly. Because once we see them, we have a different kind of choice.

We can continue leading our lives in the ways we always have — often by instinct or expectation. Or we can begin reshaping them so they better reflect how we actually think, decide, and lead.

And that kind of leadership has very little to do with titles.

It has everything to do with how consciously we choose to live.

She was eleven. Old enough to know the routine, old enough to make it easy for me.

She walked me to the door that morning, gave me a hug, and I left. I was on the bus before I let myself turn the image over in my mind — her standing at the door, already composed, already letting me go without fuss. And I remember thinking: she seems too small to be that responsible.

It wasn’t a crisis. Nothing had gone wrong. By any external measure, the morning had gone exactly as it should.

But somewhere between the front door and the bus stop, something shifted. Not dramatically. Just that quiet, arriving kind of knowing that doesn’t announce itself — it simply settles, and once it has, you can’t quite unfeel it.

I hated this.

Not the work itself. Not my daughter. Not my life in any sweeping sense. Just — this. The trade. The specific arithmetic of it. All of this, in exchange for missing that.

I pushed it down because I had to. There was a full day ahead and no version of that feeling that was useful on a Tuesday morning. So I filed it somewhere underneath everything else and got on with it.

But it didn’t go away. It simmered. It kept surfacing in small moments over the following months — in the school pick up I missed, in the weekend that disappeared into work I’d brought home, in the Sunday evenings that felt more like preparation than rest. Each time I pushed it back down. Each time it came back a little closer to the surface.

This is how it usually works, I’ve come to understand. Not a single moment of realisation but a slow accumulation of them. Life keeps working — the job, the income, the career that looks solid from the outside — and underneath it something quietly stops adding up.

The difficulty is that there’s no language for it that doesn’t sound like ingratitude. You have a good job. You have a daughter who hugs you at the door and lets you leave without making it harder than it already is. From the outside, everything is fine. More than fine.

And yet.

The feeling that arrived on that bus wasn’t dissatisfaction exactly. It wasn’t burnout, and it wasn’t a desire to blow everything up. It was something quieter and more precise than any of those words. A growing sense that the way I had structured my life — the trade I had agreed to, mostly without realising I was agreeing to it — no longer reflected what I actually valued most.

Most capable women arrive at this feeling eventually. Not because they’ve failed, or made wrong choices, or lack gratitude for what they’ve built. But because the structures we build our lives around get assembled gradually, through small sensible decisions that make sense at the time. And somewhere along the way, without any single moment of decision, the structure stops fitting quite the way it once did.

The life still works.

But something doesn’t feel quite right.

That feeling is not a problem to solve. It’s not ingratitude or weakness or a midlife cliché.

It’s information.

And it’s usually the first honest thing you’ve let yourself feel in a while.