The Empowered Leader Podcast

Insight

Guest Bio: OnyxRose

OnyxRose writes OnyxRose9 – Presence Not Permission on Substack from Atlanta and hosts the podcast OnyxRose9 – A Trans Voice.

Black, trans, nonbinary, and femme, OnyxRose has been out and transitioning for more than a decade and writes openly about visibility, queer love, and building a good life when the world pushes back.

OnyxRose is a regular voice on Another Dry Run, the weekly Substack Live with Samantha Paige, goes live with fellow creators, and will soon be working with Trans Lifeline, a cause OnyxRose has supported from the start. The line OnyxRose lives by: “Transitioning did not solve all my problems; it made my problems worth solving though.”

OnyxRose on Substack: Quick Reference

• Publication: onyxrose9.substack.com. Profile: substack.com/@onyxrose9.

• Podcast: onyxrose9.substack.com/podcast. Other recent Lives: Sturg Writes It Down – Live at Five, and Tuesdays with Two Gays with Brandon Ellrich.

• Visibility Matters (Aug 19; expanded Sep 15): “Why being openly trans is fighting the good fight.” Source for sections 1–5.

• One Bad Day (Sep 30): source for sections 6 and 7.

Opening

Everyone carries a life challenge that the world didn’t make room for. Some of us spent years shrinking to fit. Today is about what happens when you stop asking permission to be in the room, and start being present in it.

OnyxRose said it best before we scheduled this: “We tend to circle the same drain.” Two different lives, the same fight to be fully seen.

You don’t need permission to be present in your own life.

1. Presence, Not Permission

OnyxRose’s publication is built on that phrase. For women and people pushed to the margins, permission has usually been granted by someone else: who gets to speak, who gets credit, who gets to be fully themselves at work.

OnyxRose puts presence in plain words: “I am Black. I am tall. I am femme. I am soft. I take up space, I occupy space” (OnyxRose, 2026b).

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality showed that people who sit at more than one margin face barriers that neither identity alone explains (Crenshaw, 1989). [Foundational legal scholarship.]

Waiting for permission is how power systems keep you small.

2. The Cost of Hiding

OnyxRose spent two years on an online trans forum, starting in 2006, without typing “one single word,” just reading other people’s lives. In 2008, “I found my voice” (OnyxRose, 2026b). The turning point, in OnyxRose’s words: “I didn’t live to transition, no, I transitioned to live” (OnyxRose, 2026a).

Many people tone down a part of who they are to fit in at work. In a national survey, 61% of employees said they “cover” some part of their identity, rising to 83% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual employees, and most said it hurt their sense of self (Yoshino & Smith, 2013). [Practitioner survey.]

For transgender workers, the cost is sharper. In the largest U.S. survey of transgender adults, 30% of those who had a job in the prior year reported being fired, denied a promotion, or mistreated because of their gender identity or expression (James et al., 2016). [Large descriptive survey, not a random sample.]

Covering keeps you safe. It also keeps you from leading as yourself.

3. Visibility as Leadership

OnyxRose: “I want to be a beacon, a strong searchlight in the darkest of nights, the sun in the bleakest of days” (OnyxRose, 2026b). People have told OnyxRose they understood someone they love better “by listening to my story.” That is leadership, with or without a title.

It has a price. OnyxRose has faced “the worst of the worst vitriol” on Substack and YouTube: “That is the price I must pay for being so out” (OnyxRose, 2026b). The return, as OnyxRose puts it: “financially rich in love as a transaction for visibility and more love.”

Researchers call the extra load carried by people in stigmatized groups “minority stress”: the everyday weight of prejudice, expecting rejection, and concealment (Meyer, 2003), a model later adapted for transgender people (Hendricks & Testa, 2012). [Primary review and conceptual framework.]

When you stand in the light, someone behind you finds the path.

4. Problems Worth Solving

In OnyxRose’s words, transition “did not solve all of my problems. However, it did give me a chance to live a good, if not great, life” (OnyxRose, 2026a).

Research on posttraumatic growth finds that many people report real growth after a major life struggle, such as stronger relationships, new possibilities, and a deeper sense of personal strength (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). [Primary review; self-reported growth is debated in the literature.]

This connects to your wellness message: healing is what makes a leader whole enough to lead others.

Healing doesn’t erase the hard parts. It gives them a purpose.

5. The People Who Change With Us

OnyxRose’s partner, Egg, chose to stay. “She put in the work. She did the internal work, and understood the assignment.” OnyxRose: “If a partner is transitioning, it then becomes necessary for the other person in the relationship to have a transition of their own” (OnyxRose, 2026a).

Leadership parallel: when a leader changes, her team, family, and peers have to grow too, or they fall away. Not everyone comes with you.

Your growth will show you who was really in your corner.

6. Questioning Authority

OnyxRose: “It is not so much that I have a problem with those who are to be leaders; it is that those leaders are people and can be wrong. And I will let them know” (OnyxRose, 2026c).

Teams learn and perform better when people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and admit mistakes (Edmondson, 1999). [Primary empirical source.] Too often, the people asked to stay quiet are the ones who see what everyone else misses.

A leader who can’t be questioned has already stopped leading.

