The Real Reason I Never Leaned In (And Never Will)

I remember when Lean In hit the scene in 2013. It was everywhere—bookstores, headlines, conferences, women’s networking groups. The media couldn’t get enough of Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s then-COO, standing tall at the podium telling women, “You can have it all. Just lean in.”

At first? I kind of wanted to believe her.

I didn’t read the book, but I saw the soundbites. The clips. The carefully polished pull quotes meant to make us all feel like we were finally being seen by the corporate powers that be. And for a split second, I let myself think maybe Facebook was doing something different. Maybe—just maybe—this was a company where women could thrive without sacrificing everything.

That glow faded fast.

Because even without reading the full book, I read enough to feel the undertone—and it didn’t sit right. It wasn’t about women rising as themselves, or women utilizing feminine business traits. It was about women contorting themselves to fit into a system that was never built with us in mind.

Instead, it was the same old story, wrapped in a shiny new book jacket.

Sandberg wasn’t holding the door open for the rest of us. She was holding a measuring stick—and if you didn’t measure up to the image of the tireless, nanny hiring, always-on professional woman? Well, too bad.

So no, I didn’t read Lean In. I trusted the knot in my stomach more than the marketing hype.

Now here we are, March 2025. I’ve spent the last few years doing the opposite of “leaning in.” I’ve leaned out—of corporate nonsense, of Meta and X’s smoke and mirrors, and of the idea that success requires me to be someone I’m not. Instead, I’ve leaned into what makes me me: intuition, compassion, creativity, and that whole bundle of feminine business traits that the world once told me to tone down if I wanted to be taken seriously.

That’s also why I keep coming back to the bigger question of what work-life balance can actually look like, especially for women who have spent years being told that overwork is the price of ambition.

I’ve leaned into my feminine business traits.

Funny how the more I embraced them, the more powerful I became. The more whole I felt.

That’s why, when Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams showed up on my reading list, I grabbed it without hesitation. A behind-the-scenes memoir from a former Facebook insider? Interesting right?

What I didn’t expect was how much it would validate every gut feeling I had about Sandberg and the corporate culture she helped create.

This wasn’t a woman who “had it all.” This was a woman who had money, power, and status—because she prioritized the machine. She played the game, sure. But she didn’t rewrite the rules. She enforced them. And if those rules crushed women who didn’t want to sacrifice their humanity for a paycheck? That wasn’t her problem.

And when success is built around constant pressure, performance, and self-abandonment, it becomes far too easy to get stuck in survival mode and mistake exhaustion for ambition.

Reading this book didn’t shock me. It confirmed what I already knew: that behind the empowerment branding was someone who’d bought into the patriarchy wholesale and was now reselling it with a feminine font.

And that’s not empowerment. That’s performance.

Here’s what I know now, after years of undoing the conditioning and giving myself permission to run my business on my terms:

Power doesn’t require a boardroom. Success doesn’t demand we silence our intuition. And the feminine business traits they told us were “too soft” for leadership? They’re actually our edge.

They want us to believe we have to act like men to succeed in a man’s world. But that world’s on its last leg—and we’re building something better.

I’d much rather build a business that leaves room for curiosity, creativity, and the kind of possibility I wrote about in What Fantasy Fiction Taught Me About Building a better business.

So no, I never leaned in. I walked away—and found something far more real.

And honestly? I like it here.

Ready to build a business without pretending to be someone you’re not?

If you are tired of business advice that tells you to push harder, perform confidently, and ignore the quiet voice that says, “This does not feel right,” you do not have to keep following that script.

You can build a business around your strengths, your values, your energy, and the way you actually want to work.

Click here to explore what that could look like.