Today we speak with Amanda Louisa on leading from the feminine.
Amanda is a sustainability specialist, feminine leadership coach and recovering lawyer. She helps corporations and women harness the power of feminine leadership to create thriving and resilient organisations, paving the way for a better future.
When she’s not trying to revolutionise how we treat the planet and women, you can find her with her two cats or cooking up a feast for family and friends. If you like this episode, you can download her free cheat-sheet to regulate your Nervous System.
Amanda’s Course, Ditch the Overwhelm, has a 10% discount code using PUBLICLOVEPROJECT.
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Amanda Louisa – Feminine Leadership
TRANSCRIPT BELOW: Please note transcript was transcribed by technology and has not been edited, therefore may contain errors.
[00:00:00] Amanda Louisa: And if they’ve been under stress and duress, which a lot of our parents have been our nervous system gets calibrated at a level that is
[00:00:07] Amanda Louisa: finding stress kind of natural and normal and being still feels very disruptive. It feels uncomfortable because we’re not used to it. We’re not used to understanding that stillness is safe. I think nervous system work is such a key part of being able to recalibrate as a society to be okay with the stillness to be okay with not keeping up with the Joneses and to start shifting that mentality of thinking we need more in order to be successful.
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[00:00:34] Laura Hartley: I’m Laura Hartley and welcome to the Public Love Project. This podcast is all about re-imagining and remaking the world, creating the conditions for social healing and collective thriving. Each week, we dive into topics around resilience, social change, birthing, and more just, and regenerative world and how we can use our head heart and hands in action. Before i introduce today’s guest and topic though i have one request head on over to apple podcasts or spotify wherever you’re listening and hit subscribe rate and review it helps us work to reach new listeners
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[00:01:14] Laura Hartley: Today, I’m speaking with Amanda Louisa. Amanda as a sustainability specialist, feminine leadership coach and recovering lawyer. She runs a coaching and consulting firm that helps women in corporations Harness the power of the feminine within themselves, their structures and their systems. Her passion and purpose is to create a more holistic corporate culture where the feminine is integrated into how we do business and political systems.
[00:01:40] Laura Hartley: She’s currently writing a book, which is not only a call to action for the next generation of female leaders. It is a step-by-step guide to sustainably transform the current paradigm so welcome to the show amanda …
[00:01:51] Amanda Louisa: Thank you for having me on Laura.
[00:01:53] Laura Hartley: So I, I love what you say there in your bio about transforming the current paradigm.
[00:01:59] Laura Hartley: And I’m curious to start our conversation here about where you would say we are as a world. What is the current paradigm? That we’re in and that you’re talking about.
[00:02:10] Amanda Louisa: When I talk about the paradigm that we’re in, we’re in a very colonial patriarchal kind of culture. So our social understanding, our social societal norms, our cultural practices are very much based on the patriarchy where the masculine is favored as the predominant energy are not necessarily healthy masculine because a healthy masculine integrates some of the feminine energy into it.
[00:02:35] Amanda Louisa: And. What we have now is a social structure. The way our institutions are organized, the way our politics are organized, the way our legal system is organized very much favors the energy of logic, strategy and just driving forward, but not necessarily with an integrated understanding of the collective.
[00:02:56] Amanda Louisa: So it’s a little bit more on the [00:03:00] internally facing kind of selfish side. So. Everything that we do is under this umbrella of you know, if, if it doesn’t fit into this certain box it’s ostracized. It’s the other. So a lot of the feminine qualities I’ve noticed, especially working in very male dominated fields are Kind of not demonized necessarily in some cases they very much are, but they’re definitely devalued.
[00:03:27] Amanda Louisa: So things like our intuition our understanding of our collective wholeness. Aren’t prioritized in the way we make decisions and the way our political systems function is very much about the individual more than the collective as a whole. So there’s, there’s a lack of balance currently.
[00:03:47] Laura Hartley: And of course, I imagine this.
[00:03:49] Laura Hartley: What leads to some of the crises that we see today, like the climate crisis or some of the issues we have with our environment with ongoing discrimination, with unjust policies, you know, where would you say this is leading? Because you’re a sustainability specialist. So I imagine there is a link here.
[00:04:04] Laura Hartley: Would I
[00:04:04] Amanda Louisa: be right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the way we make decisions at the moment is so focused on keeping the status quo as it is that we’ve kind of lost sight at the, of the fact that, , in the last, probably 50 years, we’ve lost 60% of our biodiversity. And when I talk about biodiversity, I’m talking about various species that enable our ecosystem to work the way it works.
