The Leader You’ve Been Waiting For Is Already Within You

Reem Borrows on wholeness, growing pains, and the book she had to grow into

There is a version of leadership most of us were taught to perform: Stand straighter, Project confidence, Separate the personal from the professional, Bring your best self to work, and leave everything else at the door.

Reem Borrows spent over two decades inside some of the world’s most complex organizations, watching that version of leadership quietly break people. She’s spent the decade since building something different.

Her new book, Unfollow the Leader (Red Thread Books), is an invitation to stop performing leadership and start living it.

The Myth That Costs Us Everything

At the heart of Borrows’ philosophy is a truth that sounds simple until you sit with it: you cannot separate the leader from the human being. “You can’t separate the heart from the mind,” she says. “If you try to, it becomes a very painful journey.”

This is the founding insight behind the Health, Head, Heart framework at the core of her work with Dreem Coaching & Consulting, a model that treats emotional well-being, strategic clarity, and human connection not as separate competencies to be developed in sequence, but as one integrated whole. Neglect any single dimension, and the others begin to fracture. Most leadership models ask you to perform better; this one asks you to become more whole. That distinction, quiet as it sounds, changes everything.

What Pain Is Actually Trying to Tell You

One of the most honest threads in Unfollow the Leader is the one most books avoid entirely: the role of discomfort in genuine growth. Borrows doesn’t romanticize struggle, but she does take it seriously: as information, as invitation, as the very mechanism through which real change becomes possible. “Most people just want to tiptoe through life,” she reflects. “We’re born, and we just try to tiptoe through carefully until we die. But that’s not how things work.”

What she has observed, both in decades of coaching and in her own inner work, is that the instinct to suppress pain, to stay busy, to push through, to outrun the discomfort, often creates deeper suffering. Suppression, she says, leads to stagnation, and stagnation, over time, leads to a kind of quiet disconnection from yourself. The practice she offers instead is deceptively simple: the S.T.OP.. Not avoidance. Not analysis. Just a conscious, courageous stop; the willingness to let the feeling rise, to be honest about what’s underneath it, and to trust that understanding it will not destroy you. “What if every painful situation,” she asks, “was seen as a growing pain?”

That reframe is small in words and vast in practice. Because it transforms suffering from something to escape into something to learn from and transforms the leader from someone managing their outer world into someone genuinely tending to their inner one.

A Book She Had to Grow Into

Unfollow the Leader was six years in the making. Not for lack of material; she had decades of lived experience, frameworks tested across hundreds of clients, and a message she knew the world needed. But because the book kept asking more of her than she had yet become. “I had to go back to it and refine it into the person I had grown into,” she shares. “I had softened. I didn’t speak in absolutes anymore.”

That softening is not common or prized in the current leadership model. But what if the willingness to hold complexity with more grace, to release the rigidity of early certainty, is itself a testament to the capacity of leading? The book became, as she describes it, both mirror and practice. Less something she wrote and more something she channeled, in those quiet hours when the ego steps back and something truer comes forward. “You’re not really writing the book,” she says. “You’re allowing it.”

Published by Red Thread Books, a publishing house devoted to bringing meaningful, values-driven voices into the world, Unfollow the Leader arrives as both a personal and professional offering. It is rich with real-world stories, guided reflection questions at the close of each chapter, and practical tools designed for immediate use. But its deepest gift is something harder to quantify: the permission it gives readers to stop performing and start integrating.

The Crossroads That Keeps Arriving

What Borrows has learned, through her own journey and through walking alongside clients from teenagers on the edge of adulthood to CEOs navigating their next chapter, is that growth doesn’t announce itself on a schedule. It arrives at a crossroads. The only question that ever matters at a crossroads is the same one it’s always been.

Are you ready for the next step?

Not perfect. Not certain. Not finished.

Just willing.

“Everyone has soul corrections,” she says gently. “We all have places we still need to grow from. The question is whether you’re open to working through yours.” Unfollow the Leader doesn’t hand you a formula. It holds up a mirror. And for the reader who is truly ready, the one who has been quietly sensing that something in the old way of leading, living, and striving is no longer enough. It may feel less like reading a book and more like being finally, honestly seen.

TAKE ACTION: Unfollow the Leader by Reem Borrows is available now through Red Thread Books. Explore Reem’s coaching, workshops, and leadership programs at dreem.com.au.