Op-Ed: From Imposter to Expert – My Five Steps To Finally Gaining Confidence as a Leader

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imposter to expertFor many people jumping into a new job or career path, imposter syndrome can feel like an almost inevitable side effect. As the persistent whisper in the back of your head spews insecurities about your abilities, you learn the ropes of work culture and try your best to block out those harmful thoughts of self-criticism.

For some, those feelings subside as you gradually gain confidence through experience. But for others, it can incessantly linger with no end in sight, clouding every accomplishment.

I was at a VC event in Miami while building my second start-up. The event was held in a club, and due to the VC’s pedigree, most attendees were male. The firm hosting the event hired models to walk around as eye candy to make the event feel “cooler” to the male founders.

I know this may seem hard to believe, but this was only three years ago, in 2022. I acted like I was supposed to be there, even though I didn’t feel like I was.

My inner CEO was trying to crawl into the corner and wait for the perfect time to exit, but she has goals to achieve and won’t reach them by sitting in the corner and leaving early.

Understanding Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome is when we feel anxious and can’t experience success internally, despite being high performing in objective ways. This condition often results in people feeling like “a fraud” or “a phony” and doubting their abilities. With imposter syndrome, inadequacy and competence are symbiotic. You attribute external success to things like circumstance or luck.

Limiting beliefs are intertwined with self-worth. Our programming is a culmination of things that have happened. When you haven’t done the work to understand the stories you’re telling yourself, you will operate daily from their subconscious, the 95% below the surface that we don’t see. (Picture the iceberg)

Five Steps to Increase Confidence

It can be frustrating to watch others take bold leaps of faith while you feel stuck on the sidelines, second-guessing every move. But contrary to popular belief, confidence is not something everyone is just born with, but a skill that you can build up with time. Here are five steps to start building that muscle:

Step 1: Pattern Recognition – The first step is recognizing patterns, loops, or mud that you find yourself often walking through. Create a note in your phone titled “Stories vs. Facts.” Whenever you catch yourself in a moment feeling stuck, pause and ask yourself: What Story am I Telling Myself Right Now?

Step 2: Future Casting – Close your eyes and picture that perfect day, and say it out loud as if it’s actually happening now. Sometimes it helps to picture the person you want to emulate in your life. Study them. Use them as your source of inspiration.

Step 3: Fact-finding – Look at the stories you’ve been telling yourself. It’s time to combat the stories with the facts. Think of the concrete examples that balance out your story. Acknowledge black-and-white thinking and add some gray to the mix.

Step 4: Reframe & Action Plan – Reframing is a powerful tool that examines a situation, thought, or feeling from a different perspective. In changing the framing, we change its meaning. Now that you have the facts, you can reframe your situation and add an action plan.

Step 5: Repetition Increasing – Confidence takes time and practice. You can’t expect to start playing the game of life at an expert level immediately, but these five steps will give you the practice you need to master the skills that will get you to where you want to go.

Taking Control of Your Career

In my first job out of college, my boss sat me down and told me a harsh fact: no one is ever going to look out for my career; that’s my job. “My work will speak for itself,” or that “If I just work harder, they will notice me.” That’s BS. No one can read your mind, and no one can see all the work you are doing.

I created a tool called “Managing Up Mondays,” where I send an email every Monday to the people who are in charge of my fate within my company or career. The format is simple:

Hey [Manager]! I wanted to start a weekly “what’s on my plate” email to help with three things. 1. Give line of sight into my priorities. 2. Get ahead of misalignment/strategy shifts. 3. Share any roadblocks or answers I may need from you to move faster. I also wanted to highlight a few wins from the week prior.
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When you take your career into your own hands, you will notice how much “luckier” you become. Fake feelings can lead to actual feelings. Fake confidence can lead to real confidence. Just don’t fake knowledge, experience, and connections. Those are for you to collect along the way.

Adapted from “Toxic Grit” by Amanda Goetz

By: Amanda Goetz is a 2x founder, 5x chief marketing officer, and was a single mom to three small children before finding love again. She spent two decades building and growing consumer-facing brands before shifting to writing, teaching, and coaching ambitious working parents on how to balance success and life. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Illinois and, after hustling the streets of New York City for over a decade, is now testing out every sunscreen in the world on her children in Miami. And this October she released her first book, Toxic Grit.

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com)

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Op-Ed: Small Moves, Big Life – How to Reclaim Energy and Beat Perfectionism

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beat perfectionism small movesPerfectionism often masquerades as excellence. In high-stakes careers – finance, law, tech, medicine, consulting – it’s seen as a strength. You get praised for high standards, rewarded for over-functioning, and quietly expected to do more than most. But beneath all that output, perfectionism takes a toll.

It’s not just a mindset – it’s a tax on your time, nergy, and cognitive capacity. It chips away at your ability to delegate, pause, and make clear, strategic decisions. It steals presence and sustainability, replacing them with exhaustion and self-doubt. Burnout runs rampant. Morning Consult even found that half of employed women say they are feeling burnout at work, with younger women most likely to report burnout.

The good news? You don’t need to overhaul your entire life to reclaim clarity and power. You just need to interrupt the pattern. Let’s step out of performance mode and stop chasing balance – instead, let’s move into momentum and into a rhythm that actually supports your leadership.

If you’re a woman in leadership, you’ve likely internalized the need to be both exceptional and approachable, competent and warm, relentless and easy to work with. I’ve lived this pressure myself. When these double standards conflict, perfectionism often becomes the strategy to hold it all together. But it’s a brittle kind of control. Perfectionism doesn’t make you better; it makes you smaller. It narrows your focus to what’s missing or wrong, keeping your nervous system in a state of low-level threat. You don’t need to stop striving. But you do need to create space to lead from your whole self – not just the over-functioning version of you.

Micro-Movement and Breathwork as Cognitive Performance Tools

Your body is your most underutilized leadership asset. Movement and breath aren’t just about fitness – they’re regulation tools that directly impact how you think, lead, and recover.

Even short bursts of movement can sharpen your mind, creating real, impactful change. Physical exercise helps all sorts of issues, including anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. It can also improve memory, focus, and cognitive flexibility. Breathwork does the same. Short, daily breath practices reduce stress and enhance our moods – and anyone can do it! That’s not about mindfulness as a buzzword; it’s about giving your brain a reset switch.

This isn’t about squeezing in one more thing. It’s about strategic interruption. Small, intentional pauses that pull you out of survival mode and back into presence.

