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Evolving your leadership today isn’t only about what you achieve, it’s about how you grow, how you connect, and how you show up as a whole person, both at work and in your life.
In this episode, I’m joined by the dynamic and deeply insightful Sarah Perugia, Executive Leadership Master Coach, women in leadership advocate, and whole-person leadership transformation specialist. With a background in professional acting and a passion for communication, Sarah brings a bold and empowering perspective to how we develop women in leadership in a global world and create more gender equality.
Together, we explore what it means to lead with your whole self, how women can overcome outdated success metrics, and how to unlock true leadership impact.
Sarah shares her practical and thought-provoking ideas around redefining success, setting boundaries, and what male allies actually need to be doing to support female leadership development.
What you will learn in this episode:
- Why whole-person leadership matters more than ever
- The power of redefining success on your own terms
- How to spot the invisible blockers holding women back in their careers
- How to assert boundaries without the push back
- What male allies can do to support female leadership meaningfully
- Why intention setting transforms your communication impact instantly
Reflection Questions:
- What does success look and feel like for you?
- Where are you saying “yes”, and what would it take to say “no”?
- How do you want to show up in your next conversation, meeting or presentation?
Sarah Perugia is a whole-person leadership transformation specialist and passionate Women in Leadership Master Coach, driven by the belief that true leadership encompasses more than professional success – it involves nurturing the whole person. It’s about understanding and supporting the values, passions, and overall happiness of leaders so they can create incredible career success and build strong high-achieving teams.
Drawing on her unique blend of professional acting and expertise in neuro-linguistic programming, Strengths and Positive Psychology, she brings a fresh approach to leadership development. She helps leaders and their teams explore what matters to them, what they are great at, and the unique value they bring with them into the room. This enables them to lead with a clear mission and result in a more profound and impactful leadership style.
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Episode overview:
Whole-Person Leadership: Empowering Women with Sarah Perugia
In this blog, based on the recent podcast episode, I had the privilege of speaking with Sarah Perugia, Executive Leadership Master Coach, women in leadership advocate, and whole-person leadership transformation specialist.
Her perspective is compelling: leadership development isn’t only about doing more, it’s about knowing who you are, integrating your whole self, and communicating with authenticity.
Here are the key themes we explored, followed by questions to help you reflect, and develop your next steps toward greater leadership impact.
Whole-Person Leadership, And Why It Matters
Traditional leadership development often treats the professional and personal as separate. But as Sarah emphasises, you cannot divorce your work self from your whole self. Your values, your beliefs, your physical energy, your sense of purpose – all of these feed into how you lead, how you communicate, and how you sustain growth.
One indicator she uses: how do you feel on a Sunday evening? Excited? Overwhelmed? Anxious? Those flags offer clues into how your leadership practice is going. With greater awareness, you can make conscious choices, not default ones, about how you show up.
Redefining Success on Your Own Terms
Throughout our conversation, Sarah returned to one powerful message: women are bombarded by conflicting expectations. “Be strong, be soft, be ambitious, be meek”, often all at once.
She encourages narrowing down what success means for you, rooted in your values and life priorities, not in society’s checklist. Sometimes that means letting go of perfectionism. It means saying “good enough”, and freeing up energy for what truly matters.
In the women’s leadership circles Sarah runs, she often sees that five minutes into the question, “What does success look like for you?”a profound shift can happen.
The Invisible Barriers: “Harry Pottering,” Bias, and Culture
One striking idea Sarah shared is the phenomenon she calls “Harry Pottering”, when a manager assumes, often unconsciously, that a woman’s ambition has changed through life stages, e.g. after having children, and assigns her safer, less visible projects, keeping her hidden like Harry Potter was in ‘the broom cupboard under the stairs’, in the books and movies by J K Rowling.
This is not always malicious, but it is harmful. The antidote? Dialogue. Ask women what they want, don’t assume. As a woman, assert how you want to work and contract new ways of working in advance, so that changes don’t provoke defensive responses.
Another complexity lies in how behaviours are perceived. What one person calls confident, another might call aggressive. Sarah argues that often it comes down to bias. That’s where understanding challenging assumptions is key, and using cultural intelligence to decode the preferences, norms, and communication styles of individuals across cultures.
The Broken Rung: Losing Women mid‑career
Sarah is passionate about addressing what McKinsey calls the “broken rung”, the drop in female representation between entry-level and middle management. It is in that mid‑career stage where many women stall.
She describes working with many mid‑level women who are smart, capable, ambitious, but unseen. They tell her they’re not being put forward for leadership programmes, not being stretched, not being heard.
She is piloting scalable programmes that mid‑career women and their advocates in organisations can use to bridge that gap and prevent the “female brain drain” from leadership talent pipelines.
Communicating with Intention
One of my favourite moments in the episode came when Sarah shared her insights from recently talking with surgeons at a workshop. Their work is literally life and death, and their communication must be precise, calm and create immediate action.
She shared the idea of intention setting– before you enter into any interaction, take a breath, gather yourself, and ask: how do I want to show up? What’s this person needing from me? What’s my desired outcome?
That small reset, even a few seconds, shifts your presence and your impact, an essential tool for every leader.
Reflection Questions for You
Take a moment with these questions and allow your thinking to evolve as you consider them:
- What does success look like for you, not from the view of what others expect?
- Where in your life and career are you over‑stretching, saying ‘yes’ when you want to say ‘no’?
What are your boundaries, and are you communicating them in advance clearly and confidently?
