Balance & Beyond Podcast

Power isn't something bestowed upon us - it's something we reclaim.

For too many ambitious women, the path to leadership has been paved with burnout, invisibility, and frustration despite exceptional hard work. Why? Because we were never taught to play the game of power and politics.

From childhood, we've absorbed the message that power is something dirty or manipulative, something wielded over others rather than harnessed within ourselves. We've believed the fairy tale that exceptional work will eventually be recognized, while watching others advance past us. When we do try to step into leadership positions, we often mimic male power structures that feel fundamentally inauthentic, becoming what might be called "pink men" in leadership roles.

The truth is revolutionary: your nervous system dictates how much power you can hold. When you're constantly seeking external validation, perfectionism, or approval, you'll never fully step into your authority. The signs are everywhere—over-explaining, softening your voice, asking for permission, backing down. These aren't character flaws; they're symptoms of a nervous system that doesn't yet feel safe holding power. True power looks different. It's holding tension without discomfort, disagreeing without defensiveness, making decisions without seeking permission, and setting boundaries without guilt.

Women possess extraordinary tools for authentic leadership—intuition, emotional intelligence, and sensitivity that become superpowers when properly harnessed. Ready to transform how you lead? Join our new six-week program "Elevate: The Art of Leadership" where you'll learn to develop executive presence, regulate your nervous system, and lead with your authentic feminine edge. Your journey to reclaiming your power begins at balanceinstitute.com/elevate.

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honour the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

Before we jump into today’s episode, a quick reminder about Rise: The Future of Female Leadership, our free workshop series currently taking place. Day One was amazing, and you can register now for instant access to the replay—as well as all the details on how to join us live on the 11th of April. We’re talking about new rules, how to actually step into your power, and ditch the life of hustle we've all been taught. Now back to the episode. 

There was one game I was never taught to play as a kid, and I think it's something that actually harmed me a lot in my career. It's something very few women are ever actively taught, and yet it damages us, it impacts our potential, and it causes us untold burnout and all kinds of craziness in our lives. What am I talking about? I am talking about the game of power and politics.

If you want to be successful in leadership, then unfortunately — or fortunately — you have to learn to play the game. And leadership in itself — it's a power game. It's about who has the power. It's about who has the attention, whether we want to see it that way or not.

Avoiding the idea that leadership is a game — avoiding the fact that power and politics are games you must play if you want to be successful — makes us invisible and can make you much more susceptible to putting your head in the ground and subscribing to some old rules of leadership that you think apply but actually don’t.

I have seen so many women — and I can say this with integrity, because I fell into this same trap as well — who grew up with the belief that hard work, putting your head down, putting your bum up, doing the thing, putting your hand up... that will get you recognized. You do all of that and eventually someone will see you. They will promote you. They will see your talent.

Well, it turns out that was a load of BS. And there are so many women who now come into my world who are working their butts off. They are trying so hard. They're doing multiple people’s jobs, doing it incredibly well, to an exceptionally high standard — and yet they are not seen, they are not valued, and they feel invisible and overlooked.

Instead, what I have seen is this hard work mantra… And yes, I know you’ll probably say that many men subscribe to this as well. But men — even from a young age — any men that are listening or people who have partners here, particularly those raised in the 80s — men are actually subconsciously taught more about power, influence, and positioning than women ever are.

Mainly because of how women perceive the word power. We assume that power is a dirty word. Many women — and I know again, I’ve had many women in close proximity to me — believe that power is about power over. That power is about dominance. It’s about aggression. It’s about manipulation.

And when you’ve been conditioned to be a good girl and be nice and keep the peace and not rock the boat, well, then it’s going to be very difficult for you to assume something that is already within you. That is an inherent characteristic of who you are — already within you. That is an inherent characteristic of who you are.

And so, you can become so incredibly reluctant to step into your power because you have all of these associations with it. And usually, you will have had people in your life who have had power over you — whether that was a parent, or a teacher, or a sibling, or something like that — and so you have all these negative connotations with power.

