By: Gesche Haas, Founder of Dreamers & Doers, a curated community and PR Hype Machine™ for extraordinary women entrepreneurs.
There’s a version of leadership growth that looks like a pivotal hire, a strategy overhaul, or a new system finally clicking into place. That’s the version that makes for a clean story.
The real version, though, tends to be quieter and more personal. It looks like catching yourself mid-conversation and choosing a different response. It looks like letting go of a habit that used to feel like strength. It looks like changing how you relate to uncertainty, your team, and yourself, and watching everything around you shift as a result.
The founders, CEOs, and leaders featured here from the Dreamers & Doers community didn’t transform their companies with a single breakthrough moment. They transformed them through daily practice: the way they showed up in hard conversations, made decisions under pressure, and rebuilt trust when it frayed. These are the mindset shifts that changed how they lead.
They Left Urgency Behind and Started Leading With Intention
While it’s tempting for leaders to operate constantly from a place of rushing, performance and reactivity, these modes don’t lend themselves to day-to-day thriving and success. Ashley Graham, speaker, podcast host and editorial writer of Simply Ashley Graham, was inspired by motherhood to rethink how she shows up in her business on a regular basis. Doing so changed everything in her work.
“I stopped performing productivity and started leading from presence,” Graham says “I am stepping into a new stage around what I call ‘conscious visibility’, showing up with intention rather than volume, and it is completely shifting how I attract new connections, partnerships and opportunities. When you lead from who you actually are, everything becomes more aligned.”
Realty Collective principal Victoria Alexander has also made major strides as a leader since prioritizing genuine presence and communication over efficiency for efficiency’s sake. Today, she creates space to name what’s actually at stake for each person involved in a sale, and to let that answer evolve.
“What we’re really navigating isn’t a transaction, but a transition,” Alexander says. “The shift made me better at supporting my clients because I stopped mistaking efficiency for care.”
UMI’s founder and CEO, Esosa Edosomwan, finds curiosity a critical skill for effecting similar change as a leader.
“I started asking clarifying questions before responding in any situation, whether with investors, partners, or my team,” she says. “That shift has led to more meaningful conversations and win-win outcomes across the board. I stopped reacting and started responding, which made me a far more effective communicator and a steadier leader.”
NTT DATA Inc.’s chief of staff Candice Ooi also feels strongly about the power of inquiry in upleveling your leadership game. After joining a global IT company without any background in the industry, she had to get comfortable not being an expert and with being honest when she didn’t know something.
“My value is not domain expertise,” Ooi says. “It’s the questions I ask when I am the only person in the room without a side. That discomfort, for me and for me, is where the magic happens.”
For Jasz Rae Digital founder Jasz Joseph, growth came when she stopped trying to meet every client’s tight deadline and instead owned her role as a big-picture thinker.
“Lead generation as a service tends to attract founders who need sales yesterday,” Joseph explains. “For years, I matched that urgency because I thought it meant I was being useful. The shift was showing up day-to-day like the long-game strategist I actually am: calm, patient, focused on building systems that compound.”
As a result of her new relationship with timelines and rushing, Joseph reports a shift in customer needs and expectations as well. Instead of showing up desperate for rescue, her clients now look for repeatable engines and solutions, allowing the business to evolve even further.
Some leaders benefit from this reduction in speed. For others, success looks like the opposite. Julie Zhu, for example, challenged herself to become more proactive.
“I became more comfortable reaching out, following up, negotiating and having open conversations instead of waiting for permission or the perfect moment,” says the founder and CMO of Julie Zhu LLC. “It helped me build stronger relationships and create more opportunities.”
When leaders create space for better conversations and better decisions, growth follows, no matter the pace.
They Learned to Trust Themselves More
Effective leaders aren’t afraid to ask questions and seek out experts, but they also know when to trust themselves. A combination of self-leadership, confidence, and emotional regulation makes it happen, especially if they can get out of their own way.
As the founder of Her Tech Community, Rochelle Sonnenberg has been on a journey to leave self-doubt behind. This shift, she says, has “helped me make clearer decisions, stay focused on what truly serves the community and show up with more confidence and calm.” She hopes to empower Her Tech’s members to show up with a similar conviction and with less pressure to constantly perform.
Inner critics are tough to eradicate entirely, though, so Natalie De Vincenzi started reframing hers as an inner coach.
“I’m backing myself more and learning to respond to challenges with support and solutions instead of shame and spiraling,” says the founder and CEO of You Are Enough Co. “Ironically, becoming kinder to myself didn’t make me less ambitious. It made me more resilient, creative, and effective as a founder because I stopped wasting so much energy fighting myself internally.”
Reframing language is another effective tool. Rather than using the phrase “I have to,” GreenPortfolio’s CEO Bonnie Gurry shifted to “I get to.” The change may seem minor, but the nuance is impactful.
“No one is forcing me to run a mission-driven startup,” Gurry says. “I get to do that. I get to pick who I want to work with, and I get to pick the problems we’re trying to solve. This small change in language infuses gratitude into difficult tasks and is a great reality check. When you stop treating your own ambitions like obligations, you start showing up with a completely different energy.”
