Leading from Within: How Identity Shapes the Way We Lead

“Self-awareness is your superpower.”

Drawing on psychology, lived experience, and clinical insight, Vanessa Boachie, cognitive behavioural psychotherapist and founding director of Inside Out Well-being, guided attendees of the Network for Black Women Leaders Elevate Session: The Role of Identity in Shaping Leadership Style, through the deep connection between identity, mental well-being, and leadership style. Vanessa offered more than just leadership strategies; she offered a path to alignment, truth, and personal power.

Listen to the summary

What’s Your Story?

The session opened with a deceptively simple question: What’s your story?

As Black women navigating complex and often exclusionary systems, our leadership styles are shaped by more than just training and ambition. They’re shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. Stories inherited from our upbringing. Stories we absorbed in institutions. Stories we built to survive.

Vanessa described how her own story — as a sensitive first-born daughter of Ghanaian heritage — influenced her early leadership style. She introduced eight core leadership styles, including Servant, Transformational, Transactional, Autocratic, Coaching, Charismatic, Democratic and Laissez-Faire (hands-off). Each style, she explained, emerges not just from personality, but from cultural expectations, family roles, trauma, and values.

“You cannot outperform your self-image. If you believe your voice doesn’t matter, that belief will shape how you show up in the room.”

What does it really mean to lead as your full self? You need to explore who you are when you lead, and what parts of yourself have you silenced to survive. Leadership doesn’t begin when we get the role, title, or seat at the table. It begins with self-awareness.

Identity and Leadership Are Deeply Linked

The session explored the cognitive triad — how we view ourselves, the world, and the future — and how those views shape our behaviours and career choices.

How do I view myself?
How do I view the world around me?
How do I view the future?

This triad quietly governs how we lead, respond to challenges, set boundaries, or fail to. For many Black women, systemic experiences of marginalisation and microaggressions feed internal beliefs of invisibility, imposter syndrome, or unworthiness.

Attendees were encouraged to reflect:

What values guide my leadership?
How do I want others to feel under my leadership?
Where am I leading from truth, and where from fear?

You can’t outperform your self-image. If you’ve internalised that your voice doesn’t matter, you’ll subconsciously lead like that’s true. But here’s the good news: beliefs are not fixed. They can be rewritten. Challenge the quiet scripts that tell you you're too much, not enough, or lucky to be there. They’re not facts. They’re conditioning.

Tools for Reclaiming Your Leadership

Vanessa shared practical tools for aligning personal identity with professional leadership:

Clarify Your Core Values: Ask yourself who you are, and who you’re not.
Set Boundaries: Especially in emotionally demanding environments
Make Space for Personal Rituals: Book a "meeting with yourself” weekly to check in with your story, identity, and alignment.
Reframe Your Narrative: Challenge limiting beliefs about what’s possible.
Practice Self-Compassion: Not just as a soft skill, but as a survival tool.

She also challenged attendees to build a “brag list”. A list not just of achievements, but of who you are beyond what you do.

When you’re suppressing yourself to fit in, you’re paying a psychological cost. Eventually, that stress shows up in the body.

You Don’t Have to Perform to Lead

You don’t have to change who you are to lead. You just have to return to who you are. Become more of yourself—and lead from there. Vanessa’s message was especially resonant for Black women who feel pressure to over-deliver, over-perform, or water themselves down in professional spaces. She stressed the importance of psychologically safe environments, not just for authenticity, but for long-term health. And she urged Black women to regularly recalibrate through journaling, community, and self-affirmation.

Vanessa closed the session with an invitation to book an appointment with yourself: a time to check in, review your story, and remind yourself of your power. “Leadership isn’t about becoming someone else to lead. It’s about becoming more of yourself.”

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