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Leadership and identity

When the role that carried you no longer contains you.

Private counsel for leaders at a threshold—between authority and succession, performance and exhaustion, mastery and meaning.

A transition in role is often a transition in self.

Leadership changes can be presented as questions of timing, structure or strategy. Beneath them may sit grief, loyalty, fear, mortality, ambition, responsibility and the loss of an identity reinforced for years by other people’s dependence.

A leader may remain highly capable while feeling inwardly detached from the work. Burnout may be present, but not every loss of energy is simply overwork. Sometimes the old source of meaning has exhausted itself.

What served the achievement of authority may not serve the relinquishing, transformation or wiser use of it.

Northstar offers an independent space beyond board, family, employer and advisers. The purpose is not to manufacture confidence, but to discern what the transition is actually asking.

Taking a larger role

Understanding the person you must become without losing the person you already are.

Leaving authority

Separating value and identity from position while honouring what the role has meant.

Changing direction

Testing whether restlessness is vision, avoidance or the first movement of a more truthful life.

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