How Women Lead Without Shrinking to Fit for International Women’s Day
Updated: Mar 13
Jingying Xu, Ph.D., is the founder of Meditate Into Prosperity, guiding professionals and leaders to transform inner power into outward presence through meditation, energy healing, and personal growth coaching. A former Research Scientist at the University of Oxford, she blends scientific rigor with Eastern wisdom for lasting transformation.
Not long ago, a female client shared something with me after a meditation session. She works in an intense industry in a megacity, the kind of environment where long hours, constant decisions, and quiet competition are simply part of daily life.
After the session, she sat in silence for a while. Then tears came. Finally, she said something that stayed with me, “I feel like I’m chasing success while slowly flattening myself in the process.”
Her career was rising. Her income was increasing. Her influence was expanding. But she, the person behind all of it, felt as though she was becoming smaller. Not physically smaller. But existentially smaller. She had begun speaking more cautiously. Expressing herself more strategically. Regulating her emotions more carefully. Softening her edges.
In many ways, she had become “more professional.” But she had also become less present. The moment she said it, I realised something. This is not an isolated experience. It is a pattern many women in leadership quietly live with.
The invisible skill many women learn: Self-compression
Many successful women learn a skill that is rarely written in leadership manuals. They learn how to compress themselves. Without anyone explicitly teaching it, women often become experts at:
Softening their intuition
Toning down their sharpness
Filtering their real thoughts
Regulating their emotional expression
Ignoring the signals from their own bodies
And they tell themselves, “It’s fine. I can handle it.” But self-compression does not remain subtle forever.
If it continues long enough, it begins to show itself sometimes as exhaustion, sometimes as emotional numbness, sometimes as strained relationships, and sometimes as physical symptoms that the body can no longer ignore. Many women seek support only when the pressure becomes unbearable. Not because they are weak. But because they have been strong for too long while shrinking inside.
Why do women shrink?
While writing this article, a friend shared a quote with me:
“She had this weird habit of being herself all the time. That’s why not everyone liked her. – Unknown”
I could not stop giggling. Because in many ways, this captures the quiet tension women leaders often live with. Authenticity can still feel slightly “inconvenient.”
Many of us were trained early in life not formally, but culturally. Girls grow up hearing subtle expectations, such as: Be humble. Be considerate. Be agreeable. Be a good girl.
Alongside these messages come the warnings: Don’t be too strong. Don’t be too emotional. Don’t be too demanding. Don’t take up too much space.
Over time, we learn to calibrate ourselves. To become just visible enough. Just powerful enough. Just confident enough. But never too much. The difficulty is that leadership has never been about being “just enough.” Leadership, by its nature, takes space. And taking space is not the same as being egotistical. It simply means allowing one's full presence, intelligence, and humanity to exist without unnecessary shrinking.
Success is not meant to fit you into a smaller box
Many women unconsciously assume that professionalism requires becoming a version of themselves that has:
No body
No emotions
No personal needs
No vulnerability
In other words, a person who functions well in every role but rarely appears fully as herself. This pattern does not only appear in corporate environments. It often extends across life roles. A woman may be a respected professional, a devoted mother, a supportive partner, and a reliable friend, performing each role with impressive competence. Yet somewhere along the way, the person herself begins to disappear behind the roles she fulfils.
The system works. But the self becomes compressed. Over time, something subtle but important begins to contract.
Intuition shrinks
Creative energy shrinks
Emotional aliveness shrinks
Personal desire shrinks
Presence shrinks
From the outside, everything still looks successful. But inside, life no longer expands through the person, it simply moves through a highly functional structure.
Not shrinking is not the same as becoming self-centred
Let’s be clear. Leading without shrinking does not mean becoming self-absorbed or insensitive. It simply means:
Allowing yourself to take up space
Respecting the limits of your body
No longer shrinking in order to be liked
No longer silencing yourself in order to belong
It means leading with your whole self, instead of a carefully edited version. And paradoxically, when leaders stop shrinking, they often become more stabilising for others. Authenticity is grounding. Presence is regulating. People can feel when someone is fully there.
The next evolution of female leadership
For many years, conversations around women in leadership focused on questions such as: How can women become stronger? How can women compete more effectively? How can women succeed in male-dominated environments?
These were necessary questions at a particular stage of social development. But perhaps the next evolution of female leadership asks a different question. Not how women can become tougher. But how women can become less compressed.
True leadership does not require women to:
Become harsher
Become more aggressive
Suppress emotion
Imitate masculine leadership models
Instead, many of the most powerful leaders embody something quieter.
They are less driven by external validation
Their presence stabilises the room
Their decisions arise from clarity rather than pressure
Their boundaries are respected without force
Their leadership does not cost them their humanity
They lead without abandoning themselves.
Wholeness: The missing dimension
At its core, this conversation is not only about gender. It is about wholeness. Leadership that requires the fragmentation of the self eventually becomes unsustainable.
Conscious growth invites something different. It invites individuals to integrate rather than divide themselves. To allow strength and sensitivity, clarity and intuition, authority and humanity to coexist. In this sense, the future of leadership may depend less on domination and more on integration. Wholeness is not perfection. It is the courage to be real.
A question for this International Women’s Day
Perhaps the real question is no longer, “Can women succeed?” Women have already answered that question. The deeper question now may be, “Can women succeed without losing themselves in the process?”
Because the next stage of leadership evolution may not be about power. It may be about wholeness. The courage not to shrink. Not to compress. Not to squeeze oneself into whatever shape success is supposed to look like.
True leadership is not about becoming smaller. It is about allowing life to stand more fully through you.
A practical pathway
If this perspective resonates, begin simply. Sometimes the first step toward leading without shrinking is reconnecting with your own inner stability. A free library of short guided meditations is available here.
Even a few minutes of consistent practice can help cultivate clarity, emotional balance, and a deeper connection with oneself. From that place, leadership becomes less about performance and more about presence.
Working with Jingying Xu, PhD
Jingying Xu works with women, parents, and leaders who carry responsibility in families, organisations, and communities, and who wish to cultivate steadiness and clarity from within. Her work integrates meditation, embodied awareness, and consciousness-based development to support:
Grounded presence in daily life
Emotional regulation and clarity
Intuitive discernment in decision-making
Leadership rooted in calm authority rather than force
She offers:
Guided Meditation Programmes for Presence & Inner Governance
1-to-1 Mentoring for Women, Parents & Leaders
A Weekly Newsletter on Meditation & Conscious Development
Read more from Jingying Xu
Jingying Xu, Founder of Meditate Into Prosperity
Jingying Xu (Ph.D., DipBSoM) is the founder of Meditate Into Prosperity, guiding professionals and leaders to transform inner power into outward presence through meditation, energy healing, and personal growth coaching. A certified Level-3 Meditation Teacher with the British School of Meditation and former Research Scientist at the University of Oxford, she combines scientific rigor with 18 years of practice. Blending Eastern wisdom with Western science, Jingying empowers clients to realign within, expand clarity and presence, and lead with authentic impact.
