If you’re reading this, you probably either follow @leaderswstyle on Instagram or came across my profile and found your way here.

If you follow me, you know I talk a lot about leadership and career development. Specifically, senior leadership, what separates senior leaders from junior leaders, and my unfiltered advice based on my own decade-long career journey. I started in an entry-level leadership role and worked my way into senior leadership at the same Fortune 10 company within five years.

What you might not know is that I’m naturally very introverted.

And if you’re anything like me, your 9–5 probably takes most of your daily energy, and there isn’t always much left over.

While creating content has become a creative outlet for me, I’d be lying if I said getting in front of a camera and talking to my phone after a full day of leading and talking isn’t draining. But getting to sit down and share my thoughts with you through writing feels different.

Like everything in life, there’s always a way we feel like we should do things. We see other people doing things a certain way, and we tend to put ourselves in boxes, sometimes without even realizing it.

So while I’ve loved sharing and building through Instagram (more to come on that later), I wanted to create a space where I could go deeper. Somewhere I could share my thoughts freely, without the exhaustion of trying to communicate in a way that doesn’t always come naturally to me.

I’ve always loved writing. And in a lot of ways, this feels like coming back to something I’ve missed.

My plan is to weave personal experiences and career experiences together throughout these articles. I want you to learn more about me, but I also want you to understand why I created Leaders With Style and the experiences that shaped the advice I share today.

There’s only so much you can communicate in a 60-second Reel or an Instagram caption.

I hope you stay for a while.

Let’s Go Back to the Beginning

I graduated from the Freeman College of Management at Bucknell University in 2016.

I’ve always been drawn to English, language, and writing. I’ve always been a creative at heart.

When I was a child, I created an imaginary town in my backyard and wrote a weekly newspaper about it that I distributed to the neighbors on our court. In middle school, I was a news anchor on our school’s morning broadcast. In high school, I wrote for the school newspaper, and in college, I interned at a local news station.

Looking back, it’s funny how consistently writing and storytelling showed up throughout my life, considering the career I ultimately ended up pursuing.

The job I’ve worked in for the past decade was completely unplanned. It was something I stumbled into after receiving an offer that would allow me to financially support myself and live on my own after graduation.

I found out where I was being placed in the middle of a class during the first semester of my senior year.

As part of the placement process, I had to rank all 50 states in order of preference. We were told we’d likely receive something in our top five.

Naturally, I ranked every state that would put me within driving distance of New York City, where my college friends and boyfriend at the time would be moving after graduation.

When I opened my placement and saw Pennsylvania, I left class and cried.

Which is funny now, considering Pennsylvania was technically in my top five.

A few months later, I moved into my apartment in Allentown and started work the next day.

I had absolutely no idea how much the next four years would shape who I am today.

The Years That Changed Everything

One of the most important things those early years gave me was an unwavering belief in my ability to figure things out.

I’ve come to believe that self-confidence doesn’t come from telling yourself you’re capable. It comes from doing hard things, over and over again, until you have enough evidence to trust yourself.

You learn that even when you can’t see over the wall in front of you, you’ll find a way to scale it and make it to the other side. Not because you know exactly how you’re going to do it, but because you’ve done it before.

And you’ll do it again.

That self-trust has allowed me to take a lot of chances throughout my career. I’ve consistently put myself in challenging situations where I didn’t have all the answers and had to trust my ability to navigate ambiguity.

I think we underestimate how much confidence is built in the moments when we genuinely don’t know how we’re going to make it through something.

It’s those moments that build grit, self-trust, and the belief that you’ll be able to take on an even larger, scarier wall the next time.

And there were a lot of those moments during my first few years in Allentown.

Learning Things the Hard Way

There were many crucible moments in that first role.

My monthly employee survey scores started coming back below expectations, and I quickly found myself on a performance improvement plan. One that I actually had to write for myself, detailing how I was going to close the gap to meeting expectations and ultimately raise the bar.

I learned what it meant to work for an “and” company.

It wasn’t enough to exceed expectations in several areas. You had to deliver results and think big and earn trust. Falling short in one area could be enough to fall short overall.

I learned that not everyone is your friend and that trust is earned, not freely given. Speaking poorly about a peer to the wrong person taught me a difficult lesson about relationships, influence, and the power of informal leaders.

I learned how to lead a team to exceed performance expectations without monetary incentives and how much small, genuine acts of recognition could influence team culture.

I learned how to hold my ground, separate the personal from the professional, and control my emotions when navigating conflict. I learned what it felt like to have to let someone go.

