You brace for the hard turns.
You do not always brace for the good ones.
Eliza Reid’s surprising good turn came fast. When her husband, a University of Iceland history professor, won the country’s presidency in 2016, Reid was pulled from private life into national—and global—visibility in a compressed window. She served alongside him through two terms and wrote The First Lady Next Door: A Memoir of Iceland, Identity, and Unexpected Adventure.
Her lesson for you is two beats, not one.
First: Rapid upward change still loads your system with uncertainty. Treat the wobble as adaptation, not weakness.
Second: Once you are steadier, presence becomes a skill you practice in the room—not a personality you force.
Your Calendar Changes Before Your Confidence Does
When her husband’s seven-week campaign began, Reid was already running at capacity—four children 8 and under, a stepdaughter, freelance work and the Iceland Writers Retreat about to launch.
Her stress baseline couldn’t really go higher. Her calendar could–and did.
Other people began controlling her time in ways that were new and total. Logistics was where the win first hit.
“Very few people I’m going to tell you say, ‘I’ll look after your four small children for you, no problem,'” she told SUCCESS. “That was just my parents who flew over from Canada to this new country.”
You might recognize this kind of whiplash from a promotion, an acquisition, a viral moment or a family crisis that suddenly makes you the public face of something.
“We all face unexpected moments in life,” she told SUCCESS, “but we also all have lived our lives to a certain extent, that we’ve accumulated a lot of experience that may not, on the surface, directly apply to whatever it is that we think that we’re doing, but when you think about it, actually can really be put to good use.”
SUCCESS Tip: Name three capacities you earned before this win—multitasking, reading rooms, staying calm under noise—and assign each one a job in the new role.
Discomfort After a Win Is a Growth Signal
People assume positive change should feel purely exciting.
Reid agrees but also adds the part most people skip.
Anything uncertain can carry stress, she said, even when the outcome is something you wanted. She tells her own children that nerves before a speech or a trip usually mean the moment is big enough to matter.
“It’s actually really good and really normal to feel uncomfortable about it because that means you’re pushing your comfort zone,” she told SUCCESS. “You should have those butterflies in your stomach. That shows that’s how you grow.”
That tracks with how psychologists talk about resilience: not as a trait you either have or lack, but as adaptable responses under changing demands. The American Psychological Association frames resilience as behaviors, thoughts and actions you can develop—especially when life accelerates.
Reid also flagged the trap that comes with positive shocks specifically: They tempt you to glide. “Maybe then you’re not actually making the most of it,” she said.
SUCCESS Tip: When you feel both grateful and overloaded, label it “transition load,” not failure.
Stay Grounded After the Perks Arrive
If you were promoted yesterday, Reid centers one word: grounded.
“You can easily fly up... with upgrades, airplanes, and you have a driver all of a sudden,” she said. “I think staying grounded is incredibly important.”
Her playbook is portable:
Stay close to people who knew you before the title.
Protect sleep and recovery as nonnegotiable infrastructure, not luxury.
Learn which attention is for you and which is for the position.
She is blunt about the mirage of status. Gifts and flattery, she said, attach to the role. Who you are stays the same underneath.
One compliment she loved hearing was almost comically plain: People told her she seemed normal.
“I am normal,” she would answer. “I’m just a person like, you know, just like you.”
Reid also names a recovery fact most people skip. She is an extrovert who refills around people; her husband is an introvert who refills alone. Either is fine, but the recharge that works for him would empty her, and vice versa.
“I think there’s no right or wrong way to recharge,” she told SUCCESS, “but I think we all need to help recognize for ourselves what it is. Recognize what it is that depletes our batteries faster. And then the best ways to recharge them.”
SUCCESS Tip: This week, book one conversation with someone who does not need a single update on your “journey.” Let them treat you like a person, not a headline.
Taking Up Space Is a Practice, Not a Personality
Here is where Reid’s story turns tactical.
Early on, during receptions at the official residence, she noticed the same small pattern. Guests would shake the president’s hand, buzz with excitement and walk past her—even in her own home.