In her earliest days as founder and CEO of m times v, Monisha Bajaj recalls spending a lot of time obsessing over what executives should stop doing in order to grow into their roles. To regain focus in the business, she tuned out the noise and instead started to trust her ability to master her day-to-day work. Doing so, she says, “created room for my team to step up and own their roles and keeps me energized at work.”
Like the pressure to appear like the perfect CEO, the pressure to be in constant motion can cause even the best-intentioned leaders to get in their own way. Lona Vincent let this go, and is more effective in her role as a result.
“Someone described their career as ‘constantly in motion but rarely in alignment,’” says the founder of WOW Health. “I couldn’t unhear it. That was my shift. I had spent years leading teams, driving outcomes, delivering results, and wondering why it never felt like enough. The shift that changed everything was stepping out of that motion and into a mission that finally felt like mine.”
While entrepreneurship and executive-level work involve no shortage of external challenges, some of the biggest are actually internal. Leaders who aren’t afraid to have hard conversations with themselves will reach new levels of trust and confidence in their ability to steer teams, clients, and missions forward.
They Became More Visible and More Authentic
Previous generations of leaders got the memo that to be successful, they had to leave their personal lives and struggles behind. Those days are gone. Now, honestly, visibility and authenticity are their own form of professional currency.
Peri Finkelstein owns her truth in her work as founder and CEO of Team Peri Foundation, with the help of a communication device and an AI-generated voice that empower her to communicate more boldly.
“At first, I felt ashamed because the technology made me feel more disabled and dependent,” Finkelstein says. “I realized that asking for help and using tools that support me is a strength, not a weakness. By embracing it publicly, I’ve been able to raise awareness for those who utilize augmentative and alternative communication, share my story more authentically and help others recognize the importance of disability inclusion.”
Myra Deshmukh had her own lesson to learn about authentic communication. For her, progress was necessary in her ability to talk about herself and her work.
“Now, I think of every interaction, new meeting and client call as an opportunity to get clearer on how to communicate our offers, my value and what we do,” the Leadership Lab founder and CEO says. “It’s not about getting it right, but getting clearer.”
For leaders like Finkelstein and Deshmukh, change happened when they stopped worrying about looking or being perfect and committed instead to total honesty.
They Realized Leadership Is About Creating Meaning
Everyone shows up to a leadership role with a different idea of the impact they’d like to make. For many, there’s a common theme: leadership is about storytelling and mission just as much as it’s about budgets and management.
Given her background in media, Eileen Wu has long understood the power of narrative. After stepping into the CEO seat at Mavryx, she realized that storytelling could do more than simply market a product or communicate a company’s values. Today, she thinks of it as leadership infrastructure, which she’s shared beyond her organization’s walls.
“It’s a perspective I help founders, investors and companies use to build differentiation, narrative coherence and long-term competitive advantage in increasingly noisy markets,” Wu says.
After two decades working as a brand strategist, Erika Brechtel knew how to support women leaders on a mission to define their voices. But for her, transformation happened after a 2015 volunteer trip to Morocco, which inspired her to show up in a brand-new way in her daily life and work. That experience filled Brechtel with a new sense of purpose and conviction, forming the basis for Élanoura. The stories she heard from young girls in Morocco, she realized, were a form of leadership unto themselves.
Netta Ness finds meaning in her role as founder at Chance Management LLC by adopting intentional positioning and selective visibility.
“I chose to be under the radar, non-commercial, hard to get and hard to forget,” Ness says.
The story of Ness’s brand is one of standing out rather than blending in and of work that is intimate, authentic, original, and highly tailored. Leading with those values empowers her to work only on projects where she feels she and her team can help create a major leap.
Strong leaders know that communication isn’t just about transmitting information. It’s about how they create trust, clarity, culture, and momentum. Happy Brand Company’s marketing and accountability coach Jessie Sanchez believes in the power of reliable communication as an act of care that sets the tone for how she chooses to work and lead. She is on an ongoing mission to further refine how she communicates about timelines, particularly when that means telling a client she needs an extension.
“It keeps me accountable and helps my clients feel supported and informed,” Sanchez says.
The shifts that make someone a better founder, CEO or leader rarely happen all at once. More often, they reveal themselves in ordinary moments: the pause before responding instead of reacting, the courage to ask one more question, the decision to trust your instincts, communicate more honestly or show up a little more authentically than you did yesterday.
Taken individually, these changes may seem small. Together, they reshape how teams operate, how relationships are built and how organizations grow. The leaders here demonstrate that the strongest leadership is built day by day through intentional choices that create more trust, more clarity and more meaningful impact, for themselves and for everyone they lead.
All individuals featured in this article are members of Dreamers & Doers, a highly curated community and PR Hype Machine™ amplifying extraordinary women entrepreneurs and leaders through authentic connections, credibility-boosting visibility, and opportunities that accelerate big dreams.
