Lead
Anyway

Rule 1: You Don't Have to Be Loud to Lead

"There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas." — Susan Cain

I used to dread introductions. Actually, I still do most of the time. We all have encountered those moments in workshops or team offsites when you're supposed to say your name, your role, and something fun about yourself. You know, the icebreakers at the networking dinners or at the business events where everyone seems to be effortlessly confident, funny, magnetic and always ready with something clever to say.

I used to sit and watch the charismatic people speak. You know, the loud, energetic ones who have the blessing of being comfortable in their own skin, a feeling I've yet to fully understand. And while watching them I'd simply feel like I didn't belong. I wasn't shy or afraid of people, I just wasn't that. While others joked easily about their hobbies or pets or football, I sat there overthinking every possible answer to the question "what's fun about me", trying to sound interesting, memorable, and just "normal" enough. My brain would freeze, I didn't light up the room and I didn't have the energy to be "on" all the time. Instead, I was thoughtful, focused, and anxious. Quiet, and very anxious.

For a while, I believed that meant I wasn't cut out for leadership. I believed I needed to become someone else to succeed, especially in the corporate world. Someone more charismatic, someone more likable, more fun, more outgoing, more extroverted and more capable of speaking spontaneously without overthinking every thought.

So I studied the charismatic people I came across. And when I say I studied, I really did. I took notes on how they spoke, how they moved, how they used their hands and how they laughed at the right moments. And based on my studies, I trained myself to be more outgoing, to smile more than I wanted to and to laugh even when I didn't think it was funny. I even learned to interrupt conversations just to sound confident and to learn how to fake certainty. I prepared clever introductions in advance, I learned how to drop punchlines and soundbites like I wasn't rehearsing them in my head all morning. And by doing so, I started performing leadership instead of practicing it.

But eventually, overtime, the performance started to wear me down. By 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, I hit a wall. The back to back Teams calls, pretending to be a leader I wasn't and the pressure to project a polished, charismatic version of myself, while sitting in my own office/bedroom collided into a reality I couldn't sustain. As the pandemic forced me to work from home a lot, being my made up "work self" in my house drained me completely. I think it hit me hard because home used to be my safe place where I allowed myself to be just me without pretending and now having to work from home fulltime, I could no longer be myself in my own home. The mask I had worn at work for years was already becoming unbearable before the pandemic, but it accelerated the crash. At first, I told myself I was just tired, but deep down I knew I was burned out. Not from the job itself but from all the pretending it was requiring from me.

This was the turning point.

And slowly, very slowly, something in me started to rebel. First, it was very quiet, I almost didn't notice. But overtime, I started to hear this voice that said: What if I just stopped trying to be someone else? What if I tried to be more myself and do what feels right to me?

I didn't act on this thought right away. Not at all. I was way too scared and I didn't want to risk the career I had spent years building. But by 2022, that voice had grown louder and when I got promoted to Vice President, leading the Global Marketing team at the company I worked at, I felt a shift. The shift was probably due to the fact that I had attained a corporate level I never imagined I'd reach and I didn't expect to climb any higher. After spending years proving that I belonged, I now felt I had reached a level where I wanted to belong on my own terms. I now wanted to lead, not by mimicking others, but by being more myself.

What I thought for years were weaknesses, my quietness, my steadiness, my ability to read the room in an instant, my need to reflect before I speak, my discomfort with performative leadership, I realised were actually the things that made me effective. I didn't need to become more charismatic, I needed to become more honest, more grounded. More me.