Nobody meant harm. They were thrilled. There was champagne in the next room.
Still, she said, “This five-foot-six human being with her hand outstretched wasn’t taking up the space that people noticed.”
She realized the fix was behavioral and immediate. She began speaking first—“Hello, welcome”—and lifting her hand into the greeting on purpose.
“There was more that I could contribute,” she shared, reflecting on how that season pushed her to use her voice rather than only play a supporting visual in the story.
That is the bridge from whiplash to leadership: you stabilize enough to choose visibility instead of letting visibility happen to you.
The pattern is also bigger than one residence in Reykjavík. A widely cited KPMG study of 750 executive women one or two steps from the C-suite found that 75% had personally experienced impostor syndrome at some point in their careers, and 81% said they put more pressure on themselves not to fail than men do.
When asked what you should do if you feel overlooked in high-stakes rooms, Reid suggested two moves.
Move 1: Claim the chair you already earned. Walk in like you belong—because you do. “You have a right to be there,” she told SUCCESS. “If you are there, I assume that you haven’t snuck in.”
Move 2: Pull someone else forward. If you know a colleague is sharp and silent, ask them in front of the group. Echo Mary’s idea if Mary said it first and the room missed it. “I really like what Mary just said,” she modeled. “And reiterate them and give them credit for their ideas.”
“I guarantee that if you feel like imposter syndrome, somebody else feels the same,” she said.
Serve the Role Without Disappearing Into It
For Reid, the rule was simple—stay Eliza.
“I really always tried to be me,” she told SUCCESS. “I wanted to serve with dignity... with respect for the office of the head of state of the country, but I always wanted to be Eliza.”
She still deployed “fake it till you make it” where skills lagged—wardrobe, protocol, first state visits—while borrowing expertise from people who knew more than she did.
The Denmark trip is her favorite illustration. Headed into her first state visit as a principal, she was told a respectable spouse needed a handbag and matching gloves for every outfit. It was January. There was no clothing budget, no allowance—it was all her own money. She did not even know where to buy gloves in Iceland.
“I’m thinking, really? Will diplomatic relations be affected if I have a different purse the second day?” she said. “I was very rebellious. I just brought the one handbag, and it seemed to go OK.”
None of which means skipping the prep—only that some of the surface rules turn out to be noise.
“While I’m paddling underwater like the duck,” she said, “nobody needs to see all of that that’s going on. And at the top it looks like it’s smooth.”
She is also clear that impostor chatter shows up even when you did nothing wrong to earn the microphone—and even more so when the microphone arrives through someone else’s win. Her answer: notice the privilege, then use the platform for good rather than self-erasing out of guilt.
That is the same leadership question you face when you inherit a team, a name, a budget or a spotlight you did not build alone.
The One Sentence Reid Used to Say No
Once she stopped trying to do everything, Reid built one filter that organized the entire role.
Someone in the president’s office told her early that the job was “a marathon, not a sprint.” Every cause sounds good in week one. Every invitation feels like the one you cannot decline. You burn out unless you choose what the work is actually for.
So she chose.
“My guiding light became trying to confound outdated roles for female spouses of male heads of state,” she told SUCCESS. “When you have a clear goal, it really helps you decide what you want to take or not take.”
A concrete example: She stopped doing solo events with children unless her husband joined her.
“It’s not because I don’t like children,” she said. “It’s because, on these things, women are so often the ones photographed as caregiving or reading to kids or hugging babies. If my husband is there, too, and he’s also hugging babies—I think we need to see more men in these caregiving roles.”
The translation for you: A “core objective” sentence is not a brand exercise. It is a calendar tool. It tells you which “yes” is on-mission and which “yes” is just flattering.
SUCCESS Tip: Write your one sentence. “In this season, my work is for ___.” Run every meeting request against it for a week.
‘Squeeze the Juice’: Reid’s Case Against Coasting
Positive change can seduce you into glide mode.
Reid chose the opposite.
She knew she could have stayed in a traditional first-spouse lane. She did not judge that path, but it was not hers.
“I really, really wanted to sort of squeeze all the juice out of it that I could,” she said.
