The Leadership Gap No One Is Talking About — But Everyone Needs
There’s a paradox playing out in leadership.
We have more access to knowledge about what great leadership looks like than any generation before us - books, podcasts, frameworks, certifications, research, tools and insights at our fingertips.
And yet, beneath the surface of performance, strategic competence and success, something is missing.
People are disengaged while pretending not to be (note the movement of quietly quitting) and while a direct impact on the bottom line (in our business and life) feels hit and miss, a meaningful connection to our true passion, purpose and potential feels hard to sustain, or worse yet, impossible to achieve.
We are beyond tired. We’re exhausted, frustrated, burning out, desperate for a break and while experiencing an increased workload with more to do, it just never feels like we’re able to get ahead. We’re increasingly time-poor, more stretched and more reactive.
While many of us appear to be “high performing” on paper, we are quietly carrying the invisible weight of pressure, urgency and failure.
In my work with leaders, I see it constantly: the desire to make an impact is real but a genuine connection that empowers people, builds trust, sustains energy and delivers high-impact results is difficult to access.
This is not because they don’t care, it's often because they care too much.
I’ve walked this path myself, leading from what we see above the surface, navigating complex challenges and driving change to transform the workplace and our own lives, only to experience the same mundane challenges.
Why? Because we are leading from the same stress-fuelled, fear-based thinking, problem-solving reactionary mind.
With decades of experience in working with high-performing leaders, here’s what I’ve learnt:
Leaders don’t thrive when they do more of what they already know.
Leaders thrive when they let go of what they know, they get out of the waves and dive deep into the unknown, to align their actions with their true values, vision and purpose.
I’m an aboriginal indigenous woman, a descendent of the stolen generation of the Wakka Wakka and Kulluli First Nations Peoples. In our indigenous culture, we recognise this shift happens when we move from knowing to being - where presence wisdom and alignment come alive.
So, what is the greatest gap in leadership that no one is talking about?
It's not knowledge.
It’s not capability.
It's not persistence.
It’s not ambition.
It’s not even confidence.
It’s presence.
Presence is often mistaken as physical presence, that we show up physically. It’s also mistaken as a ‘soft skill’ of mindfulness. But in truth, it goes way beyond physically turning up and being visible.
Presence is what determines whether your team feels safe with you, whether they trust you and whether they hear you - not just your words, but your true (but often hidden) intent.
Presence, as defined in the oxford dictionary: A state of being present.
Being present is your most powerful instrument.
Ultimately we all know that leadership is never based on only what you do.
Leadership arises when the actions you take are aligned with your values. It’s more about how you feel and how you make other people feel - it’s about your who you are being when you are physically present.
Are you mentally present? Are your values present? Are “you” present?
Let’s be honest.
We are living in a world where everything around us is moving at lightening speed.
That’s not about to slow down. If anything, it is only going to move quicker as our need to adjust to the pace and efficiency of AI transforms the way we work.
No matter what is going on in the environment around us, our brain is in a constant state of stress. We are living in a constant state of urgency and in this state, our nervous system and our fear-based thinking thoughts become the decision-maker.
Our attention fragments. Our listening becomes transactional and our ability to connect diminishes. Not because we’re not trying, because our environment is overloaded.
This is why so many of us (leaders) feel like they’re doing all the “right” things, but no matter what we do, we still have the experience that nothing is really working (the way we want, or indeed the way we expect).
The Leader Must Comes First
The foundation of my work is simple:
When you align the leader within you, the leader externally becomes powerful.
Our internal experience of ourself as a leader, that is what we call our state which includes our thoughts, feelings, nervous system and our body, determines our external reality.
The quality of our own self-awareness. The quality of our attention (what we focus on). The clarity of our intention. The capacity we have to respond instead of react.
It all happens internally before we even begin our day.
Every thought we think generates an emotion.
Every emotion we feel sends a signal to our body.
Every cell in our body responds to the energy of what we repeatedly focus on.
Most of us are getting and taking action in life without even realising it, especially leaders who are trained to solve problems externally. But our internal world is not separate from our leadership. It is our leadership.
Here’s a line I come back to often:
“Our actions don’t follow what we know, they follow what we practice”
This is where neuroscience becomes deeply practical. Neuroplasticity shows us the brain is always adapting. It forms new connections based on attention, emotion and repetition.
The experts in epigenetics (my personal favourite, Dr Joe Dispenza) are expanding our understanding of how the environment, including our internal environment (thoughts, feelings and emotions), influences how we respond to life.
As it turns out, we are not responding to life, life is responding to us.
Now, what matters most to me isn't the science as knowledge, it's the science as lived-experience. Its not what you know that matters, its what you do with it that counts.
I didn’t become a leader by learning these things.
I became a leader by doing them and being them.
Why Knowing Isn’t Enough (Especially for Leaders)
As a leader, we are brilliant at gathering knowledge. We’re rewarded for being smart, informed and strategic. We’re educated, even conditioned, to seek the answer, solutions, the right model, the plan and the skill.
But leadership is rarely an intellectual event.
A thought can inspire you. A book can move you. A podcast can wake something up. But without a clear intention, without consistency, without alignment of your thinking and your emotions and without practice, most insight stays trapped in the mind.
It becomes something we admire, rather than something we experience.
