72. How to Be Taken Seriously as a Woman Leader
You’re not overlooked because you’re incapable. You’re overlooked because the room is reading something you don’t realize you’re transmitting. And if you want to be taken seriously, we have to talk about what’s actually happening beneath the surface.
Senior women are leaving leadership at record rates, not because they lack intelligence or credentials, but because the emotional cost of managing perception, overexplaining, and constantly recalibrating is unsustainable. Capability is no longer the differentiator. Capacity is.
If you’ve ever replayed meetings in your head, softened your language so you don’t threaten anyone, or tried to outwork bias alone, this episode will land. Join me today as I walk you through the three traits women leaders who are taken seriously consistently embody, and how to implement these immediately.
Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
The real reason senior women are not being taken seriously at higher levels.
Why emotional containment signals authority in high-stakes rooms.
How self-trust without permission builds credibility and influence.
The hidden cost of overexplaining and emotional leakage.
Why isolation leads to burnout and strategic alliances build staying power.
The difference between competence and emotional capacity in leadership.
Practical shifts you can implement immediately to be taken seriously.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
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Watch my TEDx talk: Reclaiming anger: A woman’s birthright
Women in the Workplace report - McKinsey & Company
Episodes Related to how to be taken seriously as a woman leader:
49. The Executive Pause: How Leaders Command a Room with Silence
63. How High-Achieving Women Can Build Internal Safety Through Self-Validation
Full Episode Transcript:
You're not overlooked because you're incapable. You're overlooked because the room is reading something you don't realize you're transmitting. And here's the part that stings a little. You already know what to do. You just don't consistently embody it. And according to McKinsey and Company and their Women in the Workplace report, senior women are leaving leadership at the highest rates we've ever seen. Not entry-level, not mid-level, senior. The ones who made it.
They're exhausted. Not from work, from managing perception, from emotional labor, from proving, from recalibrating constantly. Capability is not the differentiator anymore. Capacity is. Emotional capacity is what separates the women who advance from the women who quietly exit from burnout.
Today, I'm going to show you the three traits women leaders who are taken seriously consistently embody. And I want you to listen not for inspiration. Listen for where you leak authority.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, welcome to today's podcast episode. We are going to talk about three traits of women leaders who are taken seriously. I hear this so much from so many women. They want to be taken seriously. They come to me and they say, "Yan, I want to be taken seriously." And I often ask them, "What have you done to be taken seriously? What are you actually doing in your life, right? And how is this for you showing up?"
Because often times what I find is that women want to be taken seriously, but they don't know the roadmap, they don't know what's required and sometimes they just want the world around them to change so that they're taken seriously. But what I'm going to offer for you today is these three traits. This is the three traits that I have seen over and over again in myself, studying other women who are taken seriously. How you look at yourself, the way you think, what these traits are, and how to actually embody them.
Today's episode is not about inspiration. Today's episode is about real strategic tools that will help you in your life, period. Not just at work, but in your life, period. If you want to be a woman of influence, a woman who's taken seriously, then you have to start with yourself first. And this episode is also really relevant during this time because McKinsey and Company just came out with their latest Women in the Workplace report. And what it found was that women that are of this most senior levels are leaving in record numbers.
And often times it is one of these traits or maybe all three of them that they have not been honing, they have not been working on and it is costing them, costing them emotional labor, costing them physically, right? It's costing them in lots of different ways. And so I felt like this was so important to uncover and to talk about because more and more this is the thing that is either going to cause women to ignore their own needs and not really understand what the roadmap is for this new game at this next level or it's going to be the thing that helps women stay in the game longer, advance without burnout, feeling fully satisfied, feeling like they are winning at a game that they are playing by new rules that they never thought was possible.
So, let's look at trait one, emotional containment. Let me mirror something you might not say out loud. You replay meetings in your head. You reanalyze tone. You overinterpret pauses. You wonder if you were too direct or not direct enough. You feel everything in the room. That sensitivity is not weakness. But unmanaged, it erodes your authority.
Women who are taken seriously feel deeply. They don't process publicly. They don't escalate emotionally in real time. They don't narrate frustration. They don't make the room manage their internal state. They interrupt their own drama. Not suppress it, interrupt it. And that's a trained skill.
In my work with senior women leaders, we build what I call emotional containment, the ability to metabolize discomfort without reacting from it. But here's the truth. Emotional steadiness signals power. Emotional leakage signals instability. And rooms respond to stability.
