I came to this book sideways. A colleague mentioned it in passing, as she had completed Mohr’s online programme and said it gave her concrete tools for working with the inner critic, impostor syndrome and the unassertive communication patterns she kept seeing in the women around her. That made me curious, so I started reading.

Tara Mohr is a coach and leadership educator who developed a programme called Playing Big, which she ran with groups of women for several years before writing the book. The material grows out of that practice and reads as practice-led: observations from coaching work, connected with research and other frameworks that help explain them.

What I took from it, and what I think is worth taking, is below, along with a few places where I would want more.

The inner critic is not a truth-teller

Mohr opens with the inner critic, which is where she believes the work has to start. It is difficult to act on anything else while every idea is met with some version of “you’re not ready.”

She maps eleven characteristics of the inner critic’s voice: harsh and binary, irrational but persistent, a broken record that rehashes the same core narratives for decades, and often the echo of a critical person from earlier in life. The characteristic I find most useful in practice is what she calls the one-two punch, a pattern similar to the “second arrow” in Buddhist psychology. The critic first attacks, then shames you for having the thought: “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” followed a moment later by, “And what’s wrong with you? Everyone else seems fine.” Two blows at once.

The useful move is distinguishing the inner critic from realistic thinking. The critic makes definite pronouncements. Realistic thinking asks questions. The critic escalates to worst-case scenarios; realistic thinking stays interested in actual evidence. The critic is repetitive; realistic thinking can move somewhere.

Mohr treats the inner critic as a protective voice rather than a reliable account of reality. Its concern is emotional safety, not accuracy. Once you see that distinction, there is little value in arguing with it. A better question is what it believes it is protecting you from.

I have found this reframe useful in coaching. Clients who have spent years trying to overcome their self-doubt can ask: What is this voice trying to protect? What does it think will happen if I take this step? The critic then becomes information about a perceived threat rather than an obstacle that has to be defeated.

Two kinds of fear

Following Rabbi Alan Lew’s Be Still and Get Going, Mohr uses two Hebrew terms to distinguish between different experiences of fear.

Pachad is projected or imagined fear: the fear of worst-case scenarios that have not happened and may never happen. Yirah refers to the feeling of inhabiting a larger space than you are used to, suddenly having access to more energy than before, or being in the presence of something that matters.

When a client says, “I’m terrified” about something they want to do - a public talk, a difficult conversation or a career move they have been circling for two years - the coaching question is: which fear is this?

Pachad calls for specific tools: name it, return to the present moment, examine the actual probability and follow the fear to its end point. Yirah calls for a different response. Rather than treating the feeling as proof of danger, you can recognise that it may be connected to the importance or unfamiliar scale of what you are about to do. It does not prove that the decision is right, but neither does it automatically mean that you should retreat.

Many clients have never had a vocabulary for this second kind of fear. They feel the heightened arousal that comes with doing something that matters - the adrenaline, the slight quiver, the sense of being at an edge - and interpret it only as a warning. The physical sensation may not change when they call it yirah, but their relationship to it sometimes does.

Mohr offers fifteen tools for working with pachad, grouped by modality: heart-based approaches such as connecting with the inner mentor, inviting curiosity and returning to purpose; cognitive tools such as labelling the emotion, analysing actual probability and following the fear to its end point; and somatic tools involving breath, body scanning, movement and calming imagery. The range is useful because different people need different ways into the same work.

What school taught us that doesn't help

This is the chapter I would give to anyone designing a women’s leadership programme and wondering why the usual approach is not producing much movement.

Mohr argues that school cultivates a particular set of skills: adapting to authority figures, preparing thoroughly before acting, absorbing knowledge from outside rather than trusting what you already know, and doing excellent work quietly rather than making it visible.

These skills may have helped high-achieving women earn their gold stars, and they remain useful in many situations. They become limiting when they are the only available way of operating.

Senior leadership requires more than preparation. It also requires improvising in situations you could not have prepared for. Influencing authority, and sometimes challenging it directly, matters alongside adapting to it. Excellent work does not move very far if nobody knows it is happening. School rarely asks us to make our work visible; sometimes it implicitly discourages it.

The case Mohr uses is Jane, who spent four years studying the nonprofit sector before applying for a role in it. It is one of the sharpest illustrations of what overpreparing can cost: a great deal of time and the accumulation of evidence, year after year, that you are still not ready. Preparation becomes a way of postponing the moment when you have to find out.

I see this pattern frequently in executive coaching, particularly among women who have been identified as high potential for years but continue to find reasons not to apply for the next role. In many of these cases, competence is not the main issue. The difficulty lies in acting before certainty arrives, and allowing action itself to produce information.

Six ways we hide, and one way we don't

Chapter six is a loving calling-out. Mohr describes six strategies women may use to delay playing bigger while remaining convinced that they are moving forward responsibly.

“This before that” refers to false sequencing beliefs: I cannot teach the course until I have a website. I cannot contact that executive until I have clarified my next career step. The sequence sounds logical until someone asks whether there is any evidence that it is actually necessary.

Hannah, one of Mohr’s clients, had spent two years taking Japanese language classes before she felt ready to pursue a job in Japan. She then discovered that English-speaking professionals in her field were actively sought there.

“Designing at the whiteboard” is the pattern I see most often in practice. You work on something alone, refine the proposal, revise the framework and perfect the article without putting it in front of the people it is intended for. The whiteboard feels like diligent work. It protects you from discovering that what you have built may not land as you expected, but it also prevents you from finding out that it might.

