Leetta Jackson Angel

There is a concept in psychology called the “shadow.” In the world of high-performance strategy and process optimization, we might call it the unexamined variance in the system—the hidden operational drag.

But if I look at it through the lens of Internal Family Systems (IFS), my shadow isn’t some dark, abstract abyss. It’s simply a crowded basement full of the parts of myself I had to lock away just to survive my climb.

As midlife, mid-career influential women, we are rarely allowed to be monolithic. We are expected to be seamless. We navigate an intricate inner ecosystem made up of different “parts,” and for most of us, that ecosystem has been running on a brutal, exhausting, high-functioning autopilot for decades.

I know exactly how that system operates because mine hit a catastrophic, code-red system failure on December 8th, 1998.

When I lost my daughter, Jaylee, the pain was too massive for my conscious mind to metabolize while I was trying to maintain my trajectory. In that moment of existential overwhelm, a fierce protector part of me took the wheel. In IFS, we call these Managers. My Manager did its job flawlessly: it took that fragile, deeply wounded part of me—the Exile carrying the shattering heartbreak of losing my child—and locked her in the basement. It slammed the door, swallowed the key, and commanded: “Keep moving. Produce. Do not look back.”

Then came the loss of my cousin, Amy. Her passing brought a different, heavier kind of darkness into my system. A new Exile emerged in my basement, this one carrying the suffocating burden of survivor’s guilt—and, if I’m honest, a raw, protective jealousy that she had officially been allowed to exit the arena. My thoughts became a haunting, agonizing loop: “Why am I still here fighting? I hate this pace. I hate who I have to be to sustain this.”

To keep those bleeding wounds from breaching the boardroom, my internal bodyguards went into overdrive. They demanded I pay an astronomical people-pleasing tax. They convinced me that if I could just be the perfectly curated, unflappable, ultra-reliable leader—the woman who absorbs everyone else’s chaos and never shows a single crack—I could outrun the guilt of surviving.

That ruthless inner critic I used to hear every day? That wasn’t my core identity. It was a hyper-vigilant protector screaming at me to stop resting, stop crying, and stop being human. It genuinely believed that if I let my guard down for even a single quarter, the grief and guilt in my basement would rise up and destroy the empire I had so carefully built.

But you can only run a high-capacity system on emergency backup power for so long before the grid collapses.

And then there was my best friend Geri.

If Amy was my agonizing question, Geri was my redemption. Watching her fight, witnessing her loss, and choosing to honor her memory became my ultimate turning point. Losing Geri was the moment my internal system realized it didn’t just have to survive anymore; I was allowed to heal. Her legacy became a profound permission slip for me to step off the treadmill of performance, drop my heavy armor, and remember what it feels like to actually live.

Shadow work—or what I call Parts Work—isn’t about firing our protectors or fixing what is “broken.” You are not broken, and neither am I. It is about stepping into your true Self—that calm, curious, compassionate internal core that cannot be damaged—and intentionally walking down those basement stairs to audit the system.

For me, it meant looking at my exhausted Managers and saying, “Thank you for keeping me alive when I was drowning. But I’ve got leadership from here.”

When I did that, my entire operating system rewired.

Shifting the Leadership System: The Internal Ecosystem

My Internal Parts

Unintegrated (Manager-Led)

Integrated (Self-Led)

The “People-Pleaser”

Paid the tax daily. Suppressed boundaries, swallowed my voice to preserve capital, and quietly accumulated toxic resentment that bled into my closest relationships.

A healthy boundary-setter. I now recognize I can resource and support others without abandoning myself. The tax subscription is permanently canceled.

The Inner Critic

Acted as an aggressive, punitive chief of staff. It berated me for any sign of “weakness” or rest, using shame to force hyper-productivity.

Stepped down from the driver’s seat. I recognize its anxiety, thank it for trying to protect my reputation, and move it to the passenger side while my true Self takes the wheel.

The Grief & Guilt

Kept in strict internal lockdown. Heartbreak was wrapped in protective numbness, triggering an exhausting loop of “Why am I the one who made it?”

Integrated into my story with grace. Trauma has transformed into an unbroken thread of meaning. I honor it by choosing to truly live, not just perform.

Redemption & Legacy

Intellectualized by protectors too terrified to allow deep connection, because past data taught them that caring hurts too much.

Embraced as the ultimate permission slip. I lead, love, and connect with radical candor, unarmored empathy, and true presence.