7. One Bad Day: Grace When You Fall Short

In One Bad Day, OnyxRose writes about canceling a Live with Samantha Paige thirty minutes before air, and still feeling “like I let her down.” Samantha checked in afterward, and “you let me know that I didn’t” (OnyxRose, 2026c).

Leadership parallel: women who have had to be twice as good often hold themselves to a standard no one else would. How a team responds when someone falls short decides whether people tell the truth about how they are doing.

Grace on your worst day is what makes people brave enough to be honest on every other day.

Why This Matters for Marginalized Women Leaders: Healing What Power Systems Took from Them, So They Can Lead with Freedom, Influence, and Authority

Marginalized women leaders rarely lose their power all at once. It is taken in small pieces: the comment held back in a meeting, the part of themselves left at home, the years spent waiting for someone to confirm they belong.

Over time, hiding starts to feel like safety. The cost shows up as exhaustion, silence, and talent the organization never gets to see. OnyxRose’s story makes that pattern hard to ignore. For LGBTQ+ women and gender-expansive leaders, the pressure to hide is often sharper: who they love, how they dress, and the name and pronouns they use can all become things to manage at work.

Any woman who has edited herself to fit in will recognize it.

Hearing from someone who chose visibility at real cost gives listeners language for what they have been carrying, and proof that it can be set down. That is where healing begins, and it is why this conversation belongs on a leadership platform. A woman who no longer spends her energy covering leads with freedom.

When she is seen, the women coming up behind her can see what is possible for them, and that is influence.

When she trusts what she knows enough to speak up, even to those above her, she leads with authority. For leaders who are not LGBTQ+, this conversation is a reminder that the room they make for others is part of their own leadership. The healing is not separate from the leadership. It is what makes the leadership possible.

A Note on Language: LGBTQ+

No single acronym is official (”Expanding Acronym,” 2016; Diversity Style Guide, n.d.).

•…

Guest Bio: Diane

Diane writes Diane’s Mindful Substack, where she publishes her Mindful Engagement series and essays on the trucking industry, and she hosts the Mindful Podcast.

She has been a professional truck driver since earning her CDL in 2015, and she brings a road-tested view of mindfulness, self-awareness, and staying grounded in a field built mostly by and for men. She is also writing her first book. Her message to every reader, in her words: “Remember you are worthy, and you matter.”

The bio draws on her Substack newsletters and her Mindful Engagement series.

Opening

Mindful living isn’t a retreat or a quiet hour you never get. It’s how you show up on a Monday morning, in the meeting that goes sideways, behind the wheel in traffic. Most of us are living on autopilot, running old stories in our heads while life happens in front of us.

You can’t lead the moment you’re in if your mind is somewhere else.

1. What Mindful Living Actually Is

One of the most widely used definitions describes mindfulness as paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and without judgment (Kabat-Zinn, 1994). [Foundational practitioner source.]

Diane’s Mindful Engagement series turns that into everyday practice: intentions, self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-compassion, integrity, and noticing the ego. [Practitioner source.]

Mindfulness isn’t escaping your life. It’s finally showing up for it.

2. Why Presence Is So Hard

In a study that sampled thousands of people throughout the day, minds wandered almost half the time, and people were less happy when their minds wandered than when they were focused on what they were doing (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010). [Primary empirical source.]

For many women, the pull away from the present is heavier. Research on “selective incivility” found that women and people of color report more rudeness at work, linked to lower job satisfaction and a greater intent to leave (Cortina et al., 2013). [Primary empirical source.] When you’re bracing for the next slight, it’s hard to be anywhere but on guard.

This is where your positioning lives. Staying on guard kept you safe. It doesn’t have to be how you live.

Being on guard all the time isn’t awareness. It’s exhaustion in disguise.

3. Self-Compassion Over Self-Criticism

Self-compassion means treating yourself with the kindness you’d offer a friend, recognizing that struggle is part of being human, and holding painful feelings in balanced awareness (Neff, 2003). [Primary theory paper.]

It isn’t letting yourself off the hook. In a set of experiments, people who responded to a mistake with self-compassion were more motivated to improve and to make amends than those who didn’t (Breines & Chen, 2012). [Primary empirical source.]

Talk to yourself like someone you’re trying to help, not someone you’re trying to punish.

4. Practices That Bring You Back

Diane’s practice for when the ego takes over, in her words: “pause, reflect, retrain the ego to help keep you balanced in your emotions.”

Her third-person technique has research behind it. People who reflected on an upsetting moment using their own name or “you,” rather than “I,” felt less distress and handled stressful tasks better (Kross et al., 2014). [Primary empirical source.]

Her journaling does too. Writing about emotional experiences has been linked to better physical and mental health outcomes (Pennebaker, 1997). [Primary review.]

Diane’s words: “Being mindfully calm and not ego-driven bitter.”

5. Leading Mindfully

A team feels a leader’s presence, or the lack of it. The leader who listens without checking her phone, who pauses before she reacts, who owns her mistakes without collapsing, gives everyone else permission to do the same.

Your calm is contagious. So is your chaos.

Mindful Living is about how you show up in the moment

• Being present instead of on autopilot or on guard.

• Treating yourself with kindness instead of criticism.

