Leading with Heart: Embracing Feminine Leadership

• Societal norms that encourage women to compartmentalize personal and professional lives.

• Understanding the value of empathy, nurturing, and vulnerability in leadership.
• How aligning personal values with professional roles creates authentic leadership.

• Strategies to bring your whole self to work and home without guilt.
• The importance of self-reflection and redefining success on your terms.

• Leadership isn’t about perfection; it’s about authenticity and connection.
• A call to embrace the power of your unique leadership style.

“Leadership isn’t about separating your personal and professional self; it’s about integrating them authentically.”

“The traits that make you a great mother—empathy, patience, and nurturing—are the same traits that make you a powerful leader.”

“Vulnerability in leadership isn’t a weakness; it’s the bridge that connects you to others.”

“You can be both a strong leader and a present mother without sacrificing one for the other.”

“Redefining leadership starts with giving yourself permission to lead your way.”

ANNE RAJOO

Women who are mothers or caregivers and have careers or are an entrepreneur often feel a disconnect between their roles as mothers and leaders, which is influenced by the corporate world, which encourages the separation of motherhood, womanhood and personal lives from our professional lives. Sometimes we even have separate personas at work and at home, and I believe that often comes from a belief that leadership must follow a masculine result oriented model, which undervalues feminine qualities like empathy, nurturing and holistic thinking. 

Also often, we fear that vulnerability or aligning our personal values with our professional lives may be seen as a weakness, and this causes us to hesitate to integrate or bring all the aspects of ourselves into our leadership. However, leadership, much like motherhood, requires creating a vision and taking the responsibility for bringing it to life, whether that’s in a corporate setting or at home. 

So we are talking today about bringing feminine perspectives, including intuition and holistic thinking into our leadership to create a more authentic and more effective leadership style. 

Welcome to the peaceful productivity pod. I’m your host, and together, we redefine productivity and find your sweet spot where performance meets happiness. 

As a life and leadership coach, today’s guest, Laura Kline-Taylor’s work is about blending leadership with the heart of motherhood and motherhood with the fire and drive of our leadership. And what I really appreciate about Laura is the deep connection that we had for a few years now, because we connected over motherhood, and a lot of my personal story really is aligned with what Laura talks about. What Laura helps her clients with is creating this pathway for personal and spiritual growth in motherhood and bringing that into leadership. Because when I became a mom, I really started to appreciate the skills and the growth and the mindset shifts that I experienced and that developed over time, and I really felt like motherhood amplified these things that were definitely inside me, like really organizing my day well, managing my time, working efficiently, being the visionary of my family, but also at work, and seeing the bigger picture, all these different things. They were already there, but I felt motherhood amplified those.

When I went back to work after maternity, I really felt I wanted to bring these things into my leadership, into my work, into my team, but I felt there was resistance. Resistance from within, because it was just not something that was done and that I’ve seen a lot. And I also felt there was resistance from people around me. For example, I remember so well that when I started my business and I really tried to prioritize my family and create boundaries around my time, I remember a conversation or several comments from my husband who just didn’t quite understand why I wouldn’t answer my phone for work calls after certain hours, or why I would not check my emails late in the evening, even at out of offices that told people I only checked my emails between so and so hours. His comments literally were that, “oh, this will affect your business negatively, because people will not appreciate this”, and we had sort of a quite a discussion about it. 

For a lot of entrepreneurs, it becomes quite difficult, especially if they had a foot in the corporate world, or had a nine-to-five and have learned these ways of working. It’s quite hard to change that as an entrepreneur and to allow that in entrepreneurship, and really give yourself the permission to create your own rules and build your business by your own set of values and your own way of working. 

So I love today’s conversation with Laura, because we will get into really the integration of our personality, of our feminine traits, into leadership and how this can be amplified, something positive for us. Let’s hear it from Laura!

LAURA KLINE-TAYLOR

The corporate world and the business world encourages us so much to keep our motherhood and our womanhood and our personal lives separate. It creates this disconnect between how we show up at work and how we show up in the rest of our life. But leadership is really same thing as motherhood, because we create the vision as leaders and as mothers, and then we are the ones who take the action and we’re ultimately responsible for if the vision comes to life, whether we’re leading a team of people in a boardroom or on a professional panel, or the people in our house, in the next generation that we’re raising. 

So how we be, how we show up in the world, is a model, and the ways that we present ourselves is the way that the people who we say we lead and who say they follow us will also show up in the world when the internal dialog is different than the external messaging, or when the walk looks different than the talk, regardless of where we are, it just doesn’t work. And so I think that women, who are mothers who can work on their personal leadership, in other words, like cleaning up the alignment between what happens within them and what they say, is really the first step.

I discovered I was pregnant, so I was transforming myself and my identity and my relationship to myself by way of this program and this coach training, but also literally transforming my body and my family, and so I had the chance to really look across the landscape of my life and see where is it that I want to make a difference in a really significant once and for all kind of way. And I started with my marriage. I realized that there was a lot on the outside that looked good, that felt okay, but we were trying to become parents at the same time as we were holding on to dear life for our to our jobs, and that created this disconnect between us as partners. And so our marriage went through a whole bunch of topsy-turvy experiences, including, on my part, being involved in an extramarital affair. There’s a lot about that in my business, platforms for people who are curious, it really created less than ideal but opportune way for me to dive deep and look at myself. And so I looked at, how was I keeping alive? Messages of should I should and like performing for the outside world, whereas my inner world was going, I don’t want this. This is what I wanted instead. So, I really started to look at where the inner dialog and the outer messaging didn’t align, and that was definitely in my marriage. But then I created this ultimate cohesion and flow opportunity in my business. 