The IFS takeaway: We do not have to exile our humanity to be powerful. True wholeness happens when our protector parts trust the leader within us enough to hand over the keys to the basement.

This is slow, layered work. For a high-achiever, it can feel disorienting to slow down. But on the other side of that internal reconciliation is a life that is fully aligned, rewired for peace, and no longer apologizing for taking up space.

Take a breath. Step into your curiosity. Go check on your parts.

For decades, I treated compartmentalization like a leadership superpower.

Need to swallow blinding physical pain to implement a flawless new corporate strategy after a brutal round of layoffs? No problem. Need to put on my absolute best, hyper-competent face for a high-stakes interview while my personal world is fracturing into a million jagged pieces? Please. I got this.

Box it up, slide it onto a mental shelf, lock the vault, and smile.

I thought it was just the standard-issue Gen X executive survival kit: lace up, lock it down, choke back reality, and let the overachievements do the talking. As professional women, we often wear our ability to completely sever our agony from our output like a shiny badge of honor. We practically put it on our résumés.

But a funny thing happens when you spend your life building airtight emotional vaults. Eventually, you receive a single piece of feedback—a single, innocently delivered word—that acts like a stick cracking through the carefully lacquered surface.

For me, the word that set my world on fire was “polished.”

A few years ago, I was told directly that I was not being seriously considered for senior leadership roles because I lacked “polish.”

The Word That Shattered the Performance

Not going to lie: when I heard it, that word cut me to the bone. Not because the person delivering it was mean, but because it was an incredibly accurate description of my performance. The white-hot rage that flashed inside me wasn’t aimed at them. It was a rage that incinerated the last vestiges of the identity I had so carefully crafted to fit what I thought would be the most palatable, successful version of myself.

Now? I’ve done the work. I used that anger to fuel my creative career rebirth. I wrote myself out of the frustration, and I am standing on the other side of that dark night of the soul.

But narrative growth isn’t a straight line. Knowing I am historically triggered by the end-of-year evaluation cycle, I recently made it a point to check in with my long-time therapist, Kimberli, to process some lingering anxieties.

During the session, I found myself essentially bragging about how easily I used to detach the logical, get-things-done version of myself from the messy, wounded parts. Then, the real truth slipped out. I wondered aloud, in a voice that felt more like a confession than a statement:

“I can’t seem to do it anymore.”

Kimberli listened with her usual grounded empathy and then introduced me to a framework that explained exactly why that one word felt like a tactical airstrike on my psyche: Internal Family Systems (IFS).

It turns out my masterclass-level ninja skill at compartmentalization isn’t a personality trait to be proud of. It is a highly sophisticated, deeply exhausted internal defense system built out of raw necessity just to survive.

The Inner Boardroom: Understanding IFS

Created by Dr. Richard Schwartz, IFS posits that the human mind isn’t a single, monolithic “me.” Instead, it is an internal boardroom made up of distinct subpersonalities—or “parts”—all organized around a core, unburdened Self.

Every part has a job, and more importantly, every single part has a protective, positive intention—even the ones that are actively wreaking havoc on our health. IFS breaks these parts into three primary categories:

• The Exiles: These are the wounded, terrified, or ashamed parts. They carry historical trauma, raw grief, and deep pain. Because their agony is so overwhelming, the rest of the internal system works a 24/7 graveyard shift to keep them buried.
• The Managers: These are the proactive, Type A protectors. They run the day-to-day show. They ensure we look good, hit our deadlines, pay our hefty people-pleasing tax, and maintain absolute, rigid control so the Exiles never leak out and ruin the professional metrics.
• The Firefighters: These are the chaotic, reactive protectors. When the pain of an Exile threatens to breach the Managers’ defenses, the Firefighters swoop in to put out the emotional fire by any means necessary. They don’t care about your health, your diet, or your reputation; they just want to numb or distract the system right now.

Building the “Lee Angel” Cage

When my therapist laid this out, the lightbulb didn’t just turn on—it scorched me. I realized that my ultimate “Manager” strategy was born out of absolute terror, and that “Lee Angel” was the cage I built to keep myself safe.

Years ago, after leaving an incredibly toxic workplace, I did what many high-achieving women do: I internalized the toxicity and decided I was the failure. To survive in higher education leadership, my Manager stepped in and made a conscious decision to tone myself down. I adopted a radically different personality—one that was smart but not too smart, calm, agreeable, soft-spoken, a “safe” team player, and willing to work hard without making waves.