• Inner practices: pause, reflect, retrain; journaling; stepping back to see yourself from outside.

• The leadership angle is your calm setting the tone for your team.

Closing

Mindful living doesn’t make life slow down. It helps you stop missing it.

The present moment is the only place you’ve ever been able to lead from. Be there.

References

Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143.

Cortina, L. M., Kabat-Farr, D., Leskinen, E. A., Huerta, M., & Magley, V. J. (2013). Selective incivility as modern discrimination in organizations: Evidence and impact. Journal of Management, 39(6), 1579–1605.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.

Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932.

Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., et al. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324.

Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.

Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166.

Thank you Florence Acosta, EG, Millie Jones-Cowles, Mandy Ohman, Savio P. Clemente, Brandon EllrichCourtney M 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈 and many others for tuning into my live video with Diane! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Guest Bio: Cynthia Jamieson

Cynthia Jamieson is a transformative leadership and growth coach who has spent 37 years in Human Resources and has held more than 4,000 coaching conversations.

She hosts the podcast Who Are You to Lead, Anyway? and writes Cynthia’s Substack, where she explores what happens when capability turns into obligation, and how capable people begin choosing again. She holds the ACPC, PCC, and CBC coaching credentials. Cynthia knows this terrain firsthand: she burned out in her thirties doing everyone else’s job because she believed she had to.

1. Who Is Actually Making the Decisions?

Self-determination theory, one of the most tested models in motivation research, identifies autonomy as a basic psychological need. When people experience their actions as chosen rather than pressured, motivation and well-being rise. When they feel controlled, even good work drains them (Ryan & Deci, 2000). [Primary empirical source.]

Autonomy is not doing everything alone. It is acting from your own values instead of from pressure, guilt, or habit.

The test isn’t whether you said yes. It’s whether you were free to say no.

2. When Capability Becomes Obligation

Cynthia calls this the Endurance Trap: being good at something quietly becomes being responsible for it, every time. A temporary favor becomes a permanent expectation, and your own needs become negotiable (Jamieson, 2026). [Practitioner source.]

The research backs her up. In a series of studies, women were asked more often than men to take on non-promotable tasks, the necessary work that rarely leads to advancement, and were more likely to say yes (Babcock et al., 2017). [Primary empirical source.] The pattern is not a personality flaw. It is how the requests are distributed.

Some of what you call your personality is a job description you never agreed to. (Cynthia’s line; credit her when you use it.)

3. What It Costs

Burnout research describes three parts: exhaustion, cynicism, and a falling sense of effectiveness. Workload matters, but so do lack of control and a mismatch between your values and the work (Maslach & Leiter, 2016). [Primary empirical review.]

For many marginalized women, the pressure has an added layer. Research on the Superwoman Schema found Black women describing an obligation to show strength, suppress emotion, resist help, and keep succeeding regardless of the toll, a pattern linked to stress and health costs (Woods-Giscombé, 2010). [Primary qualitative study.]

This is where your positioning lives: healing what power systems took. Name it gently. The strength was survival. It does not have to be the operating model forever.

Strength that never gets to rest isn’t strength anymore. It’s a sentence.

4. Taking the Seat Back

Job crafting research shows people can reshape their roles by changing tasks, relationships, and how they think about their work (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). [Theory paper; widely supported by later studies.] A CEO makes those decisions on purpose.

Practical moves to discuss: notice the automatic yes before it leaves your mouth; ask “Whose is this?” before taking a task; hand back one thing this week that was never yours; and put your own needs on the calendar like any other commitment.

Note: avoid claiming people have a fixed daily supply of willpower or decisions. “Decision fatigue” and “ego depletion” findings have not held up well in large replication attempts, so they are contested.

You don’t take the seat back all at once. You take it back one honest decision at a time.

References

Babcock, L., Recalde, M. P., Vesterlund, L., & Weingart, L. (2017). Gender differences in accepting and receiving requests for tasks with low promotability. American Economic Review, 107(3), 714–747. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20141734

Jamieson, C. (2026, October 9). Being good at it is not a life sentence. Cynthia’s Substack. https://cynthiajamieson.substack.com/p/being-good-at-it-is-not-a-life-sentence

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

Woods-Giscombé, C. L. (2010). Superwoman schema: African American women’s views on stress, strength, and health. Qualitative Health Research, 20(5), 668–683. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732309355146

Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179–201. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4378011

Thank you Nabanita, julie elder, EG, Millie Jones-Cowles, Nabanita, Mandy Ohman Shauna Rae and many others for tuning into my live video with Cynthia Jamieson! Join me for my next live video in the app.

What you refuse to look at doesn’t disappear. Trust and believe it just starts running things behind your back.

Now, let me say this up front: I know “shadow work” sounds like something that comes with candles and hashtags. It’s not. Take away the packaging, and it’s one of the most practical disciplines a leader can have. The shadow is just this: every part of yourself you had to hide to be acceptable. The anger that got you labeled “too much.” The ambition that got you called selfish. The need that made you look weak. The softness that wasn’t safe to show. Now, did those parts die when you buried them? No, they did not. They went underground. And what’s underground doesn’t stay quiet it operates.

