Sustaining Power How Women Stay Grounded

How do we sustain power without losing ourselves?

At the height of  trying to answer this question, I listened to a TEDx talk by a woman named Caroline McHugh, called The Art of Being Yourself.

In that talk she explains something she calls the “I complex” – her way of describing our relationship with ourselves.

She says there are three common ways we move through the world:

Superiority – the “I’m the most important person in the room” energy.

Inferiority – the “everyone else is better than me, they’re going to find out I’m a fraud” energy.

And then a third way – Interiority – where you’re not comparing at all. You’re rooted in who you are. You understand that you have your own purpose, your own queendom as she calls it, and in that queendom you have no competition. That idea of interiority caught me.

Because if I’m honest, some of my most “successful” seasons on paper were actually seasons where my ego was driving the car.

Not in a loud, arrogant way – I’m not talking about walking into a room thinking, “I’m better than everyone.” I’m talking about the quieter ego that says:

“I need to prove that I deserve this seat.”

“I must not fail, because people are watching.”

“If I say no, they’ll find someone else and I’ll be forgotten.”

That ego is very sophisticated. It dresses itself up as excellence, service, responsibility. It looks hardworking. It looks like “strong black woman”. But it’s exhausting!

Caroline breaks it down further. She says we are made up of layers:

Perception – what other people think of you.

Persona – who you’d like them to think you are.

Ego – what you think of you.

And then, underneath all of that, Self – the unchanging you that has been there since you were a child and will still be there when all the titles are gone. Most of us, especially women who are achieving, live our lives juggling the first three:

We’re managing perception. Curating a persona. And then using ego to hold the whole performance together. No wonder we are tired!

So after really sitting with the first part of that initial question and beginning to unpack my relationship with my ego…I asked myself another question:

What if, instead, ego was not the boss, but the assistant?

Not the owner, but the driver of the car that belongs to the Self?

Because honestly when ego is in its right place, it becomes very useful: it helps you prepare for meetings, it reminds you that you’ve done this before, it carries your calling into rooms and says, “She belongs here.” But when ego is in the wrong place, it starts negotiating your worth with every new room you enter.

So, what does it mean, practically, to have an ego that is in service of you, not in control of you?

For me, it has come down to three ongoing practices. I’m not sharing them as someone who has mastered them – I’m sharing them as someone who returns to them again and again, sometimes with help from a professional as well!

I call them: Remember, Re-root, and Re-negotiate.

1. Remember – your why and your worth

The first practice is remembering.

Not in a cute Pinterest-quote way. I mean intentionally remembering who you are and why you are doing what you’re doing. In my world, whether I’m working on a complex systems projects in corporate, or sitting with young people at a Learning Mindset Foundation bootcamp trying to demystify digital skills, it is very easy to get swallowed by deliverables, deadlines, and drama.

When that happens, my ego starts whispering:

“Lerato, if you drop this ball, they’ll see you’re not as capable as they think.” “Lerato, you must always be the one with the answer.”

The only antidote I have found is to carve out regular spaces where nobody needs me to perform.

For me that looks like:

Writing honestly about where I am leading from – fear, proving, or purpose. (This really is why I started the Afternoon Papers)

A lot of silence that I use to think! In this silence the question is not “What do they need from me?” but “Who am I becoming?”

That’s actually how one of my recent articles was born in this series – I wrote about the quiet work of leadership: listening when everyone wants answers. That piece came from realising that my power is not in always speaking first; it’s in being anchored enough to listen deeply without panicking that my value is disappearing.

Here’s a line you can test in your own life and maybe share with others:

“If my inner life is weak, a promotion, more money, more notoriety is not a blessing; it’s an amplifier of my unhealed parts.”

Remembering your why and your worth is the work of refusing to outsource your worth to things like your job description. Things that can be taken away from you just like that!

2. Re-root – the communities that protect your interiority

The second practice is to re-root yourself in the right community.

We love to talk about “networking” – and don’t get me wrong, professional networks are important. But I’ve learned there’s a big difference between a network that amplifies your persona and a community that protects your interiority.

A few years ago, I found myself on the cover of a women’s magazine alongside other Basotho women changing the narrative of this country. We were described as “trailblazers” and “powerhouses” in the skills and knowledge space – everything from psychosocial support, to coding for girls, to business skills and mentorship. It was a beautiful moment, and an important one. But the moment that kept me grounded wasn’t the photoshoot.

It was the group chat afterwards, where one of the women said:

“Guys, this is amazing, but please – how are you really? Who’s resting? Who’s in therapy? Who’s saying ‘no’ this quarter?”

