You’ve got big plans and you know how to set them into motion. You are a woman that CAN. You’re all GO, GO, GO and PUSH, PUSH, PUSH! Until you’re burnt out. With the realisation that it’s time to find a new way of operating.

The fact is, women are 60% more likely to burn out than men, and as a gender, are less happy, less fertile, and sicker. But we have opportunities. And the power that it took us to achieve these opportunities is not the same power that it will take to sustain them.

My guest today talks about the challenges facing women in leadership, and the five different energies (PowerTypes), that if accessed, make available a very strong yet feminine power, which bring with it a huge amount of sustainability.

If one wants to transform the wealth and well-being of a community in the developing world all of the research points to the empowerment of women, and Dr Joanna Martin (founder of One of Many) had a calling to support these women and equip them with the tools they need to step into leadership and change their corner of the world.

Because ultimately, if all of us made a small impact we could massively change things.

Show Notes

• [00.49] Medicine never felt 100% right to Dr Joanna Martin, so she left the medical profession, and went into performing arts, before she found her calling in coaching. She talks about these career transitions, and what transpired that led her to her ‘wake-up moment'.

• [04.44] How she learnt to listen to her gut, and one habit YOU can utilise to develop your intuition.

• [07.16] The hows and the whys of One of Many with it’s aim of “unleashing the bold, grassroots leadership of 1 million women internationally”.

• [12.24] Reasons why none of us are that good at SUSTAINABLY doing things.

• [16.49] The Five Women’s PowerTypes and the challenges that come when you don’t have access to all five.

  • The Warrioress

  • The Mother

  • The Lover

  • The Queen

  • The Sorceress

• The three common challenges facing aspiring women leaders:

  • Individualism (or Superwoman Syndrome.)

  • [28.33] Imposter Syndrome (the feeling that when you achieve something, you don’t deserve it.)

  • [33.31] Inertia (when the flow of life interrupts your core objectives.)

"If we saw as many women leading as we see men, I truly believe that we couldn’t BUT see a shift in culture, away from this lack of sustainability which is rife at the moment." – Dr Joanna Martin

Learn more about Dr Joanna Martin

Check out her website oneofmany.co.uk or join the Facebook group Beone Global Community. Alternatively, (or as well as!) take her up on her offer of a free PowerTypes Assessment. Listen to this episode for the special token for Working Womens Wealth listeners.

Get the FREE download to making change stick!

If you want to get my free download on how to make change stick!

Related posts and episodes

• The connection challenge with Alan Samuel Cohen

• Imposter to influencer with Tara Bradford

• Actually... YOU can change the world! With Sara Price

• The secret to radical step-change

Quotes from this episode

"I’ve only got one shot at this life, and is this what I want to be doing? And even though I was making A difference, I wasn’t making MY difference. I wasn’t making the difference I felt called to make." – Dr Joanna Martin

"So for me I need that spaciousness to be able to listen in to those whispers and those murmurs" – Dr Joanna Martin

"Why we are not able to sustain leadership, is we don’t have enough role models of what a female friendly style of leadership looks like." – Dr Joanna Martin

"We need to find a different kind of power, and different habits to sustain us in the kind of leadership that the world is calling of us for." – Dr Joanna Martin

"We need boundaries in the home as much as we need it in the workplace" – Lisa Linfield

"Fierce prioritisation – it’s knowing at any given moment that you’re CHOOSING to give time to that which is the most important FOR YOU in that moment" – Dr Joanna Martin

"What it takes to overcome inertia to get into momentum is saying yes, not to opportunity, but saying yes to yourself and your priorities." – Dr Joanna Martin

"It doesn’t matter what the choice is, just make it consciously and just be intentional about the life you choose." – Lisa Linfield

Transcript

Lisa Linfield:                       00:21                     Hello everybody and welcome to today's episode of Working Women's Wealth. I am joined by Dr. Joanna Martin, who is the founder of One of Many. And is dedicated to empowering one million women around the world with the tools they need to step up into leadership and change the world. Hello Joa, and welcome to our show.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   00:45                     Hi Lisa. It's so good to be here. I'm really looking forward to today.

