Mind Games, Queenings & Strategic Survival: What Power Looks Like When You’re Being Watched
Power doesn’t always look like a podium.
Sometimes, it looks like a woman smiling in a room that hopes she flinches first.
I’ve been watching Mind Games: Queenings—not just as a consumer of pop culture, but as a student of leadership. Because beneath the production design and fashion, there’s something eerily familiar to anyone who’s ever had to lead while being underestimated: this show is a mirror.
A mirror for women who’ve had to strategize their voice.
For leaders of color who’ve had to play chess in boardrooms built for checkers.
For professionals who’ve had to mask authenticity just to make it to the next meeting.
What Queenings reveals—subtly and boldly—is this:
Leadership is not just about presence. It’s about performance.
Not performativity for show, but performance for survival.
Every Move is a Message
In Queenings, each contestant walks into a space already aware that their margin for error is slim. That’s not fiction. That’s the lived experience of many leaders navigating workplaces where optics carry more weight than outcomes.
A smile becomes diplomacy.
A pause becomes strategy.
An outfit becomes armor.
A silence becomes resistance.
Leadership, in these contexts, isn’t just about influence—it’s about interpretation. About being read correctly. About holding your composure while managing the weight of double standards.
The Strategic Femininity Blueprint
What struck me most about Queenings was how many of the women on the show wielded their femininity—not as softness, but as sharpness. As signal. As disarming truth.
It’s a leadership style that many Black and Brown women understand intuitively:
Show strength, but not too much.
Be kind, but never look naive.
Be assertive, but not “angry.”
Lead with excellence, but know it will still be questioned.
This is not paranoia. This is patterned reality.
And when you know the rules are uneven, your survival becomes strategy.
That’s not manipulation. That’s resilience under pressure.
Leadership Isn’t Neutral. It Never Has Been.
We are still asking women—especially women of color, queer leaders, and those from historically excluded identities—to navigate leadership under a different set of rules. One where being read as “too confident” can cost you credibility, and “not confident enough” can cost you the room.
In Queenings, you see this dynamic play out visually and viscerally. But in real life? It plays out in:
Performance reviews.
Boardroom dynamics.
Interview panels.
Executive search committees.
The question isn’t “are you qualified?”—it’s “are you palatable?”
What the Show Doesn’t Say Out Loud—But We Know to Be True
What makes Mind Games: Queenings powerful isn’t just the drama. It’s the fact that these women are navigating an emotional and strategic terrain that many of us navigate daily—but often invisibly.
They’re not just competing. They’re interpreting, adapting, and resisting all at once.
They’re not just performing. They’re surviving systems that often weren’t built with them in mind.
And yet, they do it with brilliance. With elegance. With unspoken calculation.
That’s not fake. That’s strategic leadership under pressure.
ACCESS Point:
Leadership is a game—but it shouldn’t require you to lose yourself just to win.
If your strategy is always about being less threatening, more agreeable, or more “aligned” with an outdated model of professionalism, you haven’t been leading—you’ve been managing your survival.
Real leadership? It’s about shifting the terms of the game—not just mastering them.