And ultimately, you haven’t felt safe being in the presence of power, because people had power over you. So you avoid it altogether.
You don’t play politics. You want your hard work to speak for itself. You want to just put your head down, you stand behind the team, you push the team up in front of you — because of all these negative associations. And ultimately, a whole stack of nervous system instability where you can’t hold it.

And when you’ve been conditioned to be a good girl and be nice and keep the peace and not rock the boat, well, then it’s going to be very difficult for you to assume something that is already within you. That is an inherent characteristic of who you are — already within you. That is an inherent characteristic of who you are.

And so, you can become so incredibly reluctant to step into your power because you have all of these associations with it. And usually, you will have had people in your life who have had power over you — whether that was a parent, or a teacher, or a sibling, or something like that — and so you have all these negative connotations with power. And ultimately, you haven’t felt safe being in the presence of power, because people had power over you. So you avoid it altogether. 

You don’t play politics. You want your hard work to speak for itself. You want to just put your head down, you stand behind the team, you push the team up in front of you — because of all these negative associations. And ultimately, a whole stack of nervous system instability where you can’t hold it.

That perception alone has kept so many women from embracing their own power—because we’ve been taught that stepping into it is somehow wrong or makes us unlikeable.

So you avoid it altogether. You don't play politics. You want your hard work to speak for itself. You want to just put your head down, you stand behind the team, you push the team up in front of you because of all these negative associations and, ultimately, a whole stack of nervous system instability where you can't hold it.

So the first mindset shift I want you to make around power is that power isn't something that is given to you. There's no ceremony where somebody says hello, dear one. You have ascended to X level in the company or an X level in life. You now have your power back. You can now make decisions. You don't need to ask for permission anymore. You can now speak up without being asked. 

Unfortunately, as much as I would think we need one of these, there's no ceremony, there's no rite of passage where we are reminded that actually we already have power within us. We just need to learn to hold it. And that is on our terms. No one can make us own and hold that power. We have to rediscover it for ourselves.

Of course, people come to work with me because they want to feel more powerful. They want to hold that power. We have to rediscover it for ourselves. Of course, people come to work with me because they want to feel more powerful. They want to hold more power — because with power comes influence, it comes impact, it comes income at the same time. So power is synonymous with getting what most women want, but they're too afraid to actually use that word.

So what we typically see is that women struggle to make this mindset shift, and what they do is often when women try to — and I use the word try intentionally here — step into their power or become powerful.

They have only ever seen a man take power. They have only ever seen a man take power. They've only ever seen a man be aggressive, mansplain, sit there with his legs wide open, taking up all the space, and then women think, oh, okay, well, that's what it is to hold power.

If you have been in any meeting when you see a man doing the gorilla pose, where he sits back and usually puts his legs right out and puts his hands behind his head, there are all these subtle signs of dominance that men are using.

Men take up more space because that is how you feel more powerful. And yet women are there in their seat, elbows to their sides, being a little T-Rex with their arms, not really wanting to make too many gestures or take up too much space, because they feel that the only version of power that they've ever known or seen is to go and do a gorilla pose, which doesn't feel authentic to a woman, or to take up that space, or to be domineering, or to mansplain or to put people down around you.

Now, I'm leaning into stereotypes here. I'm not suggesting that every man is doing gesturing body poses in meetings. I'm not suggesting that every male is dominant and aggressive, but this is historically the characteristics that we have seen modeled around power.

Instead, what I would love you to walk away from this episode is an understanding that if you want to be successful, if you want to climb the ladder, you have to embrace power as a word. You have to embrace your own power and stop being scared of it. You have to embrace your ability to impact and influence others in a good way, and sometimes you have to make bad decisions and sometimes you have to let people go. There are things in life that we have to do, but, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility, and I'm on a mission to see more power in the hands of women who are going to do good things with that level of responsibility.

If we avoid stepping into our power or we avoid playing the power game, what we see is this repeated pattern of women being overworked, underpaid, and overlooked. Others around them who are less qualified or less intelligent end up taking their promotions, getting the plum projects, and getting the staff members because they are stuck in an old paradigm.