Lisa Linfield:                       00:48                     So Joa you went from medicine to performing arts and then you went onto find your calling in coaching. Tell us about those transitions. They seem quite far apart.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   01:01                     Yeah, but most people listening to my kind of career path, it seems very unlikely, but I assure you, for me it seems to make perfect sense at the time. I actually started my working life as a medical doctor and although I was great at it and my patients loved me in the nurses loved me and so on. There was something about it that never quite felt 100% right. My whole way through school I had also been doing a lot of acting, so I love performing arts. That was just my passion. And I guess one of my favorite patients passed away pretty early on in my medical career, actually. I'd only been a doctor for about 10 weeks and when she died, it just had this massive overwhelming wake up moment for me. I had that realization that many of us have at some time that we all have a time limit, right?

                                                                                We all have an expiry date. Just none of us know what that is. And with the kind of, I guess dealing with that, it made me realize that I've only got one shot at this life and is this what I want to be doing? And I've got to say that 10 weeks into my medical career, the answer was absolutely no. It wasn't because even though I was making a difference, I wasn't making my difference, you know what I mean? I wasn't making the difference I felt called to make. So I guess that first transition was moving from medicine to drama school, which sounds weird, but as I say, I'd been acting the whole way through my university and the whole way through school as well, and I'd always harbored a secret desire to be an actor or indeed a director. So in my little wake up moment in my intern year of medicine, I decided, right, I'm going to go and explore performing arts as a career.

                                                                                And so I got into a great drama school. I got into the drama school that Hugh Jackman and Nicole Cuban went to. Unfortunately not while he was there, that would have been awesome. And it was whilst I was there having a lot of fun that I realized now this isn't quite it either. It was awesome, but it wasn't quite it either. And it was there that I was first introduced to the concept of life coaching. I remember thinking at the time, what does that even mean? Do we need a coach for life? But I went along to my very first personal development seminar. And within moments I was looking up at the guy on the stage doing what he was doing sharing awesome stories, empowering people, helping people, which was I think what drove me to medicine in the first place, but in a very animated and fulfilling and deep almost kind of sacred way I guess.

                                                                                And something about that deeply resonated and I just thought, that's it. That's what I want to do. And since then I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and bounds and goodness knows what else on my education and grown from a little coaching business in Sydney where, I mean I was blessed. It went from zero to 60K or so in my first year, which a lot of coaches don't achieve. I was head of research and training for one of the fastest growing personal development companies on the global stage at that time. And I was speaking to audiences of up to 3000 at a time, which was awesome. And then in about 2008 instead of doing contracting to the other organization, I restarted my own coaching and speaking business and it grew dramatically. We took that coaching business from zero to seven figures in 12 months in two countries.

                                                                                And a lot of that success I put down to kind of finding a different way of doing things. Because to be honest, I nearly burned out when I was tearing around the world. Speaking to big audiences all the time. I had to find a different way of doing things. So it's been a fairly adventurous ride, my career path, but I'm someone who really listens in closely to those little suggestions the little inner whispers that come. And when I'm finding something difficult or dissatisfying, I'll always dig into why is it just that it's a challenging moment in something that is otherwise where I'm supposed to be or is this hard because I'm out of alignment? Do you know what I mean?

Lisa Linfield:                       04:43                     I know exactly what you mean. How did you learn to listen to your gut?

Dr. Joanna M.:                   04:49                     Good question. I think I'm one of these people who's been blessed with a very active inner life. I've always been a deep thinker since I was I don't know, five, six, seven. The big questions have always engaged me and I don't know how I necessarily learned it. It's not certainly something I've ever been taught, but I've just developed a habit, I guess over the years of realizing that I have good access to deep wisdom within me if I give myself space. So for me, I need that spaciousness to be able to listen in to those whispers and those murmurs. And I spend time consciously, I guess every day and unconsciously during the day. Also kind of feeling how things are tracking energetically? But one habit that I did learn that I think has really aided in this came from my first time I read a book called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and she suggested practice called the morning pages. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it.

Lisa Linfield:                       05:49                     No.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   05:49                     It's great. She just suggests writing first thing in the morning, grab your journal and it's got to be a decent size, like a four or at least letter or something and writing three full pages of whatever is in your brain when you first wake up. And I think if there were a practice that's helped me to kind of listen, I guess that's it. That's one of the practices of developing my intuition and listening in is the practice of doing three pages every morning. It's not journaling on the day that was, which can often become like a bit of a report. It's actually journaling into how you are right now this morning, what's there, what's going on for you? And that made a huge difference to me. Highly recommend a read of that book and indeed morning writing is now one of the fundamental practices that we teach at one of many for that very reason.

