28. Feminine Leadership: How To Lead With Authenticity and Confidence
Have you ever heard the quote, “Trying to be a man is a waste of a woman?” In this episode, we explore what feminine leadership can look like in today’s world. Gone are the days of trying to fit into a masculine mold of what a leader is supposed to look like. It's time to embrace our unique feminine strengths and lead from a place of authenticity.
We are seeing a reckoning with more women in leadership positions, but there's also a call for a different way of leading that incorporates compassion, empathy, and work-life balance. But it's not always easy to break free from the masculine hustle mentality and perfectionism that has historically defined success.
Join us this week as we dive into the two key leadership traits you need to embody if you want to step into your power as a feminine leader. Whether you're leading a team at work or simply leading yourself through life, this episode is full of valuable tools and perspectives to help you lead with confidence as you stay true to your values.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why trying to lead like a man is a waste of your unique talents as a woman.
How to identify and lead from your personal values, even when they conflict with external expectations.
The importance of overcoming your fear of failure in order to take risks and reach new levels of success.
Why success and failure actually go hand in hand, and how to reframe failure as a stepping stone to growth.
How to practice self-leadership and tune into your own needs and desires as you navigate your leadership journey.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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How The World’s Most Powerful Women Are Transforming the Healthcare Industry – Forbes
Why the Future of Leadership is Fiercely Feminine and How to Embrace it Right Now – CEO Magazine
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
Full Episode Transcript:
Kelle: Have you ever heard the quote, trying to be a man is a waste of a woman?
Nina: I mean, mic drop.
Kelle: Yeah, that’s where we’re going today. I don’t think we need to give too much more background here, what do you think, Nina?
Nina: No, you ready?
Kelle: Let’s go. This is Ambitious-Ish.
Burnout? Check. Daily overwhelm? Check. Resentment rash, stress, and a complete lack of well-being? Check, check, check! You’re not alone. We’re your hosts, Kelle & Nina, and we are here to help you feel calm, balanced, and empowered so you can redefine success, make choices that feel authentic, and ACTUALLY enjoy the life you work so hard to create. You ready? Let’s go.
Kelle: Hey, I’m Kelle.
Nina: And I’m Nina.
Kelle: When you think of women leaders, who stands out for you?
Nina: I mean, there’s Kamala, Oprah, Sarah Blakely. We love Sarah, right, Kelle? Taylor Swift.
Kelle: Absolutely, she’s so cool. All of those and I have another. I just read an article, actually, I didn’t just read the article, it was a few months back, about Karen Lynch, the CEO of CVS. You know, access to good medical care has been top of my mind lately. And she’s one of those leaders that truly is making change in the healthcare sector by bringing in things like innovation and compassion and empathy, both in the company she’s running and into the conversation with the consumer. So, it’s an amazing article. I’ll link that in the show notes.
And listen, if you’re not in traditional leadership positions, stick around because the truth, we’re all leaders in our own lives. We’re all the CEOs of ourselves. Many of us are the CEOs of our families, our households. I used to be a CPA, so I pay the bills at our house. I’m also the CFO, which is incredible.
Nina: And she’s the CFO of Kelle Nina Coaching.
Kelle: Yeah. Absolutely. And so, we have leadership positions in our life, right?
Nina: Yeah. We can take the qualities we’re going to talk about today and self-lead, practice self-leadership. That’s where this work truly shines, when we bring it down to the individual, to you and your incredible life.
We were in a session with a client the other day when this quote came up, trying to be a man is a waste of a woman. The client we were chatting with is a brilliant leader, one that’s risen the ranks and has essentially grown up in the company she’s now running. and she isn’t interested in running the office like the man before her. She’s choosing to be herself and lead from all of her strengths, both masculine and feminine, but it hasn’t been easy.
Kelle: No, it hasn’t. And as women, we’re taught to look outside of ourselves for validation. We’re taught to take what we’re lucky enough to be offered and feel grateful, even though it actually has nothing to do with luck, most of the time. And women have been taught to lead from what tends to be very masculine traits, because a lot of the time they’re following the footsteps of what has historically been male roles.
Nina: Totally, yeah. And the traits we’re talking about, the traits that we really need to change, that bother us and the women we work with stem from fear. There are so many, but today we’re going to focus on just two, two leadership traits, that if we let them, they keep us from being who we are. They keep us stuck, leading in a way that doesn’t feel good to us and drive this need for perfectionism and control and making sure everything’s done ‘right’ and it fosters this fear of failure.
Kelle: Okay, nerd alert. Before we go any further, we’re going to cite some statistics. We promise this is going to be a fun conversation, but listen to this. According to CEO Magazine, and we’ll link this article as well in the show notes, only 8% of CEO positions in the S&P 500 are held by women. And yet women currently represent more than 50% of the US population. So, in contrast, men named John represent only 3.27% of the US population. And until recently had greater representation than women among the S&P 500 CEOs.
Nina: What, there were more guys named John that were CEOs than there were women CEOs?
Kelle: Yeah.
Nina: And that’s coming from someone whose maiden name is Johnson, just saying.
