You’ve heard it a hundred times. In coaching sessions, in leadership programmes, in well-meaning one-to-ones with sponsors who want to see you step up: just be yourself. Lead from who you are. Your authenticity is your superpower.

It sounds like liberation. It might actually be a cage.

Herminia Ibarra, one of the world’s foremost researchers on leadership identity, has spent years studying what actually happens when high-performing women try to step into more senior roles. What she found disrupts almost everything we’ve been told about authenticity in leadership.

I’ve seen it in the women I work with. And if I’m honest, I’ve lived it myself.

The advice to “be yourself” only works if the self you’re being is already the leader you’re trying to become.

The paradox hiding in plain sight

Here’s the problem Ibarra identified: authenticity is retrospective. It describes who you already are, your established habits, your proven strengths, your comfortable register of behaviour. But growth, by definition, requires you to operate outside that zone. And the moment you do, it can feel false and performative. Like you’re pretending to be someone you’re not.

So what do many high-potential women do? They pull back. They wait until they feel ready. They stay anchored to an older, smaller version of themselves because at least that version feels real.

Ibarra calls this the authenticity paradox. The very commitment to being genuine can become the psychological mechanism that keeps you stuck.

Trying on, not selling out

Ibarra’s research reframes identity development as something more like a wardrobe than a fixed state. You don’t discard who you are, you experiment. You try on different approaches to communication, visibility, influence, and leadership presence. Some fit and some don’t. Over time, through doing, a new and expanded self begins to emerge.

This isn’t inauthenticity. It’s how identity actually works.

Think about any senior leader you admire. The gravitas, the strategic voice, the ease in the room, none of that was innate. It was practised, often awkwardly, before it felt natural. The mistake is believing that you have to feel it before you can do it. In reality, the feeling almost always follows the doing.

You don’t become a leader by finally feeling like one. You feel like one by behaving like one long enough that it becomes yours.

One woman I coached, a senior manager moving into her first director level role, described it this way: “I kept waiting to feel like I’d earned the right to have strong opinions. Then I realised that the people in the room I most admired didn’t wait for that feeling. They just spoke.” She started doing the same. Within a few months, her stakeholders were describing her as ‘decisive and strategically sharp.’ She hadn’t changed who she was. She’d changed what she let herself do.

Why this hits women harder

The authenticity trap has a gendered dimension that’s worth naming directly. Women are socialised to value consistency between inner feeling and outer expression: to perform only what they genuinely feel. Men, on average, are given more cultural permission to ‘act the part’ while they’re still growing into it.

The result? Women often interpret their discomfort with a new leadership identity as a signal that something is wrong with the role, with the organisation, or with themselves. Men are more likely to interpret the same discomfort as simply part of the process.

Neither is inherently right. But the gap matters enormously when it comes to who takes the leap and who doesn’t.

I’ve watched talented women self-select out of opportunities not because they lacked the capability, but because the role didn’t yet feel like ‘them.’ And I’ve watched less qualified people step forward with confidence, not because they were more ready, but because they were more willing to be uncomfortable.

I’ve seen this pattern from a different angle too, through years of talent acquisition. The number of detailed questions women ask before committing to a role is striking: What will be expected of me in month one? How will success be measured? What does the team dynamic look like? These are smart, considered questions. But often they’re also a form of self-auditing, a search for certainty before saying yes. Men, in my experience, tend to grasp the high-level brief and back themselves to figure out the rest. Neither approach is wrong. But one of them gets the room far more often.

What this means for your next chapter

If you’re in transition moving toward a director/executive level role, navigating an expanded remit, or stepping into a version of yourself that doesn’t quite feel like you yet, this is for you.

The discomfort you feel is not a warning sign. It’s a developmental signal. It means you’re operating at the edge of your current identity, which is exactly where growth lives.

The work isn’t to wait until it feels right. The work is to act your way into a new normal.

Three things to try this week

  1. Name your identity gap. Write down one leadership behaviour you admire in others but don’t yet claim as your own. Not because you lack the skill but because it doesn’t feel like ‘you’ yet. That gap is your growth edge.
  2. Run one small experiment. Choose one context this week (a meeting, a presentation, a conversation with a senior stakeholder) and try on a different register. Be more direct, more spacious, and more strategic. Notice what happens. You’re not performing. You’re practising.
  3. Reframe the discomfort. The next time stepping up feels fake, replace the thought ‘this isn’t me’ with ‘this isn’t me yet.’ That single word changes everything from a statement of identity to a statement of direction.

The goal of Empower Her Thrive is never to tell you to change who you are. It’s to guide you to stop letting who you’ve been get in the way of who you’re becoming.