Are You Leading From Your Role Or From Yourself?
- Mar 30
- 5 min read
Written by Kate Adey, Business Founder
Kate Adey is described as wise, insightful, and pragmatic, creating immediate safety for transformation. A mother of three with a Master's in Leadership, she's the author of The Other Way, which distils 20 years working with professional women through transitions and leaders creating cultures where excellence and wholeness aren't in opposition.
The women I work with are senior leaders and are accomplished, respected, and focused on delivering. That was me! So many of them say some version of the same thing, I feel forever on. I’m chasing all the time. I don’t want to lose who I am. I’m so much in my head, overthinking all the time. And the one that stays with me the most, I’m too scared to show the real me at work.
That last one. Sit with it for a second. These are senior women in professional services. Women who have earned their place, who led teams, and who are trusted with significant decisions. And underneath all of that, they feel they can’t bring themselves through the door. This is what The Other Way is about.
When the role takes over
Professional services environments are brilliant at training you to perform. You learn very early what gets rewarded: confidence, control, and composure. You learn what to show and what to keep hidden. And over time, that performance becomes so practised it starts to feel like you.
I think of it like an actor on stage. While you’re in character, the role is utterly convincing. But the actor is still there beneath the costume. The problem comes when you’ve been in character for so long, through the career climb, through motherhood, through the body changes of perimenopause, showing up in the middle of a client presentation, that you’ve genuinely lost the thread back to yourself.
I lived this. My identity was completely fused with being a management consultant, a mother, and a wife. I was juggling and dropping plates, and the exhausting part wasn’t the workload. It was running the whole show from inside a set of roles I’d forgotten I was playing.
The mental load nobody talks about
The mental load women carry in senior roles is staggering. And I’m not just talking about the logistics, the school pickups calculated against the client call, the Teams messages checked at bedtime, because tomorrow will be worse if you don’t.
There’s another layer underneath that. The constant monitoring of how you’re coming across. Managing the version of yourself that’s acceptable at work. Hiding the hot flushes. Pushing through the brain fog. Keeping the morning chaos invisible when you walk into the 9 am meeting.
You’re not just carrying the work. You’re carrying the performance of the work. And that’s a very different weight. What I’ve seen time and again is that the exhaustion women feel isn’t from lack of capability or resilience. It’s from the sheer energy of switching between separate versions of themselves all day and slowly, quietly, losing touch with the one underneath all of them. The one they don’t want to lose!
The question that shifts something
In my book, The Other Way, I invite women into a very simple inquiry. Not a framework or a set of tools. Just a question: What’s aware of the role? Stay with that. Don’t answer it with your mind. Just look.
In that moment, there’s a sense of something noticing. Something that isn’t the director, the mother, the woman managing symptoms at 3 am. Something steady that was there long before any of those roles existed and is still here now.
I call this present awareness. You could call it wholeness, aliveness, or consciousness. The word doesn’t matter. It’s the deep knowing. And when I first really felt it, what struck me most was how long it had been there. The aliveness. Always there, covered over by the noise of the roles and the stories and the relentless mental commentary.
What changes when you see this
This isn’t about meditation retreats or stepping back from ambition. These can all be great. It’s about the self-inquiry I explore in The Other Way, which is quietly, practically transformative in the day-to-day.
When you stop being completely identified with the idea of you being a role, the proving loop begins to ease. The constant judgement about whether you’re performing well enough as a leader, as a mother, as a woman of a certain age, it starts to loosen. Women describe arriving into meetings differently. Less defended. More curious about what’s needed rather than managing how they’re landing. There’s more space. More of themselves in the room. And the real me at work? That stops feeling so frightening. It feels free, expansive, and creative.
Three doorways into the same place
The Other Way is built around three transitions that many senior women are navigating, often all at once: motherhood, career shifts, and menopause. In my experience, each one has the potential to crack something open if you’re willing to look at it differently.
MotherWise: The wisdom that surfaces when you stop trying to think your way through parenting and listen. Women often find something comes alive here that spills into how they lead too.
MenoPower: The fierce clarity that arrives when the body stops letting you tolerate what’s been draining you. For many women, menopause turns out to be the most powerful invitation to come home to themselves they’ve ever had.
CareerFlow: What becomes possible when you stop trying to prove your worth and start operating from it. The shift from performing your leadership to leading.
Try this now
You don’t need the book to get a taste of this. Right now, wherever you are:
Pause. Notice you’re aware right now.
Notice the role that’s felt heaviest today.
Ask: what is aware of that role?
What’s here, underneath it?
Just notice what shifts. Not an answer, a little more space, and a sense of the person who was there before the role.
You were always there
What I’ve witnessed with so many women is that the recognition, when it lands, is quietly life-changing. The chasing eases. The mental noise settles. There’s more of them available for their work, their families, and themselves. The aliveness was there the whole time. You just had very good reasons not to look. Ready to look?
You can grab your copy of my book, The Other Way, for women like you who are navigating motherhood, career transitions, and menopause, and who sense there’s something deeper available than another strategy or coping plan. Available here, as well as different ways to stay in conversation with me.
Read more from Kate Adey
Kate Adey, Business Founder
Kate Adey works with professional women navigating motherhood, career shifts, and menopause, and with leaders creating cultures where excellence and wholeness aren't in opposition. She spent years in management consulting, thinking her way through problems, until a hypnobirthing course during pregnancy connected her to her body and the signals she'd been ignoring. Everything shifted.
Her curiosity led her to the teachings of non-duality. She created The Other Way Method™ and the Triskele Framework, MotherWise, CareerFlow, and MenoPower from twenty years of this work. Her book The Other Way shows how these transitions reveal the wholeness that was there before conditioning covered it up.