Lisa Linfield:                       06:35                     I'm with you. I think I would not be the human I was if journaling wasn't the core pillar of my day, my week, my month my rhythm. I don't think I have that ability to sit quietly as much as I have that ability to journal. Well, it forces the discipline of reflection and I always find that I can start with quite rigid handwriting and after half a page the words for often I think, oh actually there's a little bit more brewing underneath that surface.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   07:05                     Yeah, absolutely. They're always impossible to read back. Right.

Lisa Linfield:                       07:09                     I'm actually not one of those people that ever really go back and read them. I guess it's just part of my sorting, my thinking process, one day I'm sure I would. So how did you, and why did you start one of many and why did you build this aim of unleashing the bold grassroots leadership of women?

Dr. Joanna M.:                   07:29                     Well, for me, I guess the wake up moment, again, I get these little moments that kind of set me off on a different trajectory. And this particular one, my son James, who is now six, was about six weeks old at the time. I was breastfeeding him in a darkened room as we do. And I was reflecting on something and that something was a quote from the Dalai Lama. He's quoted as saying the Vancouver Peace summit in 2009 that the world will be saved by the Western woman.

                                                                                Now, this is a quote that gets bandied around women's personal development and leadership gatherings a lot. The Dalai Lama said it, so it must be true, right? He's pretty tuned in. And there's something about it that called to me is always called to me. Like, yes, something about that is true and real for me.

                                                                                On the one hand, by Western women, I'm thinking what he's meaning is women with access to resources not necessarily Western because I know there's just as many women in the Middle East and the far East and Africa who do have access to financial resources, but I think he does mean resource to women. And of course it's going to be women because we have this deep seated sense of compassion and empathy.

                                                                                I'm not saying that some men don't, but if you had to take the average, it is easier for us to access. And if you wanted to transform the wealth of a community and the wellbeing of a community in the developing world, all of the research points towards the empowerment of women. Because when women get financially empowered and they have more to share, they share it with their families and then they share it with their communities.

                                                                                And that's kind of just what they do, right? They don't just hoard it or go off and spend it for their own gain. It gets shared much more powerfully when it's a woman. Indeed, the education of girl children is one of the key metrics in the developing world. So it seems to me that why would it not be the same in the developed world? Right? Why would it not be the same that we could actually transform the wealth, wellbeing and general working-ness of our culture here in the UK where I am or Australia or South Africa or the US or wherever, Western Europe.

                                                                                Why wouldn't it be the same that if we were to achieve the true empowerment of women and parity in leadership, which for me feels like a key piece to the puzzle, I believe it would be exactly the same. I really do believe that if we were able to achieve parity in leadership across politics, in the corporate world, in entrepreneurial-ism, in community leadership, in the charitable sector, if we saw as many women leading as we see men, I truly believe that we couldn't biopsy a shift in culture away from this lack of sustainability, which is rife at the moment.

                                                                                I mean, we're using up our planetary resources. The damn planet is on fire. I'm thinking of my colleagues out in Australia at the moment. Literally one of my team had to move out of our office the other day because of the bush fires and there's crazy weather events happening everywhere. So there's planetary issues. Our political systems are creaking, our financial systems are creaking. It feels to me that there is a huge systemic shift on the horizon or even that we're in the middle of it right now. And that if we were to equip good women to step up and say, yes, I want to be a part of that and I'm willing to be a leader in that to kind of shift it away from the competitive individualistic material success at all costs, culture that we predominantly live in, in the developed world led beautifully by the US and the UK and Australia and these sorts of countries.

                                                                                If we can shift away from that, then I truly believe that we could achieve sustainability as a planet. And I think parody of leadership is going to be one of those key things. So therefore, when I was reflecting back in that moment on this quote from the Dalai Lama, what came to me is he's not talking about Hillary Clinton and Theresa May and Michelle Obama and these sorts of very visible women. He's actually talking about you and me, right? He's talking about my sister, my grandmother, my mother, my neighbor.

                                                                                And I realized at that time that if all of us made a small impact, we could massively change things. But most of us are so busy tearing around like chickens with our heads cut off that we don't even think we could make any difference at all. So I just got this incredible deep calling to support those women, equip them with the tools to sustainably change their corner of the world. And if we can get a million women changing their corner of the world, some of them will be CEOs, some of them will be political leaders and many of them will be mothers and grandmothers and parish leaders and little community leaders and that would have a massive shift on the planet. So that's the game we're up to.