The other patterns include overcomplicating and endlessly polishing; collecting and curating other people’s ideas instead of claiming your own; omitting your story from your professional positioning; and pursuing another credential in place of the action you are avoiding.

Mohr’s answer to these patterns is a leap. She defines a leap as a simple action, completed within one or two weeks, that puts you in contact with the people you want to reach and has a learning question at its centre. It should create some adrenaline and produce real information. Under this definition, another plan or training course does not qualify.

The warmth-competence bind

The communication chapter is probably the most immediately usable part of the book for anyone facilitating leadership development.

Mohr identifies ten speech habits that can weaken what a speaker is trying to say: hedges such as “just,” “actually” and “kind of”; unnecessary apologies; uptalk; ending statements with “Does that make sense?”; and substituting a question for a statement when you have a position but do not want to claim it. She includes before-and-after email examples that could be used directly in training.

What makes the chapter more useful than many treatments of the subject is its structural framing. Mohr argues that women sometimes use these habits because they hear and mirror how other women speak, but also because directness can carry a social cost.

Research by Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy, Peter Glick and their colleagues identifies warmth and competence as two central dimensions through which people perceive others and social groups. Women in leadership can face pressure to demonstrate both, while direct or counter-stereotypical behaviour may be judged differently depending on who displays it.

This does not mean that all hedging is weak or that women should remove every qualifier from their speech. Hedges can communicate uncertainty, care, politeness or nuance. The more useful question is whether the language reflects what the speaker actually means. If you have a clear position but repeatedly present it as an apology or tentative question, the language may be working against you.

Mohr’s solution is not to drop warmth. She suggests signalling warmth and competence through different behaviours. Drawing on Gottman’s idea of “bids for connection,” she points to small talk at the beginning of a meeting, genuine curiosity about a colleague’s work or an appropriate joke as ways of creating connection alongside professional authority. Gottman developed this idea in the context of relationships, so its application to organisational life is an extension rather than direct evidence about workplace communication.

Callings and the signals we ignore

Mohr defines a calling as a longing to address a particular need in the world. It is not simply a career goal or passion project, but a sense that “this piece of what is missing has something to do with me.”

She describes eight possible markers. An important one is resistance: part of you wants to run in the other direction. People often expect to recognise a calling by how good it feels. Mohr argues that we may resist callings, sometimes for years, because they require capacities we have not yet developed.

You may not yet have the courage, comfort with conflict or patience that the work requires. In Mohr’s view, this does not necessarily mean the calling is mistaken. You may develop those capacities by beginning the work.

Two other markers belong together: you do not yet have everything you need, and you are not yet the person you would need to become. Mohr presents both as part of the process rather than reasons to wait until you feel completely ready.

Where I'd want to go further

The book works mainly at the level of individual psychology. This is a deliberate choice - Mohr is clear that she is addressing the internal legacy of inequality rather than the external structures.

For coaches working inside organisations, the distinction can become complicated quickly. A woman who is cautious about speaking in a particular team or board may not be playing small. She may be reading the context accurately. The tools can help with the inner work, but they do not tell you which kind of situation you are in.

There is also a developmental question. Some clients can observe their protective patterns relatively quickly, while others continue to repeat the same exercises without gaining much distance from them. Kegan’s subject-object framework offers one possible lens for understanding these differences: what one person can examine as an object of reflection may still organise another person’s experience from the inside. The book does not explore these differences or what they may mean for how accessible the tools are to different people.

The inner mentor visualisation will not be equally accessible or helpful to everyone. For some people, particularly those working under sustained threat or carrying significant distress, imagining a future self may feel remote or unsettling rather than supportive. Coaches need to use judgement rather than assuming that a visualisation is automatically benign or useful.

The callings chapter also presupposes a degree of material stability. For someone facing redundancy or working in a highly constrained institutional role, the language of callings and playing big may belong to a different set of circumstances. This matters for coaches working with people across a wide range of financial and professional realities.

What I use most

The inner mentor. Mohr presents this as a visualisation involving an imagined older, wiser version of yourself. In practice, I use it as a way for clients to connect with a preferred future and locate their own knowledge rather than continually importing direction from outside. Much of what passes for mentoring can preserve dependency. The inner mentor exercise, when it works for the client, can do the opposite.

The hiding strategies. The whiteboard is a comfortable place, and I notice it in my own work as much as in my clients’. The endless revision, the additional credential, the waiting until the idea is fully formed before allowing anyone else to see it. Mohr is right that these can be sophisticated protective strategies rather than laziness. Once named, they are harder to continue without noticing.

Pachad and yirah. When a client says, “I’m scared” about something they genuinely want, asking which kind of fear is operating changes what we explore next. Yirah does not necessarily need to be reduced or managed. Sometimes it needs to be recognised for what it is.

If I were recommending the book to a client, I would suggest the inner critic and inner mentor chapters first, because much of the rest of the book builds on that work. Then the fear chapter. For anyone navigating a transition or circling something they keep talking themselves out of, I would add the callings chapter.

It is a book written for women and developed from Mohr’s work with women. Some of it would need reframing for mixed or male groups. Several ideas nevertheless travel beyond the audience for which the book was written: treating the inner critic as a protective voice rather than a truth-teller; recognising that fear can mean more than danger; and naming the sophisticated strategies people use to delay action.

Tara Mohr, Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Mission, Your Message. Gotham Books / Penguin, 2014. Approximately 270 pages.