Those are the conversations that save us.

In the Learning Mindset Foundation, I get to watch young people step into spaces they never imagined – learning to code, to pitch, to think globally while standing in Maseru. The temptation, even with them, is to only celebrate the wins But I’m more interested in who they are becoming on the way to those wins. Who are they making friends with, who are they being vulnerable to, who do they allow to hold them accountable. Because they need to be grounded successful people. And we have seen it countless times, the wrong crowd will hype your persona. The right crowd will protect your interiority.

So ask yourself this:

“Do the people closest to me only clap for my highlight reel, or do they also hold me accountable for my habits, my healing, and my honesty?”

3. Re-negotiate – boundaries as a spiritual practice

The third practice is re-negotiating your agreements. If I map my career, it looks like this interesting path: meandering from business to business while holding space for social impact work on top of it all.  You might be tempted to look at that and say, “Wow, what a journey!”

In real life, each transition required a difficult conversation:

With myself: “Are you taking this role because it’s aligned with your assignment, or because it looks impressive?”

With family: “This season might mean less availability; how do we do this without resentment?”

With leaders: “This is what is sustainable for me; this is what is not.”

There were seasons where I failed to have those conversations. I said yes to everything because my ego loved being the go-to person.

And I paid for it – in my body, in my energy, in my joy. Now, I treat boundaries as a spiritual practice. Not because I’m selfish, but because I understand that every “yes” I give from a place of resentment or exhaustion is a false gift. It’s me abandoning myself while performing service.

So maybe this line is for someone:

“Saying yes to everything is not generosity; it is a very elegant form of self-abandonment.”

And I’d urge you to do the work of re-negotiating the agreements in your life that are not

giving you joy. It could be…

Your working hours. Your unpaid emotional labour in the family. Your relationship with your phone. Your own expectations of what “Superwoman” must do...

In closing...These are the Four lessons I wish someone had whispered earlier

Lesson 1: Your CV is history. Your pattern is prophecy.

When I look back at all the different roles I’ve held – from managing services in a small tech environment, to fixing processes in insurance, to now leading strategic projects and client experience – the jobs look different, but the pattern is the same: I am obsessed with making complex systems kinder and more workable for people. For a long time I thought my identity was in the title. Now I know my identity sits in the pattern.

Your assignment is not a line item on your CV; it’s the thread that runs through all of them.

If you feel confused about your calling, don’t just ask, “What do I do now?” Ask, “What have I been doing all along, even when nobody was paying me?”

Lesson 2: Teach the playbook you never received.

Through Learning Mindset Foundation and my career masterclass series,I’ve had a front-row seat to how much young Basotho – and especially young women – are expected to “figure it out” with very little guidance. We come into corporate, entrepreneurship, the digital world, and everybody assumes we know how to navigate meetings, politics, finances, self-advocacy. I decided a while back that part of sustaining my own power is not hoarding the tricks I’ve learned. So I design masterclasses, write, and build programmes that say:

“Here is how you can read a room. Here is how you can prepare for a year end review. Here is how you can navigate politics.”

Real power doesn’t hoard playbooks; it publishes them.

Lesson 3: Rooms are classrooms, not stages.

I’ve had the privilege of moderating and speaking at conferences and symposia – from accounting and auditing gatherings, to conversations about digitalising Lesotho’s education system, to entrepreneurship forums. When your face is on the poster, your ego wants to turn every room into a stage. What has saved me is deciding, ahead of time, that:

“Whenever I hold the mic, I am not the main character; I am the mirror. The audience becomes the centre of my world and not me at the centre of theirs”

My job is to reflect the room back to itself – to name what is already there, to ask the uncomfortable question, to weave together the threads of different voices.

When I keep that posture, my power is rooted in service, not in performance.

Lesson 4: Impact scales at the speed of your inner work.

There is this illusion that if we just had more time, more budget, more support, we’d be able to hold all the impact we dream of. From where I sit, that’s only half true.

I have seen that there is a very real ceiling on how much impact you can hold that has nothing to do with your talent and everything to do with how honest you’re willing to be with yourself.

The more I’ve done my own inner work – therapy, spiritual direction, confronting hard truths about my patterns – the more capacity I have had to:

Say no without a three-page explanation.

Sit on a panel with another brilliant woman and not feel threatened.

Celebrate someone else’s win without secretly questioning my own path.

Your inner work is not a side project. It is your infrastructure.

Thank you for continuing to read and engage, for holding space with me, and for doing the courageous work of leadership.