Written by Shelli Roberts, a leadership mentor and the creator of Inanna’s Way Feminine Leadership Academy. Shelli helps women reclaim authentic authority, navigate workplace dynamics with greater emotional coherence and presence, and redefine success on their own terms. Blending grounded leadership practices with spiritual intelligence and feminine wisdom teachings, she supports women in moving beyond burnout, overperformance, and self-abandonment to lead from inner authority rather than external validation.
We tend to think our professional identities were built at work: through experience, leadership training, mentors, promotions, successes and failures. But the reality is we arrived at work with an operating system already in place and running.
Long before we knew anything about organizational politics, we learned whether our opinions were welcomed, whether disagreement carried consequences, whether achievement earned approval, whether asking for help was safe, and whether belonging required being agreeable, useful, or good.
Those early experiences shaped our first relationship with authority, and with our own power. For many women, they unfolded alongside cultural messages about what girls and women were supposed to be: accommodating but confident, accomplished without being threatening, collaborative but decisive, ambitious but likable. Drawing on psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller’s landmark book Toward a New Psychology of Women, we can consider how women have historically been socialized to treat direct power as something dangerous to claim, permissible mainly when exercised in service of others rather than the self.
There is nothing inherently wrong with having ambition. Achievement, positional authority, expertise, money, and influence are not “lesser” forms of power. The more revealing question is:
Does my power originate within me and express itself through these things, or do I need these things to experience myself as powerful? There is a nuance here worth exploring further, which can influence how successful you feel and how bone-level exhausted you become leading in the workplace.
The Powerful Woman Who Still Has Something to Prove
She has all the vestiges of power: the title, the expertise, the track record, and the credibility that goes with it. People look to her for decisions and for her read on things. By every external measure, she is influential. Yet she is still working extraordinarily hard to prove she deserves the power her influence provides. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
She over-prepares for the meeting. Hesitates before making the unpopular call or softens her words. Makes herself indispensable because being needed feels safer than being questioned. Carries more than her share because somewhere beneath the competence sits an old calculation: If I do enough, contribute enough, know enough, perhaps no one can question whether I belong here.
Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes named this pattern in high-achieving women nearly fifty years ago: the impostor phenomenon, in which competence is experienced as a performance rather than a fact, no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary. It names an ongoing paradox of ambitious women and power: we can possess considerable external power without experiencing ourselves as inherently powerful. That distinction shapes how we lead and what drives us in our leadership.
When Adaptation Looks Like Ambition
Many of the behaviors that help women succeed can develop for more than one reason. High standards may reflect genuine mastery. Responsibility may reflect deeply held values. Independence may be a real strength. But those same behaviors can also become adaptive strategies when they’re quietly carrying another job: securing worth, safety, belonging, or approval.
Over-functioning makes us indispensable. Perfectionism protects us from criticism. Hyper-independence protects us from disappointment. People-pleasing preserves belonging. Constant achievement keeps supplying evidence that we deserve to be where we are.
From the outside, these behaviors look like ambition. From the inside, they can cost enormous amounts of energy to maintain, because, as social psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe have proposed in their model of contingent self-worth, the more a person’s sense of worth depends on meeting an external standard, the more that external standard comes to govern their emotions, choices, and self-esteem.
In her article, The Woman You Become When You Stop Performing Strength, Glenda Dawson explores a related distinction in the difference between being strong and having to continually perform strength. There is another layer underneath that distinction that is worth examining: What are we asking the performance to give us?
For some ambitious women, the answer is power, or, more precisely, the reassurance that we are finally powerful enough. That is where achievement turns exhausting: there is always another accomplishment available to prove what the last one couldn’t establish for good.
Having Power Is Not the Same as Being Self-Referenced in Power
This is why the subject of women and power deserves a more nuanced conversation than simply “women need more of it,” though we do. External power is not the problem. Women should have organizational authority, economic power, decision-making influence, visibility, expertise, resources, and seats at the tables where consequential decisions get made. The question is what relationship we have with those things as we are striving to get them and also once we possess them.
A related psychological concept is locus of control. In his 1966 work, psychologist Julian Rotter distinguished between people who experience outcomes in their lives as dependent on their own actions and those who experience them as governed by outside forces. When our sense of power stays externally referenced, losing approval can feel like losing authority. Someone challenging our decision can feel like a challenge to our competence or worth. Delegating can feel risky because our value has become fused with being the person who can handle everything.
We may hold authority over others while still unconsciously giving others authority over our experience of ourselves. And that contradiction eventually enters our leadership and our state of wellbeing.
