The Leadership Training for Women

Well, after a lot of hemming and hawing, and a lot of quiet reflection, and a lot of hinting, I am ready to announce to you what I'm up to and what the next step will be. So let's, let's go.

All right. Welcome to the Leadership Is Feminine Podcast. I'm Kris Plachy. I'm thrilled that you're here and I'm excited to share with you what I'm up to and what we proudly announced to our private subscribers last week about our new program. And I have a lot I wanna say about what I wanna say. And I hope you'll find this podcast will be as informative as it is, you know, educational.

So here's the thing, I have been working with leaders for well over almost 25 - no, even longer, yeah - let's call it twenty five, twenty six years, maybe longer. It doesn't matter. All I know is it's my whole pretty much life. And as I've sort of been addressing, through the past several podcasts, there's been a lot of massive change in my own life, which has sort of pushed me through the process of making significant changes in my business.

And I want to be as honest and candid as I can be here with you because the truth is it hasn't been easy for me. There's been a lot of confusion and a lot of overwhelm and a lot of lostness, and a lot of conversations with my amazing team member, Michelle, who's helped me for years and continues to. And, bless her heart, seems to not wanna leave my side, despite my confusion. And a lot of long chats with my bestie Brooke, who I know you all know, and really getting honest.

I think that the longer we live, the more birthdays we get to have. If we're not more honest with ourselves as we age, we're not doing it the best we could. Because if there's one thing I've learned over the past several years is time is finite. Several years ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I was very fortunate and able to move through that with limited disruption and seemingly okay. Which I'm very, very grateful to. I have lots of other friends who have not been so fortunate.

I've had other friends whose husbands and people have just dropped dead or have had- anyway, my point being, we don't have a lot of time, and when you get to be 53, you look up and go, "Oh, okay, wait a minute. You know what's matters is that every day's amazing. As best, as close to amazing as I can get."

That doesn't mean I don't have negative emotions. That doesn't mean I don't have difficult things I deal with, but listen to me, I am done pretending to know what I'm doing in a way that shields me from the honesty I wanna live. And I'm not a big pretender. I think you would find I'm pretty authentic. I think most people work with me say that, but we all do it.

And so I knew something wasn't right and I was just talking to one of my Sage clients over the past week. We were in Boston and one of my clients asked me, you know, "Were you just bored with what you were doing?"

And I'm like, "No, I wasn't bored. There was something else wrong. It was broken for me."

And I think when I'm, when I got really honest with myself, I learned how to teach and lead other leaders by first figuring it out for myself. I had some tutelage. I didn't have a lot. I mostly had people who I shouldn't learn from, but that was good, right?

And then I kind of locked in to what I knew. And that knowledge and confidence in what I knew has been my fundamental grounding for the majority of my career. And I don't think that everything I knew was wrong. I think it's all right. It's just that it was born of a time and out of a voice of a version of what leadership is that has changed.

So there's still some core tenets that I have always believed and now believe even more. Which is, what goes on inside, comes out on the outside. And that if you don't have clarity of how people are meant to succeed in your company, you will struggle. And that if you don't have your own practice for how you can give honest feedback and have conversations with people that you don't even wanna have, you will struggle. And if you don't know how to engage and attract the kind of talent that you really need, you will struggle. And if you don't allow yourself to let people go when they need to go, you will struggle.

But what I have learned by coaching now thousands of people and hundreds of women through How to CEO program, is that all I have to do is help you understand what you need to believe and know, so that you can create the company that is in your voice, instead of me telling you how to run your company. Now, the truth is, I have clients who ask me every single day questions about what they should do in their business, and I always have an answer. I always have advice, I always have guidance. That's never gonna change. But what I know now is that I have to teach you where I go to get that answer so that you can go there too.

And the clients who have worked with me for any substantial time, let's call it a year or more, they have that. Most of them are- I'll hear them say, even though they're still a part of our program, they'll say, "I know what you're gonna say. But I just, I had this really big question I wanted to work with you on, but I figured out how to handle it because I knew what you would say."