Three Daily Small Moves for Energy and Follow-Through

You don’t need a total lifestyle change. You need easy ways to show up with full energy. You need consistent rituals that ground and energize you, not exhaust you. These three practices are simple, evidence-based, and designed to support you in even the most demanding roles.

1. Start with Breath Before Screens

Give yourself five minutes before opening your inbox, calendar, or Slack. Try box breathing (4-4-4-4) or even just slow, nose-only breathing with your feet on the floor. It’s not about finding peace; it’s about claiming presence. This short ritual sets your brain up for clearer decisions all day long.

2. Use Movement as a Reset, Not a Workout

Instead of planning hour-long gym sessions, insert movement in between meetings, emails, and strategy sessions. Focus on mini workouts – small bites, not the whole pie! A few pliés at your standing desk. Spinal twists before a call. Even a 10-minute walk boosts energy and clarity. You can improve your mood and reduce fatigue without disrupting productivity or even leaving your desk.

3. End the Day with Recovery Rituals

Leadership requires recovery, and a big part of letting our brains and bodies recover is getting quality sleep. Even 10 minutes of downshifting like gentle stretching, breathwork, or a hot bath before bed helps close the stress loop and tell your body it’s safe to rest. Shutting off those screens can’t hurt either! High performance doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from knowing when to pause.

You’ve likely spent years mastering how to be productive. What you may not have practiced is how to feel well while doing it. Instead of pushing harder and harder, try staying connected to your body, your breath, your values, and your energy. Small moves in your day-to-day rhythm can unlock bigger changes than any new planner, time-blocking app, or performance metric ever could. It starts with 30 minutes throughout your day.

By: Andrea Leigh Rogers, celebrity trainer, entrepreneur, and founder of the global fitness brand Xtend Barre. In her new book, Small Moves, Big Life: 7 Daily Practices to Supercharge Your Energy, Productivity, and Happiness (in Just Minutes a Day) (BenBella Books // October 7 2025)

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com)

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Latinas in Leadership: Self-Empowerment And a Steep Ascent

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Latinas in LeadershipDespite the fact that the U.S. Latino GDP would rank as the fifth-largest economy globally, Latinas still face the steepest climb up the U.S. corporate ladder in 2025, hindered by systemic bias, cultural taxation, and lack of meaningful support.

Amidst a disconnect between the growing economic impact of Latinas and their stalled advancement in corporate leadership, we highlight the culturally grounded and self-empowering strategies that Latinas can take to rewrite the narrative that corporate culture is lagging to recast.

Latino GDP in the U.S. Is an Economic Force

The Latino population is a force within the U.S. economy that isn’t slowing down anytime soon. According to the 2025 U.S. Latino GDP Report, Latino economic output in 2023 was $4.1 trillion.

Were it a country, the U.S. Latino GDP would rank as the fifth largest GDP worldwide, growing 2.7 times faster than non-Latino GDP in the U.S.

From 2010 to 2013, Latino real consumption also grew 2.9 times faster than non-Latinos, proving to be a real economic engine.

Latinas are also the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs, starting businesses at six times the rate of other groups.

The Steepest Climb Up the Leadership Ladder

Latina’s face “the steepest climb up the corporate ladder” according to The State of Latinas in Corporate America 2024 report by Lean In, based upon 2019 to 2023 data.

Latinas are the most underrepresented of any group at entry level jobs (5% vs 9% of general population) and have the greatest drops (78%) in representation on the way to the C-Suite.

Only 1% of C-suite executive positions in Corporate America are held by Latinas. The data showed two broken rungs on the pipeline ladder: one is at the initial promotion to manager and the other at promotion to VP.

Despite the barriers, Latinas continue to demonstrate the ambition and talent for leadership. Latinas are more likely (71%) than the average woman (63%) to be interested in becoming leaders and to indicate it’s increasingly important to them.

Professional Neglect: A Retention Issue

In her research among Latina leaders, Dr. Zaibis Muñoz-Isme, of American University, explores aspects of “professional neglect” for Latinas in leadership—a phrase shared in conversation by Dr. Sofia Pertuz, workplace cultural strategist.

  • Tokenistic inclusion – representing diversity at the table without meaningful support or inclusion in decision-making processes
  • Cultural taxation – the burden of being positioned as the lone representative of an entire group
  • Lack of mentorship/sponsorship – navigating leadership without the support networks, advocates and guidance that peers have access to
  • Dismissal of expertise – having ideas dismissed or co-opted by individuals who lack the lived experience informing them
  • Micro aggressions and bias – subtle forms of discrimination that undermine belonging and confidence

Indeed, the Lean In report showed that Latinas do not feel as supported as peers in the corporate world—neither by managers or peers. They are less likely than overall women to report managers ensure they get credit for their work or show interest in their career advancement. And less likely to say that senior colleagues praise their accomplishments or advocate for compensation raises.

Muñoz-Isme also found that Latinas in leadership roles were not as supportive of other junior Latina women as she expected, perhaps due to Queen Bee syndrome. When the culture is not inherently and structurally supportive, it creates strain on those Latina leaders who do manage to break through.

Belonging and Flexibility Matter

Lean In shares that 37% of Latina women report having the “only experience—being the only person of their group identity in a room, compared to 13% of all women. Compared to overall women, these Latina “only’s” are twice as likely to hear insults towards their culture (15% vs 7%), twice as likely to feel they are expected to speak on behalf of their cultural identity (20% vs 9%), and nearly three times as likely to deal with other’s comments on their language skills (21% vs 8%).

Experiencing these micro aggressions more than doubles the odds of feeling burnt out, feeling unable to advance as well as others, and considering leaving the company for a different work culture.

Additionally, while many Latinas remain highly committed to work and community, they do not feel they have the flexibility they need to balance their diverse commitments.

Six in ten Latinas feel pressure towards both family obligations and to succeed at work. According to Lean In, Latinas reported being less able to work remotely, set their own hours, step away from work, or take family time off compared to women overall.

As written by Nathalie Darras in Hispanic Executive, motherhood and professional work are often seen by many Latinas as two divergent paths, a dichotomy that need not exist, but results from the lack of support to balance out life.

Four Self-Empowering Actions for Latina Leaders

With the force that the Latinx population represent in the U.S. economy, it’s inevitable that Latinx leaders will change the composition of leadership, but changing the character depends upon authenticity.

Each Latina leader who brings her whole self to the workplace is going to help drive that change, because it’s people who hold the power to change culture and call organizations to a greater collective accountability.

1) Carve a self-directed career path.

Muñoz-Isme recommends that Latinas embrace a self-directed career path and take initiative in their own goals and advancement wherever possible, leveraging cultural assets.

