What Alysa Liu's Olympic Gold Teaches Us About Leading on Your Own Terms

By Alissa Hsu Lynch  |  Leadership & Careers

I watched Alysa Liu win Olympic gold in Milan on February 19th and couldn't stop thinking about her for days. Not just because the performance was extraordinary, technically precise and visibly joyful in equal measure. But because the story behind it is one of the most compelling leadership narratives I've seen in a long time, and it has almost nothing to do with skating.

Liu became the first American woman to claim Olympic gold in figure skating in 24 years, surging from third place after the short program to win the free skate in front of a roaring crowd at the Milano Ice Skating Arena. The performance earned her a career-best total of 226.79 points. But what stayed with me wasn't the score. It was what she said afterward: "I really don't feel nervous. I don't feel the pressure. There's nothing holding me down or holding me back."

That kind of freedom doesn't happen by accident. And for leaders watching from the sidelines, it holds a lesson worth sitting with.

When Stepping Away Is the Bravest Move

At 16, Alysa Liu was already a prodigy. She had U.S. titles, world records, and the kind of technical virtuosity that coaches spend careers cultivating. She was also, by her own account, miserable. After placing sixth at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, she walked away from the sport entirely, saying it had started to feel like a job. "I hated skating," she told reporters at the 2026 U.S. Championships. She needed something to change.

What she did next reads like a sabbatical playbook. She enrolled at UCLA as a psychology student. She trekked to Everest Base Camp. She lived, for the first time, without a competition schedule telling her who to be. Research from Harvard Business School's Sabbatical Project, which interviewed hundreds of high performers who stepped away from careers, found that this kind of intentional pause is often transformative, not just restorative. The clarity that comes from stepping out of a demanding performance context doesn't arrive during vacation. It arrives when you've genuinely stopped performing for long enough to hear your own thinking.

That's what Liu gave herself. And nearly two years later, she returned to the ice because she wanted to. Not because a federation needed her, not because a sponsorship depended on it. Because she had rediscovered what she actually loved about skating, stripped of every external reason to do it.

Autonomy as a Performance Variable

What changed when Liu came back wasn't her technical ability. She is, and always was, one of the most gifted figure skaters in the world. What changed was who was making the decisions. She chose her coaches. She chose her music, skating to the late Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park Suite" in the free skate that won her gold. She set her schedule. She defined what success looked like.

This is not a soft distinction. Harvard Business Review's landmark research on motivation, drawing on Frederick Herzberg's foundational work, established that the factors driving genuine, sustained performance are intrinsic: achievement, meaningful work, responsibility, and growth. External pressure, titles, incentives, and expectations, can produce compliance. They can't produce the quality of presence Liu demonstrated in Milan.

Three-time Olympic champion Aly Raisman, watching Liu skate from the sidelines, put it plainly: "Allowing athletes to take control, whether that means choosing their own music and costumes or telling a coach they're not feeling right that day, does not diminish the dream. It protects it."

That observation carries directly into how organizations work. The highest-performing individuals, like the highest-performing athletes, are not those who've been most tightly managed. They're the ones who've been given enough agency to bring genuine commitment to what they're doing, rather than strategic compliance.

The Choreographer's Mindset

There's a meaningful difference between performing someone else's choreography and designing your own. Liu's gold medal performance was notable not just for its technical execution but for the evident sense that every choice in that program, the music, the costuming, the emotional arc, was hers. She wasn't executing a plan handed down from above. She was expressing something she had authored.

This is the transition that defines the most consequential phase of any leader's career: the move from executing someone else's strategy to authoring your own. It requires the same thing Liu's comeback required: a willingness to stop performing for the scoreboard long enough to ask what you actually believe, what you want to build, and what kind of leader you want to be.

HBR research on sabbaticals and career breaks consistently finds that the most disorienting part of stepping away is not the absence of work. It's the absence of the identity that work provides. High performers are often better at achieving within systems than examining them. The pause forces that examination. Liu came back from hers knowing exactly who she was as a skater, and exactly why she wanted to compete. That clarity is what you saw on the ice.

What This Means Beyond the Rink

Liu's story is striking partly because elite athletics makes the stakes visible and the outcomes legible. But the underlying dynamic plays out constantly in executive careers, often without the same clarity of feedback.

Consider how many senior leaders are performing for external reasons: the board's expectations, the analyst community's narrative, the benchmark against a predecessor, the need to be seen as decisive, or innovative, or steady, or whatever the moment demands. This is not the same thing as leading from conviction. And over time, the gap between the performance and the person tends to show, in the quality of decisions, the health of team culture, and the kind of presence a leader brings into a room.

HBR's research on career transitions describes the period between an old chapter and a new one as uncomfortable precisely because it disrupts identity, not just income. That discomfort, properly inhabited, is generative. It's where the real questions live. Liu sat with hers at Everest Base Camp and in a UCLA psychology classroom. The answers she found were not academic. They were operational. They changed how she skated.

The parallel for leaders is not to recommend that everyone take two years off. It's to ask what conditions would need to change for you to do your best work because you want to do it, rather than because you feel you have to. That question, asked honestly, is often the most productive leadership development exercise available.

Three Questions Worth Sitting With

• Who designed the choreography you're currently performing? If most of your decisions are shaped by external expectations rather than your own convictions, the gap is worth examining. The best performances, on ice and in boardrooms, come from people who have authored their own approach.
• When did you last step back far enough to hear your own thinking? Research on sabbaticals finds that the psychological benefits, reduced stress, renewed creativity, and clearer sense of purpose, persist long after the break itself ends. The pause is not the absence of productivity. It's often the precondition for it.
• What would you do differently if the outcome were already decided? Liu described herself, during her Olympic free skate, as simply wanting to share her skating with the audience. She wasn't performing to win. She was performing because she loved it. The medal followed. This sequencing is not incidental.

Watching Alysa Liu skate in Milan, I saw something I recognize from the dance world and from the best leaders I've encountered in business. There is a particular quality of presence that comes from working on your own terms, from choosing the music, setting the stage, and showing up because you genuinely want to be there. It's unmistakable when you see it. And it's almost impossible to manufacture.

The work is figuring out how to create the conditions for that quality in yourself, whatever it takes to get there.

Congratulations, Alysa. For the gold, yes. But more for showing what it looks like to choreograph your own dance.

Keep dancing.