Love Makes Better Leaders
How self-trust and discernment transform the way accomplished women lead both in love and in life.
Love Makes Better Leaders
She is the woman people call when something important needs to get done.
She leads the meeting. Makes the decision. Solves the problem. Calms the room. Builds the business. Mentors the younger woman coming behind her.
From the outside, hers is a life of earned authority.
But rewind the picture.
There may be another moment no one sees.
She is sitting at home, wondering whether she is asking too much of a relationship that consistently asks too much of her.
She can evaluate a business opportunity in twenty minutes, yet spend three days reconsidering what her own body told her about a man in the first twenty.
She knows how to lead.
But somewhere along the way, many accomplished women learned to bring the very abilities that made them successful into relationships that require something entirely different.
- We analyze.
- We improve.
- We communicate more clearly.
- We give it another chance.
- We carry.
And love quietly becomes another project.
That is why I have become fascinated by an idea that sounds almost provocative at first:
Love makes better leaders.
Not because a woman needs a relationship to become a better leader.
And certainly not because being chosen by a man completes an accomplished woman.
Quite the opposite.
The quality I am interested in is how she chooses.
More than fifty years ago, I met the man who became my husband and experienced something I would spend decades learning how to articulate: I trusted what I knew.
That experience eventually became the foundation of my work with hundreds of women and, today, the three capabilities at the heart of Grown-Up Love Society™:
Self-Trust. Discernment. Embodiment.
These are not simply dating skills. They are leadership capabilities.
Self-trust allows a woman to hear her own knowing before the committee in her head convenes to overrule it.
Discernment allows her to distinguish potential from evidence, charm from character, and what she hopes something could become from what is actually standing in front of her.
Embodiment asks an even more powerful question:
Can I be well here?
Those capacities change more than whom a woman dates.
- They change what she tolerates.
- What she carries.
- What she negotiates away.
- Where she invests her time.
- And how quickly she recognizes situations that continuously withdraw from the peace she has spent a lifetime building.
This is the connection between love and leadership that interests me.
A woman does not become more powerful because she learns to endure more.
At this season of life, power may look like becoming extraordinarily discerning about what deserves access to her energy:
- In the boardroom.
- In friendship.
- In family.
- And especially in love.
The old romantic question was often:
Does he choose me?
The grown-up question is different:
Do I choose this?
- Does this relationship add to the life I have built?
- Can I remain myself within it?
- Can I exhale here?
That is the conversation I want more accomplished women to have.
Because after decades of proving how much we can carry, perhaps one of the most sophisticated expressions of leadership is knowing what we no longer need to carry.
Love should not become another place where an accomplished woman reports for duty.
It can become a soft landing.
And I believe women who learn to choose that way bring something remarkable back into every room they lead: greater trust in themselves, clearer discernment about others, and far less willingness to sacrifice peace merely to keep something going.
That is why I believe love makes better leaders.
If this conversation speaks to the season of life you are entering, I invite you to subscribe to my LinkedIn newsletter, The Soft Landing, where I write about self-trust, discernment, relationships, and choosing a life in which love adds to your peace rather than depletes it.
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