Mary Senkowska

The Internal Revolution: Why Leadership Excellence Starts with the Mind

A short welcome to, what I hope, will evolve into your favorite space where you get challenged. Establish focus and learn to master your thoughts as a leader of the future, and a human being.

What You'll Find On The Insights Page

Purpose-Driven Performance

The psychology of meaning-making in leadership roles, exploring how alignment between personal values and professional responsibilities drives sustainable success and allows to create sustained employee engagement across different generations.

Decision-Making Science

Research-backed insights on how your brain processes complex choices under pressure or uncertainty, and practical frameworks to optimize your cognitive performance in high-stakes situations.

Future-Ready Leadership

Analysis of emerging leadership challenges in AI-integrated environments, hybrid team management, and cross-generational dynamics, backed by current research and global case studies.

Neuroleadership Strategies

Evidence-based approaches to building executive presence, managing team dynamics, and creating sustainable organizational change through understanding of brain function.

Career Transition Psychology

Scientific insights into how professionals successfully navigate career pivots, promotions, and leadership transitions—with practical applications you can implement immediately.

The Internal Revolution: Why Leadership Excellence Starts with the Mind

Have you ever been in a situation when in your head something makes perfect sense but the second you open your mouth it comes out completely twisted? That’s how I feel about the question: Who are you.

On a surface level, we all know, sure. But have you ever sat still in that question? I have, and I’m telling you, I think it’s dangerous —once you realize things about yourself, those could be good or bad ones, you can’t simply unrealize them.

The contradictions co-existing within oneself are often hard to recognize and even more so, to accept. Maybe that’s why, this is one of the quotes that has stuck with me over the years...
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman

Why should you, then, even open that door? 

For most of my career, each year felt like 3. It took living in 8, working in 40+ countries across 4 continents, collaborating with 90+ nationalities, shaping digital transformations when AI was still perceived as a figment of the far future, and addressing the (post-)pandemic global mental health crisis to understand that the process to leadership excellence is internal.

Think about it, if everything depends on our mind, you can’t afford to let it be impeded by unmanaged emotions, nor can you let your leaders operate from that state of mind. It creates stress and anxiety, which, in turn, decreases your capacity for decision-making, innovative thinking, adaptability, and, what’s probably the worst of them all, distracts you from your Purpose. And, as many studies have proved in the recent years, Purpose is the backbone of personal fulfillment and organization’s bottom line.

The causes of, and conditions for, organizational health are always changing, yet your leaders’ capacity for strategic decision-making, allocating resources, and leading their teams to high performance, short, and long term will always be a part of that.

In large transformations, companies that embedded organizational-health investments and initiatives in their change programs across an 18-month period saw 35 percent higher TSR than companies that did not invest in health. Best part of it? It doesn’t take much to get started. If that’s something your organization, or you personally could benefit from, contact me through Linkedin or email. Let’s talk.

I believe the future of leadership is about a leader’s capability to intentionally facilitate an employee’s journey to Purpose. The fewer limitations technology and internationalization pose, the more important the mental muscles (aka soft skills), self-regulation, and self-awareness are.

1. Why to research and publish? Why now?

In 2023, after 10 years, I have returned to my home country. Both professionally and personally, I felt exhausted and overwhelmed. Yet another change, that in its specificity, created a unique environment to critically evaluate learnings from these 10 years. Returning to a place you supposedly should call home turned out to feel equally foreign as did the Middle East, Asia, or the US for me, with this little difference that everyone expected me to be more accustomed to. 

The nature of my work is to help leaders see thought patterns, so naturally, I started rigorously observing and documenting my own. First and foremost, for personal curiosity, I soon realized that the process I have been going through massively complimented the research I was doing for the book I had contracted shortly before my return.

It’s been 18 months of close study, fighting my own demons, cross-referencing the findings with theoretical knowledge and experience of going through continuous change over the past 10 years to finally decide that it’s time to share.

A year to my 30th birthday, from a small village and an upbringing in an incredibly homogeneous, traditional society, through work with +90 nationalities, serial entrepreneurship, corporate ladder climbing phase, and the United Nations, to the most dreamt about baby—writing. 

Looking at organizational culture change demands across continents, leadership challenges, and the need to acknowledge that the nature of skill development requires an urgent shift, I want to build a virtual (for now) leadership excellence center that focuses on the future of talent development and prepares leaders to develop organizations as healthy organisms rather than static structures. Success is not the line to cross, it’s a system to improve and a human being is the most complex system of them all.

2. What kind of community we are building here?

Executives, leaders-to-be, people, who want to simply do better. A lot of what I will be sharing is attempting to blur the line between professional and personal. We’ll get into identity, journey of purpose and fulfillment, thought patterns that subconsciously guide our perceptions, emotions that impact our capability for truly strategic decision-making, and inner workings of adaptability. If that sounds interesting, and you commit to meeting each idea with an open mind, even if just for the sake of mental exercise, this is your place to be.

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I hope the content will spark discussions, questions, and thoughts that will actively push you to deepen your self-awareness. 

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Each month, I will bring one of the phenomenal leaders that I have met during my career to weigh in on some of these topics and share their experiences on the journey to leadership excellence. 

At the end of each article, I will share the topic of the following piece, so that if you feel you have something unique to share, you can reach out to me directly. I hope that this way, we will be able to capture and challenge the way we experience leadership around the world, above all divisions. 

3. Logistics 

It’s free, I am passionate about deepening our understanding of the brain, self-awareness, and human systems, and it’s an honor for me to be able to share with you alongside my professional work and book writing. I hope it will give you inspiration to share too.

You don’t become a master because you are able to retain the knowledge. You become a master because you’re able to release it.
  • It’s meant to challenge your perspective and stretch the standard frame you’ve experienced leadership thus far. Share your observations, ask questions, reflect, and don’t hate.
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