Kelle: Yes, but not anymore. Change is happening. Currently there’s this reckoning of sorts, this redefining of what leadership looks like moving forward. And essentially all women we work with are in some type of leadership position, whether they run their own businesses or they’re solopreneurs or they work for someone else and are in a managing or leading position with them.
Nina: Yeah. Or what we talked about earlier, they are self-leading. We are all self-leading. More on that in a minute. And what we’re seeing is a shift not only in the amount of women in leadership positions, but a call for a different way of leading just like the client we mentioned. While the male leader was still in charge, people were leaving the company at an astounding rate going to, of course, a direct competitor because they were no longer interested in being pushed to perform. If you don’t meet your numbers, you’re out, because of the top down way he was leading, that former leader.
Kelle: Yeah. Our client is trying to change the company, right the ship, so to speak, to bring in more personal values like compassion and empathy, less fear and more real life conversations, to bring in transparency and leaning into work life balance.
Nina: it’s one thing to talk about bringing those qualities in and implementing them into company culture, which is a big part of what she wants to do. It’s another to actually model them. She’s one of those leaders that had not been practicing what she had been preaching. Working 10-12 plus hour days, she’s still in this hustle mentality. Getting to the office early, staying late and then opening up her laptop again after the kids were in bed. So typical. That work ethic has gotten her where she is today, absolutely, but she can no longer continue that pace, and she’s just not willing to. This way of being isn’t scalable or sustainable.
Kelle: Yeah, and her body was starting to talk to her. She wasn’t taking care of herself. She wasn’t getting workouts in, moving her body. She wasn’t the weight that she wanted to be. And the people in her life were starting to notice. Her marriage was suffering. And she was no longer willing to miss out on things that were important to her, spending actual quality time with her kids or seeing her friends, who, by the way, mostly tended to be work friends, because that’s where she was spending all of her time.
Nina: She was totally out of balance in her feminine and masculine energy, and it just didn’t feel good to her anymore. She wanted a life outside of work, but she’s been practicing this way of being for so long, she didn’t know where to start, and that’s how we met her. That’s how she came to us, right, Kelle?
Kelle: Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t know about you, but I had a woman boss. She was nothing like the client we’re talking about. She was actually my last corporate manager when I worked for Merck. She managed like she had something to prove, more than any of the male managers I had. And I had so many because she was the only female manager I ever had. She was very hard to work with, very strict, laying down the corporate law. She expected all of us on her team to work the long hours. And let’s just say, we did not mesh at all. That was my last corporate role and then I found coaching.
Nina: Yeah, I had a manager once who would spiral emotionally on a regular basis. She would yell at us and be really aggressive. She was intimidating because of this and because she was, honestly, really excellent at her job in delivering results for our clients. I think looking back now I can see that she was leaning so hard on her masculine energy in those traits. We talked about the difference between masculine and feminine energy in episode 27. It’s a really good one, listeners, so go check it out for background here. It’s really helpful.
Anyway, she neglected her feminine energy traits, leaned on her masculine and she was just totally out of balance and was almost always burning the candle from both ends and also burning out. And it created unreasonable expectations for the rest of us who she was leading. And I wound up leaving the company, and so did one of my colleagues because just unfortunately, she kept rising in the ranks. But senior leadership wasn’t aware of how she led behind the curtain, and it really wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t happy. It wasn’t balanced.
And listen, there are so many positive leadership traits we could cover, but today, we’re going to talk about the two that have come to the forefront for us and our clients.
Kelle: Yeah. And while these have been seen as more feminine leadership qualities, they’re now being incorporated by both male and female leaders, thanks in a large part to Brené Brown. If you haven’t read her book, Dare to Lead, we highly recommend it. I read it twice and I just picked it up again for inspiration for this. Because of her work, she’s implemented this into typically male dominated industries like the military and engineering companies and rooms full of CEOs named John.
Nine: Or Johnson. No, just kidding. These are qualities we work with all of our clients on. This is such an important issue for us to make sure we’re helping women practice self-leadership first, to lead not from where Brené calls armored leadership, but from daring leadership. It starts with you as an individual. No matter how big your team is, how many people you manage or lead, it begins with you. It begins with what you want and how you treat yourself to get it, what your personal values are.
What’s important to you as you practice self-leadership? Do you expect perfection? Do you beat yourself up if you don’t do everything perfectly or just right? Are you using proving energy or trying to be performative? Are you people pleasing? That’s a sticky one. What are your thoughts about failure and how do you deal with failure?
Kelle: Yeah, those are just great questions to ponder. So, the first leadership quality we want to talk about is being value driven. So much of what is happening in our lives is driven by fear. The same is true in corporate leadership, fear of getting things wrong, fear of what other people will think, fear of not being good enough or smart enough.
Nina: Yeah, fear can make us forget our values, it’s just the truth, if we’re even paying attention to them in the first place. Many of us have grown up with our self-worth being tied to productivity and making sure we’re doing everything right. And in corporate, we often have to deal with things like favoritism, gossiping, having power over others, bullying, taking credit for others’ work, blaming, comparison and our personal least favorite, the boys club.
Kelle: The boys club. Don’t get us started.
Nina: One of our clients explains the boys club as pale, male and often Yale. Just a funny way to describe it. I’m not saying that’s every boys club, but anyway.
