There is a story that has been told in boardrooms, at kitchen tables, in houses of worship, and inside the bodies of women who lead.
It is not spoken aloud so much as inherited.
It goes something like this: to be strong is to be hard. To lead is to endure. To succeed is to suppress. And if you ever feel like sitting down, slowing down, or softening, that is a weakness you must overcome.
I have sat across from women who run companies, raise children, lead nonprofits, and carry communities. I have watched them apologize for needing rest. I have watched them confuse exhaustion with failure. I have watched them train themselves to become unmovable because, somewhere along the way, being unmovable became the definition of being strong.
So let me ask a question that every leader, regardless of sector, industry, or title, needs to sit with:
What if the definition of strength we have been handed is incomplete?
Softness is not the opposite of strength. It is the soil in which strength grows.
The incomplete definition of strength has not merely been inconvenient. It has been expensive. It has cost women their health, clarity, joy, and, in too many cases, their willingness to continue leading. It has cost organizations the depth of leadership they could have had if they had not trained their best people to perform endurance instead of model wisdom. It has cost communities the leaders who burned out before the work was done.
This is not simply a conversation about being kinder to yourself. It is a reckoning with what we have normalized, what it has taken from us, and what becomes possible when we decide that the definition we inherited is no longer sufficient.
How Leaders Learn to Perform Strength
The “strong leader” archetype did not emerge from nowhere. It was constructed.
Social constructivism, drawn from the foundational work of Lev Vygotsky, argues that what we understand as knowledge is shaped through social
interaction, cultural transmission, and the norms of the communities we inhabit.
In other words, we did not independently arrive at the conclusion that strength means toughness. We learned it by watching what was rewarded.In many organizational cultures, what gets rewarded is performance without pause, decisiveness without doubt, and output without restoration.
Leaders who show fatigue may be viewed as liabilities. Leaders who ask for support may be seen as underprepared. The unspoken curriculum teaches one thing clearly: your worth is measured by how much you can carry and how little it appears to cost you.
For women, and particularly for Black women, this expectation can carry additional cultural weight.
Research on the Strong Black Woman schema has explored how Black women are often positioned as pillars of endurance, expected to absorb institutional and personal pressure without faltering. What may begin as a cultural survival strategy can become a mechanism of self-erasure, reinforcing perfectionism, hyper-resilience, and emotional suppression at the expense of health and wholeness.
This dynamic is not limited to workplaces. It appears in families, communities of faith, and in the private lives of women who were never taught that rest is a resource rather than a reward.
It is also important to distinguish emotional suppression from culturally grounded restraint.
Not all restraint is unhealthy. In some cultures, attentiveness, self-regulation, and careful observation are signs of wisdom and emotional intelligence. The argument is not that emotional expressiveness should become the universal standard for healthy leadership.
The argument is more precise: wherever leadership demands the chronic performance of invulnerability at the cost of the leader’s interior life, a price is being paid.
What the Body Knows
Leadership culture has often treated the body as irrelevant to performance
Push through. Work harder. Rest later.
But the study of stress physiology tells a different story.
When the demands placed on a leader consistently exceed the nervous system’s ability to recover, the body begins to accumulate what researchers call allostatic load, the cumulative physiological toll of chronic stress.
Research examining burnout has linked prolonged stress with disruption to the body’s stress-regulation systems. In practical terms, this means the body may stop fully recovering between demands. Instead, it begins operating at an increasingly elevated level of strain.
This is not a metaphor for feeling tired. It is a warning about what happens when endurance becomes a permanent mode of operation.
Burnout is not always a personal failure. It is often the predictable outcome of a system that rewards performance and penalizes pause.
Nervous-system regulation is not a wellness luxury. It is a prerequisite for sustained, high-quality leadership.
Empathy, complex decision-making, creative problem-solving, and relational judgment all depend on a leader who is not chronically operating from threat, exhaustion, or emotional depletion.
When we model rest, we are not stepping away from leadership. We are protecting the internal infrastructure that makes leadership possible.
This is what I mean when I describe radical rest as infrastructure. It is not a retreat from responsibility. It is the strategic maintenance of the most important tool a leader owns: herself.
What Leadership Environments Teach
The learning sciences offer another way to understand why this narrative persists.
Situated cognition theory argues that learning is always embedded in context. We learn leadership by being in leadership environments. We watch what gets praised, punished, and ignored.
If an environment consistently rewards leaders who perform invulnerability, emerging leaders will learn that vulnerability is a liability.
They will shape their leadership identity around that norm.
Changing the narrative, therefore, requires more than telling individual women to be kinder to themselves. It requires changing the environments in which leadership is learned.
It requires changing the stories that are told, the examples that are elevated, and the language that is normalized in meetings, mentorship conversations, and organizational values.