I even toned down my name. Instead of insisting on being called Leetta Jackson Angel—a name I had to claim, defend, and explain my entire life—I shortened it to Lee and added my married surname. I christened myself “Lee Angel.”

I painstakingly built that persona: a flawless, shiny package of toxic agreeability, hyper-competence, and unbothered poise.

When I experienced profound personal loss, my internal system went into code-red lockdown. My Manager looked at that immense, unspeakable sorrow and realized that if I stopped to feel it, I would not survive it. So it shoved the grief into a concrete vault.

But it also shoved my voice. It buried my writing so deeply in the dark that I actually forgot I was a writer. To touch the pen was to touch the vault door, and the Manager was not about to let that door budge. Instead, it took the wheel and drove my career straight into the corporate dirt while I sat in the passenger seat acting like everything was fine.

The brutal reality of the corporate matrix: It doesn’t hand out gold stars for loyalty. Even though I gave that system my absolute everything, the return on investment was a joke. I was systematically overlooked and sidelined. My expertise and relentless work ethic didn’t mean a thing because the culture didn’t value my authenticity—it valued my competence, as long as it remained silent.

Why the Surface Cracked

According to standard professional definitions, a “polished” person displays a high degree of refinement, grace, and sophistication. They are free from awkwardness or rough edges.

If you know anything about me, I am not here to be smooth. I am aggressively curious, socially awkward by design, and rough around the edges by necessity. I don’t engage in polite, sanitized corporate small talk; I ask questions designed to cut through the noise, because that is where I figure out what really makes people tick.

When I look back at the “polished” performance my Manager forced me to give for years, I was existing, but I was not living. The “not polished” comment let me know that my performance was good enough to keep me employed, but it was never going to move me up the ladder. I had toned myself down to the point of invisibility. I was safe, sanitized, easily overlooked, and in absolute agony.

When your Managers work that hard to repress devastating grief, professional rejection, and your own authentic fire, your body becomes a war zone. My system responded with autoimmune disease and chronic physical pain.

When the emotional heartbreak threatened to breach the vault, my Firefighters rushed in with the oldest weapon in their arsenal: food, and later, pain medications. Not to escape reality, but to turn off the relentless, roaring noise in my own mind long enough to survive the night.

Shifting from Management to Self-Leadership

The ultimate, beautiful twist of IFS therapy is realizing that my coping mechanisms, the rigid “Lee Angel” persona, and the intense compartmentalization weren’t signs that I was fundamentally broken. They were signs that my protective parts were fighting like hell to keep me alive.

The goal of this journey hasn’t been to hate these parts, to fight them, or to fire them. It has been to step into Self-leadership—a space of calmness, curiosity, clarity, and compassion.

Once I became present in my body again, I could see that even though the word “polished” had sent me reeling, I needed to hear it. I had spent years dimming my own light for the sake of palatability. Reclaiming my full first name, Leetta, was the first bold, unpolished step toward creating the life I actually want to lead.

The 8 Cs of Self-Leadership

When you stop hiding behind a polished cage and allow the core Self to lead, you naturally exhibit what Dr. Richard Schwartz calls the 8 Cs. Here is how they translate to real-world leadership:

• Calmness: Not a fragile, icy “unbothered poise,” but a deep-seated groundedness. It is the ability to sit in an organizational storm and be the anchor because your internal foundation is solid.
• Curiosity: Replacing inner criticism with an open mind. Instead of judging your coping mechanisms, you ask, “What is that part of me trying to protect right now?”
• Compassion: Extending grace inward. Looking back at younger versions of yourself who were just trying to survive, and feeling profound love for their grit.
• Clarity: The opposite of muddled instincts. Clarity lets you look at corporate feedback like “unpolished” and see it for what it is: a sign that you were trying to play a game you were never meant to win.
• Confidence: Not manufactured corporate swagger, but a quiet, unshakable trust in your own capability to handle whatever pours out of the vault.
• Courage: The raw nerve it takes to reclaim your identity, pull those heavy concrete boxes off the mental shelves, and look at the terrifying things you buried—like your true passions.
• Creativity: When the inner Manager steps down, the channels open up. For me, creativity is the inevitable, beautiful return of my voice and my writing.
• Connectedness: The ultimate dissolution of isolation. It is the harmony that occurs when your internal parts stop fighting for the steering wheel and allow the core of who you are to guide the ship.

The Unpolished Truth

Recently, one of my direct reports shared, unprompted, that the reason people love working for me is because I care. I don’t micromanage, but I expect excellence. I have their back if they make a mistake. Above all else, I treat them like human beings.