They start to adopt the thinking process that is ultimately where your power is. It's not in a tactic. And so the reason that I started to feel like what I was doing was wrong is it was focused on tactics that- listen, if we look at the world, that's what the world wants you to buy, right? "Here's my supplement to lose weight." "Here's my workout to get fit." "Here's my five step process to get rich." And we all fall for it. That's a centuries old approach. I mean, humans aren't very complicated. The problem is, other people's approach to losing weight only works when it becomes your process to losing weight. Other people's process to getting fit only works when it becomes yours. Other people's process to get rich only works when it becomes yours.

So sure. Can other people be helpful? I like to think so, but to me, the tactics are the cheap seats. A hell of a lot more cheap seats in the stadium than the VIP seats down on the bottom. And the VIP seats are where the people are who figured it out and made it theirs. That is what I wanna help you to. I want to teach you and guide you, and coach you, and mentor you through the process of becoming the woman who can lead anyone at any time, on anything, anywhere, including yourself. In fact, ultimately yourself.

So yesterday I was writing a lot of emails and things, cuz we're launching Lead, as I'm talking to you, Lead for Women is the name of my program and that is now live. You can register, you can go to visionary.ceo/lead and you can join me immediately. And I hope you do.

But yesterday was writing about why women fail. And I wanna tell you what I wrote, because there's a lot of reasons why leaders fail. But I believe there's a particular reason why women fail at leading. And when I say failure, I remember years ago my mentor Bill Breeboss, said, "There's no such thing as failure. There's just quit quitting before you succeed."

That's always been a mantra for me. And so when I say, failure, what I mean is women give up before they've had the chance to thrive as a leader. And I wanna read you what I wrote. I wrote:

Why do women fail at leading the businesses they birth? Because they believe in a paradigm that doesn't work for them. And they are unwilling, or not introduced to believing, and then subsequently acting in a new way.

For every woman leader who fails, there are hosts of lies she has believed about herself. Hidden beneath a system that tricks her into believing she is the failure, instead of seeing the system as being the culprit. Take a look around. What do you see in leaders today?

If you're honest, you see a majority of men. You see men who use the centuries old tactics of masculine power, aggressive approach, win at all costs. There's no crying in business tactics. It's not surprising then that women who step in the leadership have to work hard to adopt and also adapt to this arcane leadership language and style.

Now, sure, there are some breakthrough leaders. Leaders who've forged a new approach, but the dominant messaging is still exactly as I've outlined it above. Women who start their own businesses and fail to lead do so, not because they are incapable, but because the very system that is supposed to teach them how to be effective, teaches them that they are unable to be the very thing they think they're supposed to be.

There was a time that women and our intuition, and our wisdom, and our nurturing and our unapologetic love was not only valued, but regarded as the wisdom that propelled successful societies. There's a lot of history to unpack here, but the short of the long, according to scholars, is that with the introduction of religion and western civilizations, women were relegated to one job, and that was to be mothers and wives.

And for centuries, women believed that as well. It has only been in the last several decades that women are finding their voice. But the trouble is they're battling the deafening beat of masculine power and leadership approach. And so even for the woman who dares to attempt to lead as she is, as a woman with all her feminine energy and strength and grace, she is labeled as weak. She's labeled as soft. She's labeled as too emotional to lead. And the worst part is she believes it and she uses the same criteria to assess other women.

It's a fascinating dilemma that we face as women today. We simultaneously wanna achieve our own independent success and to also be insidiously programmed to judge, dismiss, and tear down other women for making the same attempt. I believe that leadership is feminine. I believe that the wisdom of the years that have come and gone have never left the energy of every woman on this planet.

I believe that she hears a voice that calls to her, that tells her when she's in her truth. And can be her most powerful. But the noise of the world is so loud that it can be very hard for her to hear it, to hear her own knowing. Which is why I spend every day of my life reminding the women that I work with of how much agency and authority she has over how she chooses to live and lead.

