Once We Enter the Room

On Yin, Yang and a wider understanding of leadership

For many years, I have accompanied leaders, entrepreneurs and investors through initiatory journeys in Egypt. One of the questions that has followed me from those journeys is what sovereignty looks like when it is no longer confused with control.

That question became particularly alive for me at Hatshepsut’s temple. At the time, I was exploring how to inhabit authority without imposing, controlling or withdrawing. Standing in a place created by a woman who held enormous power opened another possibility: perhaps sovereignty is not primarily about how much we can command, but about what becomes possible around us because of how we hold power.

Since then, through my work with leaders and through my practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine, I have watched this question take many different forms.

Women fought extraordinarily hard to enter rooms from which they were historically excluded. They became executives, founders, investors, board members and decision-makers. That movement matters, and it is far from complete. But I wonder whether another stage of that journey is now asking for our attention.

Once we have gained access to the room, do we want to reproduce the logic that created the room?

Although women’s experience is an important part of this inquiry, this is not an essay about how women should lead. When I speak about the feminine, I am speaking about what Taoist philosophy associates with Yin: receiving as well as initiating, sensing as well as analysing, allowing as well as directing, nourishing rather than only producing, and understanding relationship as a form of intelligence.

These capacities do not belong to one gender. They are human capacities. I have worked with men who have a deep relationship with them and women who have learned to almost completely override them. For some women, there is a particular history of suppressing these qualities in order to be taken seriously in environments that rewarded a different expression of power. For some men, they may be capacities they were rarely encouraged to develop or express. For people whose experience of gender does not fit that binary, the relationship will be their own.

What interests me is not who is supposed to embody which qualities. It is what happens when any of us becomes cut off from part of our intelligence because it does not fit the prevailing image of a strong leader.

The Intelligence the Room Recognises

For many people entering positions of power, success requires becoming exceptionally fluent in the qualities our institutions already recognise as leadership: decisiveness, rationality, stamina, productivity, certainty, the ability to absorb pressure and keep performing.

We need these capacities. The question is what happens when they become our dominant definition of competence.

What happens to our ability to notice what is not being said in a meeting, even when everyone appears to agree? To sense that trust between two people has shifted before it becomes an open conflict? To recognise that not everything in an organisation moves at the same speed: capital can be deployed in a day and a strategy changed in a meeting, while trust, capability, culture and a new idea may need much longer to mature?

What happens to our ability to recognise when forcing an emerging idea prematurely into targets, deliverables or a business model will constrain rather than strengthen it? To see a capacity in someone before it is visible in their performance and create enough room for them to grow into it? To recognise when pushing harder might deliver the immediate objective while quietly damaging the people and relationships on which the longer-term work depends?

These are also forms of intelligence.

Because they are harder to quantify, however, they can be easier to dismiss as subjective, emotional or insufficiently rigorous. We can become highly trained in the forms of intelligence the room already recognises while gradually losing confidence in our ability to perceive what does not yet appear on the dashboard.

I see this particularly with women who have spent years learning how to succeed in environments where credibility depended on being able to explain, demonstrate and defend what they knew. They sense something, then immediately search for the data that will give them permission to trust what they sensed.

The point is not to replace analysis with intuition. Intuition can be wrong. So can a financial model. The opportunity is to recover a fuller range of intelligence with which to lead.

Carrying Is Not the Same as Nourishing

I see the consequences of our ideas about strength every week in my TCM practice.

I never set out to specialise in burnout. In many ways, burnout found me. For the past ten years, people have arrived with different symptoms and different stories, yet underneath them I have encountered remarkably similar patterns: interrupted sleep, locked jaws, tension across the shoulders, digestive issues, exhaustion that rest alone does not resolve. Bodies that have become very good at continuing long after something was asking them to change.

I see this particularly often in women carrying significant responsibility. They may be holding a company or a team while also holding a family, a relationship, the emotional needs of others and the countless details that make everyday life function. Many are extremely capable. That capability can become its own trap: because they can carry so much, more continues to be placed upon them—and often they place more upon themselves.

We have learned to associate this capacity with strength.

Our dominant Western image of the strong leader is still often the person who absorbs pressure without being destabilised by it: the one who has the answer, makes the difficult decision, remains available when things go wrong and steps in when nobody else knows what to do. In a crisis, these qualities can be invaluable. But when they become a permanent way of leading, they create a particular kind of organisation around them.

If I am always the one who knows, decides, resolves and reassures, the people around me have fewer opportunities to develop their own judgement, confidence and authority. My ability to carry can inadvertently teach the system to depend on my carrying.

What looks like strong leadership can quietly prevent strength from developing elsewhere in the system.

This is where the distinction between carrying and nourishing has become important to me.

Carrying says: I will hold this.

Nourishing asks: What does this need in order to develop its own capacity?

They can look similar from the outside, but they create very different systems. Carrying can make the leader increasingly indispensable. Nourishing gradually makes more people capable.

Sometimes nourishing means providing very clear direction. Sometimes it means resisting the impulse to provide the answer. It can mean recognising someone’s capacity before they recognise it themselves and giving them a real opportunity to exercise it. It can mean protecting an idea that is not yet ready to be scaled, setting a firm boundary, asking for support, or having enough trust to stop interfering.

And this is an important distinction when we speak about Yin: nourishing does not mean endlessly giving. A person who continually gives while becoming depleted is not participating in a regenerative relationship. They are carrying.

Healthy Yin Needs Healthy Yang

None of this is an argument for less Yang. A living system needs both.

Healthy Yang can be extraordinarily precise. It focuses. It decides. It protects. It negotiates. It closes the deal. It takes something that exists as possibility and gives it form.