This is why many of us (leaders) feel like we’ve “done the work” and still we find ourselves overthinking, people-pleasing, over-controlling the situation to avoid more failure, avoiding conflict, burning out, living in constant vigilance and failing to deliver on the results we truely desire.
This is because the subconscious mind, or as I prefer to call it, our “intrapersonal communication” (the conversations we have with ourselves that are hidden beneath the surface, blindly driving our life) is far more powerful than what we realise.
It’s not persuaded by information.
It’s persuaded by experience, and experience takes practice.
The conscious mind learns through understanding.
The subconscious learns through repetition and feeling.
And that’s where the shift from knowing to being takes place.
The Practice That Changed Everything
I want to share something deeply personal here, because this isn’t just an idea I teach. It’s a practice I’ve lived daily since 2017 after being diagnosed with auto-immune condition and waking up to my own patterns of over-giving.
I was juggling the busy demands of life as a working mum with three children who were 10, 8 and 7 years-of-age.
I was very good at prioritising other people’s needs and beating to the beat of other people’s drums. I cared deeply about other people and was very good at listening to their needs and feeding their needs while feeling completely depleted, unappreciated and not really getting the results I knew possible (for my capability).
My body was literally attacking itself and no amount intellect was getting me out of the fatigue, anxiety, sadness and frustration.
I had zero hours to spare. I was getting zero help around the unpaid duties (yes I was a slow boiling frog of resentment). I was not zen. I was not calm. I needed a new way.
Everything shifted when I made one small shift - a one-minute morning practice of making my bed while actively focussing on slowing down my breathe.
That was it. One minute of intentional listening. One minute of deep breathing and actively focussing on my own needs before the outer world got its hands on me.
Slowly, almost invisibly at first, that single minute began to compound.
One minute became two, two became three, three became five, five became ten. Ten became fifteen, fifteen became a habit, and a habit became a new identity.
Here I am, seven years later and the practice has expanded into an integrated ritual where I actively devote 1hour of practice each morning, together with it now imbued in how I life my life and how I interact with the world, not because I “should,” but because I’ve seen the profound impact it has on who I am and how I lead - the presence of being present in every interaction, every meeting and every moment.
I’m still human and I’m far from perfect (and what is perfection anyway), but I am clear that my experience, every little experience, matters.
No matter what life throws at me, no matter what someone says, no matter what someone does, no matter how bad things get, I trust myself to be a leader - to choose presence over distraction, calm over chaos and impact over urgency.
What I know to be true.
Small daily practices don’t just change our day.
They change our entire nervous system.
They change our identity.
They change what becomes possible in how we lead and the impact we have.
This is the compound effect of presence.
Why Mornings Matter More Than We Think
The morning is not simply the start of a day, it’s the start of our state.
The moment we wake up, our mind is more malleable. Our brain and our nervous system is more receptive. The “default patterns” of thought are ready to reassert themselves - stress, worry, doubt, replaying the past, anticipating the future.
Most of us reach for our phones and check notifications. We breath in the external world, what’s happening at work, what’s happening with our kids, what’s happening on the news before we choose ourselves.
Without realising it, we enter the day already reacting and acting unconsciously.
But what if the first moments of the morning weren’t just minutes? What if they were a blank canvas. What if each day started with a fresh set of paint and a brand new possibility: a habit you can change, a relationship you can strengthen, a feeling you can cultivate, a leader you can become.
The question becomes: What possibility will I plant today?
When we consciously choose our focus, we start rewiring our brain.
When we intentionally choose what we want to create rather than what we fear, we reshape our entire experience and our energy (and state) shifts.
When we combine thought with emotion, like gratitude, joy and love, we send a signal through our biology that a new reality is possible.
This is not motivational fluff.
This is physiology.
Listening With Presence: The Bridge Between Wisdom and Leadership
The heart of all of this is one practice:
Listening with presence.
Most of us think of listening as passive, something we do while distracted or multi-tasking. But listening with presence is different. It goes way beyond “active listening” which believe it or not, still carries a lo of blind distractions.
Listening with presence is intentional. It’s a deliberate alignment of your internal thoughts (your intrapersonal communication), your feelings and emotions with your external actions.
When you listen with presence, you don’t just hear words. You allow them to enter you. You let them resonate. You feel them. You become receptive.
Leadership stops becoming you need to understand and it becomes who you are.
It is the bridge between what you know and who you are being.
It is your access to wisdom and wisdom isn’t what you know, wisdom is what you live.
It is what other people experience when you walk in a room. It is the calm clarity in your voice during pressure. It is your ability to stay present in discomfort. It is your capacity to hold space. It is the coherence between your words and your way of being.
When you practise listening with presence, especially in the morning, you’re not just consuming ideas, you’re training your entire nervous system. You’re building a brand new identity, a leadership identity that aligns with your true passion, potential and purpose.
To the Leader Within You.
If you’ve been leading hard but feeling disconnected…
If you’ve been doing all the “right” things but still feeling like something is missing…
If you’re craving more meaning, more connection, more grounded confidence…
I want you to know: the answer is not more knowledge, the answer is presence.
Start small. Start with one minute. Choose what enters your mind before the world rushes in. Repeat it consistently. Pair it with emotion. Let your inner environment become the place where wisdom is formed.
Remember. Leadership isn’t built in big moments, it’s built in the invisible ones.
By committing to this practice consistently, you are not only opening yourself to new ideas and inspiration, you are actively creating a new version of yourself and a new life from the inside out.
