11/05/2026
This shows up in almost every coaching conversation I have.
She has the body of evidence a long career builds. She picks up on tone shifts in a meeting before anyone has finished speaking. She knows, before she can articulate it, that the brief she’s been handed isn’t quite right, that the dynamic in the room has changed, that the person across the table isn’t actually with her. Then she watches herself reason her way past it.
The label we typically attach to this disconnect is confidence, the advice is always to develop more of it, to assume the issue is internal doubt or lack of capability. After watching a lot of leaders move through these moments, I’d say the ones who look genuinely solid aren’t the ones without self-doubt, they’re the ones who’ve learned to read their body’s signal as information rather than as something to manage around.
Many leadership conversations about decision-making work at the wrong altitude. We talk about frameworks, pros and cons, sleeping on it, asking trusted advisors. All of that has a place, all of it sits on top of a more foundational layer that most women in leadership have been trained, often without realising it, to override.
I’ve spent eighteen months of my own career paying tuition on this lesson, in a misaligned collaboration I should have walked away from in the first conversation. What I learned wasn’t really about the collaboration itself, it was what it actually costs to keep saying yes when your whole system is saying no.
The full article is on Substack this week, including what I see now in nearly every leader I work with, and why working with both your body and your brain instead of forcing them to compete is one of the most underrated leadership skills there is.
Read the full article on Substack → https://lnkd.in/gnsYWzAc