Latinas can own their relational strengths in finding mentors and sponsors, seeking out allies, and putting your name in for opportunities. Being self-directed also means advocating for yourself, despite cultural resistance around self-promotion, leveraging existing networks of support and building new ones, as well as defining your terms of success.

It’s also important to discern your capacity to thrive in different environments, because not all work cultures are cultivated equally.

As Johanna Diaz, Global Head of Alternatives Product Strategy at Goldman Sachs, recently told us, “In facing challenges or change, I always go back to the questions: Am I in the right place? Am I surrounded by the right people? Am I learning? Am I growing?”

2) Be aware of and leverage cultural scripts and drivers.

For many Latinas, internalized cultural drivers shape behavior and decisions, often in ways that go against the grain of what is being rewarded in corporate culture. Some of these drivers are:

  • familismo: the importance of close and extended family relationships as guiding parameter for decision-making
  • marianismo: gender beliefs in which women are expected to be selfless, self-sacrificing, and nurturing
  • personalismo: creating personal and meaningful relationships
  • colectivismo: the importance of belonging to a group and recognizing the needs of that group
  • respeto: respect granted to others because of formal authority, age, or social power, without questioning
  • simpatía: promoting pleasant interactions and positive relationships, while avoiding conflict and disharmony

Embracing culturally relevant leadership means becoming aware of how these drivers influence you, as well as how they can be leveraged as assets within your leadership.

For example, Latinas must challenge the inhibiting influence of respeto and marianismo when it comes to sharing their voices and perspectives. Equally, they can leverage personalismo and colectivismo in building influence through collaboration and strong relationships.

Leveraging the strengths of cultural scripts can help Latina leaders to foster cultural pride, leadership skills, and empowerment.

3) Stay authentic.

Many Latinas have reported checking aspects of self at the door in order to fit into corporate cultural norms. But as the composition of the workforce and leadership changes, slowly and inevitably, so will culture. People ultimately create and influence culture.

While it requires courage and true resilience for Latinas to move in authenticity within a corporate context designed on different values, nothing will compromise your vitality and wellbeing more than contorting your authentic self while trying to fit in.

True belonging hinges on authenticity. It’s important that Latinas let themselves be felt in the workplace and in leadership, so that eventually, the corporate environment responds.

4) Leverage cultural wealth.

Latinas can flip the narrative by owning their cultural wealth: “an array of knowledge, skills, strengths and experiences that are learned and shared by people of color and marginalized groups; the values and behaviors that are nurtured through culture work together to create a way of knowing and being.”

Six forms of community cultural wealth, outlined by Dr. Tara J. Yosso, that Latinas can leverage in leadership include:

  • aspirational: the ability to sustain and work towards a vision for the future amidst both real and perceived barriers
  • navigational: the ability to maneuver through systems and contexts not historically designed to support you
  • social: the ability to leverage community resource and connections in building a network of support
  • linguistic: the sum intellectual, social and communication skills obtained through multicultural history, bilingual or multilingual capacity, and experiences
  • familial: the cultural knowledge and nuance obtained from family and community experiences
  • resistant: the cultural legacy of challenging inequalities and the status quo, and ability to resist stereotypes

Despite structural barriers, cultural bias, and underrepresentation, Latinas are ready to lead and are leading.

By embracing cultural strengths, carving self-directed paths, and showing up authentically. The future of leadership will be shaped not just by who gets a seat at the table, but by how leaders redefine the table itself. Latinas have the vision and the voice to lead in ways that are authentic, inclusive, and transformative.

It is no longer a question of if Latinas will lead, but when. And with every step upward, they expand the definition of leadership for everyone.

By: Aimee Hansen.  Alongside years of writing on leadership, Aimee Hansen is the founder of Storyteller Within and leads the Journey Into Sacred Expression women’s retreat on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. Follow her at thestorytellerwithin.com, on instagram, and via Linked In.

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Business Travel for Professional Women in a Volatile World

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Business travel for professional womenWhether you’re attending an out-of-town event, inspecting a new product line, or pitching for new business, travel is an integral part of executive life. But in today’s world – where geopolitical unrest and extreme weather events are becoming the norm – being on the road as a woman brings its own set of challenges.

In our latest global World Travel Protection online survey of more than 2,000 business travelers, 70% of women said they believe travel is riskier for them than for their male colleagues. Across every category measured, women expressed greater concern about business travel. Harassment and discrimination were cited as major concerns by 65% of women, compared to 53% of men. Nearly one in six women also reported having either experienced or witnessed harassment linked to gender or sexuality while travelling.

Worries about sexual assault were also high, with 64% of women expressing concern while 46% of men (which is almost half of men surveyed) also were afraid of sexual assault. This is a serious crime and these are not abstract fears, they are real concerns.

To navigate these challenges, individuals can take specific precautions to protect themselves, but organizations also have a duty of care to put robust travel risk management plans in place. At World Travel Protection, we use a practical framework built around three key areas: the Traveler, the Destination, and the Activity.

The Traveler: Knowing Your Profile

Your gender, age, ethnicity, seniority and travel experience can all affect how you’re perceived and treated abroad. A senior woman executive might command respect in one region while facing cultural resistance in another because of societal restrictions. Organizations should invest in inclusive policies that consider travel risks through a woman’s viewpoint – not just generic safety advice.

Before you travel, have an open and honest discussion with your company’s security or HR team. Are you comfortable with the destination? Will you be traveling solo or with a companion? It’s important to voice any concerns, preferences or support needs.

The Destination: Digging Deeper

While most companies assess destinations for obvious risks, such as political instability or health concerns, they may overlook subtler cultural challenges. How are women in leadership perceived? Will legal systems support you if something goes wrong? Are there local dress expectations or religious customs that impact how you should behave?

It’s essential to understand how society functions before setting foot in it. That includes knowing what areas to avoid, what cultural faux pas to steer clear of, and even how local elections or protests might disrupt transport or safety. Travel safety apps, such as our Travel Assist app, send location-specific, live insights and alerts, and help a traveler stay informed, particularly in a changing environment. These tools are essential for understanding whether, say, a local election might increase protest activity, or a cultural event could impact transport links.

The Activity: What You Do Matters

Different business activities expose travelers to different levels of risk. A journalist covering a political story may draw public scrutiny or unwanted attention, while a woman attending closed-door meetings may avoid such exposure. In contrast, a woman hosting a client dinner in a conservative society might even face hostility or discomfort. We recently supported a woman executive travelling to rural Pakistan. Every element of her trip was carefully planned – from how she dressed and conducted herself to how she navigated armed checkpoints. We also addressed medical access and emergency protocols, ensuring she had support for everything from potential evacuation to food access during Ramadan fasting hours. This is responsible planning.

