There is a profound misconception in the corporate world that when a woman steps into a leadership role, she must somehow check her personal history at the door.
We are conditioned to present a sanitised, highly professional version of ourselves, one that highlights our credentials while erasing the messy, complicated and deeply human journeys that actually shaped our leadership.
But the truth I have come to understand is simple: you cannot separate the leader from the woman she was before she earned the title. Your leadership is shaped by your whole story, including the parts you may have spent years trying to leave behind.
For decades, I lived a dynamic life of my own, navigating academia before moving into CEO roles, directorships and coaching senior executives, convinced I had it all safely planned out.
But under the surface, a major part of my identity remained tucked away in a small white box.
Adopted at two weeks old under New Zealand’s closed adoption system, I grew up loved yet completely cut off from my origins.
My state-sanctioned narrative was designed to wipe the slate clean, reclassifying me from an ‘illegitimate’ orphan named Cynthia Winters into the adored daughter of a middle-class family. For a long time, it was easier to leave the lid on that box, to pretend that the fracture of my birth didn’t affect the leader I had become.
Then, in my mid-twenties, my birth mother, Lizzy, found me.
That first meeting was a collision of unspoken trauma and intense emotional walls.
She desperately wanted to hold and smell her baby for the first time, to unburden herself of the guilt and shame she had carried.
In contrast, I was overcome by fear and a deep-seated instinct to protect my existing life. I responded with a practised, hollow smile and eventually shut the door on her.
It took nearly forty years, a pandemic lockdown, and approaching the very age Lizzy was when she passed away, for me to finally find the courage to reopen that box and confront the fragments of my history. The result was my memoir, Finding Cynthia Winters.
Unearthing my birth family history wasn’t a tidy, daytime-TV reunion. It was a turbulent, sometimes brutal process of uncovering family secrets, facing cold rejections from biological siblings, and learning that my birth name carried the weight of an abandoned identity.
Yet revisiting those letters and official records forced a massive shift in my sense of self.
I realised that for years, I had been carrying ‘Cynthia the orphan’, the rejected, invisible baby, while performing as ‘Susan the successful leader’.
Stepping onto the stage to perform in the solo play Finding Cynthia brought this integration to a visceral crescendo. Standing under a spotlight, embodying not just my current self but the alter ego of my birth name and the vulnerability of my birth mother, bypassed my logical mind entirely.
It was terrifying to stand before an audience, telling my story and stripping away the executive armour to say: This is who I am, and this is where I come from.
What surprised me most was the immediate ripple effect it had on others.
Audience members didn’t want to leave. They lingered, needing to share their own experiences of trauma, adoption and family separation.
It became starkly apparent that by refusing to present a sanitised version of my life, I had inadvertently given everyone else in the room permission to stand in their own truth.
This is where the personal story collides with leadership practice.
When we try to sever our professional identities from our personal histories, we expend enormous energy maintaining a boundary that doesn’t really exist. We hide the very experiences that have shaped how we respond to pressure, how we relate to others, what we fear and what drives us.
The determination my adoptive mother showed spoon-feeding a broken baby bird, the restless curiosity and drive I inherited from the women in my birth family, and the profound grief of sitting at my biological mother’s hospice bedside are not distractions from my leadership. They are its foundation.
Owning your whole story changes where you look for validation.
When you know who you are, where you come from and what you have survived, you no longer need to look to external corporate structures to tell you what you are worth. You regain your spark and your agency. You lead not from a textbook or a set of curated competencies, but from a deeply rooted sense of who you are and why you lead.
To the women navigating the headwinds of leadership in Aotearoa today, I offer this invitation:
Do not hide the chapters of your life that felt isolating, painful or unconventional. Question the socialised behaviour that tells women to stay quiet, tidy and compliant. Kneel down, rub the soil away from your stones, and bring what was hidden into the light.
Every leader has a white box. The parts of her history she learned to package away because they seemed too personal, too painful or too untidy for the professional world.
Mine contained Cynthia Winters.
Opening it didn’t make me less of a leader. It finally allowed me to understand the woman who had been leading all along.