But I do believe we need new teachers. My hope is to continue to have a voice in the space and be one. Even if you go look for books on leadership right now, today, 95% of them were written by men. The ones written by women were mostly written as an anti-thesis to the male leadership, instead of simply being guides to leading. Whether you're a woman or a man, leadership can be so much different than we have tolerated for too long.

So how does a feminine leader approach the challenges of a masculine world? Can a woman leveraging her feminine energy, her feminine wisdom, and her feminine agency be as or more successful than men who have come before her? The answer is yes, and we're starting to see examples, but we highlight them as anomalies instead of North Stars.

If you are a woman and you are failing at leading your business, it's not because you are not equipped to succeed. It is simply because you are surrounded by lies that perpetuate your feelings of ineptitude. When you listen to who you are and you know her at a new level, you will trust her at a deeper level. Your decisions will be made out of wisdom and grace, rather than trying to prove your compatibility with a system that was never meant for you.

So I'm a visionary. Visionaries believe in futures that don't exist. I believe that women should be leading the world in every area. I believe that's very threatening, even to some women. It's amazing how many women wanna defend the men. I don't have a negative opinion of men. I do have a strong opinion that the system that has perpetuated the male voice as the voice of a authority and strength needs to change. I think there are amazing leaders who are men, and I think if you're honest and you look at who those men are, they leverage feminine leadership.

I think there are exceptional women who are leading today and they know the delicate balance of masculine and feminine energy in their leadership, but we do not teach it. And I would like so much to encourage you as a woman to stop looking at the models of success that are primarily dominated with male energy and masculine approach. Because it's perpetuating your imposter syndrome and your lack of confidence. Your voice as a woman who leads is the voice we need, not some makeshift version.

We have to make a change, and that is what I am determined to do in Lead for Women. This will be the training. If you are a leader who is a woman who aligns with the traits of visionary, meaning you see a world, you see a possibility that doesn't exist. Because it is that vision that compels you to keep doing it. And listen to me, my love. Not everybody is a visionary and that's okay. We don't need everybody to be, but those of us who are, we have to have a place to go to curate how we achieve the mission of that gorgeous vision of yours, along with leveraging the hearts and minds and actions of others.

And I believe the Lead program that we have now launched is the answer to that. It is the practices that you absolutely need, but it is coupled with the why and how, to integrate your unique voice and experience into your practice. This is how the women who have worked with me for years have achieved the level of success they've achieved. It isn't their business acumen.

It is their own emotional and leadership acumen. It is how well they understand who they wanna be in the world, what they want their business to be in the world, and who they want to align with to make that vision happen. And being relentless in the pursuit of that. No longer compromising, no longer hiding, no longer tolerating, no longer indulging, no longer people pleasing, no longer, compensating for other people's mistakes.

What else can I say? Right? Imagine your world if that was not true. I know how radically the work we do can change your life. I know you also struggle to believe that I'm right, that even that kind of change is possible. But I stand before you, that woman. I stand before you as a person who failed at every job she ever had until she thrived. I started as a rookie sales rep, failed, thought I was gonna get fired, came back and won the top rookie of the year for the whole company. I got my first manager job. I failed some hot mess. I wanted to just go back and be an individual contributor. Came back and won the top manager of the year award and I didn't just do it once.

I got a director role failed. Went into my boss's office and head in hands and said, "What the hell am I supposed to do? Nothing is working." Came back and year after year, won top performing director in the entire company. And I built a coaching team inside a company that had never had one because I saw the need and I wrote a proposal and I created it. And initially I fought. Like, I fought everybody to prove the value. It was relentless. Everybody thought we were just icing, and then we were acknowledged in front of a thousand people for the contribution we made to leadership.

So I want you to hear in that two things. First of all, I don't give up. And second of all, what I do and what I teach works. Because I have now evidence of hundreds of people who have taken what I have taught them, and they have changed their life and their business and their success as a result.

And I'm not usually this outward about my accomplishments, I struggle with that, but I am compelled to change the world, and I need 20 million women to do this program to do that. Eleanor Beaton said to me, "What would happen in the world of 20 million people did your work? If 20 million women felt the level of success that my clients feel. How would the world change? And it would be thunderous."