[00:04:26] Amanda Louisa: And this means that, you know, we get clean water, clean air, food that’s actually nutritious soil. That’s able to produce. But we’ve homogenized a lot of our food and that impacts the way the soil works and it impacts the way biodiversity works. It means we’re using more chemicals. It me, it it’s such a we look at things in boxes and we categorize everything at the moment.
[00:04:48] Amanda Louisa: So the way our science. Works the way our understanding of the world is structured. The way we’re even taught at school is put everything in a box and categorize it. And when we do that, we compartmentalize everything. But that takes away from the feminine energy, which is one of oneness and integration.
[00:05:07] Amanda Louisa: Everything is connected. So if we look at things in certain boxes, we can’t see the bigger picture, and when we can’t see the bigger picture, we can’t see where we need to go. So we’re shooting forward in a very linear direction, instead of understanding this integration of how humans are connected to the entire world that we exist in.
[00:05:26] Amanda Louisa: We think we are separate from it, but everything impacts everything else. It’s all interconnected. So as we’re witnessing, you know, biodiversity collapse and the climate crisis increasing. We’re witnessing this in, in so many other areas, we’re witnessing it in societal collapses. We’re witnessing it in, in increasing wars, based on resources, look at Ukraine, right?
[00:05:52] Amanda Louisa: Like it’s all integrated. And the more we understand that the more we can make decisions on wholeness and on, [00:06:00] on integration, which is it’s so vital so that we can actually survive.
[00:06:04] Laura Hartley: Everything is connected. I want to step back and understand a little bit about how you came to work in this space because you call yourself a recovering lawyer.
[00:06:16] Laura Hartley: So what is a recovering lawyer and a sustainability specialist. And, and how did you end up working in the space of feminine leadership?
[00:06:23] Amanda Louisa: So by recovering lawyer, I used to be a lawyer. I was working in the corporate sector. I started my career as a lawyer and it was one of those careers where it was work hard, play hard.
[00:06:35] Amanda Louisa: I was working 80 hour weeks. I was caffeinating to survive and I was coming home and drinking half bottle of wine just to wind down cause of the stress of the, of the job. It was very competitive. And I noticed that I just didn’t like who I was becoming working in that field. And a lot of my outside of work hours, the little that I had, I was spending on environmental issues, environmental causes.
[00:07:00] Amanda Louisa: I felt I always have been very connected to mother earth, nature. I’ve always had a very spiritual connection to the land and I’ve it was where my passion lie and from there. I thought, okay, well, if I’m spending all this extra time, the little that I have outside of the law focused on sustainability, maybe I need to, to work in that.
[00:07:24] Amanda Louisa: So I, I requalified, I did my master of science and sustainability management. And started working in in environmental sectors. So I started my like environmental career in the mining and resource sector, which was very interesting cuz I live in, in wa and wa is just a mining culture. It’s a, it’s a mining community.
[00:07:43] Amanda Louisa: So That’s where I started and it grew from there. And as I, as I, grew my career in the sustainability field and the SDGs started coming out and I started looking into that. One of the key aspects of achieving the 17 U N sustainable development goals is empowering women. Women are the key to unlocking the 17 UN SDGs.
[00:08:08] Amanda Louisa: That comes from the UN. And, you know, we live in a world that we’re in 2020 and they there’s still a lot of gender. inequity and you, we still have so few countries with female representation. It’s a, and this is the case,
[00:08:26] even
[00:08:26] Laura Hartley: in boardrooms, right? I mean, we’re not seeing equity.
[00:08:30] Amanda Louisa: Absolutely. No, there’s I think 5% of CEOs globally that are women. And there’s so much so much research that demonstrates that when women are in leadership roles, when women are allowed into spaces of decision making power, the decisions that are made are far more integrated and whole, and the actual, commercial aspects, the return on investments are significantly bigger than when it’s just predominantly male or homogenized boardrooms of, you know, [00:09:00] the 1960s.
[00:09:01] Amanda Louisa: So. It’s smart business, it’s smart decisions, but we’ve got such a, a misogynistic culture. It’s so integrated into our thinking into the way our systems work, into the way our promotional systems work, that we don’t actually have a lot of diversity coming through and it’s from the, the recruitment point all the way to the promotion point, you’ve got these systemic issues that are unconsciously biasing women, and then women of color on top of it are even more biased.