And outside of work, I was learning just as much.

I spent a lot of nights eating dinner alone in my bed. I lost a lot of friends. The relationship with that boyfriend ended.

I was figuring out how to manage my money, pay my bills, live alone for the first time, and build a life that looked very different from the one I had imagined for myself.

There were a lot of nights when I felt incredibly lonely.

And looking back, I think that period of my life taught me just as much about leadership as anything I was learning inside the four walls of that building.

Because for the first time, I was really learning how to rely on myself.

I was learning how to be uncomfortable. How to make difficult decisions. How to recover from mistakes. How to navigate relationships that weren’t working. How to sit with myself when things weren’t going the way I wanted them to.

And perhaps most importantly, I was learning that I could trust myself to figure things out, even when I didn’t have anyone else to lean on.

I Had the Title of Manager. But I Wasn’t a Leader Yet.

Those early experiences tested so much of what I believed to be true about myself.

They made me stronger, but they also forced me to confront parts of myself that needed work.

And here’s the truth.

When I started that role in Allentown, my title had the word manager in it, but I wasn’t a leader.

I didn’t understand that at the time.

I thought leadership was about managing a team, delivering results, and being responsible for other people’s performance.

What I didn’t understand was that leading others can only happen after you learn how to lead yourself.

And self-leadership requires an extreme level of self-awareness.

It requires being willing to remove your ego, look in the mirror instead of out the window, and take responsibility for the things that are within your control.

It requires an unwavering level of integrity, especially when nobody is watching.

It requires knowing who you are, what you stand for, and being confident enough in yourself that you don’t need everyone around you to validate it.

And I don’t think you develop those things by reading a book or attending a leadership training.

You develop them through experience. Through failure. Through difficult conversations. Through the moments when you’re forced to confront something about yourself that you’d rather ignore.

I learned so much of that during my first two years in Allentown.

And I owe an enormous amount of what came afterward to those lessons.

Self-Leadership Has to Come First

I talk a lot about the logistics of getting into senior leadership and the characteristics of people who are successful once they get there.

How you communicate. How you make decisions. How you influence others. How you demonstrate that you’re capable of operating at a larger scope.

But I think the conversation goes so much deeper than how you talk about your work or the perception other people have of you.

Because none of those things matter nearly as much if you haven’t done the work on yourself first.

Self-leadership has to come before everything else.

And developing it takes years.

Anyone can lead when things are going well.

But I think we live in a world where far too many people are put into leadership positions before they’ve done the personal work required to lead others effectively.

And as a result, they create toxic environments. They blame other people. They step on those around them to make themselves look better. They allow their insecurities and egos to influence their decisions.

And ultimately, they limit not only their own potential but the potential of the people they’re responsible for leading.

I think that’s one of the greatest responsibilities that comes with leadership.

Your behavior doesn’t just affect you anymore.

It affects the people who work for you, the opportunities they receive, the confidence they develop, and sometimes even how they feel about themselves when they go home at night.

That’s a tremendous amount of responsibility.

And if you want to succeed, grow, and genuinely change people’s lives—which I hope you do if you choose to lead—you have to start with yourself.

Why I’m Writing This

I didn’t have mentors when I started my career.

Most of what I learned came through failure, uncomfortable experiences, and difficult conversations.

And while I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything, I often think about how helpful it would have been to hear from someone who had already navigated some of the things I was going through.

Not just the polished version of their career.

Not just the promotions, accomplishments, and success stories.

But the moments when they questioned themselves. The mistakes they made. The relationships they struggled with. The things they had to learn about themselves before they could become the person they wanted to be.

That’s what I want this space to be.

If you’re navigating leadership and finding that it’s much more challenging than you anticipated, or if you’re working toward larger opportunities and wondering what it really takes to be successful once you get there, I hope you find something here that resonates with you.

And even if you’re not particularly interested in leadership, I hope you’ll find something in these stories that makes you feel a little less alone in whatever season of life you’re navigating.

Because I think there’s an enormous amount of overlap between our personal lives and the way we show up professionally.

And I want to explore that here.

I want to write about ambition, confidence, relationships, identity, failure, success, and all the experiences that shape who we become.

Some articles will be about leadership. Others might have very little to do with work at all.

But they’ll all come from the same place.

My own experiences, the things I’ve learned, and the things I’m still figuring out.

Because getting into senior leadership is one thing. Being successful once you’re there, not just professionally but in your own mental headspace, is an entirely different challenge.

And that’s what I hope to explore more deeply through these articles.

I hope you choose to stay awhile.

Anne