There are moments when a leader needs to stop exploring and act. The financing needs to be secured. The contract needs to be signed. A boundary needs to be made clear. Someone needs to take responsibility for a decision. An organisation cannot remain indefinitely in emergence.

There is nothing inherently extractive about this kind of force. The more interesting question is what that force is serving.

I sometimes think about the precision of a predator. The moment of the kill is concentrated and uncompromising: attention, timing, speed and commitment. Yet within a healthy ecosystem, that act does not exist in isolation. The predator feeds, other species feed from what remains, microorganisms participate in decomposition, and nutrients eventually return to the soil. What appears at one scale to be an act of taking participates, at another scale, in a much larger circulation of life.

Healthy Yang in leadership can operate in a similar way. A founder may pursue a deal with extraordinary determination, but the capital brought into the organisation can become salaries, infrastructure, experimentation and the resources that allow other people to bring their gifts into the world. An investor can be rigorous about performance while understanding that healthy returns allow capital to circulate towards other people, places and ideas.

Healthy Yang concentrates energy so that the larger system can be resourced.

The problem begins when concentration becomes accumulation—when resources continually move towards one part of the system without circulating back through the relationships that made their creation possible.

And I don't think this pattern only shows up in how we relate to money.

I increasingly notice it in how we relate to one another.

I attend many gatherings of entrepreneurs, investors and leaders, from intimate retreats to places like the World Economic Forum. These spaces bring extraordinary people together, and meaningful collaborations can emerge from them. Yet I often leave tired by a particular quality of interaction that has become increasingly normalised.

Sometimes networking begins to feel strangely like Tinder.

Within a few minutes, we are unconsciously swiping left or right. Can you fund me? Can I make something out of your idea? Who do you know? Can you introduce me to someone? Is this conversation worth my time?

There is nothing wrong with seeking investors, partners, clients or opportunities. Bringing resources and ideas together is part of what these gatherings are for. Healthy Yang does exactly this: it recognises possibility and acts upon it.

But something changes when relationship becomes primarily a means to an outcome.

We stop encountering the person in front of us and begin evaluating their usefulness.

And perhaps this is where the distinction between transaction and relationship matters. A transaction asks what we can exchange. A relationship contains possibilities that neither person can necessarily see at the beginning.

Some of the most important relationships in my own life would probably have failed a five-minute assessment of their strategic value. Their significance became visible through time, trust, disagreement, generosity, coincidence and experiences neither of us could have planned when we met.

If we only invest in relationships whose return we can already see, we may be applying the same extractive logic to one another that many of us are trying to move beyond in our organisations and economies.

This is where healthy Yin becomes essential.

Yin allows us to remain in relationship before knowing what the relationship will produce. It perceives the larger field in which an action is taking place. In an organisation, it notices whether the pace of growth is exhausting the team, whether the conditions attached to capital are pulling the company away from its purpose, whether trust between partners is deteriorating, or whether an idea needs more time before being scaled.

This relational intelligence does not oppose results. It asks us to perceive the conditions producing them.

A company can hit its targets while its founders lose trust in one another. It can raise significant capital while gradually compromising the purpose for which it was created. It can grow quickly while depleting the people responsible for sustaining that growth. Equally, a leader can spend so long sensing, consulting and waiting for alignment that an opportunity passes because nobody was willing to decide.

Both tell us something about imbalance.

Healthy Yin without sufficient Yang may perceive what is needed but struggle to bring it into form. Healthy Yang without sufficient Yin can become extraordinarily effective at reaching an objective while losing awareness of what that achievement is costing the wider relational field.

The point, then, is not to become more feminine.

It is to become more whole.

Perhaps mature leadership is the capacity to move between these intelligences. To listen deeply and then act precisely. To allow something to emerge and recognise when the moment has come to give it form. To nourish without carrying. To receive without becoming passive. To pursue resources without confusing concentration with accumulation. To build relationships without immediately demanding that they become useful.

This is increasingly the territory that interests me in my work with leaders. Not how to become a better leader according to an existing definition of leadership, but what becomes possible when we begin to notice the patterns around which our leadership has been built.

What happens when the person who always knows allows themselves not to know long enough for someone else’s intelligence to enter? When the person who always carries creates the conditions for others to develop their own strength? When someone who has spent years overriding their sensitivity begins treating what they perceive as information alongside analysis and evidence? And when someone who is naturally receptive discovers that the most life-serving response in a particular moment is to become extremely precise, make the decision and close the deal?

These shifts are difficult to make intellectually. We can understand them perfectly and continue reproducing the same patterns. They have to become embodied.

Perhaps that is why I keep returning to the language of initiation. There are thresholds in leadership that cannot be crossed simply by accumulating more knowledge. Sometimes the qualities that made us successful become so familiar that we mistake them for the whole of who we are.

Women fought hard to enter the room. We should never diminish what that required. But perhaps the next question belongs to all of us:

What did we learn to leave outside in order to belong there?

For some women, the answer may include sensitivity, intuition, receptivity or the ability to receive support without experiencing it as weakness. For some men, it may involve discovering that these same capacities do not diminish strength. For others, the journey will not fit either of these stories.

We do not necessarily need to become harder. We do not need to prove how much more we can carry. And we do not need to reproduce a narrow model of power in order to stand fully in our authority.

Perhaps the work now is to become capable of accessing more of ourselves: the part that can sense the field and the part that can act within it; the part that can nourish and the part that can protect; the part that can remain with another person without needing anything from them, and the part that can recognise the moment when a relationship is ready to become collaboration; the part that knows how to receive and the part that can go out into the world, gather resources and bring them back to nourish the larger ecosystem.

Perhaps some of the intelligence we learned to leave outside the room is precisely what we now need in order to lead differently once we are inside it.