She also uses a kitchen metaphor you can steal for your own planning: Keep multiple pots on the stove—projects, relationships, skills—so when one boils first, you notice and tend it.
“Fate or God or whatever ethereal thing that you want to believe in might choose which pot’s going to boil first,” she said. “But we have to put the water in the pots to begin with.”
SUCCESS Tip: Pick one “juice” goal for this season of visibility—mentorship, advocacy, revenue, craft—and schedule it the way you would schedule a client. Otherwise the urgent will eat the meaningful.
Courage Is a Practice, Not a Poster
Reid often returns to Iceland’s Women’s Day Off legacy, and the chorus that has become a national refrain: I dare. I can. I will.
Daring, she told SUCCESS, is the piece about pushing your comfort zone on purpose.
She pairs that with a story she tells in the book: a college debate where she bombed so badly she wanted the ground to swallow her. Decades later, she checked with people who were there. They barely remembered.
“The sun came up the next morning and... nothing happened to me,” she said. “Sometimes a lot of the sort of what-if doomsday scenarios are worse in our minds than they are elsewhere.”
Then, she lands where most high-performers need landing: You do not have to “change the world” to justify showing up.
“I didn’t change the world as first lady,” she said. “I just did my part. And imagine if every single person did their part, did just one or two little things every day.”
Chris Hadfield—astronaut, engineer, author—writes something compatible that Reid places at the front of her memoir:
“Each of us needs to imagine something that can take us beyond where we are now, in a direction that we want to go, and be part of making that happen. To be a deliberate part of change.”
Reid’s version for busy leaders is no less serious: stack repeatable parts until they compound.
Inspiration Spreads as Fast as Hate
After years of travel and ceremony, Reid said what stuck was not cynicism.
“Most people are good people,” she told SUCCESS. She named volunteers, neighbors, quiet helpers—evidence you can collect in your own town.
She turned next to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa’s work on how information moves online. Studies show lies can outrun the truth, but Ressa’s research, Reid noted, also maps a lane the algorithms rarely sell you on: Inspiration spreads as fast as hate.
For Reid, that second line is not soft optimism. It lines up with what she took from years on the road. If you lead anything—a team, a class, a podcast, a feed—the most useful thing you can model is intentional, humanizing speech because the upside of doing that scales the same way the downside of not doing it scales.
Looking back from the first stretch of life after the presidency, Reid told SUCCESS about a scene that doubles as a mission statement for anyone exiting a peak season. The night her husband’s term ended, the family planned to celebrate with an exceptional bottle of wine a prince had once given them—the kind you save for a moment big enough to deserve it. They had Chinese takeout. There was a bare bulb hanging over the table because the new house was not unpacked. They went to open the bottle.
It was corked.
“It’s okay,” she told SUCCESS, walking through the moment. “The sun’s going to come up tomorrow.”
The phrase she leaves you with came from her husband, originally—and she said she is reluctant to quote him often, having spent years finding her own voice. But this one she keeps. The future, he said when announcing his run, is the beautiful uncertainty of life. Not because uncertainty is easy. Because the next chapter asks you to stay curious instead of brittle.
Your 7-Day Reset: From Whiplash to Presence
Day 1: Write one sentence: “What I refuse to lose in this win is ___.”
Day 2: Block recovery like a meeting—sleep, walk, prayer, therapy, whatever actually fills your tank.
Day 3: Message two friends who knew you before the title. No career recap required.
Day 4: In one high-stakes room, open your mouth first once—greeting, question or opinion.
Day 5: Amplify one overlooked colleague in front of others, with specifics.
Day 6: Do one imperfect visible act you have been avoiding (draft, post, pitch).
Day 7: Pair your Day 1 line with a guiding-light filter—one sentence on what this season of visibility is actually for (the calendar test Reid used to decide what to take or skip). Write down one beautiful uncertainty you do not control but are willing to stay open to next month, and one next-week action that puts water in the pot so you can tend it when it boils. Close by rereading both sentences aloud—your nonnegotiable identity plus your mission filter for every new yes.