The System Is Not Only Around Us
A leader who still needs to prove her worth may struggle to delegate because competence has become part of how she establishes her value. A leader organized around perfection may unintentionally communicate that mistakes are dangerous. A leader who earned belonging by over-functioning may reward the same behavior in others. A leader who learned to suppress uncertainty through micromanagement may create a culture where everyone else learns to be controlling too… and drive past mistakes that can become costly.
This is how personal adaptations migrate into organizational culture. We tend to talk about workplace culture as though it exists somewhere outside us: a set of policies, structures, and norms imposed by “the organization.” But organizations are also built from repeated human interactions. Organizational theorist Rosabeth Moss Kanter examined this relationship decades ago: much of what gets read as individual personality, or even attributed to gender, can be a response to structural powerlessness. Left unexamined, powerlessness can reproduce itself through the very people working hardest to overcome it.
We are in the system, and the system is us. When we bring an unexamined relationship with power into leadership, we can unintentionally reproduce the very conditions we say we want to change, not because we are bad leaders, but because what remains unconscious tends to feel normal and then gets expressed in normally unconscious ways.
Reclaiming an Internally Sourced Relationship with Power
The alternative is not becoming less ambitious. It is becoming less dependent on achievement to establish who we are. This is the movement from externally referenced power toward what I call Inner Authority: the growing capacity to retain authorship of how we understand ourselves, make meaning, discern what is true for us, and choose how we participate in what happens around us. Development scholar Jo Rowlands‘ influential distinction between “power over,” “power to,” “power with,” and “power within” offers a related framework for understanding empowerment. From this perspective, power grows from within a person and extends outward, rather than being borrowed, granted, or extracted from others.
Inner Authority does not mean ignoring feedback. It does not mean refusing accountability. And it certainly does not mean believing that simply feeling powerful replaces the need to develop expertise or exercise responsible leadership. What it DOES do is change the source from which we experience and use those things.
Instead of asking What do I need to accomplish so I can finally know I am enough? we can ask what becomes possible when I no longer require accomplishment to answer that question? Instead of how do I make sure everyone knows I belong in this room? We can ask what this room requires from me now that proving I belong here is no longer my primary assignment.
This is where ambition changes its nature. Energy previously consumed by proving, protecting, and performing becomes available for discernment, creativity, contribution, stewardship, and impact.
Power does not disappear. It becomes more available…and less exhausting.
The Ambitious Woman as Compassionate Disruptor
This is also where personal reclamation becomes organizational change. A woman no longer using leadership to establish her worth has greater freedom to question the systems that had once rewarded her adaptations. She can stop equating exhaustion with commitment. She can return authority to the people closest to the work rather than needing to control every outcome. She can tolerate disagreement without reading it as disloyalty or a personal affront. She can let uncertainty be visible. She can stop rewarding the employee who is always available and start asking why constant availability became necessary. She can recognize when a workplace is celebrating the very adaptations that are burning out its people.
This is what I mean by becoming a Compassionate Disruptor. The disruption does not begin with fighting the system. It begins with recognizing where the system has taken up residence within us. Then we make different choices, small ones at first. We stop performing certainty when curiosity would serve the room better. We stop rescuing when someone else needs the chance to exercise judgment and take the time to mentor instead of control. We stop making self-abandonment the price of being considered committed.
Social psychologist Dacher Keltner’s research on power reaches a related conclusion from a different angle: power is granted by others and can be sustained by serving their interests; when it turns self-serving, personal influence can erode. Each time we choose differently as leaders, we change a small piece of what power means inside the organization.
Examine What You Are Asking Power to Provide
Consider your own ambition. Think about the next title, achievement, income level, credential, business milestone, or leadership opportunity you want. Want it. There is no need to make yourself less ambitious to become more self-aware. Then ask a different question: what am I asking this achievement to prove about me?
That I am successful? That I matter? That I am finally safe? That no one can dismiss me? That I belong? That I am powerful?
There is no wrong answer. The value is in noticing whether your ambition is expressing your power or still trying to create it. Because the goal is not to withdraw from external power. Women having more power in our organizations, institutions, businesses, and communities matters. The deeper reclamation is learning to wield that power without requiring it to establish your worth.
You already possess far more power than you realize. The point is not to become less ambitious, less influential, or less successful. It is to stop requiring the world to convince you that you are powerful.
When power becomes internally sourced, ambition no longer has to prove who you are. Instead, it becomes available to express who you already know yourself to be, and your energy can be spent leading instead of proving to yourself and everyone around you that you are powerful.
To learn more about Shelli Roberts’ work on moving beyond proving, overperformance, and external validation to lead from a place of self-trust, authentic authority, and personal power, visit her expert profile.
