Leadership Isn't a Job — It's an Energy You Bring
It was 1995. I was in Chicago at the International Formalwear Association convention.
Seven hundred people in the room. Six of them women.
I was one of the six — and unlike most of the others, I wasn't there as someone's spouse or daughter. I was a hired gun. A professional in my own right, in a room that hadn't quite caught up to that reality yet.
The Executive Director stepped to the podium to open the convention and said:
Good afternoon, gentlemen.
I felt it before I thought it. A visceral, immediate reaction that started somewhere in my chest and arrived in my mouth as a snarky comment to the CEO sitting next to me.
Seriously? There's a woman on his own board and he can't see us in the room?
My CEO didn't take the bait. He suggested, quietly, that I pause — and that we revisit the conversation later in private.
What he told me changed the way I understood leadership forever.
He said: you have two choices right now.
You can carry the chip. Let the offense define your energy in this room. Walk through this convention with the low-grade anger of someone who has been overlooked — and watch how many doors that energy closes before you even open your mouth.
Or.
You can recognize what's actually happening here. You are one of a handful of women in an industry that is changing — slower than you'd like, yes, but changing. You are on the cutting edge of something. You are not a spouse. Not a daughter. You are a professional who earned her seat in this room. What an honor. What an opportunity.
The energy you choose to bring will either open doors or close them.
That's it. That's the whole choice.
I have never forgotten that moment.
Not because the Executive Director was right to say what he said — he wasn't, and the industry needed to change, and it did. But because my CEO gave me something more useful than validation.
He gave me agency.
He showed me that the energy I walked into a room with was not a reaction to my circumstances. It was a decision. And that decision — made before I said a single word, before I shook a single hand — would shape every interaction that followed.
Grace or grievance. Possibility or resentment. Open or closed.
The room would feel whichever one I chose.
I've watched this play out a thousand times since then — in my own leadership, in the leaders I coach, in the Vistage rooms where I watch people walk in carrying invisible weather systems that affect everyone around them.
The anxious leader whose team tightens the moment he walks in. The calm leader whose presence steadies a room in crisis. The curious leader who makes everyone around her think a little deeper. The defensive leader who makes everyone around him a little more careful.
None of them announced their energy.
They just brought it.
And the room responded accordingly — every single time.
Leadership is not the title on your door or the role on your org chart.
It's what people feel when you walk in.
It's the temperature you set before you say a word. The permission you give or withhold just by how you carry yourself. The signal you send — consciously or not — about what kind of room this is going to be.
You are always broadcasting.
The only question is whether you're doing it on purpose.
I think about that convention sometimes. About the woman I would have been for those three days if I'd let the chip win. Tight. Defensive. Performing outrage instead of presence.
Instead I walked through that convention with my head up and my energy open.
And the doors that opened that week?
They changed the trajectory of my career.
Nancy Girres is an executive coach and Vistage Chair based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She learned in 1995 that energy is a choice. She's been making it on purpose ever since.