For three weeks now I’ve been writing about the Identity-Expression Gap — the distance between who Indian leaders are internally and who shows up in global rooms.

Last week I named what it costs. Today I want to tell you what closing it looks like.

Not as a concept. As something I’ve watched happen, specifically, in coaching sessions with real leaders.

A director at a global technology company — I’ll call him Arvind — had been told, formally and informally, for five years that he needed to “show more executive presence.”

He’d attended the workshops. He’d practised the frameworks. He’d worked on his posture and his pausing and his phrasing.

And in his next performance review, the feedback was identical.

“Show more executive presence.”

When he came to me, he was exhausted. Not by the work. By the performance of the work.

In our first session, I asked him one question.

“Tell me about a conversation in the last three months where you walked away feeling like that was really you.”

He thought for a long time.

Then he described a one-to-one conversation with a junior team member who was struggling. He described how he had sat with the person’s uncertainty without rushing to fix it. How he had asked questions that opened things up rather than closing them down. How he had brought the full weight of his understanding — of the person, the situation, the organisation — into the room.

He was different as he described it. More present. The quality of his attention changed.

I said: “That is your leadership voice. That is the one they’re asking for in the boardroom. They just haven’t seen it yet — because you’ve been performing a different one.”

He looked at me like I’d said something absurd.

“That conversation was informal. It was with a junior. The boardroom is completely different.”

“Is it?” I said. “Or have you decided it has to be?”

That question is where the work begins.

Not with techniques. Not with frameworks. With the specific belief that a leader carries about what leadership communication is supposed to look like — and whether who they are fits inside that belief or outside it.

For Arvind, the belief was: “In high-stakes rooms, I need to communicate like the most senior Western leaders I’ve watched. Everything else is insufficient.”

He’d been carrying that belief for fifteen years. It had made him successful, in the sense that it had kept him safe enough to rise. But it had also built a ceiling, because the version of himself he was presenting was always slightly thinner than the real thing.

What changed for Arvind over six months of coaching was not his vocabulary or his posture or his delivery.

What changed was his relationship to his own authority.

He stopped asking, before he spoke, whether what he was about to say was acceptable. He started asking whether it was true.

He stopped modulating his directness to protect the room. He started trusting that his particular quality of directness — which is warm, and considered, and precise in the way that Indian analytical thinking is precise — was not a liability. It was his most valuable professional asset.

Three months after we ended our engagement, he sent me a message.

“I walked into my leadership team yesterday and something was different. I wasn’t performing. I was just there. And the room responded to it before I said a word. That’s the first time I’ve felt that.”

That is what closing the Identity-Expression Gap looks like.

Not louder. Not more assertive. Not more Western.

More you.

I want to say something directly to Indian leaders reading this.

The dominant advice you’ve received about leadership communication — be more direct, show more confidence, project more executive presence — is not wrong about the destination. It is wrong about the path.

You do not get to executive presence by performing a version of it.

You get there by becoming so grounded in who you actually are that the room has nowhere to go but toward you.

That is the work. It is not quick, and it is not technique. But it is the only work that holds under the kind of pressure senior leadership actually applies.

If these three pieces have landed — if you’ve recognised something in them that you’ve been carrying without a name — I’d like to hear from you.

Not to pitch anything. Just to understand where you are and whether a conversation might be useful.

My Discovery Session is where that conversation begins. Sixty minutes. A precise look at your specific gap. You leave with clarity regardless of whether we work together further.

If that interests you, here is the link.

Next week I’ll be writing about something different.

But this series continues. Because the Indian leader’s voice deserves a much larger room than the one it’s currently in.

I, Archana Parmar, work with Indian leaders and South Asian professionals to close the gap between who they are and who shows up in the room.

www.archanaparmar.com