We offer training specifically for women travelers – covering everything from emergency protocols to situational awareness, how to handle harassment, recognize manipulation, and stay digitally secure. These sessions, whether online or in-person, empower women to travel with confidence and give companies assurance that their duty of care is being fulfilled.

What Can Women Travelers Do

While company support is essential, there are practical steps women can take to feel more confident and in control while traveling. It starts with the fundamentals: dress appropriately for the destination’s climate and cultural expectations, leave expensive jewelry or valuables at home to minimize unwanted attention and assess the safety of attending after-hours meetings when traveling solo.

Accommodation is another critical factor. Always stay in vetted hotels, ideally with robust security procedures. Larger hotel chains often have dedicated security teams and are better equipped to support business travelers. When booking, request a room that is not on the ground floor and is away from isolated stairwells or emergency exits. Consider using simple tools like a portable door lock or wedge to enhance hotel room security.

Above all, trust your instincts. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. Don’t hesitate to remove yourself from a situation whether that means stepping away from an uncomfortable conversation or asking hotel staff or security for assistance.

Alcohol and Food Safety

One often-overlooked threat, especially in Southeast Asia, is the risk of tampered alcohol. Methanol poisoning is often undetectable and usually comes from counterfeit or home-brewed spirits. Only consume drinks you’ve seen opened or poured, avoid suspiciously cheap cocktails, and be particularly cautious with local liquors.

Drink-spiking is another real risk, especially for solo travelers. Never leave your drink unattended and don’t accept drinks from strangers even if they seem friendly and well-meaning. It’s vital to stay alert in social settings.

The Taboo Every Woman Should Be Prepared For

Menstruation remains one of the least talked-about but critical travel issue for women. In conservative or remote locations, sanitary products can be difficult to find or even considered inappropriate to sell in public.

For example, there is the story of a woman at Istanbul International Airport who spent hours searching five terminals for tampons. She left feeling humiliated and paid nearly $20 for a basic pack. Another woman in China was told that sanitary pads were considered “private items” and not available for sale on public transport. Always carry what you need, even if you don’t expect to need it.

Stay in Touch

A simple tip is to check in regularly. According to our World Travel Protection survey, many women say they want more frequent contact from their employer while travelling, and a third report checking in with family or colleagues as part of their routine. Also, share your itinerary before departure, keep emergency contact information saved and written down, and let someone know if your plans change.

If you have access to a travel assistance app, make sure it’s turned on. The Travel Assist app offers flexible geolocation settings, allowing users to preserve privacy with a 5km radius or, with a quick adjustment, switch to precise location sharing when needed. This means that during a crisis – whether it’s a natural disaster, political unrest, or a terror incident – organizations can accurately locate and assist travellers. Travel should never mean going off the radar.

In today’s volatile world, business travel requires more than just a flight and a printed itinerary. With the right preparation, awareness, and support, executive women can navigate the global landscape not just safely, but with confidence and authority.

By: Kate Fitzpatrick, World Travel Protection’s Regional Security Director (EMEA). Kate has lived and worked in the Middle East, Africa and Europe. In Afghanistan, she was Security Risk Manager for the European Union Delegation in Kabul; in Nigeria, she worked as Security Risk Manager and a Senior Intelligence Analyst for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; in Switzerland as Corporate Security Manager for the TAP Trans Adriatic Pipeline (Europe); and, most recently in London as Director of Security and Safety for Bvlgari Hotels and Resorts.

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com)

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Op-Ed: 5 Ways Women Leaders Can Build a Respect-Rich Workplace Culture

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Leaders Build RespectIn today’s high-stakes, high-performance industries, from finance and law to tech and consulting, one often-overlooked leadership skill can quietly make or break teams, productivity, and profits: respect.

Workplace incivility, or persistent disrespect, now costs U.S. businesses a staggering $2 billion per day, according to Gallup estimates. That’s not just a human problem – it’s a bottom-line problem. A Harvard Business Review study found that 50% of employees who experienced workplace incivility reduced work effort, and 12% left their jobs.

And for women in leadership roles, the stakes are sometimes higher. When we lead, we’re often scrutinized more harshly and held to different standards. But we also have a powerful opportunity to model a leadership style that encourages loyalty, psychological safety, and measurable success.

As the former CEO of Syms Corp., the first off-price retailer of its kind, I learned early on that cultivating respect wasn’t a luxury. It was a leadership imperative. In a male-dominated industry, I rose to become the youngest female president of a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. And I did it by building a culture where people felt seen, valued, and heard. That’s still rare. But it shouldn’t be.

In my upcoming book, Leading with Respect, I argue that creating a workplace grounded in dignity is no longer optional – it’s the most sustainable way forward in today’s anxious, fast-moving professional landscape. With 31% of employees feeling disengaged, according to Gallup, now is the time for leaders to focus on improving performance, collaboration, and retention.

Below are five ways women executives can lead with respect and reshape the cultures they’re part of, from the top down.

1. Set the Tone Early and Often

Respect starts at the top. Leaders who model respect and inclusion empower others to do the same. If you ignore microaggressions, tolerate dismissiveness, or let egos dominate meetings, your silence sets the tone. So does your presence.

Whether you’re onboarding a new analyst or presenting to the board, show up in a way that centers clarity, presence, and attentiveness. Respect isn’t about being “nice” – it’s about creating space for everyone to contribute meaningfully.

In team meetings, implement a simple practice of rotating who leads or facilitates. This democratizes airtime and signals that hierarchy doesn’t override value.

2. Listen Like It’s a Leadership Skill (Because It Is)

Too often, leadership is associated with speaking. But in high-performing firms, real power comes from listening. Employees, especially those in early or marginalized career stages, might not volunteer truth unless they trust you’re genuinely open to hearing it. And we know women are interrupted 50% more often than men in professional settings, so let’s interrupt that pattern with active listening. This also builds psychological safety, which makes employees feel more comfortable. When people feel heard, they stay engaged. When they don’t, they quietly check out.

Replace “Any questions?” with “What’s not clear yet?” or “What am I missing from your perspective?” These prompts unlock better dialogue and better data.

3. Respect Boundaries – Yours and Theirs

Respect also means knowing when to pause. In industries where overwork is normalized (“hustle culture”) and availability signals loyalty, boundary-setting can feel risky. But leaders who respect their own limits model sustainability. And those who acknowledge their team’s personal and professional boundaries earn deeper trust.