[00:09:31] Amanda Louisa: So we don’t actually have the diversity that we need to create the decision making skill sets that will allow for a more sustainable, just and equitable world.
[00:09:41] Laura Hartley: I, I remember reading this stat. I wish I could get it right. I think I’m gonna get it wrong here. But I think that there are more men at a C-suite level or at an executive level called John than there are women overall.
[00:09:53] Amanda Louisa: I remember that stat. Yes.
[00:09:55] Laura Hartley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s more, there’s more men called John with corner offices than there are women full stop. Yeah. So, you know, this, this is an incredibly male dominated world that we live in. Ah, and you know, coming back though, to this idea, I’d like maybe to understand a little bit more about, you know, you’re talking about the UN sustainable development goals and women being at the center of this and particularly, , equity, gender equity.
[00:10:19] Laura Hartley: So. We often see this as work for someone else, you know, it’s it, that is something that the government creates. It’s something that big business creates, , what is our role? What is our role as individuals? What is our role as employees or participants in a community? How are we all supposed to be creating this.
[00:10:40] Amanda Louisa: When we empower women to regulate their nervous system. So in, in my work, what I’ve seen is so much of the time we’ve integrated these beliefs about ourselves as, as women from childhood about our place in the world and, you know, see her be her, right. We don’t see a lot. Women who embody feminine qualities and leadership roles.
[00:11:04] Amanda Louisa: So we see a lot of men as leaders, but we don’t see the, the same I guess strength of women coming into leadership roles. So when it comes to ensuring that we embody this energy as we go up the ladder. If we can do the self work, if we can really focus on integrating our own energies, integrating our shadow aspects, learning to love the parts of ourselves that society has told us are not worthy.
[00:11:32] Amanda Louisa: Shameful don’t have any place in a board room or in a decision making field, if we can really embody and integrate that and then step into those leadership roles embodying that energy. We’re not only showing other people that This energy has the power to make strong decisions, and we don’t need to become masculine in order to be a leader, but we’re also enabling us to make decisions in those, in those settings.
[00:11:57] Amanda Louisa: From a point that is more [00:12:00] connected to wholeness, to integrity into to ensuring that there is a better outcome for the whole in those decision making rooms.
[00:12:10] Laura Hartley: And what is this, you know, we’re talking about masculine and feminine energy, right. But obviously that is not necessarily dependent on gender, but what exactly is the qualities of feminine energy.
[00:12:21] Laura Hartley: So when you’re talking about embodying feminine leadership, what is different about that to traditional leadership that you see today? So
[00:12:28] Amanda Louisa: traditional leadership is often characterized as focused, determined probably a little bit more domineering. When we think of leaders, we think of these like really strong masculine types that you know, show no emotion.
[00:12:43] Amanda Louisa: They walk into the boardroom, they’re forceful. They might be a bit aggressive, higher on the risk taking side. And the feminine will be more vulnerable, more honest, more integrated, more intuitive more compassionate. You’ve got qualities of community and collaboration as opposed to competition.
[00:13:05] Amanda Louisa: And it’s not that competition or strategy or forcefulness is bad. It’s about integrating and balancing that with compassion, with vulnerability, with honesty, with humility. And when you have a leader that balances both of those qualities, we make decisions that are more integrated and whole, because we are whole.
[00:13:27] Amanda Louisa: So we are not making decisions based out of fear or out of our ego. We’re making decisions from a place of connection.
[00:13:36] Laura Hartley: Do you know Jennifer Armbrust and SIster? Okay. So they have amazing work. It’s essentially a feminist business school. And their idea is around reimagining the kind of masculine capitalist economy that we have, which has so many of these traits.
[00:13:52] Laura Hartley: Capitalism is an ideology as much as it is an economic system and into a more feminine and feminist system and what that would look like, you know, with these traits of collaboration and cooperation and sharing and gratitude. So there is this work, it sounds like both at the individual level of how we’re approaching this, but also at the collective.
[00:14:14] Laura Hartley: Yes.
[00:14:14] Amanda Louisa: Absolutely. Yeah. At the individual level, it’s really about healing the intergenerational trauma we have as women. It wasn’t until the 1960s that we really started stepping into into the workforce in a more integrated way. And even then we were so Kind of belittled as we came into the workforce and we’ve been told that we need to play the game according to masculine rules, in order to get ahead, we need to, you know, just own parts of ourselves that are feminine in order to be taken seriously.
