It’s finally here! Luminaries: Women Leaders Who Light the Way is out today, and for today only it’s available for 99 cents.
This book ended up being so much more than I expected when I signed on. Thirteen contributors, with heart and courage, each told the true story of something she lived through, what it cost her, and what she learned about herself inside it. These are women who have testified before Congress, built careers across continents, led organizations through crises, survived systems that rewarded them for performing a version of strength that was quietly destroying them, and rebuilt their leadership from the ground up when the rules they had been following stopped working. Every chapter carries the weight of the actual experience, allowing you to feel your way into their world and that moment.
My work has never been gendered. A friend asked if I wanted to contribute to a book written by women for women leaders, and I said yes because the pattern I write about shows up differently when you have spent your career being told your strongest skill is the thing that disqualifies you. The book is written for women leaders, but the patterns illuminated run through every organization I have worked in for thirty years.
My chapter is about a moment during COVID when I suggested to a senior flag officer that we acknowledge what people in the Pentagon were feeling. He called any mention of such effeminate and turned away. That word, effeminate, and the years of calculation behind it, is what my chapter traces. If you have ever understood exactly what was happening around you and kept it to yourself because the environment told you it was safer, you will recognize what I am describing.
What Connects These Chapters
Every story is different, but the pattern underneath them is not. Every woman in this book carried a capacity her organization needed. Every one of them practiced it under conditions that made practicing it a risk. The conditioning told them to perform a version of leadership that left the most important part of what they understood out of the room.
What I Found Reading Them
I did not expect what these chapters would do to me. I recognized my own experience inside stories that looked nothing like mine. I kept coming back to one thought: the capacity these women were drawing on was not something they had to go find. It had been there all along, and will always be there, if we’re willing to tap into it.
I think that is what this book gives the reader. You read these stories and the weight of carrying your own version of this gets lighter, because you can see that other women have been carrying it too, in their own rooms, for years. And the thing you kept carrying was never the wrong thing to carry.
Get your copy today for 99 cents, here.