Lisa Linfield:                       12:24                     It interests me the term that you use sustainably shift. Why none of us that good at sustainably doing things? Why do we seem to have this burst of energy and then it goes, particularly when it comes to things like leadership.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   12:38                     I think it's because of the power that we are used to using to achieve results as women. So I have a little metaphor to kind of explain this. Imagine if we go to the States and bought a hair dryer, right? It would operate beautifully at 110 volts. We bought it here to the UK and plugged it into 230 volts. It would burn out. And that is exactly what we see more and more women doing right now. We're 60% more likely to suffer from job stress and burnout than men. And it's because I believe of the type of power. And by power I just mean, and if we look at the etymology of the word power, it just means to be able, I'm not talking about dominion over power over, I'm talking about power as in the ability to anything, right? The ability to make choices, the ability to work out if we want to do that, ability to parent whatever it could be.

                                                                                But this really interesting research that shows over the last 40 years that women are less happy than we were 40 years ago and less happy than are men. And this is from research of over a million women in many, many different countries around the world. And this is irrespective of age, of marital status, whether they're working or not, whether their parents or not, married or not. With the slight exception of African American women who are a bit happier than they were 40 years ago but still less happier than they're men. So this for me is a clue. We as agenda are less happy than we were 40 years ago yet we have more opportunity than we have ever had.

                                                                                We are sicker than we were 40 years ago. We're less fertile. We're burning out yet we've got all of this opportunity and my hypothesis around this, and it is a hypothesis, there is a lot of research which points at it but none done in it per se and that is that the power that it took us to achieve the level of opportunity that we enjoy now as women is not the type of power that it is going to take for us to be able to sustain it because we are using a very masculine type of power. And that is that push, push, push, individualistic achievement, focused power.

                                                                                And it's not what our machinery, our body was designed to utilize. We're not linear, we're cyclical, do you know in our very hormonal makeup, we're not linear like men's hormones. Men's hormones kind of have a couple of spikes and then just gradually decrease over their life. Their testosterone levels or whatever. We women, we cycle madly every bloody month. You ask most women and on one or two days of the month, certainly for me, seven days before my period comes, the world is ending and there's nothing anybody can do to convince me otherwise. All right. And your whole hormonal makeup changes your energy levels. It changes the way that you interact with people. It can impact things dramatically. And that's just one little biological difference to say nothing of the cultural differences which we have as women because of the way that we're brought up.

                                                                                Maybe we had in line parents who didn't discriminate based on gender, but our cultures bloody well do. So as women, most of us live in masculine cultural paradigms. We'd go to work, which is a very masculine paradigm where it's focused on competition, achievement, results, individualism. We celebrate the individuals. And then many of us grow up in families where achievement and winning and doing great at tests and all of that kind of stuff is what celebrated. And so it turns us into superwoman. It turns us into the woman who can achieve and do everything and work out at the gym and have kids and get dinner on the table and be fabulous in the bedroom and burnout. So I think a bit of a long answer to a short question, but I think why we are not able to sustain leadership is we don't have enough role models of what a female friendly style of leadership looks like.

                                                                                I hesitate even to use the word feminine because as soon as they use the word feminine, people tend to go, oh my God, that means weak and submissive. And it absolutely does not mean any of that sort of stuff. And in fact, we talk about the five women's power types at one of many, and we speak about the warrior S, the mother, the lover, the queen and the sorceress. And if we can access these five different energies, we've got very strong yet feminine power available to us. And that brings with it a huge amount of sustainability. We don't have these peaks and trolls where we go, go, go, go, go, like superwoman collapse in heat every three months with a massive cold because we're on the brink of burnout. We need to find a different kind of power and different habits to sustain us in the kind of leadership that the world is calling all of us for, I believe.

Lisa Linfield:                       17:32                     So when you look at those power types and you talk about there being five of them, is the one that we more naturally tend to or is it something which we need to build on or is it something that we need to be more mindful of the ones that we don't really tend towards and use them often?

Dr. Joanna M.:                   17:49                     Yeah. So actually we have a women's Palatine profile tool which helps people to do exactly that, to measure which of these is their natural strengths and all of us will have one or two that are more prevalent that are the ones that we tend to rely on. But when we are being our most sustainable, best selves on getting stuff done, we can rely on one or the other.

                                                                                Now, the challenge comes if we don't have access to all five. You always have one that's kind of tough for you, but if you can have consciousness about it, it can transform them.