So I want you to hear this because part of emotional containment is allowing yourself to actually expand your emotional capacity. And expanding your emotional capacity might feel messy at first and it is messy when you're going through it. But you need to allow this messiness to be inside of you and to contain it and to allow it to unleash in places that are appropriate. So I'm going to give you some of my own examples of emotional containment.
I have been in spaces where, I talk about this a lot with my senior leader women, and if you are a high-achieving woman and you've made it to a certain space, you know what it feels like when you are in a room, the tension is high, the emotions are high, and your ass literally feels like it's on fire. You are holding and containing that much power and emotional energy. If you haven't experienced this yet, I want you to know that this is coming and it's a good sign. It's a sign that you have made it into the power room. And this is what it feels like at this point.
And in order to contain it, it's for you to have this relationship with yourself, to know how to slow yourself down, to realize that instability may happen inside of you. And outside of you, you can still be able to take deep breaths, interrupt your own drama, and ask questions and be able to respond, not just react to what's going on inside or outside of you. But this is a skill set.
And what I've noticed with women who take themselves seriously, who really get through things, they're able to interrupt the drama, the victimhood. They're able to question themselves and go to school on themselves. And they don't spin out as much, right? We still may spin out. It's a very human thing to spin out. Listen, I've spun out like three times already this morning. But the difference is I am able to interrupt that pattern. And I am able to have emotional containment. And this is a skill set. It's not just something that happens to you.
And the further and further you climb in the corporate world, the more emotions you're going to feel. The better able you are to deal with those emotions and take care of your internal state, the better you're going to be able to exude authority and stability, even when you don't know all the answers.
So, let me ask you this, right? Next time you feel activated in a meeting, I want you to pause. Put both feet flat on the floor, slow your exhale before you speak. That's it. Three seconds. Authority lives in the pauses. I have a whole episode on the executive pause and it is about containment in these situations. Most women speak to relieve tension.
Taken seriously, leaders speak to direct energy, different posture entirely. This is a skill set. You can learn it. You can embody it. It is what my programs are all focused on, learning how to command yourself. Even when you're feeling hurt, even when you're feeling angry, even when you feel a lot of fear. In fact, I woke up this morning feeling a lot of fear. The difference is I didn't spin out. I noticed myself, I took a pause, I was able to coach myself through it, I was able to contain my emotions so that I can feel safe in my body. This is what internal safety is all about.
So that is trait one. Trait one is about emotional containment. Trait number two, we're going to go right into it, right? Trait number two is all about self-trust that doesn't ask for permission. So you might soften your language so people don't feel threatened. You over-explain so no one misinterprets you. You apologize preemptively so no one thinks you're difficult. And you call it being collaborative. But collaboration does not require self-minimization.
Women who are taken seriously assume they belong. They assume mutuality. They assume even if there are power dynamics and structures, they bring something to the table. They don't look around the table to see if they're allowed to take up space. They take it calmly. They make mistakes. And this is critical. They make visible mistakes. They own their mistakes without collapsing.
So what does that sound like? That was my call. Here's what we're adjusting. It is really taking ownership because often times part of what causes women to burn out is this performance, this spiraling shame, identity crisis, because they are not willing to be bad long enough to become excellent. Right? A lot of boys were grown up told to play hard, be rough. They're not even expected to have good manners. Boys are allowed to be, you know, kind of more rambunctious than girls, whereas girls are told to be nice, to be ladylike.
And this doesn't serve us as women in the workplace when we are trying to achieve incredible things, when we are learning how to operate in systems that weren't created for us, right? To try to do it and try to be likable and try not to make any mistakes. This is a recipe for burnout.
When I started climbing the ladder and being seen, what changed for me was my ability to make mistakes and own it. To really say, "That was my call and it was messed up and I own it and here's how I'm going to take it forward." It takes a lot of guts, it takes a lot of courage to take responsibility for mistakes, but it feels amazing. Because I was no longer hiding from the mistakes. I was no longer trying to hide the messiness of what my financial numbers were. By the way, they were quite messy because we had lots of different systems and there's lots of different reasons.
But I think what really shifted for me when I became a leader who was taken seriously was I was no longer apologizing for things that were wrong. I was more stating the truth of what was happening and the system that we operate in. And I was taking accountability and responsibility for making a shift and a change without apology, without permission. I would ask for the help I needed.
And this was energy-giving. It wasn't draining. It is draining to try to cover up mistakes. It is draining to try to be good at something that you're not good at yet and pretend that you're good at it even though you're not quite there yet, right? It is liberating to say, "Oh, I need help in this. And I'm going to go learn this thing. And I'd like your help in it." With your head up high, still proud and tall, not apologizing for what you don't know, but going after what you don't know and asking people for help. Because when you are playing this game, right, it's not about other people, it's about you.