And so I'm on a absolute tear right now to get as many of you to see and believe me, how valuable investing in yourself is, how valuable you are, how you were not just lucky, or how this idea that you have this business that you created. It's so much bigger than you. We are the ancestors of the future of women, and we have a responsibility to do the best we can with all the resources we have access to right now to impact that future.

And we don't have the time and we absolutely should not be indulging anymore our fear, our shame, our embarrassment. "What if nobody likes me?" "What if nobody wants to work with me?" "Why can't I just keep hiring people? And they keep quitting?" And you give up.

No. No more. Your reasons for slowing down and hiding are bigger than you, and we have to work through those because your impact is huge. No matter what you do, how big your business is, there are young women watching you, learning from you, modeling from you, and I think that is a ridiculous responsibility.

But guess what? We got it. Because we are benefiting from our ancestors, and I refuse to have my great-great-great grandma looking down on me, wallowing in my embarrassment because I put a typo in an email and shuts me down. I refuse. No more. I will do what I love. I will be compelled to talk about it. I will make the change I wanna make. I'm gonna have a damn good time. I'm gonna have a lot of fun. I'm gonna laugh. I'm gonna show up.

Are you coming? Because we gotta go. I really hope if you've been a podcast listener and you have not made the decision to work with us yet that this is the battle cry that gets your attention because now is the time. I really, really hope you're ready, mama. Cause we got shit to do. Let's go.

So go to the visionary.ceo/lead. It's a pretty cool time to join since it's new. We're doing a bonus of course, and all we're really doing is adding a month of live expert feedback. So what that means to you is when you register, you're gonna take our business edit or audit, which is basically an assessment for us to have a sense of who you are. What's going on with you? We read every single one.

And then what we're gonna do is work with you over the month of July, live through our CEO hotline. Which is my team of experts and you working through whatever's acute right now in your business. Maybe you're struggling to hire, maybe there's someone you really have to have a difficult conversation with, maybe you're just a burnout, you don't even know where to start. We're gonna do that with you. Live through the hotline. It's a Voxer thing. It's just, it's private. It's you and a coach.

Okay, and then you're gonna start to get all of the modules for Lead that I have curated for you, and you're gonna have live weekly Q and A's with myself and my team to resolve and answer the questions that you have, along with keeping the hotline. So we just wanna make sure that you are so covered and we have a lot of our clients who are not in the US, you're outside of the US and the time zones are bad.

So the hotline is awesome because you- if you've never used Voxer, it's live, it's not asynchronous, it's actually live. So you can call or basically you hit a button, you record your message, and then it comes to our team into the hotline and we reply. So if it's 4:00 AM for us, but it's 4:00 PM for you, you can leave that and then we're gonna get back to you so you don't have to show up to a certain date or time to get your questions answered.

And we also know that it's summer, and so that's why we've decided to do this bonus month of CEO hotline in July because most people don't have the opportunity to come to live calls in July. If you're working, you're too busy and if you're not working, you're on vacation, and you should be, but there might be something you need to work through and that we can do so easily through the hotline.

So we're really, really excited about this as an option for you. That's what I use with my private clients and I love it. And I think they do too. I think they would tell you that it's been handy when they need it. It's like having, you know, insurance, having coaching insurance, having a coach on retainer whenever you need it.

So go to the visionary.ceo/lead, get yourself registered. Let's go. Right? Let's go.

Lead for Women is now open for registrations. You're a woman and you are also a visionary, somebody who sees the world differently than it is. And you are eager to achieve that through your work and by leveraging the hearts and minds of others.

Then I invite you to go to the visionary.ceo/lead and learn everything you can about our Lead program. While it's not for everyone, it really is for you if you are a woman who is ready to learn how to think better so you can lead better and you can live better. You have a legacy to leave here, and I wanna help you leave it by enhancing and improving how you show up as a woman who leads. Join us there.