The Rooms We Grow Into
Mexico City, La Roma neighborhood, buildings across from Cafe Nin
How culture, creativity, and shared resilience shape evolving leadership
Leadership is shaped by the rooms we enter and the ones we choose to stay in.
Over time, we absorb the norms of the environments around us without realizing it. What authority looks like. What confidence sounds like. What steadiness requires. What ambition is allowed to express. Those norms become our reference point.
Recently, I spent time in environments very different from my own. Experiencing other cities and cultural contexts did not change my title or responsibilities. But it changed my lens.
What We Learn by Entering New Rooms
We learn through food, music, dancing, language, art, history, and architecture. We learn by walking streets that hold stories older than our institutions. We learn by listening before speaking. We learn by observing how others design their lives and leadership.
In those spaces, I saw leadership expressed with clarity and discipline, but also with pride and creativity. I saw women negotiating for structural support without apology. I saw ambition integrated with family responsibility rather than framed in opposition to it. I saw resources paired with stewardship. I saw complexity held without defensiveness.
I also saw concern, uncertainty, and fear. I saw the weight of responsibility. I saw the strain of leading in environments that are not always supportive. But I also saw resilience. I saw new approaches to persistent challenges and an enduring commitment to what matters most.
What made the experience powerful was not just observation, but exchange.
What Growth Requires Us to Reexamine
We listened to one another’s struggles and responsibilities. We spoke candidly about missteps and recalibrations. We shared the guardrails we built after learning something the hard way. We talked about the coalitions we created so leadership did not become isolation.
Growth is not only about what we learn. It is also about what we unlearn.
When we remain inside a single institutional culture for too long, we begin to assume its norms are universal. We measure ourselves against the narrowest room we occupy. We internalize definitions of confidence and credibility that may not be absolute, only familiar.
Changing environments recalibrates that.
What We Carry Forward
Exposure to different cultures and creative expressions broadens the lens. It creates space to reexamine what we have been taught about authority, success, and identity. It invites us to question assumptions we did not realize we were carrying.
Some of the challenges discussed were different from my own. Some I may never encounter. But the resolve I witnessed did not make me want to retreat. It urged me to lean in more deliberately.
To lean into the people closest to me. To lean into the work and community I serve. To lean into the responsibility of being a role model. Showing up with integrity and building support systems around that responsibility is itself progress.
If you want to evolve as a leader, change your reference point. Spend time in rooms where power, creativity, and culture look different than what you are used to. Notice what expands. Notice what falls away. Notice what you no longer feel compelled to prove.
Leadership is not only shaped by where we begin. It is shaped by the rooms we are willing to grow into next.
As I stood on the jetway in Seattle boarding my first leadership fellowship, a woman I had only met once turned around, recognized me, and said she was excited for what was ahead. She told me I was about to meet some of my closest friends and that my life would change. At the time, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Years later, choosing to travel across cities and cultures simply to spend time together, I understand what she meant. Something shifted in those rooms, and I am paying attention to where it continues to lead.
Michelle Maestas Simonsen
Chief Content and Engagement Officer at Classical KING
I work at the intersection of public media, culture, and growth, helping institutions adapt with clarity, purpose, and long-term impact.