It’s especially vital for women leaders to reclaim time and enforce boundaries as part of workplace culture, not despite being ambitious, but because of it.

Normalize “focus hours” on team calendars. Publicly support people who decline late meetings or take full parental leave. Set the example without apology.

4. Reward Integrity Over Optics

Too often, loud performers get the spotlight while quiet excellence goes unnoticed. If your culture rewards only visibility, you risk alienating the very people who keep your business running with consistency and integrity.

Women leaders are uniquely positioned to challenge performative cultures by rewarding substance over showmanship. Promote those who lift others, not just themselves.

In performance reviews, build in metrics for collaboration, mentorship, and ethical decision-making, not just revenue or output.

5. Be Explicit About Inclusion and Act on It

Don’t assume that respect will trickle down. Cultures of inclusion must be intentionally built. That means regularly reviewing who’s in the room, who gets airtime, and who’s being overlooked.

When women in leadership elevate others, especially across lines of identity and background, we disrupt exclusionary systems that thrive in silence.

Create sponsorship programs, not just mentorship ones. Advocate for underrepresented voices when promotions, stretch projects, or visibility opportunities arise.

Respect Isn’t Soft; It’s Smart

In the boardroom, courtroom, or C-suite, respect is not a sentiment. It’s a strategy. And while it costs nothing to implement, it pays dividends across every business metric that matters. According to Deloitte, leaders who model respect and inclusion significantly outperform those who don’t.

For women in leadership, leading with respect is also a form of defiance. It says: I don’t have to emulate toxic models to succeed. I can build something better, and I can bring others with me.

In a world where too many companies are quietly cracking under the weight of incivility, women executives have the power and responsibility to lead differently. To lead with respect.

By: Marcy Syms is a social entrepreneur, philanthropist, and the former chair and CEO of Syms Corp., the first truly off-price retail chain in America. Her forthcoming book Leading with Respect: Adventures of an Off-Price Fashion Pioneer (Citadel // August 26, 2025) explores how respect-focused leadership fuels performance and purpose in today’s workplace.

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com)

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Spacious Presence: The Power of Self-Exploratory Writing

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spacious presenceIn life and work, when you feel depleted, overwhelmed, contracted, or lost, what you may be craving is connection—with yourself.

Whereas when you feel spacious in your presence and perception, you are more capable of holding the whole of life: the ups, the downs, the words and behavior of others, the changes of emotional weather within, and the ever-shifting waves of life.

You’re also able to act from a wider vantage point and feel more energetically centered at work and home. You are less reactive to circumstances, not allowing them to dictate your sense of yourself or the world. Instead, you are grounded in your inner truth.

One simple tool for returning to that truth is self-exploratory writing—a practice that invites clarity, emotional spaciousness, and inner alignment.

The Underrated Value of Simple Practices

The habits that serve wellbeing and inner harmony are so basic, so mundane, and so immediately available, we tend to overlook them—good sleep, anyone?—in search of a magic fix or a peak moment experience. Culturally, we undervalue what matters the most.

Burnout is a consequence of a culture, or internalized culture, that does not prioritize wellbeing. Managing burnout becomes a coping strategy. Within that context, self-alignment and self-care are the origin points of a woman who knows her innate value and that the paradigm won’t change unless how you regard yourself does.

Inner spaciousness can be cultivated through practices such as meditation, breathwork, mindfulness, contemplation, myofascial release, dance and movement practices, grounding—and reflective and expressive journaling.

Writing To Support Emotional Wellness

Author Natalie Goldberg wrote to the power of spontaneous writing to access your first thoughts: “The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.”

When we recognize that emotions are energy in motion, we can get curious about them on the page, which can also help clarify what motives are at play in decision-making. Exploring your feelings, especially the ones you often resist, can deepen your self-understanding, expand your emotional bandwidth and resilience, and point you toward aligned action with your values and intuitive knowing.

Reflective and expressive journaling, which focuses on what’s truly on your mind and heart, has been shown to increase emotional awareness and emotional wellness while enhancing your overall outlook. Ultimately, it becomes a practice in emotional intelligence.

Cultivating An Orientation of Gratitude

People who orient in gratitude experience lower levels of stress and depression and better relationships. With practice, you can improve your ability to tap into the state of gratitude, elevating your “set point” of perception.

Practicing gratitude enhances wellbeing—for example, supporting better rest, less inflammation, and peace of mind while reducing symptoms of anxiety or depression.

Writing to express gratitude can help shift attention away from rumination and heavy emotions, and train the brain to more readily access appreciation. Not only this, but the positive effects on mental wellbeing compound like interest, creating accumulating benefits over time.

Processing Complex Emotions

Writing can also help to unwind and process trauma caught in the body’s cellular memory.

When we feel safe, writing about traumatic events or emotional experiences can help to organize chaotic thoughts, release locked-up emotions, and facilitate mental clarity and resilience long term.

Expressive therapeutic writing has also been shown to support physical health and immune function across a range of conditions, while reducing stress, anxiety, and symptoms of PTSD.

Visioning Yourself in Growth

Expressive writing which focuses on self-reflection, gratitude, and imagining a positive future increases experiences of life satisfaction and happiness. In one study, people who journaled for 15 minutes a day felt significantly less anxiety, distress, and depressive symptoms.

When you uncover and explore a new insight on paper, remember a gift that’s gone dormant, or admit future visions or goals for yourself, you are bringing them into your awareness to galvanize energy towards them.

Neuroscience has found that when it comes to goals, people who very vividly describe or picture their goals on paper (men tend to do so more) are significantly (1.2-1.4 times) more likely to achieve those goals. Part of the reason is writing them down improves the biological encoding process by which your hippocampus drops a pin and says, remember this.

Creating Spaciousness Through Reflection

When you put what is inside on paper through reflective journaling, you create spaciousness—within yourself and between you and your thoughts. Often, you can discover how you truly feel through writing and increase your self-awareness.

When you are honest on the page and guided with revealing questions, you have the ability to externalize and explore the narrative, examine triggers, reveal thought and behavior patterns, recognize values, and reveal truths. Increasing your self-awareness, you can begin to see where you are locked into the past, or into thoughts and emotions, so you can come back to presence.

As Goldberg writes, “When you are present, the world is truly alive.”

Start Now: Five Prompts For Embodying Self-Respect

Why not start now? Here are five journaling prompts related to embodying self-respect that you can write to today.

