Who Are You Becoming? The Businesswoman’s Guide to Leadership Identity
Leading Through the Looking Glass
“Who are you?” the Caterpillar asks Alice.
It is one of the simplest questions in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, yet Alice struggles to answer it. She has been changing size, encountering strange characters, entering unfamiliar situations, and hearing conflicting messages about who she is supposed to be. No wonder she is uncertain.
Business leaders can find themselves in a remarkably similar position.
The question is not simply Who are you as a leader? It is also: Who are you becoming?
Leadership is often treated as a collection of skills—communication, delegation, decision-making, strategic thinking, negotiation. Those skills matter, but beneath them is something more fundamental: leadership identity. How you see yourself influences how you make decisions, how you respond to pressure, what you tolerate, what you believe you deserve, and ultimately how others experience your leadership.
For businesswomen especially, professional growth can involve navigating expectations about how a leader should behave. Be confident, but not intimidating. Be collaborative, but decisive. Be ambitious, but approachable. Speak up, but don’t dominate.
Trying to satisfy every expectation can leave even accomplished women wondering which version of themselves belongs in the room.
The answer may begin with a different question.
Who are you becoming?
Leadership Identity Is More Than a Job Title
A title can tell people where you sit on an organizational chart. It cannot tell them how you lead.
You can become a vice president without becoming more confident. You can become a CEO without becoming more self-aware. You can manage a larger team without becoming better at handling conflict, uncertainty, or responsibility.
Leadership identity develops through experience and reflection. It is shaped by the choices you make repeatedly, especially when circumstances are uncomfortable.
Think about the difference between saying, “I am the manager,” and saying, “I am a leader who creates clarity when things become uncertain.”
The first describes a position. The second describes an identity.
That distinction matters because positions can change overnight. Your authority may increase, your organization may restructure, or you may move to an entirely different company. But the principles you develop about how you lead can travel with you.
Your leadership identity is, in many ways, the answer to the question: What do I want people to consistently experience when they work with me?
The Problem With Inherited Leadership
Most professionals do not consciously design their leadership identity. They inherit pieces of it.
Perhaps your first manager rewarded perfectionism, so you learned that mistakes were dangerous. Perhaps a demanding boss equated long hours with commitment, so you began measuring your value by how busy you were. Maybe you watched confident executives dominate meetings and concluded that being powerful meant being the loudest person in the room.
Over time, these observations become assumptions.
You may begin telling yourself:
This is just how successful leaders behave.
But is it?
Leadership development requires examining the beliefs we have absorbed and deciding which ones actually belong to us.
This is where the Looking Glass becomes useful. A mirror does not change your face. It gives you an opportunity to see what is already there.
Self-awareness works much the same way.
Instead of automatically accepting the leadership behaviors you inherited, you can examine them. Which ones make you more effective? Which ones create unnecessary pressure? Which ones reflect your values? Which ones belong to an earlier version of yourself?
Growth sometimes means learning a new skill.
Sometimes it means letting go of an old definition of success.
When Confidence Becomes a Costume
Confidence is an important part of leadership, but confidence does not require pretending to know everything.
In fact, leaders who can acknowledge uncertainty may create more trust than those who constantly project certainty.
Consider two executives facing an unexpected market change.
One insists, “I know exactly what we need to do,” even though the information is incomplete.
The other says, “Here is what we know, here is what we don’t know, and here is how we’re going to find out.”
The second leader has not surrendered authority. She has demonstrated judgment.
Authentic confidence allows a leader to say, “I don’t know yet,” without turning that statement into “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
That distinction is particularly important in environments where leaders feel pressure to have immediate answers. Sometimes the most confident thing a leader can do is create enough space to ask better questions.
Alice spends much of Wonderland trying to understand what is happening around her. Her curiosity is not weakness. It is one of the qualities that keeps her moving forward.
| Escaping Wonderland Burnout: How Leaders Create Sustainable Performance Without Losing Their Teams |
The Leadership Version of “Who Are You?”
Try answering the Caterpillar’s question without using your job title.
Don’t say CEO, director, founder, manager, entrepreneur, or executive.
Instead, complete these sentences:
I want my team to experience me as someone who…
When things go wrong, I want to be the leader who…
I will not compromise on…
I am willing to change…
I want to become better at…
The leadership behavior I need to stop rewarding in myself is…
The person I am becoming professionally is…
These questions shift the focus from external achievement to internal direction.
