The Women Emerging Philanthropist expedition has moved through Essence, Elements and Expression, and this month reached Energy, which in Julia Middleton’s book, If That’s Leading, I’m In, is not really a fourth stage at all. It is the infinity symbol that runs across the other three, generated by the flow between them. She calls it the lifeblood of leading: what happens when you actually lead.
She writes about it as a leader’s responsibility as much as a leader’s resource. Show up low, flat, defeated, and the people you lead tend to mirror it back, until the whole room is running on the same low current. Show up alert to what the moment actually needs, and it spirals the other way, and becomes more than what you brought in. Either way, what you bring into a room rarely stays only yours. That is, I think, the real weight of being the one who leads.
Why I Put Off Making the Mask
One of the assignments this month was to make a mask. On the front, how I want to lead. On the back, whatever stands in the way. In preparation I listened to a podcast in the expedition’s hub, where earlier Explorers show and explain their own creations, and looked through the examples shared for inspiration. None of it told me what to do with mine.
I put it off until the morning of the call itself. Part of the reason was practical: I’m not good at crafts and I was travelling for much of the month. But the deeper reasons were slower to surface.
The first reason was that a mask hides. And hiding is not natural to me. For example, I wear the years with pride — my youngest used to call my forehead wrinkles “the rainbow” when she was a toddler. And my look when tasting a bad glass of wine, or seeing an overpriced dress never ceases to amuse and embarrass my daughters… So the premise of thinking about leadership through a mask sat wrong with me before I had drawn a single line.
The second reason was that I could not land on an honest answer to the actual question. What stands in the way of how you want to lead? I turned it over for days and kept arriving at a list that felt true but flat: people’s expectations of me, the weight of the world’s problems, lack of time, stress. None of it reached the crux of what I knew deep down to be true.
The Same List, Read Two Ways
Clarity came, finally, on that morning. Not another item for the back of the mask, but a lens. The things that show up as my strengths and the things that hold me back are not two different lists. They are the same list, read in two directions. Strength, drive, standards, self-reliance: turned toward the person in front of me, the team, the community, they bloom, and they are exactly what I want to be known for. Turned toward what others expect of me, my own success, my own recognition, the same traits close in and become the block.
What the Earlier Dispatches Had Already Given Me
Once I saw it that way, it connected everything the expedition has already given me. Essence, which is simply what I am. Elements, which asked me to jettison, reframe or keep: my river and my rock of Gibraltar were two of the truest things about me, and even then I could see their shadow, the pace that leaves people behind, the steadiness that can read as distance. The Dispatch 3 piece which revealed the power of combining apparently opposed elements. And Dispatch 4 which I wrote after our work on Expression, about a moment I handled well and the way I could feel myself managing it from the head rather than the body.
The Mask I Finally Made
So the mask I finally made has no front and no back. Down the centre are the traits themselves. On one side, an arrow opening outward, toward the people the traits are meant to serve. On the other, an arrow that reaches out and quietly curves back on itself.
Strength, aimed outward, is the ground other people stand on. Aimed inward, it is armour that keeps them out. Drive, aimed outward, moves the mission forward. Aimed inward, I surge ahead and the people behind me are left unseen. Composure, aimed outward, becomes the calm that steadies the room. Aimed inward, stops the true feeling from landing.
My Women Emerging Expedition Mask (visual created with AI): 12 August 2026
My Own Energy
Energy, it turns out, works the same way, and this is where the month’s theme actually landed for me. I know my own Energy well enough by now. Abundant. Positive. Curious. The kind that finds the hopeful thread in difficult situations, that loves people, nature, family, a good laugh.
I am drawn to others who carry the same disposition such as Mosun Layode who led a group reflection call as a Guide. Mosun leads in philanthropy across Africa, and her own account of where she draws Energy is close kin to mine: curiosity, community, the innovation she sees in places facing the hardest odds, a faith that as long as the sun rises, there is hope. It would be easy to mistake this for simple optimism. It is not. She is explicit that leading well means not letting the difficult stories weigh you down, actively finding the ones that balance the picture. The discipline does not deny what is hard. It refuses to let what is hard be the whole account.
Reading Someone Else’s Energy
But listening to the other Explorers in the group call describe their Energy pushed me further. I’ve been reflecting on what other kinds of Energy are there, and how well do I actually read them? Am I responding to what the moment or the person in front of me needs, or simply broadcasting the frequency that is natural to me, regardless? The mask again: the same Energy, aimed with attention to the other person, or aimed without it.
There is a passage in Julia’s book, by a Guide called Alia, about how Energy shows up differently across people and cultures, and how you will not recognise it in someone unless you slow down enough to know them as a human being first: tea before business, in her example, not business before tea. I read this over a year ago and made no personal connection to it at all. It has taken this month, and my own reflection, for it to become real. The same chapter says something else I only half noticed the first time: that leading well sometimes calls for a slower, quieter register, not the bright one. Real listening asks for a different Energy than the one I favour.
What I’m Learning to Notice
One of the other Explorers, describing a photograph behind her on our group call, said that if you do not attend to your own Energy, you can slowly disappear. I think the same is true in reverse. If you are not attending to how your Energy lands on someone else, you can just as easily be the reason they fade from the room.
I do not think the answer is to become someone else, a quieter version of myself for the people my Energy does not naturally reach. What I am starting to learn is to notice, in the conversation, whether the Energy I am bringing is what is needed or simply what is mine. Julia’s book had this in it the whole time. I read it and it passed through me. It took the expedition, and a mask I resisted making, to turn it into something I actually know.
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.