You’ve seen it operate. That reaction that was three sizes too big for the moment. That colleague who irritates you way beyond anything she’s actually done. That cutting remark that came out of your mouth in your own voice and you thought, where did THAT come from? That’s the shadow. That’s the part of you working without your permission.

Hear me on this: you buried those parts to survive rooms you’re not even in anymore. But buried is not gone. And unwatched is not harmless.

What the Shadow Actually Is

Every childhood home, every early job, every family sent the same message: this part of you is acceptable, that part is not. And you complied, because complying kept you safe. What got buried depended on the room you were in. For a lot of us women, it was the anger. The ambition. The appetite. The need to be taken care of.

And here’s the part almost nobody tells you: the shadow holds treasure too. The boldness that got punished. The brilliance that made somebody uncomfortable. The big voice, the big vision, the shine buried right alongside the rage. Have you ever felt that sting of envy watching another woman take up room? That sting is a map. It’s pointing straight at something of yours that got buried alive.

The shadow is not your worst self. It’s your whole self-edited by rooms that couldn’t handle it.

How You Do the Work

You don’t fix the shadow. You take it back the same way you’d take back any ground: you walk it, you map it, and you put it back under your command.

Start with projection, because projection is free intelligence. The people who trigger you beyond reason are drawing you a map of what you buried. When she strikes you as arrogant, ask yourself: where am I not allowed to take up that much room? When his neediness disgusts you, ask: what did I do with mine? The rule is simple, and it’s humbling: if it just informs you, it’s about them. If it inflames you, it’s about you.

Then track your ambushes. Every reaction that was bigger than the moment gets written down; same day, four lines, no editing: what happened, what I felt, what I did, what it touched. You’re not journaling just to journal. You’re gathering intelligence on yourself. And the patterns show up fast. Most women find the same two or three buried parts behind a decade of “overreactions.”

Then talk to the part instead of punishing it. When the anger rises, before you shove it back down, ask it one question: what are you protecting? Anger is almost always guarding a boundary you were never allowed to have. Envy is guarding a desire you were never allowed to claim. The feeling is not the enemy. It’s the messenger. Shoot the messenger, and you lose the message.

And do this on a schedule, not just in a crisis. Shadow work you only do when you’re bleeding is triage. Ten minutes with your log once a week? That’s patrol. And patrol is what keeps the ground lit.

What You Get Back

First, your energy. Suppression is expensive. You’ve been standing guard over those buried parts for decades, and you feel the cost as a tiredness you can’t explain. When a part comes home, the guard comes off the wall. Women tell me the same thing over and over: “I didn’t know how heavy that was until I put it down.”

Second, the ambushes stop. A trigger you’ve mapped can’t run you. The anger still shows up — but it shows up as information, not possession. You get that half-second between feeling and action. And command lives in that half-second.

Third, your full range. The recovered anger becomes the clean no. The recovered ambition becomes the ask you finally make. The recovered need becomes the ability to receive help without shame. And the recovered shine becomes the room you finally take up. Integration is not becoming somebody new. It’s getting all of yourself back.

You’re not doing this work to become nicer. You’re doing it to become whole. And a whole woman is very hard to run.

Helping Others Walk Theirs

Now, if you lead, coach, or mother anybody, hear this: you cannot take another woman further than you’ve gone yourself. Her shadow will trip every wire in yours. If her anger scares you, you will teach her to suppress it politely, supportively, and completely. Your own work is your license for this work. There is no other credential.

And when you do walk beside someone, remember you’re holding the lamp, not the shovel. You don’t dig, diagnose, or drag anybody into their dark. You ask the questions you’ve learned to ask yourself: What are you protecting? Who taught you that part was unacceptable? What would you do this week if that part were allowed? And then you do the hardest thing: you stay steady while she meets what she meets. Your calm in front of her buried parts is the loudest message that those parts can be faced.

One more thing, and I mean this: never weaponize the map. The moment you use someone’s shadow against them in a conflict, a review, a family argument you’ve taught them the burial was correct. Read people to serve them, or don’t read them at all.

Keep It Honest: The Leadership Piece

Three things keep this work on the road.

First: the shadow explains; it does not excuse. “That was my shadow” is a report, not a pardon. You still repair what your unwatched parts did. And then you do the work, so it doesn’t repeat. Accountability is what separates shadow work from a shadow alibi.

Second: know your limits. Shadow work is for the ordinary buried parts: anger, need, ambition, shine. Where there’s real trauma in the ground, that’s work for a trained professional. And calling one in is not failure. It’s calling for the right unit. A good leader knows what her own kit can and cannot treat.

Third: watch what you’re burying in other people. Every time you punish an emotion on your team visible frustration, open disappointment, ambition said out loud you’re giving the same order the old rooms gave you and building shadows on somebody else’s books. The integrated leader makes it safe to be whole in her presence. That’s the quiet revolution of this work: it stops with you.

The Coaching Chair

Come sit with me for a minute. And bring the person who irritates you the most just in your mind. She has work to do here too.

Look at her honestly. What exactly is it the thing she does that you cannot stand? Say it plain. Too loud. Too needy. Too ambitious. Too soft. Now the harder question, and take your time with it: where does that same thing live in you owned, or buried? When was the last time you allowed yourself even an ounce of it?

