The Women Emerging expedition for philanthropists has been moving from the inside out. We began with Essence — the irreducible thing underneath the biography. Then Elements — how that essence shows up, and which parts to carry, set down, or combine. This month we reached Expression: how it actually shows up in the room. Julia keeps us honest about the difference. She asks us to end not with what we will think differently, but with what we will actually do differently: what we will stop, start, or continue.
The work this month was built around scenarios. Each of us brought a real leadership dilemma and sat in a small group with someone else’s — not to solve it or agree a common answer, but to see what our own leading looked like held up against theirs. Then the whole group came back together, and the collective reflection helped us make sense of what had surfaced inside each scenario, and of the pattern running across all of them.
A knot kept re-tying itself, scenario after scenario. One Explorer was carrying a brilliant collaborator who delivered late and turned sharp whenever she was challenged and was kept on partly because she was gifted, partly because she was a friend. Another had joined a traditional board to change it, questioned how things were done, and found the room quietly close against her. Different shapes, the same question underneath: when does staying connected to the person, or the institution, get in the way of doing the hard thing? When does care become a liability?
The conversation turned, at one point, to the brilliant, difficult people, and how you lead them without letting the disruption win. I shared that I had learned to handle those moments by stepping out of myself into a kind of operator: robust, clear, effective, with the feeling set to one side. A friend and mentor of mine describes this as living in the head rather than the body.
And then I asked the question I did not have an answer to. But how do you keep the connection?
I have since reflected on where the reflex had come from and the full impact.
A corporate work memory surfaced. A governance call with team leads reporting on progress, my role to oversee and connect across them. I raised a question on behalf of one of the teams, and a senior leader, a man known for getting results and for the way he got them, brushed it off in front of everyone. The wrong question, he said. We should not be entertaining those ideas. The call went quiet. Afterwards, several people messaged me to say they had felt sorry for me, and that they had been afraid to speak.
This is the part I had not fully registered then. I felt the sting. And then, very quickly, I did not. My experience stepped in and reminded me that this was about him being a poor leader, not about me not being good enough. So I did not doubt myself, and I was not embarrassed. From that steady place I messaged him after the call and asked to speak. I told him the way he had communicated was disrespectful, that it undermined me and everyone in the room, that it would stop people ever raising their views. He said he didn’t realise the impact, and asked what he should do. I said he should apologise to the group. He did which, I heard later, had never happened before. I had no illusions that he was a changed man. But it mattered to me that the team saw, out loud, that the behaviour was not acceptable.
It was the right thing. And it was done almost entirely from the head. The reflex that reframed the insult, that let me act despite the risk to my own standing, is the same reflex that meant I was the only person in that room not really feeling what was happening to me. Everyone else was mortified on my behalf. I was solving it.
I’ve written in previous posts about Range and Elements where that operator was built. In a childhood where being robust was not a style, but a way to survive, and then in a long corporate career that rewarded exactly the same thing. Living in the head was how I carried the exposure. It worked. That is the difficulty.
Back in the group, no one let the question resolve. When someone framed the hard register as switching off the softer, caring part (what Julia calls motherness in her book) others pushed back at once. Setting a boundary, they said, calling out bad behaviour and holding a line, is not the opposite of care. It might be one of its truest forms. The mother, Julia noted, is often the one who sets the firmest boundary of all.
I have continued to reflect on it. If leading from the head is simply what doing the hard thing requires, then I go on being effective and the people I lead keep meeting a version of me that has already moved past the moment they are still standing in. But if I let the feeling land first, before I act, I am not sure the steadiness survives it. The same distance that kept me from doubting myself in front of that leader is what let me confront him at all.
What makes it hard is not that leading from the head is a flaw to correct. It has saved me from false stories about myself and freed me to do frightening, necessary things. Its rightness is exactly why it is difficult to question. However, I wonder how much it costs to be good at turning a feeling into competent action before the feeling has fully landed. And whether these conversations leave a mark, the way my skin has hardened in my hands from lifting weights in the gym. Not a wound. More a callus. Useful, protective, and slightly numb.
So I do not yet know which of Julia’s list headers this goes under: whether to stop, to start, or to continue. For now I can only name it and perhaps one day, I might trade the steadiness for the feeling to fully land…
About the Author:
Anila DeHart is an Advisor, Researcher, and Executive Educator on education-workforce coordination and future-of-work. She examines coordination mechanisms that enable sustainable education-workforce partnerships and equitable pathways from learning to meaningful work. Current collaborations include Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) on university-employer partnership infrastructure and the University of Oxford’s AI in Education (AIEOU) 2026 Shared Research Agenda on Future of Education, Work and Institutions.
With twenty years at Deloitte, most recently as Global Managing Director leading talent strategy and workforce transformations for 500,000+ professionals globally, Anila brings deep expertise in future-ready skills systems and organisational change at scale. Her career began in higher education, teaching at universities in Central Europe and as a Fulbright scholar in US, and leading organisational development and strategic recruitment at the University of Arizona.
Anila serves as Executive Coach and Leadership Facilitator at Headspring Executive (Financial Times-IE Business School joint venture). She regularly briefs industry forums on transformation and skills development, and advocates for societal equity through initiatives supporting career advancement for youth and underprivileged groups.
