Leadership Lessons: Harvest Your Year's Growth & Release

While everyone's making New Year's resolutions about "better leadership," I want to share something I've learned in my own leadership journey and also observed in my practice that might reframe how you think about this year's challenges.

The leadership lessons most development programs focus on? They're often missing the deeper curriculum that's been happening in your real-world experiences. Here's what I've learned from 30+ years in corporate leadership and now as a transformation coach: your struggles this year weren't obstacles to your development; they were the development.

Truth bomb: The leader you're becoming can't carry the baggage of who you used to be.

Why Most Leaders Skip the Harvest

Why Reflection Feels Like a Luxury You Can't Afford

I see it with my clients all the time—brilliant women who've spent years, even decades climbing ladders, only to realize they've been so focused on the next rung that they never stopped to integrate what they've learned from the climb itself.

Sound familiar, brave one?

Here's what I've discovered working with high-achieving women: there's often a disconnect between the leadership development they receive formally and the leadership qualities they're actually acquiring through their day-to-day experiences.

Many of us have learned to treat reflection as optional, something to do when we "have time." But when you study how to grow as a leader sustainably, the ones who rise to aligned leadership aren't the ones who never stop moving. They're the ones who know how to harvest their experiences into wisdom.

The cost of this gap? You might find yourself repeating certain patterns, wondering why strategies that used to work aren't serving you anymore, or feeling like your hard-won success doesn't quite match your internal sense of growth.

Your brain needs integration time to convert experiences into learning. Without this harvest period, you're essentially running on a hamster wheel—lots of motion, zero transformation.

What You Actually Harvested This Year

The Leadership Education They Never Gave You

Let me reframe something for you: every moment this year when you felt like you were failing? That was your real leadership development curriculum. Every time you got triggered, overwhelmed, or knocked off your game? Your brain was downloading critical data about what kind of leader you're becoming.

But here's what I've observed in my practice—many high-achievers treat these moments like mistakes to forget rather than wisdom to claim. They're so focused on "fixing" themselves that they miss the profound leadership lessons hiding in what feels like career stagnation.

Here's the layer most people miss: While formal leadership development teaches you what good leaders should do, your challenging experiences this year taught you what real leaders actually need to navigate. There are your textbook leadership qualities: communication, delegation, and strategic thinking. Then there's your lived leadership intelligence: reading unspoken dynamics, managing up through organizational politics, making decisions with incomplete information while people are watching for you to fail.

Think about it:

• That project that went sideways? It wasn't poor project management. It was a masterclass in how to grow as a leader when systems break down and you have to improvise solutions in real time.
• The colleague who pushed every button? They weren't just difficult. They were showing you exactly where your boundaries needed development and how power dynamics really operate when no one's following the org chart.
• The promotion that didn't happen? It revealed unwritten rules about how advancement actually works versus how they say it works in the leadership development programs.

This is what I call the "shadow curriculum" of leadership development. While you were busy trying to be perfect, life was busy making you wise. The lessons that only come from being tested, triggered, and forced to navigate the unspoken realities they never put in any leadership handbook—because if they did, you'd be too dangerous.

The Release Ritual Leaders Need

What Wise Leaders Let Die

Now here's where it gets interesting, and where I see a gap in most leadership development approaches. People focus on learning from mistakes, but they rarely teach the second, critical step: what to release.

Strategic release isn't weakness—it's the mark of evolved leadership.

The leader you're becoming needs you to let certain things die. The strategies that got you here won't get you there. The perfectionism that protected you in your twenties is sabotaging you in your forties. The people-pleasing that seemed like collaboration is actually preventing you from making the hard decisions true leaders must make.

Here's what my most successful clients release during their harvest:

Old Success Strategies That Expired:

• Proving your worth through overwork
• Saying yes to everything to be seen as "helpful"
• Avoiding conflict to keep everyone comfortable

Limiting Beliefs That Kept Them Small:

• "Good leaders don't get overwhelmed"
• "I have to earn my seat at the table every day"
• "If I'm not struggling, I'm not working hard enough"

Relationships That No Longer Serve:

• Colleagues who drain your energy without reciprocating value
• Mentors whose advice no longer fits your evolved vision
• Professional circles where you feel the need to diminish yourself

This isn't about becoming cold or calculating. This is about claiming your authority with the wisdom you've earned. It's about making space for the leader you're becoming by releasing what the old version of you needed to survive.