Kelle: Yeah, again, don’t get me started. So many of our clients in corporate talk about how it doesn’t feel good to be in the position they’re in, how their personal values are bumping up against what the company wants them to do and how they want them to behave. If they could just put their personal feelings aside, be a robot, play the game, show up and do the things the company wants, act in this particular way.
Nina: This reminds me of a client we had a few years ago. I’m just feeling her right now. She was a manager in the company she worked for. She had something like 50 people on her team. She was leading from her personal values like humanity and transparency, where she was bringing in her own personality, cultivating collaboration and empathy. And her company, they didn’t like it. When she got her 360 review, which is a process that involves gathering feedback from multiple people in 360 degrees around you, peers, subordinates, colleagues, supervisors and even the employee themselves. It was really harsh.
She wasn’t playing the corporate game in the way the company wanted her to. They even hired an executive coach for her so that she could better learn to do things the way the company wanted her to and she was also working with us. So, she was surrounded by a lot of coaching, not necessarily to make her a better, more effective leader, but to make her a leader in the way they wanted her to lead. She had some really difficult choices to make. She could stay and play the corporate game the way they wanted her to, which didn’t feel very good, but which she got paid very, very well for and would likely eventually get promoted.
Or she could continue to lead the way she was leading and get the harsh feedback and possibly some retribution, maybe not getting the raise or the promotion she wants, or she could leave. She could find a position where she could be more herself, or she could lead with her values in mind. And listen, there’s no right answer here. It all depends on what you as an individual, want for yourself or what you’re willing to tolerate.
Kelle: Yeah, let’s talk about what it looks like to live into our values. To live into our values, we first have to be able to name them. So, let us ask you. What’s most important to you? What’s in alignment for you and who you want to be? And listen, the trick here, you can only have one set of values. There’s no having personal values and then a different set of values that are professional values and this is where the challenge lies.
When your values conflict with others’ values, whether that means the values of the organization you work for or your family’s values or your friends’ values or the values of your clients, or even strangers standing in the coffee line, we have a problem.
Nina: I want to share some examples of values to make sure we’re on the same page. So those might include ambition, authenticity, balance, communication, compassion, faith, freedom, health, integrity, kindness, love, responsibility, security. I have to add a couple of my own here, honesty, transparency, trust.
Kelle: Yeah, we’ll share a link to a list of values in the show notes to help you identify your own. This is not an all-encompassing list by any means, but we’re going to bet you’ll find plenty that ring true for you. What we suggest is that you circle five or eight, whatever amount that speaks to you. And then next comes the hard part. You have to land on two to three at most. Any more than that and you’ll find your priorities divided and your values conflicting with one another. And then as much as possible, lead according to your values. So, values that are going to help you foster growth in a productive and positive way.
Nina: So back to that client that had to make a decision whether to lead the way her company wanted her to lead, play the game and go for the promotion. Or lead the way that felt true for her and not play the game and possibly face retribution, or leave the company altogether. We had to tighten her values. Together we helped her decide on two, security and trust. She was just a few years away from retiring and she wanted to get a particular number in her retirement account. So, security was her first pick.
Her second pick was trust because she wanted to trust that whatever she did as much as she could, she was doing what was best for herself, her team and the organization. And that she would be able to have compassion and empathy first in herself, remember, self-leadership here, when things didn’t go the way she was wanting them to go. And she wanted to also have compassion and empathy for those on her team around her.
Kelle: So, so good, yes. So, try this for yourself. Use the list we provided in the show notes and come up with two to three values for yourself. Play around with different values that speak to you and know that they’re never set in stone. You can change them as you change and as your life changes.
Nina: Alright, yeah, let’s talk about the second leadership quality we want to touch on today and that’s overcoming your fear of failure.
Kelle: Let’s talk failure. This is so fun. Fear of failure is a big part of why we don’t try new things, why we don’t take risks. We’ve been taught that failure is bad, especially for a perfectionist, we want to do everything perfect and right.
Nina: Yeah. We’re so afraid of not getting it right, of failing and what it might mean about us, but a lot of the time we don’t even start. We quit ahead of time. And by that, I mean, we let our brain talk us out of whatever it is we want to do. Our brains tell us it’s going to be too hard or we don’t have time for what we’re going to have to do or we don’t have what it takes or we’re not smart enough or we’re too old.
Kelle: All those thoughts, all those sentences in your brain, don’t listen to them. So, let’s back up, though. What we know about failure is true failure only happens when you give up, when you decide not to go any further. The only way to really fail is to quit.
Nina: Yeah, failure is determined by your thoughts. So, before you do anything, you have to decide what your definition of failure actually is.
Kelle: Yeah, failure typically happens when you have a lot of negative emotion coming up and you’re in what we call a low impact cycle where you have all these negative thoughts. You have negative feelings and you end up with the results that you don’t want, these negative results.
Nina: When you’re in a low impact cycle, when you’re not getting the results you want, you make that mean something about you, that you’re not good enough, that you don’t have what it takes, that you can’t do it and you want to quit.
