There’s something I’ve been thinking about recently….

When the game is over, the Queen and the pawns go back in the exact same box.

Once the chessboard has been packed away, they’re just pieces again; all of equal value.

But while the game itself is being played?

The Queen is the most powerful piece on the board.

She has more freedom of movement than any other piece. She can move further, change direction and completely change the game.

But none of that power means a damn thing while she’s sitting safely in the box.

She has to be in the game.

And there’s something in that which feels particularly relevant to women building businesses, careers and lives that are becoming bigger than anything they’ve previously held.

Because we talk endlessly about wanting to play a bigger game.

We talk about the bigger business. Greater visibility. More money. The book. The stage. The team. The opportunities. The impact.

We create the vision.

We set the goals.

We decide what we’re going after.

Then the game actually starts.

And that’s where it gets interesting.

The vision is the easy bit

Nobody puts unexpected invoices on the vision board, do they? There aren’t usually pictures representing rejection, difficult conversations, people changing their minds or opportunities arriving at spectacularly inconvenient moments.

You don’t carefully cut out a magazine image representing having 47 things requiring your attention simultaneously while somebody emails you with another “quick question”

We put the outcome on there.

But building the outcome means dealing with everything that happens between here and there.

Suddenly there are other pieces on the board.

Other people.

Other priorities.

Decisions you weren’t expecting to make.

Things you can’t control.

And the identity that was perfectly capable of handling the life and business you already had is suddenly being asked to handle something she has never experienced before.

That is where identity work becomes considerably more important than another strategy.

Growth doesn’t just test your strategy. It tests your identity.

Let’s face it, most experienced founders don’t have an information problem.

We’ve read loads of personal and business development books.

We’ve done the programmes, the masterminds and listened to the podcasts.

We’ve probably downloaded enough PDFs to establish a small university.

We can always learn more, of course, but there comes a point where another piece of information isn’t actually what creates the shift.

Because eventually your business starts asking a different question:

Who are you being while you build this?

Who are you when something doesn’t work?

Who are you when someone says no?

Who are you when you don’t have all the information?

Who are you when somebody makes a move you weren’t expecting?

Who are you when you can’t control the outcome?

It’s easy to identify as a confident, decisive, self-trusting woman when everything around you is validating that identity.

The practical exam comes when it isn’t.

That’s when you discover whether the new identity is something you’ve thought about… or something you’re actually learning to live.

A horse couldn’t give a shit about the story I was telling myself

I had a rather unexpected demonstration of this recently during a HorsePower VIP day with Jenni Winter-Leach.

This wasn’t horse riding.

The work involved interacting with horses from the ground and observing what happened through energy, intention, communication and congruence.

I went into the experience with something particular on my mind, that I had thought about extensively. I’ve journaled on it, analysed it to within an inch of its life and explained it at a conscious level.

I had a perfectly sensible, logical narrative about what was happening.

And then there were the horses.

Who, frankly, couldn’t give a flying fuck about my carefully constructed narrative.

Which is rather humbling when you’re someone who is very good with words.

Because you can explain yourself to another human. Rationalise stuff and intellectualise it. You can basically create an extremely bloody convincing story about why you think, feel or behave a particular way.

But you can’t talk a horse into believing something the rest of you isn’t communicating.

And that fascinated the hell out of me.

At different points during the day I was invited to become clear about what I wanted, communicate that through my own energy and lead.

Sometimes the horses responded.

Sometimes they didn’t.

And what became far more interesting than what the horses were doing was what happened inside me when they didn’t immediately respond in the way I expected.

Did I become hesitant?

Did I try harder?

Did I question myself?

Did I change direction?

Did I become more focused on their response than on what I was communicating?

Was I leading?

Or had I started reacting?

And fucking hell, if that isn’t business.

How often are you outsourcing your certainty?

Think about how often we decide what we want and then immediately look outside ourselves for evidence that we’re allowed to want it.

You decide to increase your prices and become hyper-alert to the other person’s reaction.

You decide to become more visible, then one shitty comment makes you question the entire strategy.

You establish a boundary, somebody dislikes it and suddenly you’re wondering whether the boundary was unreasonable.

You make a decision, somebody else would have made a different one and you start dismantling yours.

We say we’re leading.

But sometimes we’re actually waiting for everybody around us to reassure us that we’re heading in the right direction.

That’s not leadership.

That’s outsourcing our certainty.

And this is one of the reasons self-leadership becomes so important as your business grows.

Because nobody appoints you the leader of your own life.

There’s no promotion, no new job description and definitely no email announcing that from Monday you’re officially in charge of yourself.

You just decide.

Then you have to keep deciding.

Especially when there isn’t a guarantee.

The high-functioning trap gets bigger with you

There’s another problem with playing a bigger game though, and that is that your old identity doesn’t politely wave you off from the sidelines.

She comes with you.

And the behaviours that helped make you successful don’t necessarily disappear just because you’ve created a bigger vision.

Often they get even louder.

If your old way of creating safety was controlling everything, you’ll try to control the bigger business.

