I was sitting on my couch at home, looking at the mask I had already started creating and thinking about how I actually show up in the world. By this stage of the WE Expedition, we had already spent time examining who we are as leaders, so I wasn’t interested in creating an idealised version of myself. I wanted the mask to feel like me as I am now: imperfect, sometimes contradictory, but increasingly comfortable with the fact that being myself allows me to be useful in ways that someone else may not be.
What struck me was the irony of the exercise. A mask is normally something we use to conceal, yet I wanted mine to reveal. I deliberately left pieces missing and drew fractures across the face. I didn’t want to smooth them over, but I also didn’t want the broken parts to be ugly. That led me to kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery to highlight the fractures, traditionally with gold. The damage is not disguised; it becomes part of the object’s history. That became the idea behind the gold running through my mask and the words I wrote on it: cracked, not broken.
Some things have happened in my life that have hurt me and undoubtedly shaped me. I am careful, though, about romanticising trauma simply because I survived it. Trauma is often not authored by us. It can come from our upbringing, circumstances, relationships, or other people’s actions. I didn’t choose all my cracks, and I don’t need to be grateful for them. What I can choose is how I respond to them.
That distinction between having my cracks exposed and choosing to show them matters to me. For much of my professional life, I have been more comfortable showing competence than emotion. I work in a highly technical environment, and I am naturally analytical, so being prepared, knowing the answer, solving the problem and remaining composed have served me well. They have also sometimes given me somewhere to hide. I remember a work conversation where, instead of giving my usual controlled response, I admitted that I was disappointed and that something had affected me personally. What surprised me was how ordinary the moment was. I didn’t suddenly become less credible. The conversation simply became more human. It made me question how much of myself I had been managing because of what I thought a leader should look like.
The First Expedition helped me put language around this. Trauma appeared as one of the pieces of my Essence, and at first, I was uncomfortable giving it so much significance. I don’t want my trauma to become my identity, but ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear. Unacknowledged hurt can become hardness. Fear can look like control. An old wound can cause an outsized reaction to something happening in the present. If I don’t understand what I carry, I risk letting what was done to me determine how I behave toward others, and perhaps even repeating or perpetuating it. Owning my history is therefore not about displaying my wounds. It is about being aware enough to choose how they show up.
This is also why the two sides of my mask matter. One is softer and deliberately feminine; the other more structured and analytical. I have spent much of my career valuing the latter: logic, strategy, decisiveness and the ability to be clinical when necessary. Now I want to make more room for intuition, empathy, emotion, nurturing, and softness. I don’t want to become less analytical to become more human. I want both to be visible.
Perhaps this is what the Expedition has surfaced most clearly for me. I had been treating parts of myself as contradictions to be resolved, when perhaps they simply needed integration. I can make a difficult decision and care deeply about its effect on another person. I can rely on evidence and still trust my instinct. I can be ambitious and nurturing, analytical and emotional, feminine and strong. The cracks run across both sides of the mask because my humanity does too.
Women can become very good at sanding ourselves down into versions that appear seamless, especially in environments where we know how our competence and credibility are judged. But leading whole does not mean making every private experience public or giving everyone access to our pain. There is a difference between privacy and pretending.
I didn’t author every experience that shaped me, but I can author my relationship to those experiences and what I carry forward from them. For me, that’s where the meaning of kintsugi lies. The gold doesn’t suggest that being broken was beautiful. It says that what’s been broken doesn’t have to be hidden for the whole to still have value.
To another woman deciding whether her cracks are safe to show, I would say: you don’t owe everyone your pain, and you don’t need to make your wounds your identity. But you don’t have to erase the evidence that you have lived to prove that you can lead.
My mask isn’t seamless. Neither am I. And I no longer think it needs to be.
About the author
Yugeshnee Naidoo is a commercial and strategic leader working across engineering, infrastructure and business development in Africa. Her professional journey has been shaped by a belief that leadership is ultimately about the choices we make, the opportunities we create and the lasting value we leave behind. Her personal philosophy is to leave every person, organisation and community stronger than she found them, through courageous leadership, lifelong learning and purposeful action. Yugeshnee is particularly passionate about creating environments where people can thrive, challenging conventional thinking and ensuring that women have a meaningful voice in spaces where important decisions are made.