[00:14:42] Amanda Louisa: So being able to heal that intergenerational trauma of being silenced for so many centuries. And there’s so much research that demonstrates that we inherit trauma for at least three generations. And even if we’ve not experienced the trauma of, let’s say grandmother, That [00:15:00] trauma runs through our system is in our DNA.
[00:15:01] Amanda Louisa: It’s in our genetics and it’s activated. And obviously with epigenetics, we know that we can activate and deactivate our genes and we can heal and integrate that in a way that makes sure that we don’t pass that trauma on, but we are also not operating out of that trauma when we step into positions of leadership, when we are seen, when we are, asked to use our voice, because for so long women, haven’t been allowed to use our voice.
[00:15:25] Amanda Louisa: So that’s on the individual level. When we go into a collective level, as feminine beings, being able to , lift each other up instead of tearing each other down. You see so much of , our TV and our, our social cultures, that kind of pit women against each other. Think of things like the bachelor, right?
[00:15:42] Amanda Louisa: Like women are always kind of pitted against each other and breaking out of those social constructs, being able to say no, you know, I rise by lifting others is such an empowering mindset shift. And it takes a lot of work because even as I was coming up through law school There was such an element of competition between the, the women that I was working with.
[00:16:05] Amanda Louisa: And, and you could see that because again, You have so few women in leadership roles that you almost feel like you need to step over each other with your stiletto heels to get to that, to that level. And that’s not true. So, you know, there was this whole kind of mentality of you need to pull the ladder up behind you because it’s a competition.
[00:16:26] Amanda Louisa: But what I’m seeing now, working in the field that I’m working in, working in, you know, as a, as a feminine leadership coach, as well as in, in my sustainability role, We’re lifting each other up more, we’re collaborating more. We realize that by paving the way we’re enabling a, a mass movement of, of, of women to come through and make the changes that we need to see in, in the world at the moment where we’re, we’re such a tipping point of change.
[00:16:53] Amanda Louisa: And we can see that there’s such a, a resistance from the old patriarchal structures. You can see the decisions of the Supreme court in the us as a part of this like suppression movement. But change does mean a little bit of chaos before we can get to that re calibration. So yes, the, the old archetypes of the patriarchy are trying to claw us back, but there’s such a movement forward and we’ve got so many allies as well in the, in the masculine and in men coming forward to support the openness of women into businesses, into politics, into decision making roles.
[00:17:26] Amanda Louisa: So , that’s also important to note and to celebrate.
[00:17:29] Laura Hartley: And you know, what, what I’m hearing in, in that description there of, we’ve gotta pull the ladder up behind us, that there’s not enough opportunities is of course this scarcity. Oh, you know, that, that there’s not. And the, the scarcity is so embedded throughout our culture.
[00:17:46] Laura Hartley: It is so embedded throughout society. And to me, I, I think it has so many roots in patriarchy. It has so many roots in capitalism, but where is this link between, you know, scarcity and we’ve gotta get ahead, patriarchy, and then [00:18:00] of course, Productivity and overworking because, as a recovering lawyer and you and I both work in the burnout space, we both had our own experiences here.
[00:18:09] Laura Hartley: Burnout is very real and this sense of overwork is very real. It’s like, where are the roots of this? Where do we start to unpack this?
[00:18:17] Amanda Louisa: It’s such a shame based culture, right? Like we keep seeing. And I think it’s, it’s gotten worse with social media because we see everybody’s curated life and all their win
[00:18:28] Amanda Louisa: plastered everywhere on our feeds. And we’re constantly be show being shown people, living a life. And obviously we internalize this, this as, oh, we’re not doing enough. So we need to do more to get ahead. We need to keep striving and we need to keep pushing. We need to keep doing, and if we’re not doing it, we’re not living at that kind of point of, the Joneses. We’re not keeping up with the Joneses. We’re we’re not good enough. It’s it’s about us. It’s about how we’ve come across. And you see that in a lot of cultures, right? Of the whole idea that if you are not getting ahead, if you’re not living the life you want it’s because you are doing something wrong.
[00:19:05] Amanda Louisa: Not because it’s a systemic issue because the actual reality is we don’t all start off at the same, start line. People of color, women , marginalized groups transgender people we all have different starting lines and to be honest, white men are privileged. They have a head start in the world already.
[00:19:30] Amanda Louisa: Acknowledging that and being able to say, okay, well, we don’t actually all have the same starting point. We’re all starting from different points. And there is no, there’s no equity at the moment. We can’t say it’s somebody’s fault that they’re not where they wanna be.
