Is your leadership style hoarding? The Marie Kondo approach to unlearning identity

Growing up, I was the kid in the house who wanted to throw things away.

Our home was a museum of just in case. The blender from 1987. The ski pants I had outgrown in grade school. Every report card from kindergarten on. My parents had a philosophy, and they said it with conviction: maybe someday, we’ll need it.

I had a counter-proposal. If we haven’t used it in a year, we probably won’t miss it.

They were unconvinced. I was relentless.

Today, my husband and I run our home the same way I campaigned for as a child — deliberately, with very little that doesn’t earn its place. It wasn’t always easy for me to have this mindset. But one particular experience cemented my belief in this approach. When I left my condo in Montreal and moved into a shoebox apartment in New York City, I had to make decisions I thought might genuinely depress me. Chief among them: a walk-in closet full of shoes. Shoes that had traveled with me through so much life. Parties, boardroom negotiations, presentations, family gatherings. I was attached to my shoes. But my apartment only allowed me to keep a handful. I let the rest go. And I’ll admit it, I cried. It was my Sarah Jessica Parker moment because these shoes were not coming to the Big Apple.

Yet what happened next truly surprised me. It didn’t feel like loss. It felt like air.

What I didn’t have language for then but do now is that I wasn’t just clearing out a closet. I was unlearning an identity.

There’s a reason Marie Kondo became a global phenomenon. Her methodology is a radical act of discernment. She asks a deceptively simple question: Does this spark joy? What she’s really asking is: does this belong to the life you’re living, or to the life you thought you’d live, or the person you thought you had to be?

The clutter in our homes is almost always sentimental. We keep things because they represent an identity, a chapter, a version of ourselves we haven’t fully said goodbye to. Clearing them out requires honesty that goes well beyond interior design. It requires unlearning, the deliberate work of examining what we’ve absorbed, what we’ve built ourselves around, and choosing whether it still serves us.

I’ve spent the last decade working with executives and leadership teams, and the same dynamic plays out inside every organization sitting across from me.

Leadership development is treated as an additive exercise. Add a new skill. Add executive presence. Add emotional intelligence. Add, add, add. Layer upon layer, until leaders are walking around carrying strategies and identities and ways of operating that made complete sense once, in a context that no longer exists, for a version of themselves that has long since moved on.

Nobody asks what they should stop carrying.

Unlearning is identity-level work. It asks: who did I have to become to succeed in the environment that shaped me, and does that identity still fit?

I think about this with almost every organization I work with.

The organization that says it wants innovation but has never built the conditions for it. Mistakes are managed, not mined. Failure is tolerated in language and penalized in practice. The governing narrative that safety lives in predictability was written when the environment rewarded consistency. The organization held onto it the way my parents held onto that blender. Just in case.

The organization where accountability flows down from the leader rather than up from the individual. Everyone waits to be told. The leader tells. It feels like control; it functions as dependency. A coaching culture gets announced in an all-hands and then dismantled daily by the very behaviors that built the leader’s career. The identity of the one who knows, who directs, who decides, is the thing that has never been examined.

The organization that celebrates lanes. Functions that execute brilliantly in isolation and struggle to build anything together. Cross-functional collaboration becomes a project management problem, a meeting cadence problem, a tools problem, when the actual problem is a governing narrative that rewards individual domain mastery and treats boundary-crossing as a threat to authority.

These are organizational governing narratives, the accumulated identity of a culture that learned, at some point, what it had to be to survive. They are the institutional equivalent of a walk-in closet that no longer fits the apartment.

Unlearning is the process of putting them down.

Here’s what I know from doing this work: the energy doesn’t lie.

Stuff takes up emotional space. It keeps too many tabs open in your nervous system. Organizations carry the same weight in identities they’ve never examined, the culture that can never admit struggle, the leadership that must always project certainty, the team that performs alignment while feeling none. Maintained at enormous cost. Rarely questioned, because they work. Until they don’t.

The Kondo question for leadership is the same one she applies to a closet: does this still belong to who I’m becoming?

Does this way of leading, this pattern, this identity, belong to the organization we’re trying to build? Or is it a holdover from an earlier chapter, kept in storage because letting it go felt like too much of a risk?

Unlearning is the deliberate edit, the kind that creates space for the identity that’s actually trying to emerge.

My parents eventually came around. Not fully but enough. Enough to notice that the cleared space felt different. More like the home they actually wanted to live in, rather than the one that had accumulated around them.

That’s what I want for every leader reading this.

Before you sign up for the next training, walk through the mental house you’ve built. What in there still serves you? What are you keeping just in case? What have you not used in years, that you’re still carrying because letting it go felt like loss?

The most transformational leaders I know got there by being willing to unlearn who they thought they had to be and discovering that what was underneath had been waiting all along.

Clearing the closet felt like air. So does this. Visit CarolinaCaro.com