They built their careers by becoming who they needed to be:
The reliable one,
The competent one,
The one who doesn’t need anything.

It worked... they got the title, the income, the reputation. But inside...

Something feels quietly wrong. Not broken, just "off".

Not dramatic.
Not a breakdown.
Just a constant low-grade tension in the chest that never fully leaves.

That’s not stress. That’s what happens when your internal pressure is forcing you to live a life it wasn’t designed for.

When you keep making decisions from obligation instead of instinct.
When you lead in ways that drain you instead of fuel you.
When you succeed by betraying your natural way of operating.

Most women think:
“I just need more rest.”
“I need better boundaries.”
“I need to try harder or care less.”

The truth is much simpler and far scarier...

You are running your life on someone else's operating system. Your Leadership Design isn’t about personality. It’s about how your energy is meant to move through the wor...

I'm not a boxer.

But I was ready to pick a fight.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. Another leadership meeting. Another conversation negotiating who in our leadership team was taking on what portion of our division’s goals. Yet another situation where my team was being pressured to take on an additional 30 Million in quota to cover the shortfall of another team. 

I felt my jaw clench. My voice got inappropriately loud. My hands slapped down on my notebook on the table.

And I had this wild thought: "I could flip this table right now."

(I didn't, of course. But the impulse was real)

That's when I knew something was deeply wrong, deeply misaligned.

Not with the meeting. With me.

Because leaders don't fantasize about flipping conference tables in quota meetings.

But managers who are pretending to lead? We absolutely do.

Here's what I realized in that moment:

I was no longer leading my team. I was managing their problems. I was no longer leading myself. I was managing my resentment. I ...

"You can have it all, just not all at the same time."

We used to say this constantly. To our team. To other women. To ourselves.

And we were wrong.

Not wrong about the sentiment. Wrong about what it implied.

Because when we say "you can't have it all at the same time," what we're really saying is:

"Leadership requires sacrifice." "Success requires compromise." "You have to choose between your career and your life."

And we’re calling BS.

The problem isn't that you can't have it all.

The problem is that you're trying to have it all in someone else's design.

Let me explain.

We spent years trying to lead like the men around us. Early mornings, late nights, constant availability, relentless drive.

We thought that's what leadership looked like, because that was all we saw.

So when we burned out, we assumed the problem was that we wanted too much. Career success AND personal fulfillment? That's not realistic. Pick one.

But here's what we discovered after a decade of deep work in ...