[00:19:44] Amanda Louisa: It might be because they’ve started like three steps behind and they’ve had more barriers to get ahead because of the unconscious bias that’s riddled within the system. Mm,
[00:19:56] Laura Hartley: knowing that we’re all starting at different points though. How do we still start to unpack this? Because you know, let’s say you or I recognize, or somebody else recognizes that perhaps they’re not like that.
[00:20:07] Laura Hartley: Number one, starting gate, . So they’re, they’re not gonna be necessarily, in the same place. Once we understand that still, where is one, the mentality that’s still driving in that sense of, okay, I’m still, I’m still in this race I’m just further behind. Yeah. And kind of getting out of it altogether.
[00:20:26] Amanda Louisa: Well, I really think it’s about allyship. So when it comes to, working in businesses for people who are perhaps a little bit more on the privilege side and they can recognize their privilege, whether it’s, you know, white women or white men or, women who’ve, who’ve gotten ahead in their industries.
[00:20:45] Amanda Louisa: Being able to recognize those microaggressions, the unconscious biases, they might be in the boardroom in the meeting rooms and being able to call it out, but also facilitating and advocating for other colleagues [00:21:00] who might be from more marginalized communities and groups. That’s really important.
[00:21:06] Laura Hartley: And, and for us personally, with overwhelm and stress, and it’s so hard to, to kind of step out of these cycles of I’ve gotta be working, I’ve gotta be doing more. And particularly anybody who’s in business, anybody in activism, you know, activism like, these crises are so urgent.
[00:21:23] Laura Hartley: So we get caught in this hustle mentality, where do we still start to go actually how do I still do the work? But step out of this completely. How do I step out of the race myself?
[00:21:37] Amanda Louisa: , I think it comes back to understanding that rest is part of the productivity cycle and we’ve forgotten that we think that to get ahead, we need to constantly be striving.
[00:21:45] Amanda Louisa: If we look at nature I think that’s one of our biggest teachers, everything is in cycles, especially feminine energy. Cause we have a 28 day cycle for the most part it’s around 28 to 35 days. And the masculine energy has a, a 24 hour cycle. So the masculine energy testosterone based people have an energy that lasts for 24 hours.
[00:22:09] Amanda Louisa: And so they have a productivity system that’s able to output quite steadily, whereas the feminine energy or people who menstruate, we have 28 to 35 day cycle. We Follow nature cycles a lot more. We have four seasons and rest is part of that season. Being able to just have the time to recalibrate to go into our rest cycle is so, so, so important because it gives us the time to process.
[00:22:37] Amanda Louisa: And it’s amazing when we do take time for the pause The ideas, the energy, the movement that comes out of it is incredible. Like, even if you think about winter, the fellow season, that has a place in the cycle, right? Like if we didn’t have winter and give the land rest, it wouldn’t be able to be as productive.
[00:22:54] Amanda Louisa: And we can see that happening now in an earth based way. We continuously use the soil and it’s to the point where the soil’s been stripped, bare barren, and we have to use all these chemicals to try and renourish the soil, but we’re still not getting the same nutrients out of the soil and into our food system as we were before.
[00:23:13] Amanda Louisa: So if we think of that as human beings, we’re so productive constantly that we’re filling ourselves with alcohol, with TV, with all these external things, to try and fill up our depletion. But it’s not helping us be more productive. So we were very similar to the earth. And, and if we can compare that and understand that, and again, this comes back to indigenous cultures and understanding, and their understanding of the, that ancient wisdom of our connection and our mirroring of the planet we live on.
[00:23:42] Laura Hartley: So how does this look for you? Right? Because you know, it’s, so I think so many of us more and more are aware that you’re right. We are cyclical beings and we live cyclical lives and there are seasons and there is a time.
[00:23:55] Laura Hartley: And I think part of that is acceptance. Of that, of [00:24:00] accepting that there is a season and yet there’s also the contrast or the tension with living in a world that is not designed for that. . So how do we navigate that? How do we hold that tension there?
[00:24:13] Amanda Louisa: I think finding safety within our own nervous system is a key part of that.
[00:24:17] Amanda Louisa: So being able to rewire our nervous system to be okay with the pauses, we’ve grown up in a society and with parents whose nervous system you know, we feed up as children until the age of seven. We’re very much, you know, mirroring our parents’ nervous system. And if they’ve been under stress and duress, which a lot of our parents have been our nervous system gets calibrated at a level that is.