                                                                                Let me give you this as an example. Let's take for instance a very common pattern that we see in our communities. Women who have their primary power type is the mother power type. And this is very common because in our culture, the only power that women are allowed that we celebrate women for is this unconditional love, nurture and nourishing of the mother. We don't celebrate our warrioresses. We don't celebrate our queen. We don't celebrate our lovers. We celebrate mother, and that's it. Everything else is not really allowed. We see a lot of women who have a high mother power type and then for instance, very low queen power type. Now, what does that mean? It means that she is going to be nourishing, nurturing, caring and unconditionally loving of people because that's what mother does and she can have the unconditionally loving everyone.

                                                                                The problem is that the mother is one of the power thoughts that will sacrifice and by sacrifice I mean go negative on her needs. She will sacrifice her needs to others. It makes sense for mother, right? If you think about it, the mother of a newborn that baby's crying and the mother is up out of bed and in there breastfeeding the baby before she's even cooked for faculty needs to go and do a wee herself and that's normal and natural.

                                                                                However, when mother is sacrificing for loads of other people, which is what she'll tend to do, she'll sacrifice for her job. She sacrifices for her boss. She sacrifices for her neighbor and her mother and her sister all the time and she doesn't have access to queen our pipe. Now queen is a lot of us that is serene, graceful, where she might be the regal queen with robes flowing or she might be a tribal queen.

                                                                                But either way, it's that visionary, clear, serene pot who is incredible with boundaries. She knows that having her needs met not only for herself but more importantly for her whole realm. So she's great at saying no without upsetting anybody. So if you take someone whose natural tendency is to sacrifice and who doesn't have access to the part that can say no, and the part that can see the long view, the vision that she has for her family or her community or what have you, she just thinks she has to please all of the time. Then this is a recipe for burnout. You see what I mean? So we also see women who commonly don't have access to lover power type. Now most think a lover. Is that about sex and sexuality? Yes.

                                                                                But crucially about lover is she is the center of self-care. She is the part of us that honors this vessel of the body that we've been given. We only get one of them right that cherishes it and nurtures it and loves it to sustain us. So yes, we have power types and that we have more access to and we have some that we have less access to and our journey in becoming mature women in our soft, what I would call soft power, a very effective yet non-super woman style of operating. Our journey becomes about enhancing our access to all of them and knowing which to employ and which to bring into different situations.

Lisa Linfield:                       21:39                     And also that neither are good nor bad. They are all situational. My daughter, myself and a very wise person, we're having a long conversation about mythology and about the Genesis from Greek to Roman, et cetera and the mythology. And it was such a fascinating conversation because she's very into it and it was the point of these mythologies throughout the ages have helped us understand human beings today and that there's a certain part of us that because we no longer learn the classics, we no longer allow the story to help us identify the situation currently or use that story to identify that situation. And I think it's hugely important that we do give ourselves permission to be all of those, to be the lover and the queen and the mother and not feel that in any position at any time, we can only use what, in leadership we could use all of them. In the home we can use all of them. We need boundaries in the home as much as we needed in the workplace.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   22:43                     Absolutely. You are so right. And I think culturally you've got to look at the stories that we pail and some of our religions and if you look at our cultures, look at our fairy pails. Every queen is wicked. Every lover is a whore. Mothers are fine.  They're loving and kind and gentle and sacrificing and oh yes, and all of that. Worry arrests she doesn't even write a mention and sorceress even that word. We chose that word very deliberately. But she is evil. It's witchcraft. And let's say, so if we look in our mythology, these occupied to keep us power, they have been, I don't know if this was a conscious thing, but you can't look past the patriarchy, right? There's really, I think we've had generations and generations where either on purpose or by neglect our stories like men are allowed the full breadth, but stories wise we have not been allowed that.

                                                                                And for me, I came across the archetype because I was nearly burned out by my 50th birthday carrying around delivering trainings in Sydney one weekend, LA, the next weekend in London the next weekend. I was absolutely exhausted and I had a big white public record. I've got to find a new way of operating. This isn't working for me.

                                                                                But as I looked around, I knew that part of that was actually being more of a yes to my feminine later that I saw no role models for the strong feminine. I didn't have a single one in my life. I met one lady on a retreat for burned out people who was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, but so strong. She was the epitome of soft power. And so her pain just kind of didn't even write in her life. It was amazing meeting her. She was just there with her husband because that was kind of thing they did with what is meaningful retreat. But that's the one person who went, wow, so this is possible. And because I saw no role models and I'm a great modeler, I went, well what is there? And just as you said, I went back to the classic, went back to, okay, well Artemis, Diana, Aphrodite, these are the models. It's not that we're going to bring all of them all of the time. but situationally we need access to all of that.