That right there? That is a direct result of engaging my pure, unfiltered, human-centered Self. The corporate matrix might not know how to log that on a performance rubric, but my people do.

For the first time, I can look at my hyper-vigilant, exhausted Managers and my desperate Firefighters and say:

“Thank you. I see how hard you worked to protect me when I was paralyzed by loss. I see how you kept me standing when I was being overlooked. But you can stand down now. The core Self is awake. I’ve got this.”

True resilience isn’t about how many grief-filled boxes you can stack on a mental shelf without them toppling. It is about having the courage to sit on the floor, open the boxes, and invite the parts of yourself you buried back into the light.

I am unlocking the vault. I am holding space for the pain. And beautifully, painfully, inevitably… I am Leetta, and I am writing again.

The Power of Turning Toward Discomfort

I have a system for vehicle maintenance. I always schedule my appointments as early as possible on a Friday or a Monday. The logic is simple: it carves out a rare, non-negotiable window to slip on my headphones, drown out the noise, and either reflect on the week that's ending or mentally blueprint the operational challenges of the one ahead.

This past Friday, I was looking for exactly that.

After a failed attempt to navigate the complimentary waiting-room coffee station, I decided to treat myself instead. I dropped a dollar into the vending machine for a Cherry Dr Pepper, found a seat in the corner, and pulled out my headphones, ready to disappear into a playlist.

Then a voice to my left broke the silence.

"How do those connect to your phone?"

I looked up. Sitting very straight in a notoriously uncomfortable waiting-room chair was a woman of indeterminate age, her hair swept up into a neat, clean bun.

I smiled, explaining that they connected via Bluetooth—usually just a matter of toggling a button in your settings. Before I could even ask, she volunteered that she'd have someone show her how to use a pair right after I mentioned they were rechargeable.

I wished her luck, looked back down at my screen, and started scrolling for my music.

Then came the second question.

"What do you do for work?"

In that split second, I realized my quiet morning was evaporating. A conversation was happening whether I had engineered it or not.

A Conversation Was Happening

As leaders, we talk a lot about emotional intelligence and active listening. Lately, I've been challenging myself to bring that same radical presence to the unplanned moments life hands me.

In the past, when a stranger tried to engage me outside of a professional setting, I'll admit I often chose the path of least resistance. I would listen politely, nod, and withhold my truth to avoid confrontation. I used to tell myself it was for some noble purpose—that I was just keeping the peace.

But if I'm completely honest with myself, it wasn't noble.

It was a form of arrogance.

It was the subconscious belief that it wasn't worth my time or that I knew better.

I'm trying to push past those internal biases now. I'm trying to welcome opportunities to engage with an open heart and a wide-open mind.

So I set my phone down.

I turned my entire body toward her.

I decided to step out of the shadows of polite avoidance and be fully present in the moment. I gave her my full attention.

I told her I worked for an online university and had been there for nearly seventeen years. When she asked if I was a teacher, I explained that while I used to be, I now manage a team of mentors who support MBA students from the day they arrive until the day they walk across the graduation stage.

I even shared a bit about my past leadership work with traditional, brick-and-mortar, private religious universities here in Kentucky.

That's when she threw the pitch that clued me in.

This was going to be one of those conversations.

"Are most teachers Democrats or Republicans?"

Inside, my soul braced itself.

I live in a place where my personal views are not the prevailing majority, and high-stakes cultural topics often mean putting up walls.

I told her that, in my experience, it's evenly divided—like most opposing viewpoints in this world.

But she was just getting started.

Her next question went straight for the cultural fault lines.

"What do you think about drag queens reading to children?"

As the mother of a transgender daughter, you can bet that I am uniquely attuned to the LGBTQIA+ community and the issues they face.

My hackles rose instantly.

That protective, mother-bear instinct is real, and it is fierce.

This wasn't an abstract political debate anymore. This was potentially about my child's right to safely exist in the world.

In the past, this is where I probably would have shut down, said something mean-spirited, or simply walked away.

But true leadership means choosing leverage over vitriol.

Instead of letting anger dictate my response, I chose a higher road.

I chose to speak with compassion, protecting my house and my daughter's honor not with rage, but by calmly challenging this woman's assumptions without attacking her humanity.

"Why not drag queens?" I asked gently. "They're just people, like everyone else. They've always existed."

She immediately began quoting Bible verses to me.

Now, if you're going to step into the scriptural arena, you need to be prepared for who you're wrestling with.