Kelle: Oh, man, we do not want you to quit. And what we want to offer you is the opposite. When you’re failing, you are getting closer. Feeling like you’re failing means you’re taking risks, but most likely your brain is not going to be on board with this. Remember, your brain wants to stay safe, don’t take risks, seek comfort, safety and pleasure, do what you’ve always done. We quit and ultimately fail because of fear.
Nina: Yeah. And someone described fear as an acronym to me once, F-E-A-R, false evidence appearing real. It’s such an interesting way to look at it. We see this happen in our personal lives, too. We see this happen in business. We see this happen with any goal or dream we want to pursue and we don’t want this to happen to you. What we want to offer is that failure is part of success, not the opposite.
I can’t remember who said this, but I’ve heard it so many times. Success is built on a mountain of failures. And what we want you to do and what we want to teach our clients is, you have to anticipate when failure may or may not happen, what it might look like, so that when it does, you have a plan for it, you’re ready for it.
Kelle: Listen, the more risks you take, the more you’re going to fail in the process. And your brain is going to want to go on defense. It’s going to want to give you all the reasons you should stop pursuing your dreams and your goals. This is where self-leadership comes in. It’s knowing yourself so well, which is a big part of what we teach our clients, knowing and paying attention to yourself in a different way so that you can see when your brain is freaking out, when your brain is trying to talk you out of things you really want in your life to try to keep yourself safe.
Nina: Because you can totally quit. We almost did this. We have been in business together for a couple of years, so this was a while ago. We’d hired a business coach that we didn’t vet very well. He didn’t really know what he was doing. And we spent a lot of time and quite a bit of money building out this program to scale our business, when we hadn’t tested our messaging or even gotten clear on who we were talking to.
Kelle: Yeah, we talked about that a little bit in the last episode.
Nina: Number 27, yeah.
Kelle: So, we had to redecide for ourselves what we wanted our business to look like, exactly who we were helping, who our best clients were. And we have failed a lot to get to where we are today, where we have a full practice and we’re super clear on who we help and we know exactly how we help our clients get the results they want. I remember the day we decided not to quit. We reinvested in ourselves. We hired another business coach and within two days we landed a client.
Nina: And then another shortly after that. And it wasn’t because we hired the business coach, although we learned a lot from her and she’s still one of our coaches. We believe we were successful because we believed in ourselves and our coaching. We believed we could help women feel better. We went all in on ourselves. We invested in ourselves and we were willing to fail a lot along the way.
Kelle: Yeah, failure is essential. You have to be able to face your fears and be willing to fail. Along with that, you’re going to have to be able to be willing to feel discomfort along the way. You’re going to have to be willing to feel feelings like frustration and disappointment and embarrassment. This is a big part of what we do with our clients. We teach them how to feel discomfort ahead of time in a safe way, to teach their nervous system that it’s okay to feel negative feelings. That emotions are really just vibrations in our bodies and the more we feel them, the more risks we’re willing to take.
Nina: Yeah. And the more risks you’re willing to take, the more failure you’re going to have and the more success you’re going to see. Success and failure actually go hand in hand. You can’t reach success without failure along the way.
Kelle: So, for today we want to suggest that you fail on purpose, pick something small at first, like trying a new sport. My kids are teaching me how to play pickleball and it’s hilarious because they can crush me. I grew up playing tennis, so I’m trying to swing the paddle like a tennis racket, and it’s shorter, and I keep missing the ball, just swinging and completely missing. It’s so embarrassing, but I’m willing to feel it. I can laugh at myself and it’s a complete fail. I don’t even know the rules. I’m totally terrible but I’m just going to keep playing.
Nina: I love me some pickle, it’s so fun, Kel. Oh, my God. Or you can make something for dinner you’ve never made before. There’s another venue for this little experiment. Go to the kitchen. I had a friend who made really awful guacamole, she just couldn’t get it right. What’s worse than terrible guacamole?
Kelle: Nothing, absolutely nothing.
Nina: Nothing. I so look forward to it. There was either way too much lime or not enough salt. She kept trying different spices and yeah, it just wasn’t right. She decided she was going to be a master guacamole maker. She just decided. She kept at it. She tried 20 times before she found the perfect recipe for her and her family’s taste. Now, she makes it all the time, it’s her thing.
Kelle: Yeah, love me some chips and guac, it’s a full food group in itself. Okay, going back to this, you have to be willing to fail, rock stars. When you fail, you learn and eventually you succeed. We like to say, when you’re putting yourself out there, when you’re leading, whether it’s self-leading or leading your team, you’re either winning or you’re learning. And the only real way to fail is to quit. And the only way to really find out what you’re capable of is to put yourself in positions where you might fail. Start with low risk situations like pickle or guacamole and build your failure tolerance.
Nina: Yes. Sound good here? Alright, so to review. We talked about living into our values, leading into our values. Remember, pick two and experiment with how you feel and then put yourself in positions where you might fail. Experiment with failure, practice feeling your way through to the discomfort on your way to success.
Kelle: We have so much more to come on this.
Nina: Yeah. Get curious and explore what leadership style is your style, what feels good on you, what feels good to you. Alright, that’s it for today. Make sure you lean in and practice what we’ve offered here.