Your Leadership Harvest Assessment

Three Questions That Change Everything

Ready to do this work? Here are the three questions that will extract the pure gold from your year's experiences. This is how to grow as a leader by turning your struggles into strategic wisdom. Grab a journal, brave soul, because this is where transformation begins.

Question 1: What broke your old patterns? Look for the moments this year when your usual strategies stopped working. When your go-to responses failed you. When you had to improvise or innovate. These moments aren't failures—they're evolution points. What new leadership qualities did you develop when your old tools weren't enough?

Question 2: What do you now know about leadership that you didn't know 12 months ago? Not the theoretical stuff you read in Harvard Business Review. The visceral, lived experience kind of knowing. The knowledge that comes from being tested and emerging differently. What truths about power, influence, and impact do you now carry in your bones?

Question 3: What served you once but now limits you? This is the hardest and most important question. What behaviors, beliefs, or relationships helped you survive and succeed in the past but are now keeping you from your next level of leadership? What do you need to lovingly release to step fully into who you're becoming?

The Release Practice

Three Steps to Actually Let Go

Now that you've identified what you've harvested, it's time for the equally important work of conscious release. This isn't about forcing yourself to "get over" things—it's about making intentional choices about what gets to travel with you into your next season of leadership development.

Step 1: Name What You're Ready to Release. Look back at your harvest assessment, particularly Question 3. Write down specifically what you're ready to let go of. Be concrete: "I'm releasing the belief that I have to be the smartest person in every meeting" rather than vague statements like "I want to be less insecure."

Step 2: Thank What Served You. Before you release anything, honor what it gave you. That perfectionism? It helped you excel in environments that demanded flawless execution. That people-pleasing? It taught you valuable relationship skills. This step matters because your psyche won't release what it doesn't feel acknowledged for providing.

Step 3: Choose What Replaces It. Release isn't just about letting go; it's about making room for the leadership qualities you're growing into. For every limiting belief you release, identify what empowering truth you're choosing instead. For every expired strategy you drop, name the new approach you're embracing. This isn't positive thinking; it's conscious leadership evolution.

These aren't rhetorical questions, beautiful soul. These are diagnostic tools for conscious leadership evolution. The women who do this work intentionally don't just advance in their careers—they transform their entire relationship with power and influence.

What This Means for Your Next Season

The Leader You're Becoming

When you harvest your year's wisdom and release what no longer serves, something remarkable happens. You stop being reactive and start being responsive. You stop leading from ego and start leading from essence. You stop trying to prove your worth and start knowing it.

This is what aligned leadership looks like: decisions that feel clear rather than agonizing, boundaries that flow naturally rather than requiring constant enforcement, and influence that comes from presence rather than performance.

The women who do this harvest work don't just become better leaders; they become the kind of leaders other women aspire to become. They experience what I call the identity shift that changes everything—moving from proving their worth to knowing it. They're the ones who seem to navigate complexity with ease, who make hard decisions without drowning in guilt, who inspire not through perfection but through authentic power.

Here's what I know for certain: The leader you're becoming already exists within you. She's been emerging all year through every challenge, every triumph, every moment when you chose growth over comfort. Your job isn't to create her—it's to claim her.

Your Next Step Forward

As you sit here this week of Thanksgiving in the U.S.A., I want you to consider this: What if this year's challenges weren't obstacles to your leadership development but the very curriculum you needed? What if everything that felt hard was actually teaching you how to grow as a leader in ways no program could?

This is exactly the kind of deep identity work we explore together in the SoulFire Leadership Mastermind starting January 14th. Because here's what I've learned from 30+ years in corporate leadership and now as a transformation coach: the women who rise aren't the ones who avoid the hard questions. They're the ones who turn their experiences into wisdom and their wisdom into unshakeable power.

Ready to turn your year's lessons into next-level leadership? The SoulFire Leadership Mastermind is designed for ambitious women who are done with surface solutions and ready for the real work—the harvest work that transforms good managers into aligned leaders. This is where you learn to decode the shadow curriculum and use it to step into the leadership qualities that actually create lasting influence.

If you're done collecting experiences and ready to transform them into wisdom, this is your invitation. Because the leader you're becoming deserves that level of intentional development.

What leadership lesson from this year are you ready to claim? Share in the comments below—your insight might be exactly what another woman needs to read today.