They also make leadership development more practical.
If you want to become a leader who creates clarity, you may need to communicate priorities more consistently. If you want to become a leader who develops people, you may need to delegate instead of automatically taking over. If you want to become a leader known for courage, you may have to become more comfortable having difficult conversations.
Identity becomes meaningful when it changes behavior.
| Growing and Shrinking: Why Adaptive Leaders Change Size, Style, and Approach |
Don’t Confuse Familiar With Authentic
One of the most challenging parts of leadership growth is recognizing that something can feel natural without being authentic.
You may be naturally conflict-avoidant because it has helped you maintain relationships. You may be naturally controlling because preparation makes you feel secure. You may say yes quickly because being helpful has always been part of how you demonstrate your value.
But familiar behavior is not necessarily effective behavior.
Sometimes growth feels uncomfortable precisely because you are practicing a way of operating that is new.
The leader who has always solved everyone’s problems may initially feel guilty when she delegates. The executive who has avoided difficult conversations may feel unusually direct when she finally addresses an issue. The woman who has spent years waiting for permission to speak may feel uncomfortable taking the floor before someone invites her.
Discomfort does not automatically mean you are doing something wrong.
Sometimes it means you are expanding.
Stop Trying to Be the “Right” Kind of Leader
Wonderland is full of characters who insist that their version of reality is the correct one.
The Queen of Hearts wants obedience. The Mad Hatter embraces absurdity. The Caterpillar demands answers. The Cheshire Cat offers cryptic guidance.
Alice has to navigate all of them without becoming any of them.
That is an important leadership lesson.
There is no single personality template that guarantees effective leadership. Some excellent leaders are energetic and charismatic. Others are thoughtful and quiet. Some lead from the front; others create influence by asking exceptional questions and developing people around them.
The goal is not to become someone else’s definition of a leader.
The goal is to become a more intentional version of yourself.
That means distinguishing between authenticity and comfort. Authentic leadership does not mean doing whatever feels natural. It means aligning your behavior with your values while remaining willing to grow.
Sometimes authenticity requires becoming more assertive than you naturally feel. Sometimes it requires becoming more patient. Sometimes it requires saying no.
Your authentic leadership style is not a fixed personality trait.
It can evolve.
The Woman in the Mirror
Leadership development is often described as moving upward: more responsibility, a bigger team, a larger budget, a more impressive title.
But leadership growth also moves inward.
Who are you when nobody is watching?
What do you do when you have authority but no applause?
How do you behave when your decision is unpopular?
What happens when someone on your team disagrees with you?
What do you do when you make a mistake?
These moments reveal leadership identity more clearly than a polished presentation or impressive résumé.
The woman in the mirror is not simply the person who has already achieved something.
She is the person making choices about what comes next.
Becoming Is the Real Leadership Journey
Alice changes throughout Wonderland, sometimes literally. She grows, shrinks, questions, adapts, gets confused, becomes frustrated, and keeps going.
Leadership can work the same way.
There will be rooms where you feel too small for the responsibility in front of you. There will be others where you realize you have outgrown the role you once occupied. There will be moments when you have to change your approach, challenge an assumption, or reconsider what success means.
That does not necessarily mean you have lost yourself.
It may mean you are becoming someone new.
The most important leadership question may therefore not be Who am I?
It may be:
Who am I becoming—and are my daily choices taking me there?
You do not need to have the entire answer today. Leadership is not a finished identity. It is something you construct through repeated decisions, relationships, failures, discoveries, and acts of courage.
So take a moment to look into the glass.
Not to ask whether you look like the leader you think you’re supposed to be.
Ask something more useful:
Does the leader I am becoming look like the woman I want to be?
That is where the real journey begins.
References
Carroll, L. (1865). Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Macmillan.
Goleman, D. (1998). Working with emotional intelligence. Bantam Books.
Ibarra, H. (2015). The authenticity paradox. Harvard Business Review, 93(1–2), 53–59.
Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.
Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and practice (9th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Bishop, Parker. Leading Through the Looking Glass: Curious Lessons in Leadership From Wonderland. Fort Lauderdale, Tin Roof Publishing, 2025