Women have been trying to play by men's rules of leadership for a long time, but it's not working. The system is fundamentally broken because those women who step into a male-defined version of power typically end up being so out of alignment with the truth of who they are. They've become what I often call a "pink man," where they lead like a man just dressed up in pink. It's like putting lipstick on a pig — it doesn’t work.

We don’t lead that way. There are other ways to lead. You don’t have to be dominant, you don’t have to be a bully, and you don’t have to be mean. However, in a bid to prove that they can lead like a man, some women become even more aggressive and domineering, having more power over others than any male ever has.

As evidence of this, many of the poor examples of leadership that I've encountered in my career have come from women. They have been soul-crushingly mean, manipulative, and have thrown me under the bus. They haven’t been able to give me a leg up. I even had one woman say to me when I passed a comment about the importance of us reaching behind and helping those around us, she turned to me and said, "I walked over crushed glass to get here, and every woman is going to do the same."

That's a direct quote from something someone said to me—someone who had ascended to the levels of leadership and was determined that she had to earn her stripes. She believed every other woman should do the same. So, she treated every other woman the way she was treated by men on her way up the ladder. This is no way to live.

As evidence of this, many of the poor examples of leadership that I've encountered in my career have come from women. They have been soul-crushingly mean, manipulative, and have thrown me under the bus. They haven’t been able to give me a leg up. I even had one woman say to me when I passed a comment about the importance of us reaching behind and helping those around us, she turned to me and said, "I walked over crushed glass to get here, and every woman is going to do the same."

That's a direct quote from something someone said to me—someone who had ascended to the levels of leadership and was determined that she had to earn her stripes. She believed every other woman should do the same. So, she treated every other woman the way she was treated by men on her way up the ladder. This is no way to live.

I know that seems counterintuitive, but our nervous system is wired for safety. If you don’t know how to cultivate safety within, if you’re still looking to others for validation, or if you're relying on being a perfectionist, a people pleaser, or helping others to feel worthy, then those are not internally cultivated methods of safety. They are always reliant on someone else.

As a result, it will feel wobbly as all hell when you try to step into your power. You’ll be asking for permission, worried about making mistakes, and you’ll go into a functional freeze. You'll become paralyzed, because you’ll realize that you can’t hold the power without the safety that should come with it.

So, that is the first step: you have to stop over-explaining. You have to stop softening your voice. You have to stop backing down. These are all characteristics and behaviors that you’ll see when a woman is trying to step into her power but is terrified of getting into trouble.

She wants to have an impact, but she asks for permission, or she puts herself in this little, teeny, tiny box because that’s the box that she knows is safe. Everyone has given her permission to sit in this box, and so, heaven forbid, she steps out of it. Meanwhile, she has the key around her neck, her hand on the lock, but she’s frustrated and full of rage because she knows she can be more. She knows she has more capabilities.

Yes, you have the potential, but you’re sitting in a box that you created—your box of safety. So, the first step in order to step into your power, in order to play the political game that comes with many jobs, especially those involving other humans, is to play politics. It’s not a dirty word, and you can learn to do it really well.

The first thing you need to focus on is your nervous system—nervous system regulation, nervous system safety. This has been such a huge piece of work that I’ve done with those in my Alliance program, which is a follow-on from Balance and Beyond. We’ve seen as women step up, move into CEO roles, into the C-suite, and become executives. They can’t hold that level of power without doing the nervous system work. When we do both—nervous system work and power work—in tandem, my goodness, everyone starts to soar.

The second lesson, “Let's Say No”, transcript. You need to be able to see what you are capable of. So, owning your power means things like holding tension without discomfort and sitting in silence. How about disagreeing without being defensive, or going on the attack? Giving feedback or receiving feedback without taking it personally, making decisions without asking or seeking permission from others, saying no, and being okay with disappointing someone. 

