You are the light, just dusty

Every morning at 7am, before the boardroom conversations began, a group of women walked down to the beach. They came to watch the sun rise. It sounds like a small ritual, almost incidental to the real work of a leadership retreat. But by the second day, something had shifted. The women who watched the sunrise were sleeping better than the ones who didn’t. Their evenings were calmer. Their mornings were sharper. The retreat hadn’t even reached its main session yet, and already the room was learning its first lesson: clarity begins with attention, not effort.

That lesson set the tone for the inaugural “Executives in Residence” retreat, hosted by Corporate Women in Africa in partnership with the African Institute of Mind as knowledge partner. And it was the exact idea at the heart of the full-day session I facilitated: “Tissue Issue.”

The premise was simple, almost stubbornly so. A room full of accomplished women. A string of hanging light bulbs. A box of ordinary tissues. And one instruction: unpack, wipe clean, see clearly.

The Room as a Mirror

We opened by reframing the room itself as a metaphor for the body. The light bulbs represented vision and insight — every woman’s inherent capacity to see herself and her leadership clearly. The dust that dulled each bulb represented what accumulates over years of performing, proving, and pushing through: the assumptions, the old feedback, the roles we outgrew but kept wearing. And the tissue — soft, ordinary, disposable — was the instrument of clearing it away. Not a dramatic intervention. Not a five-year strategy. Just a small, deliberate act.

Before anyone touched a bulb, we slowed the room down. Executive women rarely enter a space already regulated; they enter still calculating, still analysing. So we began with a short nervous-system down-regulation exercise — naming what could be touched, naming the temperature of the air — to move the group from a cognitive state into a felt, present one. Only then could the real work begin.

Wiping the dust, not performing insight

What made the session different was that we didn’t sit and talk about clarity. We walked to it. Each woman moved physically to a light source, took a tissue, and wiped the dust from a bulb by hand. As the bulb brightened, we asked what the tissue was doing for the glass — and then the harder question: what is the “dust” in your own life right now? What’s been dimming something in you without your full awareness?

From there, the questions deepened, moving through what I call the coaching-psychologist layer: When did you last feel fully lit — visible, undimmed, unapologetic? What have you mistaken for permanent that was actually just dust, gone the moment you paid attention to it? Whose fingerprints are on your bulb — whose expectations or outdated versions of you are you still polishing around instead of removing?

By the time the group reconvened as a circle, lit bulbs overhead, the conversation had turned from insight to ownership. What does the room look like now that it’s clean, that you couldn’t see five minutes ago? What’s one thing in your leadership you’ve been navigating by feel, in the dark, that you’re now willing to actually look at?

The takeaway wasn’t a framework. It was a tissue.

Each woman left with a single tissue in hand — not a workbook, not a slide deck. Written across it: a soft act, a clear choice, a brighter you. The instruction was equally simple: this week, choose one bulb in your actual life — a relationship, a role, a belief about your own capacity — and wipe it clean. One bulb. One week. One breakthrough.

Because here is what a room full of senior women confirmed for me over three days on that beach: insight isn’t rare. It’s just usually covered. Leadership development doesn’t always need another framework. Sometimes it needs permission to notice the dust, and the humility to pick up something as unremarkable as a tissue and use it.

You are the light. You were just dusty.

Four calls to action for Business A.M. readers

1. Start your own “sunrise reset.” Before your next high-stakes meeting or retreat, give your team ten unscheduled minutes outdoors. Regulated nervous systems make better decisions than rushed ones.
2. Name your dust this week. Identify one belief, relationship, or role that has quietly dimmed your leadership clarity — and take one small, deliberate step to address it before month-end.
3. Bring embodied practice into your next leadership session. Trade another seated workshop for one physical, walking exercise. Insight lands differently when the body is involved.
4. Invest in spaces built for women in leadership. Explore partnering with or attending future Corporate Women in Africa and African Institute of Mind programmes — clarity compounds fastest in the right room.

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Joshua Awesome

Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org