You Found Your Voice—Now What? Navigating the Leap to Authentic Leadership
- Linda Rhoads
- Sep 29
- 6 min read
You found your voice, now what
You did the work.
You paused.
You listened.
You unlearned the noise that told you who you needed to be in order to lead.
You reclaimed your voice—not just the one others hear, but the inner voice that tells you what’s right for you.
So now what?
This is the moment so many women reach and freeze—not because they’re unclear, but because they’re exposed.
Because now, it’s not about knowing your truth.
It’s about living it—out loud, in spaces where that truth might not land easily.
And here’s the truth no one talks about enough:
Authentic leadership lives in a delicate tension—between hiding who you are and feeling like you have to let it all hang out.
It’s easy to confuse authenticity with oversharing.
Yet, imagining that “showing up fully” means spilling every emotion, naming every thought, or pushing past your own readiness, highlights a missing pieces of the leadership puzzle including emotional intelllegence, and discernment.
On the flip side, it’s just as easy to over-correct:
To downplay what’s real.
To edit your voice into something palatable.
To silence the very clarity you worked so hard to reclaim.
But authenticity isn’t about exposure or self-protection. It’s about presence. It’s about showing up in ways that are true, intentional, and self-honoring.
You don’t owe anyone your vulnerability. But you do owe yourself leadership that doesn’t rely on hiding.
So if you’ve reclaimed your voice—and now find yourself wondering what to do with it—this is for you.
This is where the real shift begins.
Why Authentic Leadership Feels So Exposed
If you’ve been leading in high-stakes spaces—especially ones shaped by dominance, urgency, or image management—then you know the subtle calculation that happens before every move:
“How much of myself is safe to bring here?”
“Will this land well, or will I seem too emotional?”
“If I tell the truth, will I still be trusted?”
These questions have a root source.
They’re the residue of leadership models built around control, assimilation, and respectability.
For many women I coach, the shift into authentic leadership isn’t just about being more expressive—it’s about recalibrating their entire nervous system to withstand visibility without self-abandonment.
That’s no small thing.
Authentic leadership doesn’t mean saying everything you feel.
It means telling the truth, in a way that honors both your clarity and your care.
But even that can feel risky—especially when you’ve finally reclaimed your inner compass and want to protect it.
The Gap Between Inner Truth and Outer Expression
There’s often a gap between what you know inside and what you’re ready to share outside.
That gap might feel like:
Shaky voice in a meeting
Avoidance of high-stakes conversations
A tendency to write, revise, and delete that bold LinkedIn post before hitting publish
Sometimes that gap is necessary. It can be a space of integration, where your leadership realigns with your values.
But sometimes?
That gap becomes a holding pattern. A way of keeping yourself almost visible. Almost in your power.
You don’t owe the world your vulnerability.
But you do owe yourself the chance to show up aligned—so you don’t have to perform your way through another quarter, year, decade, of your life.
A Client Story: From Monitoring Perception to Leading with Self-Assurance
We worked together to redesign her leadership presence—not to impress the board, but to reflect what felt rooted, steady, and right.
For months, she had been walking into executive meetings already half-occupied—one part of her focused on the content, and the other scanning the room for signs:
Am I coming across the right way?
Did I soften that too much?
Was it too sharp? Do they trust me?
Do I fit what they expect a leader to look like?
She wasn’t questioning her competence.
She was navigating the unspoken dance of perception—a dance she had mastered, but one that never quite felt like home.
It was exhausting.
She described the weight she carried in those rooms—not just the responsibility, but the effort to remain affable, credible, and unthreatening.
“It’s like there’s a version of me that’s allowed to lead here. And then there’s the rest of me, holding back.”
When the time came to present her restructured department plan, the content wasn’t the challenge.
The moment just before she spoke was.
Her inner critic stirred, warning her not to get too comfortable in her clarity.
It reminded her to scan for subtle threats, to anticipate how she might be perceived, and to question whether she had earned the right to be this grounded, this direct.
Her chest tightened.
Her breath, shallow.
She felt the rising energy in her face—her body’s signal that she was stepping out of her comfort zone.
But this time, she stayed.
Instead of defaulting to performance, she paused. She remembered what mattered. And she chose to trust the self she’d been working to reclaim.