Lisa Linfield:                       24:53                     And it's not just related to leadership. I was laughing with my mum, my mum and I, we've got a personal trainer that we jumped together and we worked him the other day and she was asking me, I'm going to America at the same time, my husband. And she said, well who's looking after the kids? And I said, oh this lady. And she used to work for me and I said she's wonderful grandmother. And my mother looked at me horrified and she was like, what are you talking about? So I said the one that like bakes cookies and does things like that. And she said, I bake cookies with my grandchildren. So I said, yeah, yeah I know that you do but and I was struggling. Then eventually I told her, I said in the fairytales they never say, and then grandma went and did burpees and pushups with her daughter.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   25:40                     That's exactly it.

Lisa Linfield:                       25:40                     Grandmas are supposed to be gray and plump and soft and sitting in the corners. I mean my mother is skiing in France every year, hiking a mountain, riding a mountain bike, doing dealt with her daughter. That is actually so true is that in all these archetypes that we teach and I with money being a strong focus on what retirement being a strong focus of kind of high encouraged people to look forward. As you said, the strategist, I often think that part of the major challenge is that people have such a small view of retirement because retirement is granny baking cookies and I sit there, and I go, well, I've never had that view. I'm from a long lineage of women who did the most amazing things in the latter parts of their life, not the formal path.

                                                                                And I think they'd retirement is around climbing mountains, going skiing all the things that have been role models to me, but yet it is so foreign to so many people because as you said, there have been very few models that are doing burpees and pushups in the gym at 70 and 75 so it just-

Dr. Joanna M.:                   26:42                     Absolutely, absolutely. It's so very true. So, so very true. And I think, I mean clearly your mom's got great access to warrior arrests, right? That's exactly what that is. And I think that's it. If we can consciously choose what we want to bring in any given situation, then no matter what our age, we can create incredible result. Whether that be a really active retirement or a really balanced motherhood we can create it as long as we bring that consciousness.

Lisa Linfield:                       27:09                     But I also think what has been interesting is that throughout my childhood, because of the gender stereotyping of the day, I would have said that my mum was mostly that maternal mother archetype and get as almost that responsibility has shifted. She has become more of this archetype of the warrior and of things like that, that I've been able to go, wow, I'm I never knew this about my mom. And I think that's the reality is that it does all sit in all of us, but that situationally we feel we have to conform to a certain archtype So women in the workplace in my 20 years in corporate, the archetype was never show emotion, never bring that mother thing to work because that's what everyone's expecting you to be.  Show the warrior, show the leader.

                                                                                But in the leader, you just have to access the hottest version of it. That strategist is aloof and untouchable rather than queen in her nature.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   28:13                     Absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.

Lisa Linfield:                       28:16                     So when we look at these aspiring women leaders we've spoken quite a bit of superman syndrome and the individualism. One of the other two challenges that you talk a lot about are imposter syndrome and inertia. Tell us a bit more about those.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   28:31                     Yeah, so I think one of the biggest things that impacts women who are in any kind of leadership position, by leadership, I mean might just be leading a family, right? But any organizational situation in the workplace, politics, what have you, is imposter syndrome, which effectively is that feeling that when we achieve something that we don't deserve it and that we're a fraud and that someone's going to find out sooner or later, which I can really relate to.

                                                                                I mean, here I am. We've had incredible financial success in our lives. We've had incredible career success. I'm at the helm of a movement that had 2000 women through our communities over the last five years. It's extraordinary what we're doing in the world. And yet I feel regularly, I won't say every day anymore, but regularly I have this moment where I think someone's going to find out I'm just this little kid from Lewisham Tasmania sooner or later.

                                                                                Someone's going to find out that I've got absolutely no idea what I'm doing and it's all this blood grapefruit. And that's imposter syndrome. I feel into it a lot. I was invited by the Virgin Unite Foundation to a courageous leadership gathering. It was called try just conversation on Necker Island earlier this year in May with some extraordinary people like ex-president of Columbia, president Juan Manuel Santos, Martin Luther King the third, Martin Luther King, Jr. son, a lady called Hella Thomas [inaudible 00:29:52], who some people may or may not be aware of, but she was one of the women at the helm of the only financial services business in Iceland, not to go bankrupt when Kaupthing went bankrupt. And Icelandic presidential candidate who came from about 1.5% of the vote, about 35 days out coming a very close runner up to the presidency a couple of years back. And he's now the CEO of the B team, an organization of awesome business leaders, including the CEO of Allianz and Danone and Arianna Huffington and others who could set up by the Virgin Unite Foundation originally.

