“A woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing. She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination prepared to be herself and only herself.”
— Dr. Maya Angelou

I keep coming back to the river.

Not because it is calm. A river is rarely calm. It bends, it floods, it narrows through rock and widens across open ground. What makes it a river is not stillness. It is movement. It keeps going toward where it is meant to go, without apology. It does not ask the bank for permission. It does not pretend to be a lake because a lake would be more convenient. It goes where it will.

That line, without pretense, is the one that stops me every time. 

Because pretense is the thing I see most often in the women I work with, and it is almost never a flaw. It is a survival skill. 

The women who find their way to me are not lost in the way that word usually means. They are senior. Accomplished. Trusted. They have the title, the team, the seat at the table that someone fought to give them, and that they fought harder to keep. By every external measure, they have arrived. 

And quietly, often for the first time, they admit they are no longer sure the person who arrived is actually them.

I think of one woman, though in truth she is a composite of many I have sat with. She leads a large organization. In our first session, she walked me through her week the way she might brief her board, crisp and sequenced, every fire already named and contained. 

I asked her how she was. She gave me the version she thought I expected. Then a long pause, the kind that means something important is being decided. Almost annoyed at herself, she said, “I don’t know who I am when I’m not handling something.” 

She had spent two decades becoming indispensable, and somewhere in the process, she had become unfamiliar to herself.

That is the pretense I mean. It is not vanity. It is the slow, expert work of becoming what every room needed. Steadier than she felt. Warmer than she wanted to be that day. Smaller in some rooms, larger in others. Competent while exhaustion sat quietly beneath the surface. She called it professionalism, and it was. But it was also performance. A version of herself so practiced and rewarded that eventually the line between the performance and the person blurred.

I understand this from the inside. My own path moved through corporate life at companies like Coca-Cola and Abbott, then through leadership and advisory roles in other settings, including public education, where I first found my way into coaching. Different rooms, different titles, the same lesson repeated. 

I was excellent. I was depleted. Treating that as a fair trade. Many of us do. That is exactly the problem. You can become so skilled at the performance that you forget it’s a performance. You can mistake the applause for alignment.

This is the heart of what I mean by Harmonious Leadership. Not leadership that is soft or conflict-free. Leadership that flows from internal alignment rather than constant internal negotiation. Leadership where the woman in the meeting and the woman in her own kitchen at night are recognizably the same person. Where her True North is not a phrase she says, but the current underneath her decisions. So much of what looks like burnout at the top is not simply too much work. It is too much contortion. It is the cost of holding a shape that is not yours, day after day, year after year.

When people ask why I do this work, this quote comes close to my answer.

I do it for the moment a woman stops managing how she is perceived long enough to notice what she actually wants. I do it for the conversation where she says the true thing instead of the acceptable thing, and discovers the ceiling does not fall in. I do it because I have watched accomplished women realize that the knowing she has treated like a liability may be the most trustworthy thing she has. 

I am not in the business of making women into rivers. They already are rivers. My work is to help clear what has built up against the flow. In practice, that work is often quieter and less glamorous than people imagine. We slow down. We notice the shapes she has been holding and ask, one by one, whether they are still hers to carry. The habits that once kept her safe and now keep her small. The performance that earned her the room but now keeps her from being honest inside it. The belief that being needed is the same as being known.

A river arrives prepared to be itself and only itself. That preparation is not effortless. It is the long, patient work of moving through everything that tried to redirect it. But the destination was never in question. The destination was always herself.

That is the work. That is why I do it. And if you are a woman reading this with the quiet sense that you have been holding a shape that no longer feels like yours, I want you to know something: 

The current is still there. It has been waiting for you the whole time.

If this feels familiar, The Bridge: A Harmonious Leadership Playbook was created for you. It is a guided, practical way to step back, reflect on the full arc of your leadership journey, and begin designing what comes next, not based on expectations, but from a deeper alignment with who you are now. 

Because the next chapter of your leadership should feel like you.