I lobbed verses right back, taking her to Sunday school with the very text she sought to weaponize.

I asked her how she could speak words of exclusion when Jesus commanded us, above all else, to love our neighbors.

We moved from there to the Muslim faith.

She was convinced Christianity was right and Islam was wrong, pointing back to her biblical knowledge.

"Do you use the King James Version?" I asked.

She confirmed that she did.

"Why do you think the King James Version is the definitive authority," I countered, "when it was commissioned by a British monarch with political motives and used to reinforce existing power structures?"

She pivoted to intelligent design.

On that point, I nodded.

I told her plainly, "I am a Christian. That is my faith. But I am not so arrogant in my certainty that I believe I have the right to pass judgment on anyone else."

She spoke of the strict law of the Old Testament God.

I spoke of the radical, boundary-breaking love of Jesus and His message of acceptance regardless of what a person believes.

She spoke of obeying the law, specifically referencing a decades-old honor killing. Her details were muddy, but her intent was clear.

I asked her, "Do you value a society where all people are free from religious persecution and allowed the full spectrum of free expression?"

She said she did.

"Then how," I asked, "can you set parameters on the Muslim community in good faith?"

Sitting there, listening to her, I felt a sudden rush of decades-old familiarity.

It reminded me vividly of the conversations I used to have with my peers back in middle and high school—that precise moment in adolescence when you first start wrestling with the universe, trying to separate what you actually believe from the traditions you inherited from your family.

Here we were, two adult women, still dancing around the same ancient fire.

And we kept dancing.

People wandered into the waiting room, heard snippets of our conversation, and promptly found somewhere else to be.

She stated that money was the root of all evil.

I gently corrected the misquote, offering the fuller truth: "It is the love of money that is the root of all kinds of evil."

She lamented that history was being scrubbed from the books.

I agreed with her but gave her the history she didn't see coming: the reality of Japanese American internment camps on our own soil during World War II, alliances built around exclusion, and the devastating truth of how enslaved people were bought, sold, and systematically disenfranchised long after the Civil War ended.

She spoke of the horrors of pedophilia, tentatively trying to direct her bias toward Muslim traditions involving arranged marriages and child brides.

I agreed on the horror of the act but brought the reality right back home to our shared soil.

"I had a classmate who became a wife at twelve years old," I told her. "In the early 1980s. Right here in the great state of Kentucky."

Then the room went quiet.

We sat there in the silence, looking across the space at one another.

We weren't friends.

But we weren't enemies, either.

We were simply two women in an auto repair waiting room, holding opposing corners of a massive, complicated world.

A moment later, the technician walked in and announced that her car was ready.

She thanked him, stood up, and looked at me.

I didn't look away.

I reached out my hand, looked her in the eye, and thanked her for the conversation.

I told her I had genuinely enjoyed it and that it had been a pleasure to meet her.

She smiled, shook my hand, and said the exact same thing.

By refusing to hide, I hope I managed to show her that a Christian woman with a transgender daughter could sit in the heat of a high-stakes conversation, hold her ground with dignity, expose someone to uncomfortable truths, and still wish them well.

We don't have to agree to be civil.

And we don't have to think alike to find deep, necessary value in another person's lived experience.

Sometimes, the oil change is simply the excuse the universe uses to remind us how to talk to each other again.

The Executive Challenge: Turn Your Whole Body

As influential women, we live in a culture that constantly coaches us to build high walls, wear noise-canceling headphones, and look away.

We are taught to protect our peace, optimize our time, and avoid the messy, unpredictable business of engaging with people who don't see the world through our particular lens.

But hiding behind politeness or writing people off before they even speak isn't peace.

It's insulation.

True leadership requires us to step out of our silos.

My challenge to you this week is to look for your own waiting-room moment.

The next time someone reaches out a tentative hand or a colleague asks a question that makes your soul brace for impact, don't look down at your phone. Don't offer a hollow nod simply to get through it.

Turn your whole body toward them.

Be fully, unapologetically grown in that moment.

You don't have to compromise your truth, and you don't have to back down from protecting your house.

But you do have to show up.

We are never going to heal the fractures in our businesses, our communities, or our world by staring at our own screens.

Sometimes, the most radical and influential thing you can do is simply sit in the discomfort, hold your space with grace, and remind another human being what it looks like to listen with an open heart.

Leetta Jackson Angel is an organizational performance leader and changemaker based in Kentucky, specializing in higher education operations, strategic mentorship, and workforce transformation.