The Reluctant Leader
Being Bossy is A Leadership Skill.
I never got called mandona directly.
No one ever looked me in the eye and said the word. It was ambient. It was the conversations I overheard between mothers — *ay, esa niña es mandonísima* — said with a kind of exhausted shame, like the girl’s leadership was a problem to be managed. A thing to be quieted before it got worse.
I heard it. I filed it. I let it slowly rewrite what was safe to be.
That is how cultural shame works. It doesn’t announce itself. It just shapes the room you’re willing to walk into.
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There is a part of me I have been calling the Reluctant Leader, what my Ecuadorian culture calls La Mandona and shamed into hiding.
She is not my creative self — that one has been on fire. She is the other one. The one who can read a room, move it, lead it. The one who bought a laundromat during a recession at 32, put a chandelier in it, and made little girls stop and stare because they couldn’t believe a woman like her owned the place.
She is the one mired in shame.
While my creative self has been blooming — making music, building portals, showing up on camera — my leader self has been standing outside the door. Asking the oldest question: *who does she think she is?*
The cost of her hesitation has not been small. It has been confidence. Patience. The ability to take action, create change. The slow erosion that happens not from failure but from *not going.* not showing up, again.
Inaction, it turns out, is the most expensive thing I own.
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Here is what’s been working. And I say that with a little embarrassment — which is exactly how I know it’s true.
I make affirmation music.
Not the kind with angelic harps and whispered mantras. Mine sounds like a Friday night. Like something your chakras want to dance to. I take the words that are reprogramming me — *when the frequency shifts, everything becomes possible. Different is your superpower. Safety is the strategy. Expression is key* — and I put them inside a house beat.
It is not scientifically backed. I do not have hundreds of case studies. What I have is: I can’t get the words out of my head. And for someone who has been running an old program for decades, that matters.
The reluctant leader? She has been listening.
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I realized something at the grocery store this week. In the middle of the most ordinary errand, I named her. And she froze — the way you freeze when someone finally sees you after a very long time of being invisible.
She has been waiting to be integrated. Not fixed. Not silenced further. *Integrated.*
The same way I once went back for my five-year-old self — held her, told her she was safe to create — I am now going back for this one. The girl who was told her leadership was dangerous. Who learned to make herself smaller so the room felt more comfortable.
She is asking to be seen. Held. Healed.
And I think the way I heal her is the same way I heal everything — by doing it out loud. By showing the process. By being the proof before I have the credentials.
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The woodpecker doesn’t apologize for its sound.
It is distinct. Persistent. Impossible to ignore. You hear it and you know exactly what it is — there is no other bird that sounds like that.
That is what creative intuitive leadership looks and sounds like when it stops hiding.
Different. Attention-grabbing. Unapologetically itself.
I am not waiting until I have the case studies. I am not waiting until the shame is fully gone. I am leading now — with the music that makes my chakras dance, with the chandelier I put in the laundromat, with the woman I already am.
The reluctant leader is not gone.
She just got named.
✨Where you called a mandona? When did you reframe your innate gifts as leadership skills?
*Different is your superpower. Expression is key. Safety is your strategy.*
*— Alexa Fernandes, The Quantum Mermaid*