The Cost of Hiding in the Rooms Where It Matters Most: Leadership, Identity, and Learning to Lead from Presence with Julie Averill

What does it actually cost you to hide yourself in the rooms where it matters most? Not the obvious things. Not the opportunities you can point to or the relationships you can name. The subtler cost. The version of yourself that never quite got to show up at grad school, in the boardroom, at the table where it counted. The years of spending your best mental energy managing how you were perceived instead of actually being there. That's the cost most high-capacity leaders don't talk about, and it's exactly what Julie Averill is willing to put on the table. Who is Julie Averill? Julie Averill is a technology executive, leadership advisor, and the author of Chief Impact Officer, a book about why psychological safety, influence, and culture matter more than authority and control. She served as global CIO of lululemon, where she helped scale the company from two to over ten billion dollars, and has led technology at some of the most recognized brands in the world. She works with companies navigating the intersection of human leadership and the AI era through her advisory practice, Goldthread. Her book, Chief Impact Officer, launches June 16th, 2025. Julie Averill's Story: The Cost of Leading from Behind Walls For most of her corporate career, Julie Averill was exactly who you'd want leading a transformation. Strategic, capable, and able to move companies through massive change. But underneath the results and the credibility and the seat at the table, she was operating with significant parts of herself carefully out of view. She was hiding, not from the work, but from being fully known in the rooms where she was doing it. For years, Julie minimized her relationship with her wife Cindy, keeping her presence out of professional contexts, navigating a life that required her to show up as a partial version of herself. At the time, it felt like the only reasonable way to operate. What she didn't fully see was the cumulative cost. The relationships she didn't build at grad school because she wasn't all the way in. The leadership impact she left on the table because the energy she should have been directing toward her team was going toward managing perception instead. The people on her team who might have felt permission to be more fully themselves, if she had been. The shift didn't come from a framework or a leadership course. A mentor asked her one direct question: how was her team supposed to follow her if they didn't know who she was? It landed differently than she expected. She thought she'd been hiding the hiding. She hadn't been. What followed was a reckoning, a coach with difficult questions, and a slow process of learning what it actually meant to lead from presence rather than proof. Then came the trip to Ethiopia to bring home her son Airmas, who was six years old and had no reason to trust these strangers who'd arrived to take him across the world. Every instinct Julie had, her drive to fix, to connect, to prove she was the right person for this, failed her completely. It was a stranger singing the Bingo song on a street, and two Ethiopian businessmen in a coffee shop who finally reached him. All Julie had to do was get out of the way. She stood there, heart breaking a little, and let it happen. That moment didn't just change how she understood adoption. It changed how she understood control, connection, and what leadership actually requires when the stakes are real. What we cover in this episode: - How success can arrive exactly as planned and still not feel the way you expected. Julie reflects on reaching what many would call a pinnacle at lululemon, and the quiet recognition, not of ingratitude, but of misalignment: that she was there for comfort and a paycheck, not because the work ahead was the work she needed to do. - The invisible tax of hiding yourself in professional environments. When you spend your processing power managing how you're being perceived rather than contributing what you actually think, you leave your own potential on the table. Julie names this with uncommon precision, including what it cost her at grad school, in her marriage, and in her leadership. - Why identity fusion with leadership is such a specific trap for high-capacity people. The skills that make someone great at leading others, being needed, being capable, being the one who holds things together, are often the exact skills they refuse to apply to themselves. Julie and Lisa go deep on what self-leadership actually looks like when you're wired to lead everyone else first. - The mentor question that changed everything. One direct observation from someone who knew her well: nobody on her team knew who she really was. What that question revealed about the walls she'd built, and what it took to start coming out from behind them. - The coffee shop in Ethiopia and what it taught her about control. This is the story at the heart of this episode. Julie arrived in Addis Ababa wanting to be the right mother for her six-year-old son. She couldn't speak his language, couldn't make him trust her, couldn't will the connection into being. Two strangers at a coffee shop did what she couldn't. What she learned in that moment about surrendering control without abandoning responsibility is something no leadership book had prepared her for. - What over-functioning actually costs women in leadership. The pattern of doing more, carrying more, proving more, is socially rewarded right up until the point it isn't. Julie and Lisa talk honestly about how this wiring shows up, what it feels like when you're inside it, and why naming it as self-inflicted doesn't make it easier to stop. - The qualities that will become more valuable, not less, as AI reshapes work. Judgment. Passion. Curiosity. The ability to connect with human beings. Julie has spent significant time working at the intersection of organizational change and AI adoption, and her perspective on where the real competitive advantage lies is worth paying attention to. - What psychological safety actually requires from the leader. You can't create it externally if you don't have it internally. Julie is direct about this. If you're not operating from a place of honesty yourself, your team knows, and no amount of stated values or culture investment closes that gap. - What Julie has become unavailable for, and how that clarity has shaped her first year as an entrepreneur. After years of corporate life, she's learning, in real time, that freedom and over-commitment are not mutually exclusive. The work of saying no to herself has turned out to be harder than saying no to anyone else. This episode is for you if: - You've achieved something significant and you're starting to notice the gap between how it looks from the outside and how it actually feels from the inside. - You've spent years being excellent in rooms where you weren't fully yourself, and you're only now starting to count what that cost you. - You pride yourself on your leadership but would privately admit that you don't extend that same standard of care to yourself. - You've reached a level of success that required you to be the capable one, the strong one, the one who held it together, and you're tired of that being the whole story. - You know what it feels like to grip something so tightly in an effort to control the outcome that the very thing you wanted slipped through anyway. - You're moving into a new chapter, whether that's entrepreneurship, a new leadership role, or simply a different relationship with how you succeed, and you sense that what got you here isn't quite what will serve you next. - You've wondered what it would feel like to actually lead from who you are rather than from who you need to prove yourself to be. What leading from presence actually requires There's a version of leadership that looks like strength from the outside and costs everything on the inside. It's the version built on walls, on carefully managed perception, on channeling every ounce of capability toward the work while keeping the person doing the work just out of view. It works. For a long time, for most people, it works. What Julie's story makes clear is that the cost of that way of operating doesn't always announce itself. It accumulates quietly, in the relationships that stayed surface-level, in the rooms you were only partially present for, in the version of yourself that kept getting left at the door. And at some point the gap between what you're projecting and what you're actually carrying becomes its own kind of exhaustion. The shift Julie describes isn't about becoming more vulnerable or softer or less ambitious. It's about understanding that real leadership presence, the kind that actually moves people, actually creates safety, actually earns trust, requires you to be a person first. Not a role. Not a result. A person. That's the work this conversation points toward. And it's the same question underneath everything I work on with my clients: not how do you achieve more, but what are the patterns you're running to maintain what you've already built, and what are those patterns costing you? Ready to understand what's running underneath your success? If this conversation landed for you, a useful place to start is understanding which pattern is most active in how you lead and achieve. The Success Paradox Quiz takes about five minutes and identifies the specific archetype shaping how you succeed, what it's costing you, and what becomes possible when you start leading from a more intentional place. Take the quiz at lisacarpenter.ca/quiz. And if you haven't already, grab Julie's book. Chief Impact Officer is out June 16th and available wherever books are sold, including Amazon. Chief Impact Officer https://goldthreadllc.com/book Connect with Julie Averill: goldthreadllc.com  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julie\averill\/ Connect with Lisa Instagram: @lisacarpenterinc  Take the Success Paradox Quiz: lisacarpenter.ca/quiz The question isn't whether you've achieved success. It's whether your success feels the way you thought it would.