Now go further back. Who first taught you that part was unacceptable? What room? What face? What sentence? Notice that you were probably young. And notice that the burial worked — it kept you safe, liked, chosen. Thank that girl. She made the best decision she could with what she knew. Then tell her what she couldn’t have known back then: the war is over. The room has changed. The part she buried is allowed to come home now.

One last thing before you get up: which buried part, if it came home this month, would change how you lead? That one. Start there.

What part of you is still serving a sentence for something that was never a crime?

Think about the last time you lost track of time doing your work.

Not because you were behind. Because you were in it. The hours went somewhere, and you didn’t miss them.

Now think about the last time a Sunday night sat on your chest like a weight.

Both of those moments are giving you intelligence. One tells you where your energy lives. The other tells you where it’s being drained.

Most of us were trained to listen to neither.

What It Actually Is

Choosing the path that lights you up isn’t chasing a feeling. It’s reading your own energy as data and letting it decide where you invest your life.

Light is the signal that the work and the woman doing it are aligned. Your attention sharpens. Ideas come faster. Setbacks sting less, because they’re in service of something you care about.

It isn’t the absence of hard work. This path will still ask everything of you. The difference is that it gives something back.

How It Gets Withheld

For a lot of us, the path was chosen before we ever got a vote.

Take the stable job. Don’t make waves. Be grateful you’re in the room at all. If you came from a family, a community, or a workplace that told you your options were narrow, you learned to pick the path that kept you safe, not the one that kept you alive inside.

Then the system reinforced it. The assignments that drew you in went to someone else. The work you were good at but never loved became the work you were known for. Every review rewarded you for staying in the lane you were placed in.

Nobody had to forbid you from choosing. They just made every other option feel like a luxury you hadn’t earned.

Why You, and Why It’s Not Weakness

You may have been told that wanting work that lights you up is self-indulgent. Something for people with money, connections, or a safety net.

Hear me on this. Wanting your energy back isn’t indulgence. It’s maintenance.

A leader running on empty makes smaller decisions, tolerates more than she should, and stops seeing possibility for herself and for the people behind her. You can’t light the way for anyone from a place that’s gone dark.

And you’ve already proven you can endure. Endurance was never the question. The question is what you’re enduring for.

The Leadership Impact

When you stay on a path that drains you, it leaks.

Your team feels the flatness even if you never name it. Your patience runs shorter. You start managing tasks instead of leading people. And quietly, you teach everyone watching that this is what success costs.

When you’re on a path that lights you up, the opposite happens. You bring ideas into the room, not just answers. People want to be near the work because you’re visibly in it. And the women coming up behind you see a different picture of leadership: not martyrdom, but alignment.

Where you spend your energy sets the climate for everyone around you.

How to Take It Back

You take it back by paying attention, then acting on what you see.

First, run an energy audit. For two weeks, at the end of each day, write down one thing that gave you energy and one thing that took it. Don’t analyze. Just record. Patterns show up faster than you’d think.

Second, find the thread. Look at what lit you up and ask what those moments have in common. Teaching? Solving the hard problem? Building something from nothing? Advocating for someone without a voice? That thread is your direction, even if the job title doesn’t exist yet.

Third, take one step you can stand behind. You don’t have to walk out of anything tomorrow. Volunteer for the project. Have the conversation with your manager. Enroll in the program. Choose one move that puts more of your time on the thread, and make it this month.

The path doesn’t appear all at once. It appears one step at a time, and only after you start walking.

What It Feels Like to Stand in It

It feels like being awake.

Mondays stop being something you brace for. You still get tired, but it’s the tired that comes from giving, not the tired that comes from leaking.

Your voice gets steadier, because you believe what you’re saying. And it feels like freedom. Not because everything is easy, but because you chose it. A path you chose is a path you can own.

From the Coaching Chair

I worked with a leader I’ll call Carla. Senior program manager, twenty years in, respected by everyone, and completely flat.

In our first session she told me she was fine. Good job, good pay, no complaints. Then she said, “I just don’t feel anything anymore.”

I asked her to run the energy audit. Two weeks later she came back frustrated. Nearly every entry on the energy side was the same thing: the one hour a week she spent mentoring two new hires. Almost everything else landed on the drain side.

She said, “That’s not a career. That’s a side thing.”

I asked her who told her that.

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Nobody. I just never thought I was allowed to want it.”

Over the next six months, she built the case for a role in talent development, pitched it, and got it. Same organization. Same pay grade. Different woman. “I feel like myself again,” she told me.

Nothing about her talent changed. She just stopped treating her own light as optional.

Final Reflection

The path that lights you up was never a reward for finally being good enough. It was always yours to choose.

You’ve spent years proving you can carry what was handed to you. You’re allowed to set some of it down and pick up what’s actually yours.

Where does your energy rise, and what have you been telling yourself about why you can’t go there?

And if no one had ever told you what you were allowed to want, what would you choose now?

Closing

This was Foresight. I see you. And I’ll see you next time.

Let me ask you something.

How much of your pain have you been carrying as evidence against yourself?

Now ask yourself what would become possible if that same pain became the raw material of your leadership.