  • What is one way you are keeping your word with yourself? How does it feel? What supports you to honor your intention?
  • What promise to yourself are you bending—or breaking? How does it feel?
  • What nurtures your sense of self that you regularly nourish?
  • What nurtures your sense of aliveness but you are not prioritizing it?
  • What is one thing you ache to give more attention and energy to? What are you doing instead that is a lower investment in your fulfillment?

In the practice of yoga, more than half the task is getting onto the mat. With expressive or reflective writing, more than half the task is getting onto the page.

So often, we stay stuck in the same mental and emotional energetic loops, but self-exploratory journaling in response to powerful questions can open new doors of awareness which allow us into more of ourselves—and more of our lives and our unique leadership.

Aimee Hansen is co-author of This Book Is a Retreat: 101 Soul-Nourishing Questions to Reconnect with Yourself to be released on August 22, 2025 (prior to that, available for pre-order), a co-creation with USA Today bestselling author, Marianne Richmond. She is the founder of Storyteller Within and has led the Journey Into Sacred Expression women’s retreat on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala for the past ten years. As a lover of the questions that open us, she’s inspired hundreds of women in writing their hearts into expansion.

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com)

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Why Protecting Time for Deep Thought Makes You More Productive and More Alive

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deep thoughtA bucket of gravel does not make a boulder.

And yet, consider how many leaders spend their days: back-to-back meetings, two-line email replies, quick notes on a presentation or report. It’s all understandable—the organization’s engine is humming, employees need decisions, and a leader’s job is, among other things, to stay in touch broadly across a team or organization. It’s no wonder leaders often feel that they succeed based on their ability to task-switch as much as their ability to set a vision and galvanize a team.

Or more simply: Your calendar is probably packed. If there’s no time for lunch breaks, or even a bathroom break, there’s definitely no time for leisurely, expansive, deep thought.  According to Dorie Clark in Harvard Business Review, 97 percent of leaders say long-term thinking is critical, and 96 percent of leaders say they don’t have time for it.

The reason frenzied executive calendars continue to exist for so many executives is that, in the short term, it is a functional way to get things done. Peers, teams and clients want discussions, an answer, an approval. That’s what they need to do their jobs. What we sometimes forget as leaders, amidst all the organizational bustle, is that it’s our job to tend to the visionary, strategic questions before they become threatening, existential questions. When we operate only in a place of stimulus-response, we’re actually playing out of position—like a goalie who’s left the goal. This might work for a while, but when a competitor shoots and scores because we weren’t protecting what was most important—our ability to think broadly, creatively, strategically—we lose.

Deep thought is important because as leaders we’re not usually measured by the quantity of our output. We’re measured by the quality of our thought. A brilliant vision. A unique understanding. A counter-intuitive strategy. A prescient decision. These are things that drive careers and businesses. No one was ever promoted for their email response time. Warren Buffett knew this and once said, “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business.”

Deep thought is also important because it’s a beautiful way to spend our time! Warren Buffett ended the quote above not by saying, “I [sit and think] because it drives shareholder value.” He ended it with, “I do it because I like this kind of life.” It can be incredibly nourishing and invigorating to be lost in thought; to find a state of “flow” in which we’re so immersed in our thoughts that everything else seems to slip away.

Unfortunately, deep thought, as you likely know, is not easy to protect. And women managers often face the additional, biased expectation of being “a pleasure to work with”—available and attentive to others’ needs. It’s completely understandable why a female leader would be more inclined to return the email quickly, bolstering her reputation for being responsive, even when her time is better spent thinking deeply. It’s not an unbiased world. And yet we can still find ways to thrive within it.

Here are four things you can do in the next week to start protecting your time to think:

  1. Block and defend the time. Block your calendar for at least two hours. If you need, call it something formal like “Strategy and Planning”. If you can, block what I call a “Do Nothing Day” (or hours), when you commit to producing nothing and instead set your mind to expansive brainstorming or deep consideration of challenges ahead. Now the blocking part is easy—it’s the defending part that’s hard. I have two words for you here, which you can repeat as many times as needed: Still No. Should you shorten your time so you can take that other meeting? No. Maybe by just a little? Still no. Move it to next week? Still no. You deserve this time to think. So does your career. So does your team.
  2. Revere your brain. If you work for your brain, your brain will work for you. Sometimes finding your way to deep thought is just a matter of blocking hours. But you’ve likely experienced that writer’s block feeling of finally arriving to that time, except your brain did not arrive with you. Consider: What places allow you to focus? What do you need to have off your plate? Does music help? What about how you’re sitting or what you’re wearing? Do you prefer having fodder around like research and examples? Or does a blank sheet of paper feel more invitational? Do you want to talk things out with others or muse on your own? Do you think best when you move? Perhaps a walk is in order.
  3. Leave the time unstructured. There are reasons why people so often get ideas in the shower. You’re unreachable. There’s no agenda. Your body is busy getting clean so your mind can wander. When our brains are in threat detection mode—return the email, fix the error, make the call before it’s too late—we are focused on reducing the noise around us. But imagination, foresight, and sharp strategic thought all require creating noise—dreaming up counterfactuals, letting 73 bad ideas flush from our brains before the brilliant number 74 comes. Unstructured time allows for that noise creation. In the words of Georgia O’Keeffe, “To see takes time.”
  4. Enjoy! In this harried world you have given yourself the gift of space. You’ve honored what your brain needs to do its best work for you. You’ve prioritized the brilliant thinking you’re capable of—the thinking that will propel your career and your organization. Not every deep thought block will yield a masterpiece, but with consistency, one will. And in the meantime, hopefully you’re having fun. Our lives are short and our careers are shorter—engaging in deep thought is a beautiful use of both.

By: Bree Groff is a workplace culture expert and author of Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously). She has spent her career guiding executives at companies such as Microsoft, Pfizer, Calvin Klein, Google, Atlassian, Target, and Hilton through periods of complex change. She is a Senior Advisor to the global transformation consultancy SYPartners and previously served as the CEO of NOBL Collective. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MS in Learning and Organizational Change from Northwestern University. Bree lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).

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How to Thrive in the New Workplace: Why Learning Agility is Your Secret Weapon

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agilityIf you’ve ever felt like the rules of advancement keep changing just when you think you’ve figured them out, you’re not alone. The challenge with “Merit” as we know it is that research demonstrates that people worldwide tend to believe their societies are more meritocratic than they actually are, and this blind spot particularly affects professional women, LGBTQ+ and people of color. Interestingly, studies show that when organizations emphasize meritocracy as a value, it can actually trigger implicit gender biases.