[00:24:41] Amanda Louisa: Finding stress kind of natural and normal and being still feels very disruptive. It feels uncomfortable because we’re not used to it. We’re not used to understanding that stillness is safe. So I think nervous system work is such a key part of being able to recalibrate as a society to be okay with the stillness to be okay with not keeping up with the Joneses and to start shifting that mentality of thinking we need more in order to be successful.
[00:25:08] Amanda Louisa: We’ve got such a wasteful society. We’ve got so much waste, especially in the Western world. If you think about our food systems and the amount of of food that put into landfill, even think about your own fridge and the way we kind of discard things so easily. You know, do we actually really need as much as we think we do?
[00:25:29] Amanda Louisa: Probably not. And I’m hoping in a lot of ways that forced us to slow down a lot and to see that we don’t need to always be out there doing things find happiness sometimes just that stillness, that ability to connect with our own family and our own people is so much more nurturing and re-energizing than, you know, being out at various cocktail bars, doing whatever the life was before, before the pandemic hit.
[00:25:56] Amanda Louisa: So hopefully it, it showed a lot of us who experienced that stillness isn’t necessarily a bad thing and that we don’t need as much as we think we do.
[00:26:06] Laura Hartley: And where do we start with that safety? Creating safety in our bodies and our, in our nervous systems, you know, our body is really the unconscious, right?
[00:26:13] Laura Hartley: It’s where our unconscious lives. So how do we start
[00:26:16] Amanda Louisa: creating safety? There it’s a lot about tuning into our bodies. A lot of us are very disassociated. I think especially the feminine is dissociated because our bodies have become our enemies. We kind of grew up with this idea of what our body is supposed to look like.
[00:26:32] Amanda Louisa: And as feminine we also carry the trauma of past generations where our bodies have been used against us in a lot of ways. You know, being in our body can feel really unsafe. So one of the key aspects of reclaiming the feminine power is being able to befriend our body and to really step into our, full body.
[00:26:52] Amanda Louisa: A lot of us live from the head up, right. We don’t really connect into what’s going on in our own self, in our own body. So [00:27:00] part of that is, a lot of work that comes down to tuning into various parts of our body and, and tuning into what feeling lives within those parts.
[00:27:09] Amanda Louisa: So how often do we actually sit still and, focusing on. From our toes up, up through our, through our whole system and tune into, the energy that’s sitting there. Do we feel tension? Do we feel sorrow. Do we feel a bit of numbness and what does our numbness tell us? It’s a slow process.
[00:27:28] Amanda Louisa: And I think a lot of us go into this work or looking for a quick fix because that’s just the way we’ve been programmed. But we have to remember that we’ve got centuries worth of trauma and conditioning that we’re undoing. And it just, it is, it is not gonna happen overnight, but it is a process of like really falling back in and reconnecting with the various parts of ourselves that we’ve lost touch with everything from our womb to our stomach, to the energy that moves in our heart space.
[00:28:01] Amanda Louisa: It’s really, really about just befriending slowly, those parts that started to ignore or kind of demonized or yeah. Made the enemy.
[00:28:11] Laura Hartley: Yeah. And when we’re talking about leadership, You know, I know a lot of this conversation, here we’ve talked about structures as they are. We’ve talked about the corporate world and, business as it currently exists.
[00:28:24] Laura Hartley: But a lot of this audience also, are change makers or way finders and people looking for a different way, or they’re people working already in slightly different spheres, but we still have this idea of leadership that carries through. And so when we’re starting to, To do this work, to connect with our body, to understand that there are cycles to look at what a more feminine or feminist leadership might actually look like.
[00:28:50] Laura Hartley: What, what is their bringing opportunity for? What actually has the space to emerge out of that?
[00:28:57] Amanda Louisa: I think a lot of that will be First in understanding that leadership doesn’t mean your title. So your job title, doesn’t make you a leader. It’s how you influence the energy of the room around you.
[00:29:10] Amanda Louisa: So, a good example I have of this is in my previous role, I had a manager who was very highly stressed. She was overworked and we were under resourced, which, you know, is, is the norm and sustainability, especially. It’s one of the most under-resourced departments. And she started micromanaging me, which I don’t do well with.