That is the conversation we are having today.

Pain is one of the most misunderstood forces in leadership. People tell you to push through it. To stay positive. To leave it at the door because feelings are not professional.

But the kind of pain that actually serves you is not suppressed.

Pain is wisdom that has not been claimed yet.

It is the moment you stop treating your hardest experiences as disqualifications.

And it is the doorway to the three things you have been quietly abandoning: your power, your purpose, and your voice.

If you are a marginalized leader, you know this in your bones. You learned early that pain was something to hide. So you became composed. You buried the sting of being overlooked, interrupted, and underestimated. You performed resilience because falling apart was never an option.

Those strategies kept you standing.

But what you had to bury to stay composed is the very thing now keeping you from leading powerfully.

You don’t need thicker skin.

You need a different relationship to what your pain is actually telling you.

Why It Matters

Unexamined pain is a slow leak. And it drains the three things you can least afford to lose.

Without transforming pain:

• Your power weakens; you spend energy guarding wounds instead of leading from wisdom

• Your purpose blurs; you avoid the rooms and conversations that once hurt you

• Your voice shrinks; you self-edit so no one sees where you have been broken

Take a breath and notice which one you have lost the most of.

It looks like:

• staying silent in meetings where your experience is exactly what is missing

• overworking to outrun a failure no one else even remembers

• avoiding the next risk because the last one left a scar

• telling a polished version of your story that leaves out everything that made you strong

When you lead from unexamined pain, you lease your leadership from avoidance. And avoidance always collects eventually.

Every move you make to protect the wound rather than learn from it is built on a foundation of fear.

You deserve a foundation made of hard-won wisdom.

Ownership: This is where your power comes back

Claimed pain changes how you lead.

Not defensively. Deliberately.

Leaders carrying this can say:

• “My hardest seasons are credentials, not confessions.”

• “I do not lead in spite of what I survived. I lead because of what it taught me.”

• “I decide what my story means. No one else holds that pen.”

Here is the part most leaders miss: your power is not built by proving the pain never touched you. It is built by demonstrating what you did with it.

Teams do not trust leaders who seem untouched. They trust leaders who are unbroken in a way that was clearly earned.

That is power. That is the kind that creates loyalty.

Owning your story is not oversharing. It is authority. It tells every person you lead that setbacks are survivable, because you are standing there as proof.

Alchemy: This is Where Your Purpose Comes Back

Real transformation is internal alchemy. It means refusing to let pain remain a debt and insisting it become an asset.

It sounds like:

• “The thing that hurt me is the thing I am now equipped to change.”

• “I am not responsible for what happened to me. I am responsible for what it becomes.”

• “My scars are a map of where I can take others safely.”

When you stop running from your pain, direction replaces drift.

That is purpose.

Not the abstract kind. The everyday kind. The purpose to mentor the person facing what you once faced. The purpose to change the system that wounded you instead of quietly enduring it. The purpose to choose work that matters because you know firsthand what is at stake.

Alchemy is the end of the inherited contract that said your pain was yours to carry alone and in silence.

That contract is over.

Testimony: This is Where your Voice Comes Back, Yours and The People you Lead

When one leader turns pain into power, something radical happens.

The people around them are given permission to stop pretending.

Other leaders realize:

• “I do not have to hide my hardest chapters to be taken seriously.”

• “Vulnerability with boundaries is strength, not exposure.”

• “We can build cultures where struggle is spoken, and everyone can finally stop performing invincibility.”

And then something most leaders forgot was possible begins to return, voice.

Voice in the meeting where your lived experience changes the decision. Voice in the story you tell whole, not edited for comfort. Voice in the rooms that once silenced you, now steadier because you know exactly what you survived to get there.

That is how personal transformation becomes cultural transformation. Leadership stops being a performance of perfection and starts being the practice of turning what happened into what happens next, and powerfully so.

The Leadership Reality

Most leaders are not struggling with pain because they are weak.

They are struggling with pain because they were trained to hide it as a survival skill.

You were taught to be:

• strong but not struggling

• honest but not too honest

• resilient but never in need of recovery

That is the reality. And it is also why so many capable leaders are exhausted from the daily labor of appearing untouched, and why their power has weakened, their purpose has blurred, and their voice has shrunk.

If that is you, pause.

You are not failing.

You learned to bury your pain because that is what survival asked of you.

And you are allowed to put it to work instead.

Turning pain into power is not the absence of hurt. It is the refusal to let hurt have the final word on who you are.

Closing Reflection

Before you walk into your next challenge, sit with these three questions:

• What pain am I still hiding that has quietly become the boundary of my leadership, and what is it costing my power?

• What would change in my leadership today if I treated my hardest experience as my deepest qualification, what purpose would return?

• What voice am I sacrificing by telling only the polished version of my story, and who is waiting to hear the whole one?

The answers are not weakness.

They are direction.

The Final Truth

You cannot lead with power while treating your past as a liability.

You cannot find purpose while avoiding everything that ever hurt you.

And you cannot speak with voice while editing out the chapters that made you.

Your power is on the other side of owning what happened.

Your purpose is on the other side of asking what it prepared you for.

Your voice is on the other side of telling the story whole.