Kelle: Okay, until next time.
Nina: Thanks for being here. See you next time.
Nina: Hey everyone, if you want more live access to me and Kelle, you have to join our email list.
Kelle: Yes, we’ll come to your email box every Tuesday and Thursday.
Nina: You can ask us questions, get clarity and get coached.
Kelle: We offer monthly free email coaching when you’re on our list and you’re the first to know about trainings, events and other free coaching opportunities.
Nina: Just go to kelleandnina.com. That’s K E L L E and nina.com to sign up.
Kelle: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Nina: If you’re ready to align your ambitions with your heart and feel more calm, balanced, and connected, visit https://www.kelleandnina.com/ for more information about how to work with us and make sure you get on our list.
Kelle: See you in the next episode!
Nina: I mean, mic drop.
Kelle: Yeah, that’s where we’re going today. I don’t think we need to give too much more background here, what do you think, Nina?
Nina: No, you ready?
Kelle: Let’s go. This is Ambitious-Ish.
Burnout? Check. Daily overwhelm? Check. Resentment rash, stress, and a complete lack of well-being? Check, check, check! You’re not alone. We’re your hosts, Kelle & Nina, and we are here to help you feel calm, balanced, and empowered so you can redefine success, make choices that feel authentic, and ACTUALLY enjoy the life you work so hard to create. You ready? Let’s go.
Kelle: Hey, I’m Kelle.
Nina: And I’m Nina.
Kelle: When you think of women leaders, who stands out for you?
Nina: I mean, there’s Kamala, Oprah, Sarah Blakely. We love Sarah, right, Kelle? Taylor Swift.
Kelle: Absolutely, she’s so cool. All of those and I have another. I just read an article, actually, I didn’t just read the article, it was a few months back, about Karen Lynch, the CEO of CVS. You know, access to good medical care has been top of my mind lately. And she’s one of those leaders that truly is making change in the healthcare sector by bringing in things like innovation and compassion and empathy, both in the company she’s running and into the conversation with the consumer. So, it’s an amazing article. I’ll link that in the show notes.
And listen, if you’re not in traditional leadership positions, stick around because the truth, we’re all leaders in our own lives. We’re all the CEOs of ourselves. Many of us are the CEOs of our families, our households. I used to be a CPA, so I pay the bills at our house. I’m also the CFO, which is incredible.
Nina: And she’s the CFO of Kelle Nina Coaching.
Kelle: Yeah. Absolutely. And so, we have leadership positions in our life, right?
Nina: Yeah. We can take the qualities we’re going to talk about today and self-lead, practice self-leadership. That’s where this work truly shines, when we bring it down to the individual, to you and your incredible life.
We were in a session with a client the other day when this quote came up, trying to be a man is a waste of a woman. The client we were chatting with is a brilliant leader, one that’s risen the ranks and has essentially grown up in the company she’s now running. and she isn’t interested in running the office like the man before her. She’s choosing to be herself and lead from all of her strengths, both masculine and feminine, but it hasn’t been easy.
Kelle: No, it hasn’t. And as women, we’re taught to look outside of ourselves for validation. We’re taught to take what we’re lucky enough to be offered and feel grateful, even though it actually has nothing to do with luck, most of the time. And women have been taught to lead from what tends to be very masculine traits, because a lot of the time they’re following the footsteps of what has historically been male roles.
Nina: Totally, yeah. And the traits we’re talking about, the traits that we really need to change, that bother us and the women we work with stem from fear. There are so many, but today we’re going to focus on just two, two leadership traits, that if we let them, they keep us from being who we are. They keep us stuck, leading in a way that doesn’t feel good to us and drive this need for perfectionism and control and making sure everything’s done ‘right’ and it fosters this fear of failure.
Kelle: Okay, nerd alert. Before we go any further, we’re going to cite some statistics. We promise this is going to be a fun conversation, but listen to this. According to CEO Magazine, and we’ll link this article as well in the show notes, only 8% of CEO positions in the S&P 500 are held by women. And yet women currently represent more than 50% of the US population. So, in contrast, men named John represent only 3.27% of the US population. And until recently had greater representation than women among the S&P 500 CEOs.
Nina: What, there were more guys named John that were CEOs than there were women CEOs?
Kelle: Yeah.
Nina: And that’s coming from someone whose maiden name is Johnson, just saying.
Kelle: Yes, but not anymore. Change is happening. Currently there’s this reckoning of sorts, this redefining of what leadership looks like moving forward. And essentially all women we work with are in some type of leadership position, whether they run their own businesses or they’re solopreneurs or they work for someone else and are in a managing or leading position with them.
Nina: Yeah. Or what we talked about earlier, they are self-leading. We are all self-leading. More on that in a minute. And what we’re seeing is a shift not only in the amount of women in leadership positions, but a call for a different way of leading just like the client we mentioned. While the male leader was still in charge, people were leaving the company at an astounding rate going to, of course, a direct competitor because they were no longer interested in being pushed to perform. If you don’t meet your numbers, you’re out, because of the top down way he was leading, that former leader.