[00:29:33] Amanda Louisa: And I could have easily internalized that moment or that energy, and it could have become a big confrontation and made the relationship very uncomfortable. And. Which is an old trauma response. Instead I recognize because I’ve done the inner work that she was coming out of her own trauma and that the micromanaging was her sense of safety and control and how she was managing me.
[00:29:59] Amanda Louisa: Wasn’t a reflection [00:30:00] of my performance and my work. It was her own internal monologue that gave her sense of safety by trying to control every aspect of the work that was happening in, in our team. And just that shift of me looking at that as, okay, well, it’s not about me. It’s about her shifted a lot of the energy of that relationship.
[00:30:20] Amanda Louisa: I was able to not come at her from an energy of aggression or frustration. I was able to hold a space because I’d done the inner work. So understanding that when we start doing this work as individuals, whether we are you know, a manager or a team member, We can really shift the energy in rooms and it really comes back down to us.
[00:30:43] Amanda Louisa: So imagine if we had change makers and leaders and you know, people coming into, you know, entry level roles, who’ve done this sort of work who really understand themselves their own triggers, their own nervous system and how they react to people and are able to come in to the organizations they’re working in from that place of real.
[00:31:05] Amanda Louisa: Integration and understanding and how much influence your energy can have on the people around you, because it doesn’t matter what level people are at because that’s a social construct, right? It’s imaginary, we’re all human beings. We’re all equal. And the only thing that influences things is our own energy.
[00:31:23] Amanda Louisa: So we can create massive change by just shifting the way we come into, into situations, how we come into meetings. And I think that’s really powerful and something that we need to talk about more. It’s not about your title. It’s about your energy.
[00:31:39] Laura Hartley: So this is really relational work that we’re talking about.
[00:31:42] Amanda Louisa: Absolutely.
[00:31:42] Laura Hartley: Yeah, because a lot of the time when we’re experiencing conflict or politics or any of these things in an organization that kind of gets seeded between people, these tensions or these kind of micro violences that, that we feel between each other. You know, there does seem to be this sense that we don’t feel safe.
[00:32:01] Laura Hartley: You know, we don’t feel a sense of belonging that we felt very often a sense of our identity attached to what we are doing or what we’re worth. This constant need to be producing. Would you say this is kind of potentially where it’s coming from as well, so that this lack of safety is related to this always need
[00:32:18] Amanda Louisa: to be producing.
[00:32:19] Amanda Louisa: Absolutely we feel so. Pressured to constantly be on. Even though we have a lot of talk about flex work arrangements, the reality is the people that are promoted are still the people that are sitting at their desk from, you know, 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM or 7:00 PM. So even though there’s a, there’s a lot of lip service paid to rest and mental health in, especially in the corporate.
[00:32:44] Amanda Louisa: Sectors nowadays how this translates in terms of promotion and ability to earn more on your earning capacity is still very old school patriarchy. It’s still very much like, no, not really. Like if you are not working at the desk, [00:33:00] then. If you’re not online, if you are, if you’re working from home then the reality is you, you don’t seem to get ahead as fast.
[00:33:10] Amanda Louisa: So we are pressured to continuously produce or to continuously perform. it’s a very, very integrated part of, of I think how we function and how we think we’re supposed to. Mm. So,
[00:33:25] Laura Hartley: When we’re looking at this paradigm of the world as it is, . This podcast is all about remaking the world, how can we remake the world together?
[00:33:34] Laura Hartley: So I think to almost remake it, and I think what you’re articulating here is this vision of a different way. And actually there’s a different form of leadership. There’s a different form working that we could embrace one that is much more regenerative and much more embodying of nature, but I’d love to hear a little bit from you about this vision.
[00:33:52] Laura Hartley: You know, what is your vision of a more, just a more regenerative, more equitable
[00:33:56] Amanda Louisa: world? Oh, I I would love to see a world where no matter your gender identity, no matter your cultural background, you’re treated as, as valuable to the decision making spaces that, that exist. I’d love to see a more holistic way of making decisions, ones that really allow for intuition ones that take into account, not only the economic viability of an option, but also the environmental and social impacts.
[00:34:38] Amanda Louisa: We have a model where we pay lip service to the triple bottom line in sustainability, which is environmental, social, and economic. But the reality is the economic decisions, the economic outcomes of that decision still takes a lot of weight. And I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that we haven’t really Valued ecosystem services that are, are given to us from, the environment or from social connections, those aren’t valued as highly.
