What Are You Bringing Into the Room?

By Leslie K Leland

The responsibility of becoming aware of what we carry

Think about how many rooms you have entered in your life.

We enter marriages carrying expectations about love.

We enter friendships carrying our experience of loyalty and our memory of betrayal.

We enter new relationships carrying everything from the ones that ended.

And we enter leadership carrying our insecurities, our ambition and our need to be
validated.

Then one day we look up and notice that the same thing keeps happening to us. Different
city. Different organization. Different people. Same feeling.

And we start asking what is wrong with these rooms.

I want to ask a harder question.

What if the room is not always the common denominator?

What if something is coming in with us?

A New Room Does Not Automatically Make You a New Person

This is the part I had to learn the slow way.

I used to believe that if I changed the circumstance, I would change the experience. New
title. New building. New team. New season. I thought the environment was doing it.

But you can leave a situation and still be the same woman who walks into the next one.

You can leave a marriage and still over-function in your next relationship.

You can leave a job where you were not valued and still walk into a new one trying to prove
you deserve the chair.

You can leave a room where you were excluded and still enter every room after it scanning
for who is going to exclude you.

Reinvention is not relocation.

Reinvention is becoming conscious of the woman who shows up.

I Know This Because I Have Done It

I have been in a marriage where I was the one over-functioning.

I carried more than my share and then resented carrying it. I managed everything and called
it love. I stayed busy enough that I did not have to sit still with how disconnected I actually
felt.

And for a long time, I thought I was unhappy with another person.

It took me a long time to understand that I was unhappy within myself, and that no amount
of fixing the other person was ever going to touch it.

That realization did not stay in my marriage. It followed me. Because over-functioning is not
a relationship habit. It is an identity. It shows up in business. It shows up in volunteer work. It
shows up in friendship. It shows up anywhere there is something I can manage instead of
something I have to feel.

So when I say we carry things into rooms, I am not talking about other women. I am talking
about me.

What Leaders Carry

Here is what makes this urgent for women in leadership.

When you are a private individual, what you carry affects you and the people closest to you.
That is painful enough.

But when you hold a seat, what you carry becomes the weather.

If you lead out of a need for validation, your team will learn to manage your ego instead of
telling you the truth.

If you lead out of scarcity, you will build an organization that treats every other woman doing
similar work as competition instead of a collaborator.

If you lead out of a need for control, you will hire capable people and then never let them be
capable.

If you lead out of an old wound, you will start interpreting ambiguity as opposition. A
delayed email becomes disrespect. A different opinion becomes disloyalty. A room that did
not applaud becomes a room that is against you.

And here is the dangerous part.

Nobody will tell you.

They will just adjust. They will learn what not to bring you. They will learn which version of
the truth you can receive. And you will experience that as harmony, right up until the
moment you cannot understand why good people keep leaving.

Your unexamined patterns do not stay yours. They become the culture.

The Inventory

I am not suggesting we become so self-interrogating that we cannot function. There is a
version of self-awareness that is really just anxiety wearing a nicer outfit.

But I do think there are a few questions worth sitting with before we walk into the rooms we
are responsible for.

What am I expecting to happen here, and where did I learn to expect it?

Am I responding to this person, or to someone they remind me of?

Is this conviction or is this insecurity? Because they can sound identical from the inside.

What is it costing the people around me that I have not dealt with this yet?

And the one I ask myself most often now.

If nothing in this room changed except me, would anything be different?

That last one has humbled me more than once.

Presence Is the Work

This is why I keep coming back to presence.

Most of us are not actually in the rooms we are standing in. We are in a conversation from
three years ago. We are in a meeting that already happened. We are defending a position
nobody in this room has attacked.

We are physically present and historically occupied.

And the people in front of us can feel it, even when they cannot name it. They know they are
talking to someone who is partially somewhere else.

Being present is not a soft skill. It is the discipline of letting the room be the room.
It means noticing when an old story is trying to narrate a new experience, and setting it
down long enough to actually see what is happening in front of me.

That is harder than any strategic plan I have ever written.

What I Am Working On

I am not writing this from the other side of it.

I still catch myself. I still notice the moment where I start building a case about somebody
based on something that has not happened yet. I still find places where I am managing
instead of trusting.

But I am learning to notice it sooner. And noticing sooner is most of the work.
Because the goal is not becoming a woman with no history.

The goal is becoming a woman whose history informs her without running her.
A woman who can walk into a room and let it be new.

So before the next meeting, the next hard conversation, the next table you have worked
years to sit at, ask yourself the question I am carrying into this season.

What am I bringing into this room?

And is it something I actually chose?

--

The Presence Paradox

Most of us are not actually in the rooms we are standing in. If this landed, the Presence
Paradox walks through why, and what to do about it.

[Download the free guide →] shebizness.com/presence-paradox