When we talk about growth, we tend to picture addition—new skills, new systems, new habits. But often, real growth begins with subtraction. With letting go of what once worked but no longer serves.
That was the quiet theme running through a recent conversation I had with four women leaders from across Central and Eastern Europe, part of the She’s Next Hackathon 2025 Grand Finale. Each is from a different country, sector, and generation, yet all orbit around the same truth: success today demands unlearning yesterday’s rules.
We began with a question that made a few people smile in recognition: What are the myths of success we need to outgrow?
Tanja Sternbauer, founder of The Female Factor and one of Austria’s Top 100 Most Influential Business Women, admitted with a laugh, “I’m definitely a perfectionist. I’ve always gone the extra mile.” In the early years of building her company, that obsession with detail paid off. “We over-invested. We wanted to do things better than others — that made us stand out.” But over time, she said, that same drive became a trap. “It’s much nicer if you don’t have to be the perfectionist leading a company. You can do more because you’re not on every single detail.”
It was a pattern others recognised instantly. Cristina Doros, Visa’s Regional Manager for Central Asia, reflected: “Being a perfectionist fuelled my growth — it made me deliver over expectations.” But she added, “There’s a flip side. It can be overwhelming. You kill yourself over mistakes. You have to give yourself the right to be wrong.”
‘We had to be excellent in everything’
That idea—permission to be imperfect—struck a chord. In a region where generations grew up hearing that failure wasn’t an option, unlearning that message takes courage. Nikica Mojsoska Blazhevski, an economist and empowerment advocate from North Macedonia, put it plainly: “The family and society defined for us what success meant—especially for women. We had to be excellent in everything: at school, at work, at home. Failure was not accepted.”
She smiled, then added, “Even today, I sometimes ask myself, ‘Do I deserve this?’ And then I remind myself: yes, I worked hard, and I do.”
Milena Argirovic, country head at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, has spent three decades in the corporate world—much of it in male-dominated environments. “I used to hire people who were just like me—perfectionists, gold-medal winners. Over the years I realised that was wrong. We don’t need everyone to be perfect. We need people who complement each other.” Her son, she said, taught her a lesson that rewired her thinking: “He told me, ‘If it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean it’s good.’ That was totally different from how I was raised.”
It’s remarkable how a single sentence can undo a lifetime of programming.
What all four women described wasn’t a rejection of ambition—it was a redefinition of it. A shift from proving to evolving. From over-performing to trusting. From chasing every standard to setting your own.
Knowing what to stop
And perhaps that’s the real art of leadership today—not doing more, but knowing what to stop doing. Letting go of the habits that once protected us but now quietly hold us back: over-preparing, over-compensating, over-controlling.
We ended the session with a reflection from Cristina Doros that lingered with me: “The most important thing we can teach the next generation is the right to choose. Whether you want to lead a company or run a household — both are success, if they make you happy.”
That might be the most radical unlearning of all.
Because the future doesn’t need more perfect leaders. It needs freer ones — people who know that growth isn’t always about holding tighter, but about finally learning how to let go.
Photo: Dreamstime.