Kelle: Yeah. Our client is trying to change the company, right the ship, so to speak, to bring in more personal values like compassion and empathy, less fear and more real life conversations, to bring in transparency and leaning into work life balance.
Nina: it’s one thing to talk about bringing those qualities in and implementing them into company culture, which is a big part of what she wants to do. It’s another to actually model them. She’s one of those leaders that had not been practicing what she had been preaching. Working 10-12 plus hour days, she’s still in this hustle mentality. Getting to the office early, staying late and then opening up her laptop again after the kids were in bed. So typical. That work ethic has gotten her where she is today, absolutely, but she can no longer continue that pace, and she’s just not willing to. This way of being isn’t scalable or sustainable.
Kelle: Yeah, and her body was starting to talk to her. She wasn’t taking care of herself. She wasn’t getting workouts in, moving her body. She wasn’t the weight that she wanted to be. And the people in her life were starting to notice. Her marriage was suffering. And she was no longer willing to miss out on things that were important to her, spending actual quality time with her kids or seeing her friends, who, by the way, mostly tended to be work friends, because that’s where she was spending all of her time.
Nina: She was totally out of balance in her feminine and masculine energy, and it just didn’t feel good to her anymore. She wanted a life outside of work, but she’s been practicing this way of being for so long, she didn’t know where to start, and that’s how we met her. That’s how she came to us, right, Kelle?
Kelle: Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t know about you, but I had a woman boss. She was nothing like the client we’re talking about. She was actually my last corporate manager when I worked for Merck. She managed like she had something to prove, more than any of the male managers I had. And I had so many because she was the only female manager I ever had. She was very hard to work with, very strict, laying down the corporate law. She expected all of us on her team to work the long hours. And let’s just say, we did not mesh at all. That was my last corporate role and then I found coaching.
Nina: Yeah, I had a manager once who would spiral emotionally on a regular basis. She would yell at us and be really aggressive. She was intimidating because of this and because she was, honestly, really excellent at her job in delivering results for our clients. I think looking back now I can see that she was leaning so hard on her masculine energy in those traits. We talked about the difference between masculine and feminine energy in episode 27. It’s a really good one, listeners, so go check it out for background here. It’s really helpful.
Anyway, she neglected her feminine energy traits, leaned on her masculine and she was just totally out of balance and was almost always burning the candle from both ends and also burning out. And it created unreasonable expectations for the rest of us who she was leading. And I wound up leaving the company, and so did one of my colleagues because just unfortunately, she kept rising in the ranks. But senior leadership wasn’t aware of how she led behind the curtain, and it really wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t happy. It wasn’t balanced.
And listen, there are so many positive leadership traits we could cover, but today, we’re going to talk about the two that have come to the forefront for us and our clients.
Kelle: Yeah. And while these have been seen as more feminine leadership qualities, they’re now being incorporated by both male and female leaders, thanks in a large part to Brené Brown. If you haven’t read her book, Dare to Lead, we highly recommend it. I read it twice and I just picked it up again for inspiration for this. Because of her work, she’s implemented this into typically male dominated industries like the military and engineering companies and rooms full of CEOs named John.
Nine: Or Johnson. No, just kidding. These are qualities we work with all of our clients on. This is such an important issue for us to make sure we’re helping women practice self-leadership first, to lead not from where Brené calls armored leadership, but from daring leadership. It starts with you as an individual. No matter how big your team is, how many people you manage or lead, it begins with you. It begins with what you want and how you treat yourself to get it, what your personal values are.
What’s important to you as you practice self-leadership? Do you expect perfection? Do you beat yourself up if you don’t do everything perfectly or just right? Are you using proving energy or trying to be performative? Are you people pleasing? That’s a sticky one. What are your thoughts about failure and how do you deal with failure?
Kelle: Yeah, those are just great questions to ponder. So, the first leadership quality we want to talk about is being value driven. So much of what is happening in our lives is driven by fear. The same is true in corporate leadership, fear of getting things wrong, fear of what other people will think, fear of not being good enough or smart enough.
Nina: Yeah, fear can make us forget our values, it’s just the truth, if we’re even paying attention to them in the first place. Many of us have grown up with our self-worth being tied to productivity and making sure we’re doing everything right. And in corporate, we often have to deal with things like favoritism, gossiping, having power over others, bullying, taking credit for others’ work, blaming, comparison and our personal least favorite, the boys club.
Kelle: The boys club. Don’t get us started.
Nina: One of our clients explains the boys club as pale, male and often Yale. Just a funny way to describe it. I’m not saying that’s every boys club, but anyway.
Kelle: Yeah, again, don’t get me started. So many of our clients in corporate talk about how it doesn’t feel good to be in the position they’re in, how their personal values are bumping up against what the company wants them to do and how they want them to behave. If they could just put their personal feelings aside, be a robot, play the game, show up and do the things the company wants, act in this particular way.
Nina: This reminds me of a client we had a few years ago. I’m just feeling her right now. She was a manager in the company she worked for. She had something like 50 people on her team. She was leading from her personal values like humanity and transparency, where she was bringing in her own personality, cultivating collaboration and empathy. And her company, they didn’t like it. When she got her 360 review, which is a process that involves gathering feedback from multiple people in 360 degrees around you, peers, subordinates, colleagues, supervisors and even the employee themselves. It was really harsh.
