What Happens When Women Stop Abandoning Themselves to Succeed

The older I get, the less interested I am in leadership that only lives in the head.

For years, I worked in fast-moving businesses where intelligence, capability and performance were deeply valued. And rightly so. I’ve spent much of my career around brilliant women — women who could think strategically in seconds, hold enormous pressure, read a room before anyone else had spoken, lead teams, shape culture and carry responsibility with extraordinary competence.

But underneath that capability, I often sensed something else too.

Exhaustion.

Disconnection.

Women who had become so good at surviving that they had slowly stopped feeling fully alive inside themselves.

I know that journey because I lived it too.

For a long time, my leadership came almost entirely from my mind. My intellect. My resilience. My ability to hold everything together. And externally, it worked. But internally, there were moments where I realised I felt strangely disconnected from myself — from my body, my softness, my intuition, my emotional depth, my sense of aliveness.

I think many women know this feeling.

Because so many of us were taught, directly or indirectly, that being respected meant becoming less of ourselves.

Less emotional.

Less intuitive.

Less expressive.

Less soft.

Less human.

We learnt how to perform leadership. But not always how to inhabit ourselves.

And eventually, that disconnection catches up with us.

Not always dramatically. Sometimes quietly.

In the feeling that life has become functional rather than nourishing.In the exhaustion of constantly over-riding yourself.In the ache of being deeply capable while also feeling emotionally distant from your own life.

What I’ve come to realise through my own journey and through witnessing it in so many women I admire is that leadership changes when women reconnect to their aliveness.

Not just their ambition or confidence.

Their aliveness.

The kind you feel in deep conversations where you skip the surface and go straight to truth. In music that cracks something open inside you. In slow mornings where your nervous system can finally exhale. In creativity, beauty, nature, desire, stillness and presence.

In the fire of the sea on stormy days.

And the calm of waves gently crashing against the shore.

The moments where you don’t just think you’re alive.

You feel it.

This is also why I’ve become increasingly interested in the original meaning of eros.

Not in the way the word has been flattened or sexualised.

But in its deeper meaning: life force. Creative energy. Aliveness. The current that runs through us when we are deeply connected to ourselves.

Because the women who move me most are rarely the loudest in the room.

But they change the room.

Their presence lands before their words do. People trust them. Feel safe around them. Listen when they speak. Not because they dominate but because they are deeply connected to themselves.

There is a different kind of power that emerges when a woman stops abandoning herself in order to succeed.

When she trusts her body alongside her intellect.

When softness is no longer mistaken for weakness.

When rest, intuition and emotional truth stop being things she squeezes in around productivity.

When she no longer measures her worth purely through output and performance.

That kind of woman doesn’t just lead differently.

She lives differently.

And honestly, I think this is the deeper work for many women now.

Not becoming more impressive.

Becoming more whole.

For me, reconnecting to that aliveness has looked like slowing down enough to hear myself again. Choosing depth over surface-level connection. Letting music, nature, creativity and beauty nourish me rather than treating them as luxuries to earn after productivity. Listening to my body instead of constantly over-riding it. Allowing softness and strength to coexist.

It has also meant questioning the systems and leadership models many of us inherited —models that rewarded burnout, hyper-independence and disconnection from self while calling it success.

I think many women are waking up to the fact that they no longer want to lead from survival.

They want to lead from presence.

From embodiment.

From truth.

From wholeness.

And I think we know, deep down, when we are disconnected from ourselves.

But I also think we know when we’re finally coming home.