When Being Strong Becomes The Expectation
People trust you. They rely on you. They know you can handle complicated moments without falling apart. You become the steady one, the capable one, the person who can absorb pressure and still keep moving.
Author: Judy Hoberman
June Featured Woman In Healthcare: A Q&A With Dr. Shernette R. Kydd, PE, PhD, MBA, CLSSMBB, CSSBB, CPHQ, LBC
She currently serves as the Assistant Vice President of System Effectiveness at Cook Children’s Healthcare System (CCHCS) in Fort Worth, TX and is tasked with establishing operational excellence and process improvement strategies for the system and also charged with providing operational leadership for the Innovation program. She enjoys mentoring employees and coaching leaders on their journey to excellence.
Since 2013, she has served as an Adjunct Professor in the Industrial, Manufacturing & Systems Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), in Arlington, TX.
She is from the beautiful island of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands and enjoys spending time with her family and supporting her church community.
The Quiet Loneliness Of Being The One Everyone Counts On
There is a particular kind of loneliness that doesn’t look like loneliness from the outside.
It looks like competence.
It looks like being prepared, responsive, calm, and available. It looks like being the person others trust when the room gets tense or the plan starts to wobble. It looks like knowing how to keep things moving, how to steady the conversation, and how to listen without making the moment about yourself.
From the outside, it can look like success. But inside, many women who lead know there is something else happening too.
The Exhaustion Of Being Easy To Work With
She was the flexible one, the reliable one, the one who could step into difficult situations without creating more tension around them.
If something needed to get done, she figured it out. If personalities became difficult, she adjusted. If deadlines tightened, she absorbed the pressure quietly and kept moving.
People appreciate her for it.
They trusted her. They depended on her. They described her as collaborative, supportive, professional, and calm. And for a long time, those qualities felt like strengths…because they were.
But over time, something else started happening too.
Women Leaders Aren’t Just Lifting As They Climb…They’re Building The Ecosystem
For a long time, leadership was viewed as something deeply individual. You worked hard. You proved yourself. You climbed. And if you succeeded, the story often focused on personal resilience, determination, and the ability to overcome barriers along the way.
That narrative still exists, and parts of it are true. Many women did have to navigate systems that were difficult, competitive, or isolating. Many learned how to lead in environments where support was inconsistent and visibility had to be earned repeatedly.
Women Leaders Don’t Just Climb The Ladder. They Protect The Pathway.
For a long time, leadership was described as a climb.
You worked your way up. You proved yourself. You took on more responsibility, more visibility, more pressure…until eventually you reached a level that reflected everything you had built.
And for many women, that climb required more than just capability. It required persistence, resilience, and finding ways forward in environments that were not always designed with them in mind.
So when women reached leadership roles, the assumption was simple…they made it.
But something has been quietly changing. Reaching the top is no longer the only measure that matters.
May Featured Woman In Healthcare: A Q&A With Dr. Alison Curfman, MD MBA
She co-founded Imagine Pediatrics, a value-based care company that serves nearly 100,000 children on Medicaid. She sits on advisory boards for multiple early-stage digital health companies and partners with venture funds and operators on clinical strategy and physician-led innovation. She still works shifts in the pediatric ER — the source of every idea she builds […]
Women Leaders Aren’t Behind in AI. They’re Defining It
Some of it is exciting. Some of it is overwhelming. And some of it has created a familiar question for women leaders: Are we keeping up?
But that question may be too small.
Because the more interesting story is not whether women are behind in AI. It’s how many women are stepping into the part of the conversation that matters most…how AI is governed, trusted, adopted, and used responsibly.
Women In Leadership Don’t Just Change The Room-They Change What The Room Allows
For a long time, the conversation about women in leadership centered on presence…how many women are in the room, how many at the table and/or how many are in senior roles.
Progress was measured by visibility. By representation. By whether women were included in spaces where decisions were being made. And that work mattered…and it still does.
High Performance Isn’t Just Mental. It’s Physical Too.
There’s another shift happening for women in leadership…and it’s showing up in a very different way.
More women are beginning to take their physical strength seriously…and it’s not a side goal or something separate from their work….but it’s part of how they lead.
If Leadership Feels This Heavy, It’s Not You. It’s The Design
There’s a moment that many leaders have quietly experienced, even if they’ve never said it out loud.
It’s not dramatic and it doesn’t happen all at once. It shows up slowly, over time, in the middle of doing work they care about. They start to feel the weight of it.
Women Aren’t Just Starting Businesses. They’re Reclaiming Their Value
For a long time, value in the workplace was something many people believed would eventually be recognized if they simply did the work well enough. It showed up through raises, promotions, expanded responsibilities, or the quiet acknowledgement that someone had “earned it.” The path felt familiar…work hard, deliver consistently, be dependable, be valuable, and at some point, the system would reflect that value back.