And most high-achieving women were rewarded early for being right. So being wrong feels destabilizing. But here's what separates winners from quitters. Notice that I say winners from quitters because my belief is that you're not a loser unless you choose to quit. Because if you are a loser, over time you are going to become a winner if you're dedicated to it, if you're willing to be bad long enough to be good. But what failure actually is, is quitting. Because that is a choice. It's a choice to quit and it's a choice to use failure as a reason for quitting versus a reason for winning.
Emotional tolerance for imperfection. This is the capacity that women who are taken seriously, this is the trait that they learn, right? To learn how to trust themselves even when they're making mistakes. In the rooms I lead and where I coach women, we practice visible imperfection. We talk about it deliberately. We discuss how making mistakes is making us stronger and more powerful. We celebrate making mistakes. We switch the thought process around it. And we recondition ourselves to embracing being bad, to learning, to growing, to giving us that ability to learn to trust ourselves.
We let women speak before they feel ready, share before they feel polished, hold eye contact when it feels uncomfortable. Because authority is built through imperfect action. It is not built through perfectionism. It is not built through polish. It's built through repetition under discomfort.
So this week, I want you to take this seriously, take this trait seriously. Replace, "Does that make sense?" if you say that. Oftentimes people are saying that in meetings. "Does that make sense?" Instead of, let's move forward. State your recommendation before your reasoning. Stop sending follow-up emails that re-justify your position. You'll feel exposed. You'll feel on your edge, but this is good. This exposure builds range. This is you inviting discomfort into your life, assuming other people will rise to it and you're no longer asking for permission.
Again, that is trait two, self-trust that doesn't ask for permission. This is your ability to go in it, do it, make mistakes, learn, be bad before you're good. And this builds on the emotional containment too because the more reps you get, like the more reps that I had making mistakes and being able to notice myself when my authority was leaking, the better I was able to contain my emotions when it did happen. The better I was able to say, "Whoa, I just noticed that where I want to ask for permission." And the more I didn't allow my missteps or imperfect action to derail me. I was like, this is just part of it. And that emotional containment really helped that and over time it built that self-trust in myself.
So the third one, and this is so important. Women who are taken seriously, they do not do it alone. They create safety for themselves within themselves, but also externally through strategic alliances, through getting support from people who've gone before them. So here's the part most high achievers resist. Independence is not leadership. Isolation is not strength.
The women who are taken seriously have strategic support, not cheerleaders, not venting partners, strategic mirrors. They process before they react. They ask, "What am I not seeing? Where are my blind spots?" They build alliances intentionally. I used to go into meetings and know, whoa, what I'm about to say is going to really trigger people because what I have to say is powerful. Now, who can I socialize this with beforehand so that they are part of my alliance, so that they know that I am going to speak up and say this and they are going to also say, "I recommend what Yann says. I trust what she says. I've seen it myself," right? This is about building strategic alliance before the meeting even begins. This is how you show up even more powerfully.
And women who are taken seriously, they invest in environments that stretch their emotional capacity. They do not try to outwork bias alone. Because when you process everything internally, you exhaust yourself. And exhaustion leads to exiting and burnout. That is why senior women are leaving, not because they can't do it, because they've been doing it alone for far too long.
In the spaces I facilitate, something shifts quickly. Women realize their emotional patterns are predictable. Their overexplaining is a pattern. Their reactivity is a pattern. Their self-doubt spikes at the same moments. When you can see this pattern, you can interrupt it. And when you interrupt it consistently, your identity changes. Not your confidence, but your identity, your ability to show up for tough things. And if you're emotionally triggered consistently, I always tell my clients, this is a good thing because then you're going to know how to support yourself in that emotional trigger.
So before your next high-stakes moment, text someone you respect and ask, "What blind spot should I watch out for?" That question alone builds power. It has you starting to go to school on yourself. It has you experimenting with yourself. And it has you creating the type of support that will have you feeling like you are ready, able, arms out, strong, embracing for what's coming next, not bracing for it, but really embracing what's next.
Let's let this land clearly. Emotional capacity is what separates the women who advance from the women who quit and burnout. I want you to ask yourself this question. How much discomfort can you hold without shrinking? How much criticism can you absorb without spiraling? How much imperfection can you tolerate without losing self-trust? Capacity determines trajectory. Not intelligence, not experience, not credentials, capacity. And capacity is built intentionally.