[00:35:05] Amanda Louisa: So a world that I would love to see is where we really understand the importance of connectivity for human beings, for our mental health, for our own wellbeing, for our soul. And that things like talking about our you know our values or talking about things like our, our respect of the earth, our integration with the earth, our connectivity to the earth isn’t considered root because it it’s such a Western paradigm where we see ourselves as separate.
[00:35:37] Amanda Louisa: And it’s so integrated. All decision making that we devalue anything with Eastern medicine or indigenous cultures that, that see this interconnectedness. So how beautiful would it be to be able to make decisions that are holistic, that integrate the indigenous, the Eastern ways of, of understanding our our place in the world, as opposed to only [00:36:00] looking at it from a in a Western kind of aspect, I would love to see.
[00:36:06] Amanda Louisa: Holistic decisions, decisions that really take soul into account. Because I think we would make such a difference. We would see the world, not as a competition, not as a resource, not as a a thing, but a living being .
[00:36:21] Laura Hartley: Mm, I love that. You know, I, I think one of the things that you’re articulating there is that there’s more than one way to be human.
[00:36:29] Laura Hartley: And, very often in our culture, we, we tend to think there’s only one way to be human. And you know, the world is the way it is because humans are inherently bad and this is just what it means to be human, as opposed to actually, this is a complete cultural paradigm that doesn’t actually apply or hasn’t historically applied to large swaths of the world.
[00:36:47] Amanda Louisa: Absolutely. I don’t even know how to articulate this at, at this point, but we are so programmed to, to see the world in a certain way. And because I was raised in, in Western culture, in Western society, I didn’t realize how integrated and how different other cultures were in their view of where humanity sits.
[00:37:10] Amanda Louisa: In the context of the earth. We kind of have a pyramid right in the west where humans are at the apex and then everything else falls underneath us and where the hierarchy and the hierarchy is everywhere in society. Right. Whereas I think a lot of indigenous cultures are really more of a circle.
[00:37:26] Amanda Louisa: You see humans at the center of this interconnected ecosystem, interconnected web of life. And if we could integrate that belief system, that understanding more into how we make decisions into how we view the world. If we see ourselves as just one small part of an in incredible web of life. How much more powerful would our decisions be?
[00:37:47] Amanda Louisa: How much less would we be prioritizing selfish outcomes as opposed to holistic outcomes?
[00:37:55] Laura Hartley: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a reframe of our mindsets away from the, the colonial paradigm. so many of us have inherited.
[00:38:03] Laura Hartley: Amanda, I know you’ve got some workshops coming up.
[00:38:06] Laura Hartley: Where can people find out
[00:38:08] Amanda Louisa: more about you? Where can people work
[00:38:09] Laura Hartley: with you? What are you currently offering? What would you suggest?
[00:38:13] Amanda Louisa: So you can find me on Instagram. I’m @theamandalouisa. And I’m also quite active on LinkedIn. So you can find me the same name, Amanda Louisa. I have a new offering coming up in September.
[00:38:27] Amanda Louisa: It’s called ditch the overwhelm. So if you’re interested in some of this nervous system work that we were talking about today about, how leadership can really be about how we show up. This is the perfect workshop and it really dives into understanding how our nervous system works.
[00:38:45] Amanda Louisa: Understanding the four states of overwhelm that we go through, which is fight flight, freeze, and fawn, and how to actually work through those with like really easy to do exercises that will rewire your nervous system to a sense of more [00:39:00] safety and calm. And when you’re in that space of safety and calm, it’s so much easier to make decisions not only in your personal life, but in, in your business life.
[00:39:08] Amanda Louisa: I would love to, to offer a 10% discount any of your wonderful listeners who would like to join me on that workshop. That is
[00:39:16] Laura Hartley: wonderful. I thank you so much for coming on the show, Amanda. It has been really great to have this conversation.
[00:39:22] Amanda Louisa: Thank you so much, Laura, I have loved having this chat with you.
[00:39:25] Amanda Louisa: It’s it’s such an important, issue at the moment and it’s such a turning point. So I love the work that you are doing and the influence you are creating as well.
[00:39:34] Laura Hartley: Thank you so much. And for anybody listening, who wants to join that workshop, all the details will be in the show notes. You’ll also find a discount link in there for 10%.
[00:39:42] Laura Hartley: So please go check out Amanda Louisa. That is all we have time for in today’s episode. I do love it when listeners suggest topics or guests. So please head on over to our website. publiclove.enterprises Send me an email. Otherwise you can reach me on @laura.h.hartley.