                                                                                So extraordinary people. And I was invited out to participate in this gathering and all my God did my imposter syndrome have something to say about that?  Like who am I to be invited? Okay. They've seen what we're up to in the world. Oh my God. They're going to find out what the... Like all of that stuff, which drives us as women to work really, really hard because we want to contribute and we want to achieve in the world, but we don't own our success, which stops us from putting ourselves forward or asking for more. There's a great cartoon that I've seen once about a man looking at himself in the mirror next to a woman looking at herself in the mirror. The man's pretty poorly, but when he looked in the mirror, he sees this ripped six pack pecks anything.

                                                                                And then this topic of the woman she's pretty beautiful when she's looking in the mirror. She's saying overweight and from P and what have you, and I think this is this imposter syndrome thing that we do is we have a tendency as women to see ourselves as less than. There's loads of research that shows this whereas men see themselves often as more than, they often overestimate what they're capable of. So it's something that we work really strongly with in the women in our lead the change program to kind of call out imposter. And in fact, when I was talking to Halla about it on Necker, we had quite a few conversations about imposter syndrome. She suffers from it hugely as well. I could see it even she, the presidential candidate is flipping out about the fact that she was on Necker Island with these amazing leaders.

                                                                                So none of us is immune. But she said what I really believe about imposter syndrome is the more we spoke about it and the more that we all learn up to it, the less it has a hold over us. If I really carefully believe. So that's the imposter syndrome. But do you do imposter Lisa, or are you?

Lisa Linfield:                       32:12                     I'm a big person for imposter syndrome where Kylie popped on this afternoon and she was talking about thinking about this overachiever as in me. And I looked at her, I thought, hmm, I have no idea what you're talking about. And the problem about imposter syndrome is what you feel imposter syndrome about at one stage of your life does become normal over time. But if you are moving forward, the next thing just flipping comes and smacks you six left two seconds later.

                                                                                So I always say that one of my greatest goals in life, my biggest achievement if I ever get there, would be to totally feel comfortable in my own skin. You mentioned individualism, imposter syndrome and a nausea. I think my biggest challenge would be impostor syndrome is who am I to do this or anything like that. And like all of us, I need to break through it. And I once had a mentor who used the word came your space. And it was such an interesting word because one of the problems with that was inherently the piece of your space that could be your space.

                                                                                So when I started my podcast, the imposter syndrome was massive. And I guess because one of the things was who am I to be in the podcast space, let alone tame it and grow it. But I think that's the challenge. I definitely relate to it and inertia?

Dr. Joanna M.:                   33:33                     Yeah. And inertia. This one brings us on stuck a lot because it's this feeling that we've all got we all have these thoughts, whether they be in the shower or when we're talking to our friends, things that we see out in the world that we'd like to do something about. Injustices we'd like to thank impact. We'd like to make, businesses we'd like to stop, wealth we'd like to build so that we can make a contribution to those causes that we really deeply care about. Whatever it might be.

                                                                                But then we let life shape our priorities because I call yet it throws them at you, right? Just in the last two weeks alone, I have had two cases of massive chickenpox with my kids. We had worms and I have a great housekeeper who helps me out and she's been away having surgery, so it has been absolutely bedlam in our house in the last couple of weeks.

                                                                                My friend Sarah says one of many reasons why I don't have children, but it doesn't mean that you can stop prioritizing those things that are deeply, deeply important. Obviously when my kids being awake all night with chickenpox. The thing that is most important is being with my child and then once we're on the way out of that, does that mean that I can stop from making a stand I want to make around impacting the women that I want to impact. It doesn't stop, so we have to always put our first priorities first. My theme is I'm going into 2020 myself and something that I'm going to be talking about in our community over the new year period. Is that a fierce prioritization. It's knowing at any given moment that your choosing to give time to that is the most important for you in that moment and that which is the most important for you in any given moment might be sacrificing your need to someone you need to care about, but it's a very conscious sacrifice as opposed to one that happens out of obligation.