Stop hiding your pain with the same energy you could be using to transform it.

Then lead from there.

That is the work.

Guest Bio: Beth Shekinah Terrence

Beth Shekinah Terrence is a shaman, holistic transformation facilitator, and recovery coach based in Annapolis, Maryland.

She has more than 30 years as a holistic and wellness practitioner and 18 years as a practicing shaman, trained through a long traditional apprenticeship with shaman Ross Bishop. Beth holds a Master of Science in Restorative Practices and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, psychology, and art history. She is a certified Feeding Your Demons® facilitator, a nationally certified peer recovery support specialist, and has just earned a certification in Karmic Constellations.

Her work rests on one idea: disconnection is the greatest disease of our times, and connection is the medicine.

Supporting details:

* Other teachers: Rose Khalsa, Kupua Claudette Knox, Deanna Slate, and Herb Stevenson; Haumana (Huna) shaman training (2019). Ross Bishop is the author of Healing the Shadow.

* Education: Graduate Certificate in Restorative Practices (IIRP); B.A. from SUNY Stony Brook; graduate study in anthropology at CUNY Hunter College.

* Other certifications: Licensed Massage Therapist; Reiki Master; Bach Flower Registered Practitioner; Certified Zero Balancer; addiction counseling certificate.

* Trainer: Authorized trainer for IIRP restorative practices courses, the SHINE mindfulness program, Mental Health First Aid, and recovery coaching programs.

* Speaking: Way of Council; loving-kindness meditation for resilience; transforming your inner critic into your inner ally. She has spoken for NAMI Maryland, the Maryland Peer Summit, and national recovery conferences.

* Writing: Contributor to Igniting Our Hearts & Souls; I’m Okay, Really!; Becoming Peace; Lost & Found: The Birth of Shaman; and Be Still (poetry).Guest Bio: Beth Shekinah Terrence

* Signature line: “Our traumas and pain [are] lamp posts that are guiding us to where our inner work of transformation and healing lies.”

"Connection is viewed as the 'medicine' needed for healing and transformation. Disconnection is "the greatest disease of our times." - Beth Shekinah

Thank you Toni Sakoman, Diane, Mandy Ohman, Jolie, Leilani, Millie Jones-Cowles, and many others for tuning into my live video with Beth Shekinah 🪷! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Guest Bio: Erica Voell

Erica Voell is a Human Design guide for women in midlife.

* Career: Children’s librarian for nearly 20 years; left in May 2025. She told you she spent her last five years there working out how to leave, and that COVID surfaced everything she had been denying.

* Credentials: Certified Human Design Coach (Ignite Coach School); Certified Human Design Guide, Levels I and II (Erin Claire Jones / Human Design Genius); Certified Life Coach and Illuminator (Dragontree); Reiki Seichim Level 2 (Living Light Energy); Certified Breath Coach (YOGABODY).

* Platforms: Unfolding: Connecting the Dots of Midlife with Human Design (Substack newsletter and podcast, ericav.substack.com); website ericavoell.com.

* Her own design: Generator, 5/1 profile, emotional authority. Self-described practical problem-solver: “I’m sort of your practical person.”

* Experience: Four years studying Human Design. She is 52 and in her Chiron return.

* Recent work: Summer of Self-Love series (most guests outside the U.S.); spring series on trusting your voice; free Midlife + Human Design workshop; October weekly 30-minute workshops on the nine centers for paid members.

If three people name the same gift in you, it’s not flattery. It’s data.

Thank you Stephanie, Mandy Ohman, Florence Acosta, Shauna Rae and many others for tuning into my live video with Erica Voell! Join me for my next live video in the app.

The covert narcissist is loud.

They take the room.

They demand the spotlight.

They are easier to spot.

The covert narcissist does not announce themselves.

They arrive humble.

They arrive helpful.

They arrive as the “safe” one in the room.

They tell stories of being misunderstood.

They mention how others have hurt them.

They position themselves as the quiet, sensitive, deeply-feeling person

You are lucky to have on your side.

And by the time you realize

The relationship has been a slow extraction

You are already entangled.

This is not a piece about diagnosis.

It is a piece about pattern recognition.

And about what your body has been trying to tell you

For a long time.

Why This Matters

Most people miss the covert narcissist

because they are looking for the loud one.

They are looking for arrogance.

Bragging.

Bombast.

Covert narcissism is overt narcissism with better marketing.

It looks like:

• the friend who is always supportive, until you succeed past them

• the mentor who guides you toward their own visibility, not yours

• the colleague who is humble in public and competitive in private

• the partner who is gentle until you assert yourself

• the family member who is generous with help that comes with hooks

The covert narcissist does not announce themselves.

They audition for the role of the safest person in the room.

Their humility is the costume. Their need to be central is the body underneath.

For marginalized leaders, especially,

the covert narcissist is a particular danger.

They gravitate toward people who are:

• visible

• capable

• generous

• trying to break new ground

They use the language of allyship, mentorship, and support.

They make themselves indispensable.

They become entangled in your story

until your wins begin to feel like betrayals to them.

The cost is rarely visible early.

It accumulates

until you wake up one day

and notice that your life has been quietly bent

around the gravity of someone else’s fragile center.