Most humans are fascinatingly steeped in their contextual and subjective realities, combine that with stereotypical implicit beliefs and it is cognitively easy to believe that more effort would equal more success. Social psychology meets neuroscience very quickly here to result in false conclusions with real life negative impacts for people when surface thinking instead of systems thinking is applied by HR and leaders.

Why Learning Agility is Your Competitive Edge

Here’s where it gets interesting. The most successful organizations are shifting away from traditional merit measures toward something called “learning agility”— and this change could be your secret weapon. Learning agility isn’t just about taking more courses or earning additional certifications. It’s about demonstrating your ability to adapt, grow, and deliver results in new situations. Research shows that learning agility — the ability to learn from experience — is one of the key characteristics of high-potential employees. Even better, Korn Ferry research shows that people with high learning agility are promoted twice as fast as individuals with low learning agility.

This shift matters because it measures what you can do, not just what you’ve already done. For women who may have had fewer opportunities to build traditional credentials, learning agility creates new pathways to demonstrate your potential.

Four Ways to Build Your Learning Agility Profile

1. Become the Solution Finder

Instead of just executing tasks, position yourself as someone who tackles complex problems. Studies demonstrate that workforce agility enhances not only individual performance but also promotes innovation and effective knowledge dissemination. When challenges arise, volunteer to lead cross-functional teams or pilot new approaches.

Action Step: In your next team meeting, don’t just report on your progress. Come prepared with one process improvement suggestion and offer to lead the implementation.

2. Make Your Learning Visible

It’s not enough to learn—you need to demonstrate how your learning translates into results. Research indicates that learning agility directly affects employee engagement and innovative behavior, but only if others can see the connection.

Action Step: After completing any training or taking on a new challenge, send a brief summary to your manager highlighting what you learned and how you’re applying it. Include specific metrics when possible.

3. Seek Stretch Assignments

Learning agility is best demonstrated through performance in unfamiliar situations. Ask for projects outside your comfort zone, volunteer for challenging assignments, or request to work with different teams or departments.

Action Step: Identify one area where your organization needs improvement but lacks expertise. Propose a pilot project and position yourself to lead it, even if it’s not directly related to your current role.

4. Build Your Feedback Loop

Learning agility requires continuous improvement, which means you need honest feedback. Create a system for getting regular input from colleagues, clients, and supervisors about your performance and growth areas.

Action Step: Schedule quarterly “learning check-ins” with your manager. Come prepared with specific questions about your performance and growth areas, and ask for concrete suggestions for improvement.

Navigating the Transition

Not every organization has made this shift yet, and you may encounter resistance. In 2020 Robin J. Ely and David A. Thomas share in HBR a study named “Getting serious about diversity: Enough with the business case” as a follow up from their 1996 research paper called Managing Differences Matter which included a prediction of an emerging paradigm cited as the learning and effectiveness paradigm. This work may have provided answers if it had of been applied, but the work was not undertaken by most firms at scale. For meritocracy or “diversity” benefits to truly be realized, organizations have to adopt a learning orientation and be willing to change structures, and culture.

If you are in a more traditional environment or an environment now recoiling from their last twenty years efforts, focus on building your learning agility profile quietly while demonstrating clear results.

Your Next Steps

The workplace is changing, and this shift toward learning and effectiveness could be the key to unlocking opportunities that traditional merit systems may have denied you. Start building your learning agility profile.

1. Assess your current situation: Where have you demonstrated learning agility in the past year?
2. Identify growth opportunities: What challenges could you volunteer to tackle?
3. Make your learning visible: How can you better communicate your development to key stakeholders?
4. Build your support network: Who can provide feedback and advocate for your growth?

The traditional rules of advancement may have been stacked against you, but the new rules reward exactly what you bring to the table: adaptability, fresh perspectives, and the ability to learn and grow. It’s time to make that work in your favor.

Work with a coach – book in for an exploratory chat to see if coaching is right for you HERE

By Nicki Gilmour, founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com and Evolved People Coaching

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Why Coaching Is So Powerful for Senior Leaders

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Nicki GilmourAt the top of the organizational ladder, senior leaders often face a paradox: the higher they rise, the fewer people are willing — or able — to give them honest feedback. Leadership can become isolating. Expectations grow, complexity increases, and decisions carry more weight. Yet the space to reflect, grow, and challenge one’s own thinking often shrinks.  This is precisely where coaching becomes not just valuable, but transformative. 

Here are six powerful ways coaching helps senior leaders reclaim perspective and lead with greater clarity and impact.

1. A Rare Space for Honest Reflection

Senior leaders are frequently surrounded by people with competing agendas or cautious filters. Coaching offers a confidential, judgment-free space where leaders can think out loud, test assumptions, and examine blind spots without political risk.

Unlike a board or a management team, a coach’s only agenda is the leader’s development. This objectivity is rare, and incredibly powerful.

2. Support for Navigating Complexity and Ambiguity

The senior leadership landscape is rarely black and white. Decisions involve trade-offs, incomplete information, and wide-ranging impact. Coaches help leaders pause, zoom out, and reflect strategically instead of reacting tactically or emotionally.

By asking the right questions, coaches encourage broader thinking, deeper listening, and more thoughtful decision-making.

3. Development of Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence

At the executive level, leadership success is less about technical expertise and more about emotional intelligence — how you show up, communicate, and influence others. Coaches help leaders build self-awareness around their behaviors, mindsets, and emotional triggers.

This kind of insight enables leaders to better manage themselves and others, particularly during periods of stress, change, or conflict.

4. Challenging the Comfort Zone

Senior leaders are often expected to be the ones challenging others. But who challenges them?

A skilled coach holds up a mirror and asks the difficult questions:

  • What are you avoiding?
  • Where are you playing it safe?
  • How might your leadership style be limiting your impact?

This challenge, balanced with support, drives real growth. Coaching helps leaders stretch into new mindsets and evolve in ways that books, courses, or peer feedback often can’t match.

5. From Competence to Legacy

Many senior leaders have mastered execution. They know how to hit goals, run operations, and deliver results. But coaching shifts the focus from short-term performance to long-term impact.

Leaders explore questions like:

  • What kind of leader do I want to be remembered as?
  • How do I build a culture that lasts beyond me?
  • What legacy am I creating?

This reflective process often unlocks deeper purpose and renews energy at a stage where burnout or stagnation can set in.

6. A Catalyst for Inclusive and Adaptive Leadership

Coaching also supports the shift from authority-based leadership to more inclusive, adaptive leadership which is an essential trait in today’s diverse, fast-changing world.