If your sense of value came from being useful, you’ll make yourself indispensable to everybody in it.

If you protected yourself from rejection through perfectionism, you’ll spend weeks perfecting something that needed to be finished a fortnight ago.

If you kept yourself safe by keeping everybody happy, growth simply gives you more people to say yes to.

This is what I call the high-functioning trap.

And it’s one of the reasons women can finally create the opportunity, business or life they desperately wanted and then discover they’re fucking exhausted by it.

That’s nothing about the dream and the vision, but that we’re trying to build the new thing using an identity designed to survive the old thing.

Those are two completely different problems.

Capacity isn’t about learning to tolerate more shit

This might be one of the biggest misconceptions we have about growth.

We assume increased capacity means becoming capable of holding more.

Whether that’s more work, more pressure, more people, more responsibility, more demands…. More chaos.

Only, I don’t think that’s the identity shift at all.

Your capacity doesn’t grow because you learn to tolerate more shit. It grows because you stop giving everything equal access to you.

You get better at choosing.

Better at saying no.

Better at allowing something to be imperfect.

Better at asking for help.

Better at allowing somebody else to be disappointed.

Better at recognising that urgency and importance are not the same thing.

And better at identifying the difference between work that genuinely matters and work that makes your old identity feel wonderfully safe because she’s busy.

High-functioning women can make almost anything look productive.

We can spend an entire day doing genuinely useful things and somehow avoid the one move that would actually change something.

Which brings me back to the chessboard.

Power isn’t frantic movement

The Queen has more freedom of movement than any other piece on the chessboard.

But having more possible moves doesn’t mean she should make all of them.

That’s not power.

Power is having the freedom to move and knowing which move matters.

This is one of the identity shifts required as your business grows.

You can’t control the whole board or predict every move.

You can’t make other people behave in the way you hoped they would, or even know exactly how the game ends.

And trying to achieve that level of certainty before you move will keep you exactly where you are.

Instead, the question just becomes: What’s my next move?

Not the next 47.

Just the next one.

What matters now?

What deserves my energy?

What can wait?

What genuinely needs me?

What doesn’t need me at all?

And perhaps the most revealing question:

What am I doing because it matters and what am I doing because my old identity feels safer when she’s busy?

Control and self-leadership are not the same thing

This is the distinction I’ve been sitting with most.

Control says: I can relax when I know what’s going to happen.

Self-leadership says: I can move because I trust myself to deal with what happens.

That’s self-trust.

It’s the more subtler certainty of knowing: Whatever happens next, I trust myself to respond to it.

I don’t need everybody to say yes to trust my direction.

I don’t need to know what the next five years look like to make today’s decision.

I don’t need to control somebody else’s move.

I just need to be responsible for mine.

And I think reinvention asks this of us over and over again.

Because if you’re genuinely doing something new, there will inevitably be a point where you have to move before you have evidence.

Otherwise you’re not creating anything new. You’re simply repeating what you already know works.

Your next identity can’t come with references

This is why identity design matters.

The woman you’re designing doesn’t have a ten-year track record for you to check.

There is no evidence that she’ll succeed because she hasn’t existed in this form before.

You’re literally creating her.

Which means that eventually you have to make some decisions as her before you have proof that those decisions will work.

You have to let her be seen.

Let her make the move.

Let her get something wrong.

Let her deal with rejection.

Let her change her mind.

Let her discover what she can handle.

This is why I say: You don’t find yourself. You design her.

But designing her is only the beginning. Eventually you have to bloody live as her.

You have to put her on the board.

Because you cannot discover your power while staying safely in the box.

So, what’s your next move?

Maybe you don’t need another plan right now.

Maybe you don’t need to know exactly how everything will unfold.

Maybe you don’t need another qualification, another programme, another person’s approval or another six months thinking about it.

Maybe the next stage is asking something else of you.

Who do I choose to be while it’s happening?

The board will move.

People will surprise you.

Things won’t go to plan.

Some opportunities will disappear and others will arrive from nowhere.

You’ll get things wrong.

You’ll change your mind.

You’ll discover that something you desperately wanted isn’t actually for you.

And you’ll discover that you’re capable of things your previous identity couldn’t imagine.

That’s the game.

And the Queen doesn’t become powerful by knowing exactly how it ends.

She becomes powerful when she gets on the board and makes her move.

Ready to get on the board?

If you’re a founder or business owner and you know the next stage of your business requires more than another strategy, Be You Now is the room I created for exactly these conversations.

On Friday 4th September 2026 at Leonardo Royal Hotel London Tower Bridge, we’re bringing together founders and business owners to explore identity, leadership, visibility, systems, self-trust and who your business actually needs you to be now.

No weird cliquey networking bollocks. No pretending you’ve got everything figured out.

Just brilliant people having the conversations that sit underneath business growth.

Find out more and book your place at Be You Now.

And if you’d like to hear me explore this in more depth, including what those horses taught me about leadership, listen to the accompanying episode of The Reinvention Era: The Identity Required to Play a Bigger Game.