Self-Determination Theory also offers an important perspective. It identifies three fundamental psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
People need to feel that their actions are self-directed, that they are growing in capability, and that they are genuinely connected to others.
Leadership cultures that demand performance without pause and punish vulnerability can frustrate all three needs.
They undermine autonomy by prescribing a narrow range of acceptable leadership behaviours. They weaken relatedness by making authentic connection feel professionally risky. They distort competence by measuring it through output rather than sustainable impact.
The qualities often described as soft include deep listening, emotional attunement, the willingness to express uncertainty, and the capacity to hold space for another person’s experience.
These qualities do not diminish leadership authority. They create the conditions in which other people can grow.
Relearning Leadership from the Inside Out
The question I am often asked is:
“How do I practise this in a culture that still rewards the grind?”
It is a fair question.
You cannot simply decide to become softer in an environment that punishes it without acknowledging the possible cost.
What you can do is begin with the interior work.
This is the foundation of what I call Softness as a Superpower™. It is not a posture or performance. It is the disciplined cultivation of emotional intelligence, nervous-system awareness, and the capacity to lead from wholeness rather than hurry.
One practical entry point is the PAWS™ Framework:
Pause. Assess. Witness. Shift.Pause to interrupt the immediate stress response.
Assess the actual situation rather than the story the stressed mind is telling about it.
Witness, without judgment, what is present in yourself and in the room.
Shift deliberately towards the response that serves the moment rather than the reaction that serves the wound.
This is softness in action.
It is leadership through regulation rather than reaction.
Strong is not the same as well.
A person can be high-performing and hurting. Successful and depleted. Admired and fundamentally disconnected from herself.
Functioning is not the goal. Flourishing is.
Flourishing includes health, peace, clarity, connection, and sustainable impact. It asks us to measure strength not by how much we carry, but by how honestly we lead, how wisely we pause, and how courageously we ask for what we need.
The Systemic Stakes
The implications extend beyond individual leadership development.
Human behaviour cannot be separated from the systems in which it occurs. Families, organizations, institutions, and communities shape individuals, and individuals also reshape those systems.
When a woman models that rest is legitimate, that needs can be named, and that softness is not a liability, she is not only protecting herself. She is rewriting an inherited script for the next generation.
When a senior leader demonstrates that pausing is a sign of wisdom rather than weakness, she is not merely managing her own stress. She is reshaping the culture’s definition of performance.
These are systemic interventions disguised as personal choices.
Ubuntu philosophy, often expressed through the principle “I am because we are,” offers a model of strength that was never individualistic to begin with. Ubuntu-rooted leadership does not simply ask the strong woman to carry less. It asks the community to carry with her.
This reframes the problem entirely. The crisis of the strong woman leader may not only be that she carries too much. It may also be that the communal infrastructure intended to support her has been weakened by individualism, organizational culture, migration, and the pace of modern life. If that is true, then the work is not simply to soften the individual. The work is to rebuild the village.
What Strength Actually Requires
I want to be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not suggesting that toughness has no place in leadership. I am not asking women to abandon boundaries, dilute their decisiveness, or perform softness as a strategy for palatability.
The leaders I most admire are both soft and strong because they have stopped treating those qualities as opposites.
True strength requires the capacity to feel without being consumed by feeling. It requires the ability to pause when every instinct says to push. It requires the willingness to be known, not only respected. It requires enough presence that the people around you can feel your investment in them, not only your demands of them.
These are not soft skills. They are advanced human capacities that take discipline to develop and courage to model.
There are also two different women who may be reading this. The first already has the seat, title, influence, and track record, but is quietly eroding because she has never been given permission to lead any other way.
The second is still fighting for the seat. She is navigating rooms where her presence is being evaluated and where the armour she wears may be a necessary strategy rather than a wound.
For her, softness may not yet feel safe.
This work does not ask her to perform vulnerability before she has the ground to stand on. It offers her the interior architecture to remain whole while she fights, so that when she wins the seat, she does not arrive already depleted.
These are not two separate paths. They are two stages of the same long work. The model of strength that told us to push without pausing, to lead without needing, and to carry without being carried has extracted more than it has multiplied. Every woman who has felt the distance between who she is on the stage and who she is at midnight already understands the cost.
The question was never whether softness was strong enough for leadership.
The question is:
What have we been missing by leaving it out?About the Author
Dr. Darcell L. Streeter is a learning scientist, global keynote speaker, and nonprofit CEO whose work sits at the intersection of human development, applied learning sciences, and women’s leadership. She is the founder of B.HER™ Global, CEO of The Women’s Circle, Inc., and creator of the Softness as a Superpower™ leadership framework.
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