Senior leaders who work with coaches are more likely to:

  • Listen deeply to different perspectives
  • Navigate change with agility
  • Empower and develop others effectively

These are not just soft skills—they’re core capabilities for modern leadership.

Take Your Leadership to the Next Level with an Executive Coach

Coaching is about unlocking potential. For senior leaders, it offers a rare combination of support, challenge, and reflection that’s hard to find elsewhere. It turns leadership from a role into a practice, helping executives lead not just with authority, but with wisdom, clarity, and humanity. In a world where the demands on leaders have never been greater, coaching provides something invaluable: the space to grow.

Book your complimentary exploration of coaching conversation for your leadership development plans for yourself or your team with Nicki Gilmour our head coach and founder here at theglasshammer.com

By Nicki Gilmour, founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com and Evolved People Coaching

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Own Your Energy: Seven Keys to Honing Your Personal Power

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own your personal powerOne power dynamic we rarely speak explicitly about is the one with yourself. Yet it’s arguably the most powerful relationship impacting your work, your leadership, and your life.

Are you still perceiving power as the ability to exert control over others – or to be subject to another’s control? What if you began to define power instead as the energy you cultivate when you move in alignment with your truth as you navigate the choices of your days?

In any given situation, do you remember to re-orient yourself towards your axis of personal power? Are you aware of how you leak power? Are you aware of how you build it? No matter the situation, you hold power. How you perceive and steward that power – especially with yourself – matters most.

Leading and empowering others begins with your ability to authentically lead and empower yourself. Here are seven ways to step into greater energetic mastery of personal power.

1) Disrupt the urge to dominate yourself.

In the patriarchal paradigm, achieving outcomes often means using pressure and domination inside of a hierarchy. When you internalize this, you dominate yourself to meet external demands – often at a profound cost to your well-being.

If you laud force over yourself to make things happen, you push beyond your limits, override your embodied truth, and live in chronic stress and anxiety, priming yourself for burnout. As Stephen Covey illustrates, you err when you prioritize the golden eggs (production) over the goose that creates them.

Empowering yourself means honoring how you treat yourself – mentally, energetically, and physically – rather than devaluing yourself. When you stop normalizing self-dominance, it become harder for others to dominate you and easier to discern toxic environments.

2) Start moving from where you stand now.

Often we displace our power to some future, idealized scenario.

You tell yourself that when you reach a certain title, goalpost, or milestone, you’ll finally manage your time better, assert yourself, relax, or set boundaries. If only something were different, you think, or if you attain that one qualification, then you could make the leap.

But any notion that displaces your personal power to a future scenario blinds you to the power you presently hold. It may even create a false story about what is necessary to move toward what you want, suspending your ability to act here and now.

Your ability to affect your experience never lies in the future. It is available in this moment.

3) Stop seeing giants around you.

“If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.” ― Anas Nin

In patriarchal culture, we are conditioned to see authority as external to ourselves. No matter how far you are in your career, do you still find yourself projecting disproportionate power onto certain people, especially those with prestigious titles or positions?

True power exists within you – it’s how you manage your energy and choices in every interaction. It can neither be granted nor taken away. It has nothing to do with role, reputation, or permission. It’s embodied from within.

When you see giants around you, you subtly give away your power. If you stopped, what might you be willing to speak, do, or risk?

4) Get honest about what holds power over you.

Unconscious thoughts and behaviors drive most of our daily interactions. More than any person or institution, you surrender your power to beliefs, patterns, stories, habits, and cultural norms. What you repeatedly activate infuses your energy. The narratives you tell yourself shape your lived reality and how much power you have.

When you react rather than respond, you are not in your power. Certain interactions, people, or thoughts can trigger you to lose regulation, unplug your energy, or activate fear-based behaviors.

Bringing these dynamics into your conscious awareness allows you to investigate how you lose power, such as:

  • What beliefs, patterns, and habits unplug your power?
  • How do you silence or diffuse your own voice and possibilities?
  • What story are you telling that disempowers and limits you?
  • Where and how do you abandon your values?

Where you lose power impacts upon your ability to show up authentically in leadership. As the saying goes, the calmest person in the room holds the most power.

Working with an executive coach can help you to reveal and recalibrate the power battles you face within.

5) Practice discernment and boundaries.

“Energy is power. And it is your responsibility to monitor how you manage it.” – Caroline Myss

Navigating your “yes” and “no” is energy management and has consequences for your clarity, health, and sense of power. When you cannot say “no,” you victimize yourself.

Boundaries matter. Not every invitation requires your attention. Not every conflict merits your engagement. Not everyone has free access to your energy and time.

Practicing discernment can strengthen your energetic field, so you are not scattering energy or leaking power. You sense intuitively what is in alignment for you. Sometimes this means action; other times, withdrawing or letting go.

Every time you say “yes” to a clear internal “no,” you chip away at your personal power. It is far healthier for you to disappoint others than to betray yourself. When you manage your energy, you radiate an authenticity and leadership rooted in self-esteem and self-respect.

6) Keep your word with yourself, first.

Trust is a foundation of leadership, including self-leadership. When you deeply trust yourself, you build the inner wholeness essential to personal power. But as Martha Beck writes in “The Way of Integrity,” lying to yourself – even in small ways – wreaks inner havoc.

  • What are you doing that you know hurts you?
  • What are you not doing that it hurts to not be doing?
  • Where are you fibbing to yourself or breaking your own word?
  • Where are you being unfaithful to your truth?

When your thoughts, energy, and actions align, you come from inner coherence. Power rooted in real integrity speaks through your presence, energy, and actions, far more so than power rooted in title, performance, or external validation.

7) Calibrate your presence from within.

The ultimate power you hold is your perception and ability to define your inner experience. Most people live in reaction. Because of X or Y or Z, we must shrink or be afraid or lose trust. But circumstances and meaning are two different things, and context does not dictate response.

You can default to reflecting the environment, or you can anchor your tone from within. You decide whether to mirror chaos and fear and victimhood or to choose calm and groundedness and trust. Personal power happens when you no longer default to unconscious reactions but instead move from conscious choice, sourcing your stability from within.

If there is one power dynamic you master, let it be the one you hold with yourself. This will transform the way you move through every challenge, opportunity, and relationship – and it will redefine the quality of your leadership.

By: Aimee Hansen.  Alongside years of writing on leadership, Aimee Hansen is the founder of Storyteller Within and leads the Journey Into Sacred Expression women’s retreat on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. Her upcoming event is July 26th – August 4th, 2025. Follow her at thestorytellerwithin.com, on instagram, and via Linked In.

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