She wasn’t playing the corporate game in the way the company wanted her to. They even hired an executive coach for her so that she could better learn to do things the way the company wanted her to and she was also working with us. So, she was surrounded by a lot of coaching, not necessarily to make her a better, more effective leader, but to make her a leader in the way they wanted her to lead. She had some really difficult choices to make. She could stay and play the corporate game the way they wanted her to, which didn’t feel very good, but which she got paid very, very well for and would likely eventually get promoted.
Or she could continue to lead the way she was leading and get the harsh feedback and possibly some retribution, maybe not getting the raise or the promotion she wants, or she could leave. She could find a position where she could be more herself, or she could lead with her values in mind. And listen, there’s no right answer here. It all depends on what you as an individual, want for yourself or what you’re willing to tolerate.
Kelle: Yeah, let’s talk about what it looks like to live into our values. To live into our values, we first have to be able to name them. So, let us ask you. What’s most important to you? What’s in alignment for you and who you want to be? And listen, the trick here, you can only have one set of values. There’s no having personal values and then a different set of values that are professional values and this is where the challenge lies.
When your values conflict with others’ values, whether that means the values of the organization you work for or your family’s values or your friends’ values or the values of your clients, or even strangers standing in the coffee line, we have a problem.
Nina: I want to share some examples of values to make sure we’re on the same page. So those might include ambition, authenticity, balance, communication, compassion, faith, freedom, health, integrity, kindness, love, responsibility, security. I have to add a couple of my own here, honesty, transparency, trust.
Kelle: Yeah, we’ll share a link to a list of values in the show notes to help you identify your own. This is not an all-encompassing list by any means, but we’re going to bet you’ll find plenty that ring true for you. What we suggest is that you circle five or eight, whatever amount that speaks to you. And then next comes the hard part. You have to land on two to three at most. Any more than that and you’ll find your priorities divided and your values conflicting with one another. And then as much as possible, lead according to your values. So, values that are going to help you foster growth in a productive and positive way.
Nina: So back to that client that had to make a decision whether to lead the way her company wanted her to lead, play the game and go for the promotion. Or lead the way that felt true for her and not play the game and possibly face retribution, or leave the company altogether. We had to tighten her values. Together we helped her decide on two, security and trust. She was just a few years away from retiring and she wanted to get a particular number in her retirement account. So, security was her first pick.
Her second pick was trust because she wanted to trust that whatever she did as much as she could, she was doing what was best for herself, her team and the organization. And that she would be able to have compassion and empathy first in herself, remember, self-leadership here, when things didn’t go the way she was wanting them to go. And she wanted to also have compassion and empathy for those on her team around her.
Kelle: So, so good, yes. So, try this for yourself. Use the list we provided in the show notes and come up with two to three values for yourself. Play around with different values that speak to you and know that they’re never set in stone. You can change them as you change and as your life changes.
Nina: Alright, yeah, let’s talk about the second leadership quality we want to touch on today and that’s overcoming your fear of failure.
Kelle: Let’s talk failure. This is so fun. Fear of failure is a big part of why we don’t try new things, why we don’t take risks. We’ve been taught that failure is bad, especially for a perfectionist, we want to do everything perfect and right.
Nina: Yeah. We’re so afraid of not getting it right, of failing and what it might mean about us, but a lot of the time we don’t even start. We quit ahead of time. And by that, I mean, we let our brain talk us out of whatever it is we want to do. Our brains tell us it’s going to be too hard or we don’t have time for what we’re going to have to do or we don’t have what it takes or we’re not smart enough or we’re too old.
Kelle: All those thoughts, all those sentences in your brain, don’t listen to them. So, let’s back up, though. What we know about failure is true failure only happens when you give up, when you decide not to go any further. The only way to really fail is to quit.
Nina: Yeah, failure is determined by your thoughts. So, before you do anything, you have to decide what your definition of failure actually is.
Kelle: Yeah, failure typically happens when you have a lot of negative emotion coming up and you’re in what we call a low impact cycle where you have all these negative thoughts. You have negative feelings and you end up with the results that you don’t want, these negative results.
Nina: When you’re in a low impact cycle, when you’re not getting the results you want, you make that mean something about you, that you’re not good enough, that you don’t have what it takes, that you can’t do it and you want to quit.
Kelle: Oh, man, we do not want you to quit. And what we want to offer you is the opposite. When you’re failing, you are getting closer. Feeling like you’re failing means you’re taking risks, but most likely your brain is not going to be on board with this. Remember, your brain wants to stay safe, don’t take risks, seek comfort, safety and pleasure, do what you’ve always done. We quit and ultimately fail because of fear.
Nina: Yeah. And someone described fear as an acronym to me once, F-E-A-R, false evidence appearing real. It’s such an interesting way to look at it. We see this happen in our personal lives, too. We see this happen in business. We see this happen with any goal or dream we want to pursue and we don’t want this to happen to you. What we want to offer is that failure is part of success, not the opposite.
