Nobody really teaches you how to lead when your heart is broken. How to walk into a meeting when part of you is somewhere else. How to hold space for other people when you're quietly trying to hold yourself together.

I know this because I've lived it.

Grief changed the way I lead — not because it made me stronger in the way we usually talk about strength. It made me more human.

We've been sold a version of leadership that rewards composure at almost any cost. Keep going. Stay professional. Don't let emotion cloud your judgement.

But grief doesn't stay home while you go to work. It comes with you — into the room, into the decisions, into the moments where everyone is looking to you for certainty and you're still finding solid ground beneath your own feet.

That's the moment grief hands you a choice. You can shut down — armour up, perform a certainty you don't feel, disappear a little to keep the room comfortable. Or you can open — let what you're carrying make you more present, not less.

Opening doesn't mean unravelling in front of your team. Leadership was never about emotionally offloading onto the people who look to you. It's about authenticity — letting your humanity be visible without asking others to hold it for you.

My heart did not weaken my leadership. It made it honest.

There's a quieter kind of courage in that. One that can say, "I don't know." One that can sit beside someone else's pain without rushing to fix it. One that understands strength and tenderness were never opposites.

You cannot indefinitely lead from a body and heart that have nothing left to give. Capacity changes in seasons like this — that doesn't make you weak. It makes you human.

Grief changes you. I don't believe the job is to get back to who we were before. Sometimes there is no going back. There is only becoming — softer in some places, clearer in others, open where you once would have closed.

That, to me, is leadership. Not pretending life hasn't touched us — but letting what we've lived through deepen the way we show up in it.

Where in your leadership right now are you choosing to shut down, when part of you actually wants to open?

Are you seeking to find clarity, confidence and courage?

Like to learn more about developing resilience through life challenges?

Niky offer’s her Rise UP program for women online as well as her Lead Her UP retreats for women.

• Find out more about her retreats here

• Listen in to Niky’s Synergy Women podcast here