Beyond the Expected Role: How Women Leaders Reclaim Authenticity and Why Success Still Doesn’t Feel Like Freedom
You can be booked, respected, and financially successful …and still feel off.
Many women leaders reach a point where success no longer brings momentum. Energy leaks. Joy thins out. Everything looks right on paper, yet something essential is missing.
This talk names what rarely gets said: success doesn’t free us from the roles we learned to survive. It often rewards us for staying in them.
This is not about fixing your mindset or pushing harder. It’s about recognizing what’s been holding you in place, and what becomes possible when you stop performing for belonging.
If success has started to feel strangely empty, this talk will make sense of that feeling.
Dr. Lia Roth shares these key takeaways:
- When success no longer brings satisfaction …and what that tells us.
- Approval versus belonging, and the personal cost of confusing them.
- Imposter syndrome redefined.
- The "freakn’ middle," the place where we get stuck ...and how to move past it.
- Authenticity and how to stand in our full size.
Born in Argentina and based in St. Louis, Dr. Lia A. Roth is a psychoanalyst, keynote speaker, and bestselling author whose groundbreaking work on shame and betrayal has changed how we love, lead, and belong. She’s written more than ten books, including the bestseller Get In or Get Out, But Don’t Stay in the Freakn’ Middle, and the Routledge-published Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Gaze, Body Image, Shame, Judgment and Maternal Function. Her research has been shared on academic stages across three continents. Dr. Roth is known for passion and sharp insight, without the drama. She turns hard truths in a way that makes a room feel awake, strong, and capable. Her tools stay with us long after we hear them.