This is what I do with women that I coach every single day in my containers. We are building their emotional capacity to contain, to trust themselves. And of course, to not do it alone, to normalize it, to understand that they are part of a bigger game here and that the rules that they've been playing by aren't the rules that they need to continue playing by.
So I want you to ask yourself these questions again. Take this podcast seriously if it's touched something in you. If you want to be taken seriously, you've got to take this work seriously. Where are you leaking authority? Where are you still asking for permission? Where are you trying to prove instead of simply lead? Being taken seriously is not about being louder, it's about being steadier. And steadiness is trained.
If this episode felt precise, not motivational but clarifying, that's intentional. Because advancement is not about doing more, it's about becoming different. And when you expand your emotional capacity, you don't just get taken seriously, you change how the room responds to you.
All right, that was today's episode. I want you to go to school on yourself, notice yourself, get the transcript to this, ask yourself these questions and connect with me if you want to take this work deeper for yourself. This is the exact thing that I support women to do who truly want to be taken seriously and are willing and ready to invest their time, energy, financials and get the most out of their life as possible.
All right, have a beautiful week ahead and continue showing up and taking yourself seriously. I'll see you soon.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
They're exhausted. Not from work, from managing perception, from emotional labor, from proving, from recalibrating constantly. Capability is not the differentiator anymore. Capacity is. Emotional capacity is what separates the women who advance from the women who quietly exit from burnout.
Today, I'm going to show you the three traits women leaders who are taken seriously consistently embody. And I want you to listen not for inspiration. Listen for where you leak authority.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, welcome to today's podcast episode. We are going to talk about three traits of women leaders who are taken seriously. I hear this so much from so many women. They want to be taken seriously. They come to me and they say, "Yan, I want to be taken seriously." And I often ask them, "What have you done to be taken seriously? What are you actually doing in your life, right? And how is this for you showing up?"
Because often times what I find is that women want to be taken seriously, but they don't know the roadmap, they don't know what's required and sometimes they just want the world around them to change so that they're taken seriously. But what I'm going to offer for you today is these three traits. This is the three traits that I have seen over and over again in myself, studying other women who are taken seriously. How you look at yourself, the way you think, what these traits are, and how to actually embody them.
Today's episode is not about inspiration. Today's episode is about real strategic tools that will help you in your life, period. Not just at work, but in your life, period. If you want to be a woman of influence, a woman who's taken seriously, then you have to start with yourself first. And this episode is also really relevant during this time because McKinsey and Company just came out with their latest Women in the Workplace report. And what it found was that women that are of this most senior levels are leaving in record numbers.
And often times it is one of these traits or maybe all three of them that they have not been honing, they have not been working on and it is costing them, costing them emotional labor, costing them physically, right? It's costing them in lots of different ways. And so I felt like this was so important to uncover and to talk about because more and more this is the thing that is either going to cause women to ignore their own needs and not really understand what the roadmap is for this new game at this next level or it's going to be the thing that helps women stay in the game longer, advance without burnout, feeling fully satisfied, feeling like they are winning at a game that they are playing by new rules that they never thought was possible.
So, let's look at trait one, emotional containment. Let me mirror something you might not say out loud. You replay meetings in your head. You reanalyze tone. You overinterpret pauses. You wonder if you were too direct or not direct enough. You feel everything in the room. That sensitivity is not weakness. But unmanaged, it erodes your authority.
Women who are taken seriously feel deeply. They don't process publicly. They don't escalate emotionally in real time. They don't narrate frustration. They don't make the room manage their internal state. They interrupt their own drama. Not suppress it, interrupt it. And that's a trained skill.
In my work with senior women leaders, we build what I call emotional containment, the ability to metabolize discomfort without reacting from it. But here's the truth. Emotional steadiness signals power. Emotional leakage signals instability. And rooms respond to stability.
So I want you to hear this because part of emotional containment is allowing yourself to actually expand your emotional capacity. And expanding your emotional capacity might feel messy at first and it is messy when you're going through it. But you need to allow this messiness to be inside of you and to contain it and to allow it to unleash in places that are appropriate. So I'm going to give you some of my own examples of emotional containment.
I have been in spaces where, I talk about this a lot with my senior leader women, and if you are a high-achieving woman and you've made it to a certain space, you know what it feels like when you are in a room, the tension is high, the emotions are high, and your ass literally feels like it's on fire. You are holding and containing that much power and emotional energy. If you haven't experienced this yet, I want you to know that this is coming and it's a good sign. It's a sign that you have made it into the power room. And this is what it feels like at this point.
