Author: Jyothi Madanlal, Tech Women Executive Team Member
“It feels like, to succeed at this company, your name has to start with the letter ‘J’.”
That was said to me by one of the senior members of the team I had just stepped up to lead. It was my first real encounter with imposter syndrome, not mine exactly, but the version that gets handed to you by the room. I spent days turning it over. Why me? Especially when a good chunk of the team clearly felt I hadn’t earned it.
But here’s the thing: I hadn’t waited to be picked. Months earlier, in a one-on-one, I’d told my manager I wanted to move into a more technical leadership role. I said it out loud, before I felt fully ready, before there was even a role on the table to ask for. Then I did the work to back it up. I spoke up in stand-ups instead of sitting quietly, asked the awkward questions in retrospectives, put myself into the technical conversations rather than waiting to be invited into them. I put my hand up, and I kept it up.
So when the previous lead moved into an individual contributor role and the position opened, it didn’t fall from the sky. It came to me on potential, on what I’d already chosen to show. That wasn’t luck. That was me, quietly leading myself toward the thing I wanted long before anyone handed me the title for it.
I know now how rare that is. So many of us are asked to prove ourselves twice over before anyone bets on us, to show the experience before we’re trusted with the potential. I had a manager who saw it early. Not everyone does.
But here’s the part I want to be honest about, because it’s the part we don’t usually admit.
I had it, and then I lost it
Owning my career came naturally back then; thirteen years as a builder will do that. So when I stepped up, leading felt like an extension of who I already was.
A few years later, I changed roles, only slightly, same industry, and I completely forgot how any of it worked.
I was stuck in my old ways, sure I didn’t need to learn the new system or how to navigate this different room. I forgot it had ever begun with me. So instead, I blamed. My manager. My teammates. The culture. You name it, I found a way to make it the reason. I personalised every interaction, read a slight into everything, and carried each one home.
I still did all the work. But I did it as a victim.
I’d lost the single most important ingredient and hadn’t even noticed it was gone: self-leadership. I didn’t need a title to lead; I’d known that once. But somewhere in the transition I’d handed my power to everyone around me and called it their fault.
It took a conversation with my dad, and a well-timed executive coaching session, to say the quiet thing plainly: the change starts with me. Not with the culture shifting, not with my manager finally getting it. With me.
The ingredients that matter most
As so many of us in this community navigate change, expanding our influence, growing our confidence, pushing our careers forward, these are the five things I keep coming back to.
1. Start with yourself. You don’t need a title to lead. Leadership isn’t a position someone grants you; it’s how you choose to show up in every single moment. Decide to lead before anyone hands you permission to.
2. It’s rarely about you. When something stings, your first instinct is to assume it was aimed at you, because you’re the centre of your own story. But other people are rarely thinking about you as much as you fear. They’re navigating their own load: family, kids, money, work, the same hunger to be appreciated and to win. So instead of reading a slight into their behaviour, ask what’s driving them, not what it says about you. It won’t always excuse how they acted, but it hands you back your objectivity, and your peace. And once you stop treating it as you-versus-them, you make room for something better: a way through where you both win.
3. Focus on what you can control. It’s easy to get trapped in the loop of victimhood, or the belief that you’re simply stuck. The way out is almost always smaller than you think. Find the tiniest step that is genuinely in your control, and take it. Sometimes that step is looking for another role, because you’ve accepted the culture isn’t aligned or there’s no space for you to grow. That’s not failure. No career is a straight line; it’s a series of zigzags, and each turn is yours to choose.
4. Back yourself, with clear eyes. Believe in yourself, and get honest about what that means in practice: know what you’re good at, where your gaps are, what you’re truly ambitious for, and what your reality is, how much time and energy you can actually commit right now. Awareness in both directions. And once you know what you’re missing and where you need to be, the next small step toward your goal comes into focus. The fog of “I’m stuck” lifts, and there’s a move you can actually make.