Yeah right, it's a pretty good chance to go, “Oh, that's making me feel so uncomfortable.” We say welcome to the limits of what your nervous system is capable of handling. When you own your power, when you stand fully in your possibility and impact, you own your time. You set boundaries. You work on what’s important to you. You don’t hesitate to find your voice and speak up. You become more unfiltered—not in a profanity sense, but in a way where you stop swallowing your thoughts and ideas.

So many women hold things back. They have ideas, but they don’t speak up, and then someone else says the same thing in the next meeting and gets the credit for it. That person gets the promotion for the amazing idea that you had but couldn’t share because you hadn’t tapped into your power. True power is not just about owning your time, it’s about meeting your needs and learning to influence without overproving. It’s not about feeling like you have to justify your existence or take on the whole world.

The whole "overpromise and underdeliver" mentality is exactly what we want to avoid. Many people operate with this idea of “I’m going to underpromise, and then make sure I overdeliver, giving 150%.” But so much of that comes from a place of proving energy. It’s about saying, “Let me show you I can do it. Let me show you I’m smart. Let me show you I’m on top of it.”

So, this is how true power actually starts to move. Imagine when you can unlock this power: when you can hold boundaries, protect your time, meet your own needs, and feel safe in discomfort or conflict. When you can speak up, even when you want to swallow your words—that is the essence of true power.

Women have an immense array of tools and capabilities inherent within us that prime us for this game. Things like intuition, which we have access to, and our incredible sensitivity to emotions and feelings. These are our superpowers, especially when we unlock them. These are just two of the many tools and strengths we have, yet we've disavowed them because we've been playing by someone else's rules.

When you understand how power works and recognize the distinct path a woman needs to take to step into her power—different from a man's path—then you have a roadmap to follow. You can start playing the political game without the constant worry of disappointing others. You can speak up, you can say "no," and you can confidently set boundaries. You are no longer caught up in the need to please or over-deliver.

Can you imagine? When you've truly stepped into your power and own your expertise, that's when your impact and influence skyrocket. And of course, as a result, your income will begin to follow suit. But that doesn't mean you're not still going to get nervous. I'm not suggesting you're going to turn into some kind of power robot, or become power-hungry, or stomp on everyone around you, which is often a fear that many women have. 

There is a new model of female leadership, and those who are ready will find that this new era of possibility is endless. There will be countless opportunities for women to step into creating this new model, to own their power, to speak up, to say the things that need to be said.This is exactly what we are diving into in my brand-new leadership program, Elevate: The Art of Leadership.

I'm going to be teaching you how to hold power, how to have presence. Executive presence is a buzzword that everyone's talking about, but you can't have presence if you can't hold your own power. I'll teach you how to regulate your nervous system, how to develop charisma, how to open doors—not just claim your seat at the table and then fall into the trap of overthinking and overworking.

This is about stopping the overworking, the overproving, and asking for permission. This new approach is going to unlock so many areas of your life, if we can get you to step into this new model of female leadership that no one else is talking about.

I want you to come and join me at balanceinstitute.com/elevate. It's a brand-new program, and I've never done anything like this before because I have so much to say about leadership. I’m seeing so many executive women—powerful women—who are almost absent from their power, completely disconnected from themselves. But once they do this work, the opportunities and possibilities that open up are priceless.

I want that for every single woman, which is why I'm making this program available to you. It’s a six-week live program, with lots of contact with me and plenty of time for Q&As.

This is going to blow your mind! We're going to unlock a new paradigm and find a way to lead with all of our feminine edge, with all of our incredible gifts. It’s time to break the old paradigm, stop the burnout, and step into our true selves. So, make sure you come and join me at balanceinstitute.com/elevate. Until then, here's to your next day of power, presence, and politics!

OUTRO: Thank you for joining us today on the Balance and Beyond Podcast. We're so glad you carved out this time for yourself. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who might need to hear this today. And if you're feeling extra generous, leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice would mean the world. If you’re keen to dive deeper into our world, visit us at www.balanceinstitute.com to discover more about the toolkit that has helped thousands of women avoid burnout and create a life of balance, and beyond. Thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on the Balance & Beyond Podcast.