Trauma With a Good Suit: What It Really Takes to Lead Yourself First
There is a moment that a lot of high-achieving women know intimately, even if they have never had a name for it.
It is the moment when the carefully constructed life you have been building…the achievements, the titles, the relentless proving, suddenly feels like a costume you cannot breathe in anymore. You have been so busy doing everything for everyone else that somewhere along the way, you completely lost the thread back to yourself.
That is exactly where Carol Metz Murray found herself in her early forties. And what happened next changed everything, and it was her first step into the work she is here for, teaching self-leadership for women.
Twenty Seconds of Insane Courage: The Road to Self-Leadership for Women
Carol was driving alone on a mountainous highway in the Yukon, heading to Whitehorse to attend her final class before writing her master’s thesis. Somewhere along that drive, she blanked out. She became completely disconnected from who she was and drove most of the trip with no awareness of what she was doing.
When she came back to herself, she pulled over and called her doctor.
The words her doctor said to her were simple and completely unsparing. Carol, either you deal with what is going on, or I will make you deal with it. Your whole life has been high stress. Your body is burning out.
In that moment, Carol made a choice. She calls it twenty seconds of insane courage. She did not know what shifting her life was going to look like. She just knew she had to do it.
That decision became the foundation of Naked Leadership, her coaching and consulting practice built around one core idea: the most important leadership you will ever do is leading yourself, and that is the most important step in self-leadership for women.
Trauma With a Good Suit
Here is something I say a lot, and I said it in our conversation too, because it is just true: a lot of high achieving is trauma with a good suit.
The people pleasing. The proving. The knowing exactly how to play the game to be seen, liked, and chosen. For so many of the women I work with, and honestly for me too, that drive did not come from a place of pure ambition. It came from somewhere much earlier and much more tender than that.
We learned to achieve because achievement kept us safe. It kept us liked. It kept the peace.
And it works, until it does not. Until your body starts sending you signals you cannot ignore. Until you wake up one day and realize you have been on autopilot for years, not at the helm of your own ship at all.
That is not a failure. That is a reckoning. And in my world, we call it your power era and self-leadership for women at its best.
The Box You Built Yourself
One of the things Carol said that really stopped me was this: we put ourselves in a box thinking we are protecting ourselves, and then we pull down the lid. But we are not protecting ourselves. We are confining ourselves. Diminishing ourselves. Squeezing ourselves into a shape that was never really ours to begin with.
For Carol, part of what she had buried was her creative self. For decades, she was convinced she could not write, even while she was writing constantly in leadership roles throughout her entire career. She just never counted it. Never saw it as real or valid or creative.
That changed in 2013 when she arrived home from her mother’s funeral to find two separate emails waiting for her, both invitations to contribute to book collaborations from people she had never met. Her first instinct was to delete them. I can’t write. Why are you asking me?
And then she heard a voice, she describes it as coming from somewhere behind her, that said simply: hit the button and respond. You are going to write.
She did. And that was the beginning of letting her creative self come forward after a lifetime of keeping it locked away.
Why Anger Is Not the Enemy
Something we talk about a lot in my work, and that Carol and I went deep on in this conversation, is the way women have been conditioned to treat anger as something shameful, something to manage and suppress and apologize for.
But here is the thing. Anger is a side partner of passion. When you suppress your anger, you are also suppressing your drive, your fire, your ability to move toward what you actually want.
Finding a healthy and sacred outlet for anger changed my life. For me, it was boxing. For you, it might be something completely different. The point is not the method. The point is giving yourself permission to feel it and move it through your body instead of swallowing it down year after year.
That pent-up anger has somewhere to go. And when you let it move, you often find the passion and the clarity you have been looking for waiting right on the other side.
The Running Shoes Story
Carol told a story in our conversation that I have not been able to stop thinking about since we recorded it.
She had a young client who came to see her in tremendous pain. For two sessions, the woman sat and cried, sharing the details of a life that had been genuinely horrific. On the third visit, mid-session, words came out of Carol’s mouth that she had not planned.
When are you going to stop running?
The client’s anger was immediate and total. She stood up, told Carol she had no idea, and stormed out. On her way out the door, she turned back and said, and I always wear running shoes.
Two months later she called Carol and asked to come back in. When she arrived, she was smiling. She had found a new home, a new job, enrolled in college, regained joint custody of her child, and signed up for therapy.
And she lifted her foot to show Carol something.
She was wearing walking shoes.
That is what it looks like when someone stops running and starts leading themselves. It does not happen on anyone else’s timeline. It does not follow a formula. But when it happens, it changes everything.
You Are Only Waiting on Yourself
One of my favorite moments in this conversation was when Carol said something I have believed for a long time: if you do not lead yourself, someone else will. This is the epitome of self-leadership for women.
There are long lines of people perfectly willing to hand you a life to live, an identity to wear, a set of rules to follow. And if you leave that space empty, something will fill it.
The permission slip you have been waiting for is not coming from anywhere outside of you. You are the one who gets to write it. You are the one who gets to hand it to yourself.
And here is what I know from thousands of human design charts, from years of sitting across from women in their power era, from my own messy and ongoing becoming: you came here with something specific to bring. A piece of the puzzle that belongs only to you. Not a version of someone else’s gifts. Yours.
The world does not need you to be more palatable or more palatable or more agreeable. It needs you to be more you.
Where to Find Carol
If this conversation resonated with you and you want to go deeper with Carol’s work of self-leadership for women, you can find her at carolmetzmurray.com. She works with women who are ready to stop running and start leading themselves, and she has a rare gift for seeing your strengths before you can see them yourself.
You can listen to the full episode and a deep dive into self-leadership for women on Own Your Piece, wherever you get your podcasts.
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