5. Be kind to yourself. Be gentle with yourself along the way. Don’t measure your journey against anyone else’s; their chapter one isn’t your chapter five, and their race was never yours to run. It’s you against you, no one else.
The uncomfortable, non-negotiable bit
None of this is comfortable. It asks you to put yourself out there, to build your brand and let people see what you’re capable of, without apologising for taking up space. And yes, you still have to be excellent at what you do; in an environment this competitive, that part isn’t optional, and I won’t pretend it’s easy. Above all, it asks you to notice your self-limiting beliefs, the stories you tell yourself about what you’re not allowed to want. None of this is one-and-done, either. That’s exactly why I lost it the first time: I treated self-leadership as something I was, rather than something I had to keep practising.
Which raises the obvious question: if self-leadership has to be practised, not just possessed, what does that practice actually look like day to day? For me, the answer turned out to be smaller and more communal than I expected.
This is where a circle comes in
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: self-leadership is the what. A steward circle is how you keep at it.
A steward circle isn’t one person, and it isn’t a job title. It’s a small, deliberately chosen set of people, at least three, each holding a different piece of your journey. Someone who helps you navigate the now, the immediate decision, the difficult week, the thing right in front of you. Someone who helps you navigate where you want to go next, the near-term direction when the path forks. And someone who holds the longer view, who helps you realise your full potential, the goal that’s still years out and easy to lose sight of in the day-to-day. Three different vantage points, because no single person, however wise, can hold all three at once.
That’s exactly what the TechWomen Mentoring Circles are designed to start. This is a TechWomen initiative built around one plain idea: the relationship doesn’t have an expiry date. Over five monthly sessions you’re brought together with a small group that stays together the whole way through, so trust can build and the conversations can go deeper, alongside facilitators who don’t lecture or hand out answers, but guide the conversation and hold the space. Five months is the beginning, not the programme.
This year the programme runs 22 circles across the country, with 222 women enrolled, from Auckland and Wellington to Hamilton, Christchurch, Palmerston North, Queenstown, and virtual groups. Each one shapes its own path from a shared set of themes: confidence and career direction, leadership and influence, navigating change and uncertainty, sustaining a career in tech alongside everything else life asks of us, staying on the technical path, and making sense of a fast-changing world of work. Different circles, different emphases, same idea: wherever you are right now, there’s a conversation with your name on it.
The five months are the low-stakes place to practise showing up differently before the stakes are high, and to notice, alongside four or five other women, which kind of support you actually reach for and which kind you’ve been going without. It’s the mirror that catches you personalising, because the women around you can see the story you’re too close to notice. But the real intent is longer than five months: we hope the relationships you build here keep running long after the formal sessions end, and that you carry the habit forward, filling your own steward circle deliberately, the now-person, the direction-person, the potential-person, instead of leaving it to chance. The circle is meant to outlast the circle.
And here’s the part I love most: a circle is a win-win-win. You win: you get the safe room, the honest mirror, the accountability to keep going. The women beside you win, because your courage to be honest gives them permission to be brave too. And the community wins, because the facilitator guiding you was once a participant in a circle just like this one, and one day you’ll be the one holding space, or the one someone chooses as their now-person, their direction-person, their potential-person. That’s the quiet genius of it: it regenerates. Every woman who gets lifted turns around and lifts the next.
I relapsed the first time because I was practising alone, in my own head, with no one to reflect it back, no now-person, no direction-person, no one holding the long view for me. The circle is the room where you don’t have to be.
So this month, whatever change you’re navigating: start with yourself. Your name doesn’t have to begin with a J. You just have to decide to lead, before anyone hands you the title.
And you don’t have to do it on your own. Join a TechWomen Mentoring Circle, and let it be the start, not the whole story.
Your 30-second action: Name the one thing about your current situation that you’ve been blaming on someone or something else. Now find the smallest piece of it that is within your control. Then take stock of your own steward circle: who is your now-person, your direction-person, your potential-person? If a seat is empty, that’s this month’s work.