It was the second afternoon of the workshop, the part where people take turns leading an exercise for the rest of the group.
The room had been humming a minute earlier. Small conversations, someone's laugh, the clink of coffee cups. Then she stood to take her turn at the front, and I watched the warmth drain out of the room. Conversations stopped. Shoulders stiffened. Eyes dropped to notebooks. She hadn't said a word yet, and she didn't need to. Something in the way she stood was already pushing at us. The room tightened. Everyone tensed.
Then her turn ended and the next woman walked up. She simply arrived, reaching for nothing, and the tightness dissolved. Shoulders came down, faces lifted, and people leaned in not because they had to, but because they wanted to. When she spoke, her voice didn't compete for the room, it invited it. Same room, same people, and the air had gone from be careful here to you're safe here.
One woman pushed and the room braced. The other pulled, and the room leaned into her. I sat there feeling both, and I knew both of those walks from the inside. Because I've made both of them.
Twenty-five years ago I stepped into my first leadership role, so unsure of myself I was certain everyone could see it. So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I studied the people who seemed to own every room they entered, and I copied them. The problem is, the role models I had were dominating those rooms through force — the sharp tone, the rigid opinions, the influence that dimmed everyone else's light. I wore it like a coat two sizes too big for me, my insecurity showing through the seams.
A room can smell that combination from the doorway. I walked into my role already pushing, braced, performing a confidence I didn't feel and the room braced right back. I thought I was commanding the space. Instead, I was leaning on it, and everyone in it leaned away.
It took me some time to see what I'd actually copied. Not influence. Pressure. The kind that always pushes, requesting the room to grant respect, sometimes with the aggression showing under the polish. The woman who settled the room wasn't reaching for anyone. She wasn't pushing at all. That was the secret, and it was the last thing my twenty-seven-year-old self could have understood.
What changed for me was never a better way of walking to the front. Something within me got calmer. Slowly, over years, I stopped needing to prove I belonged there. The day that need went quiet, I stopped pushing my way into rooms, and the rooms stopped bracing back. With years of inner leadership practice, the hardness I'd carried softened, and there was nothing left to press against.
Nothing about the room had changed. Everything about what I brought into it had.
I keep returning to this on the days I'm the one leading. A room gives you back what you carry into it. Walk in pushing a tension you haven't settled in yourself, and it hands that tension back, amplified. Walk in genuinely settled, and that moves through the room too — quietly, reaching for no one, asking nothing, inviting everything.
That's the difference between commanding a room and dominating it. Domination pushes the room into shape and leaves everyone in it a little smaller. Commanding never pushes at all. People lean toward it on their own, and they leave feeling bigger than they walked in.