ABOUT LAURI-ANN AINSWORTH
CEO turned
storyteller.
Author. Speaker. Self-leadership Consultant.
Lauri-Ann Ainsworth uses writing and storytelling as tools for self-discovery and self-leadership, helping leaders read their own story and lead from what they find there.
WHAT I KNOW TO BE TRUE
There are two life skills every human being needs and almost none of us were ever taught. Self-discovery and self-leadership. Not as corporate concepts or leadership frameworks but as the most fundamental human capacities there are. The ability to know who you actually are and the ability to live and lead from that knowing.
Children need them. Adults need them. Parents need them. Entrepreneurs need them. Leaders need them. Why? Because children become adults who become parents who become leaders, and at every stage of that journey the same gap follows them: they were never taught how to know themselves, so they perform instead.
They take on the title, the role, the image, and pour everything they have into making the outside match what is expected of them. Somewhere in the doing of that, the real person, the one with the actual gifts and the genuine passions and the specific way of seeing the world that nobody else has, gets set aside. Not gone. Just buried.
The result is a life that looks right and feels hollow. A leadership that is technically competent and personally depleting. A career that makes sense on paper and quietly costs everything. We call it imposter syndrome.
But that is too small a name for it. It is not that we feel like imposters in our roles. It is that we have become so fluent in performing those roles that we have lost the thread back to ourselves. We burn out, not because we worked too hard but, because we worked too hard at being someone we were never quite sure we were.
The answer isn’t another leadership program or personal branding strategy,
it’s learning the two skills we were never taught: Knowing who you are and having the courage
and the tools to lead from that place.
That is what I do. Not just for leaders, though leaders are where I focus now, because leaders who do not know themselves lead organisations full of people who do not know themselves, and the cost of that multiplies outward in ways we can all feel even when we cannot name them.
This work is for every human being. I am starting with the ones who have the most influence. Because when leaders learn to lead themselves well, the people around them learn it too and that’s how it spreads.
Lead Yourself Well.
MY STORY
I grew up in Jamaica knowing exactly what I was going to be. A doctor. Not because someone pushed me toward it, but because in the Jamaica I grew up in, success had a short and very specific list of acceptable shapes: doctor, lawyer, accountant, teacher, pilot. Medicine felt serious and purposeful. It felt like work that left a real mark on the world. So I believed in it wholeheartedly, the way you believe in things when you are young and the culture around you has quietly agreed on what matters.
I was also, without fully appreciating it, exceptionally good with words. Literature came easily to me. Language felt like home. But I did not see that as a gift worth following. Writing was a hobby. It was what people listed on their CVs between their real qualifications. It was not a serious life.
Then a school principal looked at my transcript and said: “you are naturally inclined to do languages and literature. You could be a Nobel Laureate,”
I was furious. I did not yet have the tools to hear what he was actually telling me.
I spent years building and achieving and leading, giving everything I had to external goals and external measures of success, until burnout arrived and stripped all of that away and left me with the most basic question: who am I when I am not performing a version of myself for everyone around me?
What brought me back was not a plan or a programme. It was the page. I started writing the way you write when no one is watching, honestly and without stopping to make it sound good, and something in that process began to give me back what I had lost. My actual strengths. My real values. A way of understanding my own story that I could actually lead from.
THE WORK
Then I led from it. I became CEO of Richard Branson's Centre of Entrepreneurship in the Caribbean and led that organisation through crisis, transition and transformation with self-knowledge as the foundation. For six years I put this belief into practice, developing leaders and building culture from the inside out.
That experience, along with everything the writing practice had already taught me, became my first book: The Self-Love Mindset, published by Wiley. Praised by Holly Branson. Required reading for leaders who are done performing and ready to lead from who they actually are.
What followed were more hard decisions, the kind that are only possible when you know yourself well enough to trust what you know. Decisions I am now proud of because I am living more authentically and more happily than I ever have.
Today I write, speak and work with leaders who are ready to stop performing and start expressing. Through The Self-Written Life, my weekly Substack, through keynote speaking, through executive coaching and workshops, I help leaders read their own story and lead from what they find there.
The tool is writing. The methodology is self-discovery, self-leadership and self-expression. The destination is a life led from the full truth of who you actually are.