Just to link back to what you said about this judge in the workplace, it is very masculine driven, it is very results oriented. It is very what you see is what you get. And so we work hard to put on this visible way that leadership is supposed to look. And so, for a lot of powerful women, it doesn’t look in their minds, their vision. It doesn’t look like what the team or the company or their boss might say it’s supposed to look like. So being willing to trust your gut instinct, even if you don’t get to draw it up from, you know, from scratch, on a blank canvas, but being willing to say the things that may be a little bit less commonly stated, because you bring that degree of diversity, because you bring a willingness to trust your feminine perspective, not just your perspective as a woman, but the feminine side that is a little bit more curiosity. Or let’s take a look at the big picture here. Or how can we look at the people and the impact on the people, as well as the impact on the bottom line? And those are the pieces I think that we must bring, because we can only bring them and we’re so, it’s innate to us to consider some of those more holistic, big picture, all-inclusive perspectives. And so that’s the first step. 

The second step is to not stop after the first try. I think a lot of us will. First of all, the problem is trusting ourselves. Then, once we dare to trust ourselves, we voice it and we get that eyebrow raised, or we have people say, well, hold on. I’m not used to this, and so we have to be willing to keep going and stand firm in the message that we have dared to voice, and then back it up. Because often what we’re doing is, as leaders, we’re training people in a way that we see can come to life, and if we only voice it but then don’t back it up. Then, people they get the message that we may not really believe in the message ourselves, and so it’s like just doubling up and backing up your own initial perspective that I think will give us the results and the difference like it’ll differentiate us, set us apart as a leader, a willingness to trust the mechanism that is within us, instead of just looking to the ones that are out there to tell us we’re okay. 

So the mechanism is really a cycle that repeats itself. And when we can know that something is predictable that will repeat itself, it gives us a lot of a sense of a control, and not control at the white knuckling, hard-driving kind, but the deep, grounded sense that this too shall pass. And so the different phases of the cycle really mimic the different phases of the year and the seasons of a year, so that there is a winter when everything kind of gets covered and cools down, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, the knowing with all humans who live in this environment is that, and then there will be new life. And so the menstrual cycle takes that on by way of and after the menstruation period, we will then begin to create a new egg and look for fertilization. And so that’s the summer when we want to be big and expressed. And then we go into the premenstrum of like the scurrying and the closing down and looking within and preparing for winter. So it’s leadership, because it creates this template or this backdrop that we can work with, and we can say, Oh, I’m actually going to be most effective, most well expressed when I’m in that period of ovulation or my inner summer, I’m gonna be willing to voice my opinion and be seen, and then I’m not gonna try to do the things that I’m not designed physiologically and biochemically to do when my body is wanting to just renew and recycle and refresh. So it’s leadership, because it is both how we take ownership for our bodies, but also how we relate to people who need us to show up at our best, and the best doesn’t, then have to be this person warmed best where we’re really suffering on the inside. 

ANNE RAJOO

So as we wrap up the episode with Laura Kline-Taylor, I just want to highlight three elements that really stand out for me, that I think are important to take away. So integrating our roles with purpose, because motherhood, womanhood and leadership are interconnected. So instead of compartmentalizing, embrace our strengths and our values and enrich the different worlds we have in our lives, we can blend work-life priorities and use empathy and our vision to really inspire our teams and lead our teams efficiently and embrace our feminine leadership qualities. These are unique and powerful I build, my nurturing, my clients, my community collaboration, it’s huge. It makes such a big difference. 

And intuition, I’ve not always been a very intuitive person. I’m learning, still learning, to really lean into my intuition, but we’ve got this, these powerful gifts as women, and they can really make our leadership and our work more effective, and then practice authentic vulnerability intimacy, share our personal experiences with our teams and our clients and show true leadership authenticity and integrity, because this sets powerful examples, and it just build deeper, intimate connections, which are so powerful for business. So for example, I’ve got the story that was a huge thing for me when for the first time, and the only time, one of my VA clients in my virtual assistance agency wasn’t happy with my work, and I received a very harsh feedback email. It was really difficult to handle it, but I leaned into what intuitively came to me, to be vulnerable, to create intimacy around my feelings and my emotions, and share with that client that my belief and my value is that even negative feedback can be expressed in a kind respectful manner, the reaction of that client was beautiful and powerful. And so it really was, for me, a proof that by creating intimate relationship, it even overcomes difficult situations. 

So I want you to just mull over this today and see how your feminine side is integrated into your leadership, into your work, and see where maybe you can lean a little bit more into your feminine leadership qualities. 

I hope this episode was interesting to you. I would love to hear from you. If you have any comments, please connect with me on Instagram @_annerajoo_ as always. Help me spread the word for the podcast. Share the episode with someone in your network, in your community, who would be interested in this conversation. Leave a review. It really helps me as a podcaster to reach more people. 

I invite you to visit my website to book yourself a complimentary mini productivity audit. I have opened my calendar for a few more slots, so get on my calendar and let’s have a conversation.

And don’t forget to come back next week, we are going to talk about the inner child. This is an interesting conversation because a lot of the productivity struggles like procrastination, burnout, perfectionism, people pleasing stem from unresolved emotional wounds from our past. And I have Lavinia brown with me, who will dive into what is the inner child and how does it affect the way we work and our productivity? 

So that’s coming next week. to him back in and until then, be peacefully productive and I catch you next time.