The One Leadership Skill to Practise This Summer

By Gem Dentith.

The leadership skill most women struggle to practise isn’t strategic thinking or resilience. It’s stillness. I know this because it’s one of the things I struggle with most, even though I teach stillness in my coaching practice.

In my own experience, I’ve found that women aren’t incapable of being still. It’s what being still represents. Stillness threatens the identity that many high-achieving women have built their success on.

As women in leadership roles, we are rewarded for momentum, for forward motion, for decisiveness. And in our personal lives, we are often the ones who step in and take action. Wherever there’s drama, we sort it. Stillness, by contrast, can feel like risk. Like loss of control. Like stepping out of relevance. Like if we stop thinking about what we’ve built, stop acting on it, it might slip away. Or worse, be forgotten. As though something else might take its place and we’ll lose the energy or momentum for the thing that matters.

Summer holidays have a way of exposing this. We’re finally sitting on a sun lounger in the south of France when that voice appears. But rather than ignoring it and soaking up the sun while watching the children play, there’s a pesky voice inside that says, Go and get the laptop. While you’re here. While there are no distractions. No people to manage. No demands. Just get on top of things. Clear the admin. Send that last email.

And instead of relief that you can finally have a family break, many women feel restless, irritable, even uneasy. Without the usual busyness to anchor your sense of value, you’re left alone with yourself and your thoughts. This discomfort is often mislabelled as boredom or guilt. What’s really surfacing is a lack of familiarity with presence.

Why rest feels unsafe

For many powerful and successful women, productivity has quietly become identity. Output equals worth. Being needed equals being valued. So when the doing slows down, the nervous system doesn’t relax. It searches for something to manage, fix, or optimise.

It’s like you know you need to stop. You understand intellectually the importance of rest, of allowing the mind to settle, of allowing the body to rebalance and restore. However, what tends to happen instead is that the holiday also becomes performative, because then it feels like the holiday was productive.

So what do we do? We fill the holiday with activities. Suitcases full of books on productivity and rest, books on how to relax, the irony not lost. You might even read a book on breathwork or yoga. Your time becomes packed with personal development projects.

Even stillness becomes something to “do properly”. The body might stop, but the internal machinery keeps running. Presence feels unfamiliar because it offers no immediate feedback loop. No praise. No metrics. No proof you’re doing it right.

Stillness is not passive

One of the most persistent misunderstandings in leadership culture is the idea that stillness equals disengagement. That presence is the opposite of productivity. In reality, the opposite is true.

I often find that stillness doesn’t mean lying still while your head spins through the to-do lists waiting for you back at home or in the office. Ironically, completely switching off from the day-to-day responsibilities of business or life back home, and fully immersing yourself in whatever you’re doing, is what creates real presence.

That might look like watching your children without checking your phone. Or basking in the sun without combining it with admin. Or simply feeling the warmth of the sun on your skin while listening to the sound of the waves in the background, even for thirty minutes.

Pure, single-focused concentration, where the mind is still and focused on just one thing, sharpens perception. It allows leaders to sense what’s actually happening beneath the surface of conversations, decisions, and dynamics. Leaders who can not only tolerate stillness but immerse themselves in it listen differently. They notice tone, timing, and energy. They respond rather than react. Their authority comes from grounded presence, not speed.

This is why stillness is confronting. It demands internal regulation rather than external control. And it exposes how much leadership has been driven by adrenaline rather than clarity.

What your summer vacation reveals

When work is two thousand miles away, what’s left becomes visible. Irritation. Fatigue. Desire. The quiet realisation that life has been running at a pace that hasn’t been questioned in years. Summer vacations don’t create these feelings. They reveal them.

Many women interpret this as a problem. Something to push through. Something to manage away before autumn arrives and the “real work” resumes. But this is the moment worth paying attention to. Stillness shows you where your energy leaks. Where you’ve been over-giving. Where you’ve been leading from habit instead of intention.

This is an invitation to lead differently.

Stillness as a leadership advantage

Leaders who practise presence don’t lose influence. They consolidate it. Their decisions carry weight because they’re not rushed. Their boundaries feel natural rather than defended. They don’t need to dominate space because they already inhabit it fully.

Presence changes the quality of leadership. You become more precise. This is especially true for women, whose authority is often undermined when it’s forced or over-explained. Stillness allows authority to settle rather than perform.

A different way to think about rest

Rest isn’t recovery from leadership. It’s part of it. Not as indulgence or escape, but as recalibration. Stillness isn’t about doing nothing. It’s about being available to the moment without distraction.

If rest feels uncomfortable, take that as information. It’s pointing you toward an edge of leadership that hasn’t been trained or valued, but is deeply powerful.

This summer vacation, the most radical leadership move may not be stacking your reading list, using your time as admin space, or preparing for what’s next. It may be learning to stay present when there’s nothing visibly demanding your attention.

Because stillness doesn’t make leaders weaker. It makes you more discerning. 

Gem Dentith spent years behind the scenes in senior change and communications roles, shaping the words leaders were praised for, guiding narratives, and helping organisations move through transformation with clarity.

Now, she’s stepping out from behind the script.

Through her column In Her Own Words, Gem explores leadership from the inside out, drawing on real moments, lived experience, and what she’s witnessed up close. Her work gently undresses the layers of power, behaviour, and expectation that shape how women lead in real time.

She writes for founders, CEOs, and senior leaders who sense there’s another way, one that doesn’t require shrinking, performing, or borrowing someone else’s version of authority. Her perspective brings clarity to where we’ve been over-adapting, and confidence in what becomes possible when we lead from our own centre.

The result is leadership that feels grounded, personal, and powerfully aligned.

You can connect with Gem and explore her work at  Gem Dentith | Coaching, Energy Work & Embodied Transformation