I can’t remember who said this, but I’ve heard it so many times. Success is built on a mountain of failures. And what we want you to do and what we want to teach our clients is, you have to anticipate when failure may or may not happen, what it might look like, so that when it does, you have a plan for it, you’re ready for it.
Kelle: Listen, the more risks you take, the more you’re going to fail in the process. And your brain is going to want to go on defense. It’s going to want to give you all the reasons you should stop pursuing your dreams and your goals. This is where self-leadership comes in. It’s knowing yourself so well, which is a big part of what we teach our clients, knowing and paying attention to yourself in a different way so that you can see when your brain is freaking out, when your brain is trying to talk you out of things you really want in your life to try to keep yourself safe.
Nina: Because you can totally quit. We almost did this. We have been in business together for a couple of years, so this was a while ago. We’d hired a business coach that we didn’t vet very well. He didn’t really know what he was doing. And we spent a lot of time and quite a bit of money building out this program to scale our business, when we hadn’t tested our messaging or even gotten clear on who we were talking to.
Kelle: Yeah, we talked about that a little bit in the last episode.
Nina: Number 27, yeah.
Kelle: So, we had to redecide for ourselves what we wanted our business to look like, exactly who we were helping, who our best clients were. And we have failed a lot to get to where we are today, where we have a full practice and we’re super clear on who we help and we know exactly how we help our clients get the results they want. I remember the day we decided not to quit. We reinvested in ourselves. We hired another business coach and within two days we landed a client.
Nina: And then another shortly after that. And it wasn’t because we hired the business coach, although we learned a lot from her and she’s still one of our coaches. We believe we were successful because we believed in ourselves and our coaching. We believed we could help women feel better. We went all in on ourselves. We invested in ourselves and we were willing to fail a lot along the way.
Kelle: Yeah, failure is essential. You have to be able to face your fears and be willing to fail. Along with that, you’re going to have to be able to be willing to feel discomfort along the way. You’re going to have to be willing to feel feelings like frustration and disappointment and embarrassment. This is a big part of what we do with our clients. We teach them how to feel discomfort ahead of time in a safe way, to teach their nervous system that it’s okay to feel negative feelings. That emotions are really just vibrations in our bodies and the more we feel them, the more risks we’re willing to take.
Nina: Yeah. And the more risks you’re willing to take, the more failure you’re going to have and the more success you’re going to see. Success and failure actually go hand in hand. You can’t reach success without failure along the way.
Kelle: So, for today we want to suggest that you fail on purpose, pick something small at first, like trying a new sport. My kids are teaching me how to play pickleball and it’s hilarious because they can crush me. I grew up playing tennis, so I’m trying to swing the paddle like a tennis racket, and it’s shorter, and I keep missing the ball, just swinging and completely missing. It’s so embarrassing, but I’m willing to feel it. I can laugh at myself and it’s a complete fail. I don’t even know the rules. I’m totally terrible but I’m just going to keep playing.
Nina: I love me some pickle, it’s so fun, Kel. Oh, my God. Or you can make something for dinner you’ve never made before. There’s another venue for this little experiment. Go to the kitchen. I had a friend who made really awful guacamole, she just couldn’t get it right. What’s worse than terrible guacamole?
Kelle: Nothing, absolutely nothing.
Nina: Nothing. I so look forward to it. There was either way too much lime or not enough salt. She kept trying different spices and yeah, it just wasn’t right. She decided she was going to be a master guacamole maker. She just decided. She kept at it. She tried 20 times before she found the perfect recipe for her and her family’s taste. Now, she makes it all the time, it’s her thing.
Kelle: Yeah, love me some chips and guac, it’s a full food group in itself. Okay, going back to this, you have to be willing to fail, rock stars. When you fail, you learn and eventually you succeed. We like to say, when you’re putting yourself out there, when you’re leading, whether it’s self-leading or leading your team, you’re either winning or you’re learning. And the only real way to fail is to quit. And the only way to really find out what you’re capable of is to put yourself in positions where you might fail. Start with low risk situations like pickle or guacamole and build your failure tolerance.
Nina: Yes. Sound good here? Alright, so to review. We talked about living into our values, leading into our values. Remember, pick two and experiment with how you feel and then put yourself in positions where you might fail. Experiment with failure, practice feeling your way through to the discomfort on your way to success.
Kelle: We have so much more to come on this.
Nina: Yeah. Get curious and explore what leadership style is your style, what feels good on you, what feels good to you. Alright, that’s it for today. Make sure you lean in and practice what we’ve offered here.
Kelle: Okay, until next time.
Nina: Thanks for being here. See you next time.
Nina: Hey everyone, if you want more live access to me and Kelle, you have to join our email list.
Kelle: Yes, we’ll come to your email box every Tuesday and Thursday.
Nina: You can ask us questions, get clarity and get coached.
Kelle: We offer monthly free email coaching when you’re on our list and you’re the first to know about trainings, events and other free coaching opportunities.
Nina: Just go to kelleandnina.com. That’s K E L L E and nina.com to sign up.
Kelle: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Nina: If you’re ready to align your ambitions with your heart and feel more calm, balanced, and connected, visit https://www.kelleandnina.com/ for more information about how to work with us and make sure you get on our list.
Kelle: See you in the next episode!
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