                                                                                I wasn't sitting with my daughter who was really listless and awful with chickenpox, feeling resentful that I wasn't at work. I was just with her and then when she was better than I was able to go back to work without too much. And I won't say I'm immune to it, I'm a mother, but without too much sense of guilt that I wasn't with her. And that's because I know that in any given moment I've chosen where I'm choosing to spend my time and it weakly aligned with my values. And for women I think if we can give the space to get to know ourselves, to know what our deepest values are and to make choices that we feel we'll be proud of when we're on our deathbeds, whether or not other people understand those choices that we would be proud of, that's the best thing that I think we can do. And that's what it takes to overcome inertia and get into momentum is saying yes, not to opportunity but saying yes to yourself and your priorities.

Lisa Linfield:                       36:31                     And I think one of the words you used there that really resonates with me is conscious. Because what I always say to people is it doesn't matter if you would make the exact same choice, unconscious conscious, but just make a choice. Don't end up somewhere in life that you go, oh goodness, how did I get here? Why didn't I change long ago? It doesn't matter what the choice is. Just make it consciously and just be intentional about the life you choose. 

                                                                                It's summer holidays in South Africa and our kids are around the whole time, like they're always on summer holidays and it is really difficult to prioritize them and work in this and that and everything. But each day I consciously choose, okay, this is the activity I'm going to do with them. And the rest of the day I'm going to work with up mother's guilt?

                                                                                Yes. When I look sideways and they sitting looking at me, then I think maybe I should be doing something with them. But then I say, no, I've chosen that we're going to go. Yesterday we went ice skating. So we went ice skating and had a wonderful time. And whilst I was there, I was very in the moment of being with them. I wasn't thinking I should be doing work because that was the choice.

                                                                                And it's just not letting, as you say, the flow of life interrupt your core objectives. For me also it's way easy to work 24/7 because there's never an intuit. But having said that, if I did that I would be unconsciously saying yes to work and no to my kids. So it's that ability to go through the moment and as you say remind yourself, I have to remind myself often, one of the reasons I gave up corporate was to spend more time with my kids. So get off your desk and go and spend more time with your kids kind of thing. So it is that whole change.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   38:16                     Absolutely.

Lisa Linfield:                       38:16                     I keep forever. And I'm so grateful for your wisdom on the subject. How would people find out more about you? More about one of many, the courses that you offer or maybe do that power types assessment that you mentioned?

Dr. Joanna M.:                   38:29                     Yeah, absolutely. We would love to welcome you into our community. We've got loads of great resources to get people started, so if you start by checking out our website oneofmany.co.uk. So you can head along there and we've also got a fabulous Facebook community. It's called The BE ONE as in B-E-O-N-E BE ONE Global Community. Which you are very welcome to join. So come and check out a lot of our free resources. If you would like to do the power clap to assessment on discover, which of these power types is your most readily accessed and which perhaps is your underbelly, if you like, then you can go to oneofmany.co.uk/profile. And it's normally $97 but if you likely, so I'm very happy to organize a token for your listeners so that they can go and do it for free. Would you like me to organize that for you guys?

Lisa Linfield:                       39:20                     That would be wonderful.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   39:21                     Let me make up a token right now and I'll tell the team to set it up. Let's go LL so lisa Linfield and SPW for Southern Pride Wealth, so L-L-S-P-W, all capital letters. If you use that token you can do the profile for free. And on the back of it I've got some videos debriefing it and helping me understand the pilot types more readily and how you can apply them in the life. So yeah, oneofmany.co.uk/profile. And I'll get that set up with my team hopefully before we get this out to the listeners.

Lisa Linfield:                       39:49                     That would be wonderful. Thank you so much and thank you for your time today.

Dr. Joanna M.:                   39:53                     It's been an absolute pleasure, Lisa. I look forward to hearing how the team go out there.

Lisa Linfield:                       39:59                     That was Joanna Martin and I just love her mission of empowering grassroots leaders and I would strongly encourage every one of you to take up her amazing offer of a free women's power types assessment. I think it'll be such an interesting and insightful journey for all of us to do. And also to remember that we have all of the power types inside us, that in order to be great leaders, we need to be situational and learn when to use them and truly embracing that amazing part that each one of us has for this new year. Take care everybody. Have a great week. I'm Lisa Linfield and this is Working Women's Wealth.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Spotify

Please do Subscribe to our Podcast on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review.  This helps the podcast to rank higher and therefore makes it more visible to others browsing podcasts in the hope they too may benefit from our content.

Get my book - Deep Grooves: Overcoming Patterns that Keep you Stuck

• You can get the first two chapters of my book FREE here

• If you want a paperback copy and you’re in South Africa, visit my site LisaLinfield.com

  If you want a Kindle copy or a paperback anywhere in the world, visit Amazon