The Patterns Worth Watching

This is not a checklist for diagnosis.

It is a list of patterns to notice over time.

The pattern is the proof, not any single moment.

They sulk when you succeed.

They do not say it directly.

They go quiet.

They withdraw warmth.

They make a small comment that hurts more than it should.

Your win became their wound.

Their support has hooks.

They help, but the help is collected.

Later, when you assert yourself,

the help is suddenly evidence of how much they have given you.

It was never freely given.

It was an investment.

They tell every story with themselves at the center.

Even when the story is yours.

Even when the harm is yours.

Even when the celebration belongs to someone else.

The narrative always returns to their feelings, their effort, their experience.

They use humility as a weapon.

Self-deprecation that demands reassurance.

False modesty that fishes for praise.

“Oh, I’m sure I just did it wrong,” said until you correct them, twice.

They never apologize cleanly.

Apologies become a vehicle for re-centering themselves.

“I’m sorry you felt that way.”

“I’m just so sensitive; I take everything to heart.”

“I am working on it. I’ve been through so much.”

The apology is for them, not for you.

Your body tells you something is off long before your mind does.

You feel tired after seeing them.

You feel small in their presence.

You start performing for them without realizing it.

You begin to question your own perceptions.

If your wins make them sad, that is information.

The Cost of Staying Entangled

It shows up in the body:

• a chest that braces around them

• a tiredness that follows their texts

• the chronic sense that you have done something wrong

• a vague unsteadiness about your own perceptions

It shows up in your story:

• your wins begin to feel like risks

• your boundaries begin to feel like cruelty

• your truth begins to feel like an attack on them

It shows up in your leadership:

• decisions slowed because you anticipate their reaction

• ideas softened because you are managing their fragility

• a quiet self-erasure that no one in the room can see

A covert narcissist costs you what you cannot easily measure: your unfiltered self.

Visibility: Behavior changes over time, not vibes in a moment

Do not rely on a single bad moment.

Watch:

• how they respond when you succeed

• how they speak about you in your absence

• whether their support is offered or invoiced

• whether your truth is welcome when it does not center them

• what happens when you say no, decline, choose differently

If the pattern, over time, leaves you smaller

The relationship is not nourishing you.

It is metabolizing you.

Leaders who can name what they see:

• “I notice this happens every time I succeed.”

• “I notice my wins always become about your feelings.”

• “I notice your support arrives with conditions I did not agree to.”

Stop being managed

and start managing the dynamics on their own terms.

A pattern is the portrait. One incident is just the brushstroke.

Liberation: Trust your read

Liberation begins when you stop arguing

with what your body has been telling you for months.

It sounds like:

• “My read is allowed to be enough.”

• “I do not need them to admit it for it to be real.”

• “The pattern is the proof. I do not have to wait for a confession.”

When you stop overriding your own perception,

something opens in the body:

The chest releases.

The breath returns.

You stop carrying a relationship you have been managing alone.

You do not need a clinical diagnosis to recognize a cost. The cost itself is the diagnosis you need.

Transformation: Limit access. Source your power elsewhere.

The deepest move is not to confront the covert narcissist.

It is to remove yourself from the dynamic.

They cannot operate in your life without your continued participation.

You do not have to:

• explain

• justify

• prove the pattern

• convince them they are doing it

• get them to admit anything

You only have to:

• limit access

• stop feeding the dynamic with your reactions

• redirect your time, energy, and trust toward people whose support is unconditional and visible

Confrontation is rarely useful with a covert narcissist.

They will reframe it.

They will become the wounded party.

You will end up apologizing for noticing.

Do not enter that arena.

Distance is a complete sentence.

You do not owe a covert narcissist an explanation. You owe yourself a different room.

The Difference

A friend supports you and is bigger when you grow.

A covert narcissist supports you only when you stay smaller than they are.

A friend celebrates your wins.

A covert narcissist mourns them.

A friend’s help is freely given.

A covert narcissist’s help is collected.

A friend can hear your truth.

A covert narcissist will turn your truth into evidence of their suffering.

Real support feels expansive. Covert extraction feels heavy, even when the words are kind.

How to Protect Yourself

1. Stop overriding your read.

Your body has been keeping the receipts.

Listen.

2. Track behavior over time, not statements in a moment.

They will say the right thing.

Watch what they do over months.

3. Limit what you give them access to.

Information is currency to a covert narcissist.

Your wins, your fears, your strategy, your relationships.

They do not need a full picture of your life.

4. Stop explaining yourself to them.

Explanations are an opening for reframe.

Your no does not require justification.

5. Build your room with people who do not need to be the center.

Real allies celebrate from where they stand.

They do not need to be more discerning, more wounded, or more humble than you

In order to support you.

You do not have to confront a covert narcissist. You only have to stop participating.

Closing Reflection

Whose support has been making me feel smaller?

Whose presence requires me to manage their feelings

more than I have ever asked them to manage mine?

If I removed access from this person this week,

What would my body do?

Final Truth

Beware the one who insists on being the safest person in the room.

Beware of the help that arrives with invisible terms.

Beware of the support that goes silent when you grow.

You do not need permission to walk away.

You do not need a confession to leave.

You do not…