Written by Reem Borrows, author of Unfollow the Leader, leadership strategist, and founder of Dreem Coaching and Consulting. With more than 25 years of leadership experience across both corporate and community sectors, Reem helps leaders and organizations align strategy, behavior, and culture through a practical, trauma-informed approach to leadership and personal growth.
When I was 16 and in Year 11, my parents gave me one of their cars. You can imagine how excited I was.
I soon discovered there was a practical reason behind their generosity.
My younger sister, Loudy, was training as an elite diver. She trained morning and evening, six days a week. My role was to collect her from school, take her home to change and drive her to training.
Loudy went on to represent Australia at four Olympic Games and win 39 international medals, including two Olympic bronze medals, four World Championship medals and three Commonwealth Games gold medals.
Her achievements were extraordinary, and I always reflect on those days because what stayed with me was the support behind them.
She had diving coaches, strength and conditioning specialists, physiotherapists and sports psychologists. Each person helped her see something she could not see alone. They challenged her thinking, refined her performance and expanded her understanding of what was possible.
Nobody expected an elite athlete to reach her potential without that support.
Yet many women in business expect exactly that of themselves.
When You Become the Person With the Answers
As women progress through their careers or build businesses, they often become the people others turn to.
Employees want direction. Clients want certainty. Families need decisions. Teams bring problems.
The woman leading it all becomes accustomed to working things out, holding everything together and finding a way forward.
Competence can gradually become isolation, and it can get very lonely at the top.
When everyone looks to you for the answer, fewer people ask the questions that stretch your thinking. They may respect you, trust you or depend on you, while hesitating to challenge what you believe.
This can leave even highly capable women operating within the boundaries of what they can already see.
We all have blind spots.
They are part of being human.
Our experience shapes how we interpret situations, which possibilities we notice and which options we dismiss before exploring them.
There is no final point at which we become fully aware.
Growth in awareness has no fixed limit.
Every new perspective can reveal another question, assumption or possibility.
Coaching Creates Room for a Wider View
Years after driving Loudy to training, I was building my career in the pharmaceutical industry when I read The Making of a Corporate Athlete by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.
I immediately recognized the principles they described.
I had watched my sister practice them for years: preparation, repetition, feedback, recovery and continual improvement.
Everything they wrote about, I could relate to and thought to myself, “I am certainly no athlete, but I can do that in the corporate space.”
I began approaching my own career similarly.
I sought coaches and mentors. I observed people performing at a higher level and studied how they worked.
I treated sales, negotiation, communication, leadership and strategic thinking as skills I could continue to practice.
I honed in on my questioning skills as I had learned that the quality of my work was only going to be as good as the quality of the questions I asked of myself and others.
That approach helped me progress into senior leadership roles in Australia with some of the world’s largest organizations, where I held responsibility for significant profit and loss portfolios, before establishing my own business.
The greatest value of coaching went beyond improving individual skills.
Coaching expanded my thinking beyond my own expectations. It helped me see choices and opportunities that were difficult to recognize from inside my existing view of myself.
A valuable coach does not need to provide every answer.
They create the conditions for deeper thinking.
They listen for the assumptions underneath a decision, notice repeated patterns and ask the question that opens a different path.
- What are you assuming about this situation?
- What are you avoiding?
- Whose expectations are shaping this decision?
- What would you pursue if you believed you were ready?
- What else could be possible?
A question asked at the right moment can change the direction of a career, a business or a life.
You Still Need Somewhere to Think Honestly
Many women have built their success by becoming capable, dependable and resilient.
These qualities deserve recognition.
They can also make it harder to admit when you need space to think.
Coaching provides a place where you do not have to perform certainty. You can examine an idea before defending it, acknowledge uncertainty without unsettling your team and explore an ambition before knowing exactly how to achieve it.
It can also help turn awareness into action.
Insight has limited value when nothing changes afterward.
A valuable coaching conversation leads to a decision, an experiment, a conversation or a commitment.
Growth takes shape through what you practice between conversations.
Private coaching is one way to create this support.
An experienced mentor, a trusted peer group or a thoughtful accountability partnership can also provide perspective.
What matters is having someone who will listen closely, challenge you honestly and resist the temptation to simply confirm what you already believe.
Who is having that conversation with you?
Loudy’s Olympic medals were decided in seconds.
Behind each dive were years of preparation and people who helped her see, adjust and grow.
Every businesswoman reaches points where determination and experience can only take her as far as her current view allows.
The right conversation can reveal a blind spot, challenge a long-held assumption and open a possibility she had never considered.
You have already proved that you can carry responsibility.
Your next stage of growth may begin by allowing someone to challenge how you think, widen what you see and expand what you believe is possible.
Who is having that conversation with you?
Reem Borrows explores what happens beneath the surface of leadership — the patterns, behaviors and internal states that shape how we communicate, make decisions and respond under pressure. Visit her Expert Profile to learn more about her work on self-leadership, emotional regulation and creating sustainable change.
