In her twenties, Nikki Barua wore pantyhose and pearls to work. And she took up golf.
She hates golf.
She did it because she’d heard that’s what business people did.
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Maybe at one time you too have studied the leaders a level or two above you and started borrowing their habits.
You copy how they talk in meetings, how they work a room, how they treat their reports.
At some point, you can lose track of what actually feels like you.
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Nikki immigrated to the US in 1997, and went straight into a very traditional corporate world.
As an introvert, she had already felt like she was outside every inner circle.
So she did what a lot of us do. She tried to blend in.
It worked, more or less.
Until she noticed what it was costing her.
“The more I became like everyone else,” she told me, “the less there was of me to see.”
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Nikki didn’t choose her turning point. In 2008, she suffered a devastating loss that became public, and suddenly there was nowhere left to hide.
What she found on the other side surprised her.
She felt free.
That experience helped her see her introversion differently.
She’s deeply introspective. Patient. A real listener. She sees patterns other people miss.
Those traits had always been there. But once she stopped treating her introversion as something she needed to fix, she could start to see what those qualities made possible.
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Her speaking story follows a similar path, and it starts somewhere brutal.
In high school, she froze in front of a thousand students. Full panic. The room went silent, then one person laughed, and then everyone did.
A teacher had to walk her off the stage.
On the way off, she made a decision. One day she’d speak on stages around the world, and she’d get paid to do it.
So she got her reps. Toastmasters. Classes. Every invitation she could find, “even if there were three people in a room with a pulse.”
But for years, she was trying to be the wrong kind of speaker.
Her model was Tony Robbins: six and a half feet tall, booming voice, endless energy. Nikki is under five feet tall, and theatrical isn’t her style.
Trying to be him, she says, made her mediocre.
What changed was the realization that there are eight billion people on the planet. Some of them want to hear a message delivered exactly the way she delivers it.
So she dropped the stage persona and started being herself on stage.
Her audience got bigger, not smaller.
She said, “If you don’t show yourself, how will your tribe find you?”
I like this way of thinking about visibility. You don’t have to talk more or become the person who commands every room. People need a chance to see how you think, what you care about, and what you bring to the work.
Otherwise, the people who would value those things may never know they’re there.
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Today, Nikki’s team knows her as the wartime CEO. When everything is falling apart, she gets calmer. She turns inward, listens harder, and acts on purpose.
Her teams have told her that her calm is what makes them believe they’ll get through.
She thinks qualities like these matter even more now, when so much of what we read and hear can feel interchangeable. The way someone listens, how they respond under pressure, and the experiences they bring to a situation are harder to replicate.
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If you want a place to start this week, Nikki shared an exercise for finding your zone of genius.
Pick two people you work closely with and ask them one question:
“What do you come to me for?”
Then look at their answers. Pay attention to the things they value that also come naturally to you. Those are worth spending more time on.
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At the end, I asked Nikki what she’d tell her younger self, the one wearing pearls on the golf course.
She didn’t hesitate.
“You are perfect as you are.”
If you’ve ever found yourself trying to fit someone else’s idea of what a successful leader looks like, give this a listen.
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