Later she told me,
“I wasn’t trying to be confident. I just wasn’t chasing their acceptance. I felt anchored. Like I wasn’t waiting to be seen. I already had my own trust.”
That’s what self-assurance feels like. It’s not loud. It’s not performative. It’s the quiet recognition that you’re no longer negotiating your clarity.
And that’s the turning point— when it becomes easier to quiet your critic than to abandon yourself again.
When you stop bending your voice to be accepted— when you stop monitoring yourself to match an image— you don’t just become visible.
You become undeniably present.
Have you ever felt that moment—when you realized you were done reshaping yourself to fit the room?
Why This Moment Feels So Risky
Let’s be clear: this isn’t just about nerves.
It’s about risk.
Because the moment you decide to lead from your own clarity—without filtering it through other people’s expectations—you are risking something real.
Risking being misunderstood.
Risking not being liked.
Risking disrupting the comfort of the room.
And maybe most of all, you’re risking the identity you’ve worked so hard to manage—one built on credibility, likability, or strategic invisibility.
But here’s what I want you to remember:
You are not performing anymore. You are practicing.
And practice means:
Your voice can be strong and uncertain.
Your presence can feel real even if it doesn’t look polished.
Your leadership can land—even if it doesn’t meet everyone’s expectations.
This is what authentic leadership looks like in motion.
Not rehearsed. Not pristine.
Just real.
What You’re Really Risking
A lot of women I work with express a quiet fear that showing up as their whole selves will erode their credibility.
But the real risk?
Staying in roles, conversations, or leadership habits that require you to suppress your clarity.
If you’ve found your voice and are still shrinking yourself, the dissonance doesn’t go away—it compounds.
It starts to show up in small betrayals:
Saying yes when your body says no
Nodding along in meetings when you feel discomfort
Leading teams in ways that don’t reflect what you know is possible
Authenticity isn’t a branding strategy.
It’s the daily act of not abandoning yourself.
A Few Truths to Hold Onto
As you step forward from this place—voice intact, clarity returning—here’s what I want you to know:
1. Feeling vulnerable doesn’t mean you’re off-track.
It means you’re not hiding.
2. You’re not required to have it all figured out.
You just have to lead from what’s true right now.
3. You are allowed to learn out loud.
That’s what leadership actually is.
This is not the polished leadership you may have been taught to model. It’s the kind that creates actual space—for change, for trust, for something real to happen in the room.
What Happens Next?
When we're unlearning the leadership modes that keep us stuck, understanding our own patterns is the moment we shift from internal reconnection to external reclamation.
It’s not just about knowing your values—it’s about claiming your seat and speaking your truth.
That doesn’t mean being loud or forceful. It means being present in your own leadership style—without muting, shrinking, or assimilating for approval.
This next phase is not about “taking up space” for its own sake. It’s about showing up in a way that reflects your truth, your power, your rhythm.
It’s not easy. But it’s deeply worth it. Because once you’ve found your voice—the only way to honor it is to use it.
Not perfectly.
Just truthfully.
Your Turn: Crossing the Threshold
If this is where you are, try reflecting on one of these:
Where am I still shrinking, even though I know better now?
What would I say or do differently if I trusted that my truth could belong in the room?
What does authentic leadership look like for me—not in theory, but in practice?
You don’t need to perform your authenticity.
You just need to let it be real—here, now, as you are.
You’ve done the unlearning.
You’ve found your voice.
Now let’s practice using it.
Next Step:
If you’ve reclaimed your voice but find yourself hesitating to use it, this is the exact threshold we work on in The Reset — a 3-month coaching experience designed to help high-achieving women pause, realign, and step into leadership that reflects who they really are.
This post is part of Unlearning to Lead: Reclaiming the Way Forward for Women in Leadership—a blog series exploring the invisible rules many women carry, and what it takes to lead from authenticity instead of adaptation.
Linda coaches high-achieving women, drawing from 20+ years of leadership, including confidential executive advising and Chief of Staff roles. As a certified executive coach (PCC), she empowers women to move beyond self-doubt, cultivating leadership presence and sustainable rhythms for fulfillment.
✨ Discover how to lead and live on your terms.
Connect with Linda on LinkedIn or visit The Soul Spot for more insights.
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