True Cost of Your Armour

Hello, visionary,

I walk through the front door to the sound of my daughter's music drifting down from upstairs. I drop my workshop materials and feel the particular emptiness that comes after pouring yourself out for eight hours, helping other people find their voices.

The irony isn't lost on me.

I spend my days creating safe spaces for leaders to shed their corporate armour and discover their creative truth. I watch brilliant people transform from polished performance to raw authenticity. But there was a time I sat in those same rooms, wearing that same armour, making the same calculations about what was safe to say and what needed to stay locked behind my ribs.

I want to talk about the quiet that lives between words. The space where our most brilliant ideas, our deepest truths, and our most innovative strategies go to die.

This isn’t just personal exhaustion; it's a strategic bottleneck. And overcoming it is the most vital work a leader can do.

The Quiet That Lives Between Words

It happens slowly, this retreat inward. Like how you don't notice winter coming until suddenly your hands are cold and you can't remember the last time you felt warm.

At work, you watch yourself edit your thoughts before speaking. Not just for clarity - for safety. The bold idea gets softened into a suggestion. The strategic concern becomes a gentle question. You read the room, and the room is full of people barely keeping their own heads above water.

We sit in boardrooms, twelve brilliant minds, and discuss quarterly projections while the real conversation - the one about how we’re all terrified of being the first to admit we don't know what comes next - hovers like humidity in the air.

This performance of certainty is suffocating your greatest asset: your team's creative intelligence.

I remember sitting at those polished tables, watching a colleague present his review. I saw the exact moment he decided not to mention the real challenge - that half his team was quietly burning out. He gave us the clean, optimistic numbers instead. We all nodded. We moved to the next agenda item. And in that silence, we lost an opportunity for real, resilient growth.

‘In protecting everyone else from our complexity, we start to forget what our own voice sounds like when it's not being filtered through other people's capacity for truth.’ Oz

The armour we wear to feel safe becomes our prison.

But what if there was another way?

In the workshops I lead, I watch the same dance from the other side. Leaders arrive in their armour, speaking the language of ‘optimisation’ and ‘strategic pivots.’ But by session three, something shifts.

Sarah, a brilliant woman carrying invisible weight, admits, "I keep thinking everyone else has figured out something I'm missing." I watch the relief flood the room as ten other heads nod in recognition.

Marcus, a tech founder, breaks open in session four: "I've built this entire company culture around a version of myself that I'm exhausted pretending to be."

This is where the real work begins. This is the unmasking room. It's where leaders discover that their vulnerability isn't a liability; it is the very source of their team's psychological safety, their creativity, and their resilience.

And my own breakthrough didn't happen in a boardroom. It happened in my hallway.

My sixteen-year-old looked up from her phone with that particular intensity teenagers reserve for seeing through adult bullshit, and she said, "You know you can tell me, Mum. It's okay not to feel good."

This wasn't the voice of a child learning to perform—this was a young woman who's watched me long enough to recognise the performance itself.

"You always ask how I am," she continued, setting her phone down completely—the ultimate teenage gesture of serious attention. "But you never really tell me how you are. And sometimes I can see you're not okay, and I want to help but I don't know how."

The role reversal hit me like a gentle earthquake. Here was my daughter, offering to hold space for my complexity, extending the very readiness I had stopped looking for.

I took a breath that felt like coming home to myself, and I told her something true about what it's like to be a grown-up trying to figure things out while everyone expects you to already know.

Her face didn't relax; it brightened. "I thought so," she said. "I've been waiting for you to trust me with the real stuff."

And in that moment, something fundamental shifted.

She saw through the armour I didn't even know I was still wearing. And with that, she offered me the one thing I had stopped offering myself: readiness.

Here's the strategic insight I want you to hold: Readiness isn't something we wait for. It's something we create.

We create it for each other, one honest conversation at a time. My daughter's willingness to see me fully made me braver in my next workshop. My increased authenticity with those leaders gave them permission to be more honest with their teams.

And the ripple effect is profound.

Three weeks later, Sarah texts me: "I told my team the truth about our Q4 challenges yesterday. They came back with solutions I never could have imagined. Turns out they were all waiting for permission to be creative instead of just optimistic."

Marcus restructures his company around psychological safety. Six months later, his revenue has improved. "Turns out supported people innovate better than stressed people," he reports. "Who knew?"

The loneliness and performance that we believe is just "the cost of doing business" is, in fact, the single greatest barrier to building a truly rich, resilient, and innovative organisation.

The cure begins when we offer the very readiness we seek.

So, I ask you: if you dropped your armour this week, what would you create. To your confident self.