And in order to contain it, it's for you to have this relationship with yourself, to know how to slow yourself down, to realize that instability may happen inside of you. And outside of you, you can still be able to take deep breaths, interrupt your own drama, and ask questions and be able to respond, not just react to what's going on inside or outside of you. But this is a skill set.
And what I've noticed with women who take themselves seriously, who really get through things, they're able to interrupt the drama, the victimhood. They're able to question themselves and go to school on themselves. And they don't spin out as much, right? We still may spin out. It's a very human thing to spin out. Listen, I've spun out like three times already this morning. But the difference is I am able to interrupt that pattern. And I am able to have emotional containment. And this is a skill set. It's not just something that happens to you.
And the further and further you climb in the corporate world, the more emotions you're going to feel. The better able you are to deal with those emotions and take care of your internal state, the better you're going to be able to exude authority and stability, even when you don't know all the answers.
So, let me ask you this, right? Next time you feel activated in a meeting, I want you to pause. Put both feet flat on the floor, slow your exhale before you speak. That's it. Three seconds. Authority lives in the pauses. I have a whole episode on the executive pause and it is about containment in these situations. Most women speak to relieve tension.
Taken seriously, leaders speak to direct energy, different posture entirely. This is a skill set. You can learn it. You can embody it. It is what my programs are all focused on, learning how to command yourself. Even when you're feeling hurt, even when you're feeling angry, even when you feel a lot of fear. In fact, I woke up this morning feeling a lot of fear. The difference is I didn't spin out. I noticed myself, I took a pause, I was able to coach myself through it, I was able to contain my emotions so that I can feel safe in my body. This is what internal safety is all about.
So that is trait one. Trait one is about emotional containment. Trait number two, we're going to go right into it, right? Trait number two is all about self-trust that doesn't ask for permission. So you might soften your language so people don't feel threatened. You over-explain so no one misinterprets you. You apologize preemptively so no one thinks you're difficult. And you call it being collaborative. But collaboration does not require self-minimization.
Women who are taken seriously assume they belong. They assume mutuality. They assume even if there are power dynamics and structures, they bring something to the table. They don't look around the table to see if they're allowed to take up space. They take it calmly. They make mistakes. And this is critical. They make visible mistakes. They own their mistakes without collapsing.
So what does that sound like? That was my call. Here's what we're adjusting. It is really taking ownership because often times part of what causes women to burn out is this performance, this spiraling shame, identity crisis, because they are not willing to be bad long enough to become excellent. Right? A lot of boys were grown up told to play hard, be rough. They're not even expected to have good manners. Boys are allowed to be, you know, kind of more rambunctious than girls, whereas girls are told to be nice, to be ladylike.
And this doesn't serve us as women in the workplace when we are trying to achieve incredible things, when we are learning how to operate in systems that weren't created for us, right? To try to do it and try to be likable and try not to make any mistakes. This is a recipe for burnout.
When I started climbing the ladder and being seen, what changed for me was my ability to make mistakes and own it. To really say, "That was my call and it was messed up and I own it and here's how I'm going to take it forward." It takes a lot of guts, it takes a lot of courage to take responsibility for mistakes, but it feels amazing. Because I was no longer hiding from the mistakes. I was no longer trying to hide the messiness of what my financial numbers were. By the way, they were quite messy because we had lots of different systems and there's lots of different reasons.
But I think what really shifted for me when I became a leader who was taken seriously was I was no longer apologizing for things that were wrong. I was more stating the truth of what was happening and the system that we operate in. And I was taking accountability and responsibility for making a shift and a change without apology, without permission. I would ask for the help I needed.
And this was energy-giving. It wasn't draining. It is draining to try to cover up mistakes. It is draining to try to be good at something that you're not good at yet and pretend that you're good at it even though you're not quite there yet, right? It is liberating to say, "Oh, I need help in this. And I'm going to go learn this thing. And I'd like your help in it." With your head up high, still proud and tall, not apologizing for what you don't know, but going after what you don't know and asking people for help. Because when you are playing this game, right, it's not about other people, it's about you.
And most high-achieving women were rewarded early for being right. So being wrong feels destabilizing. But here's what separates winners from quitters. Notice that I say winners from quitters because my belief is that you're not a loser unless you choose to quit. Because if you are a loser, over time you are going to become a winner if you're dedicated to it, if you're willing to be bad long enough to be good. But what failure actually is, is quitting. Because that is a choice. It's a choice to quit and it's a choice to use failure as a reason for quitting versus a reason for winning.
Emotional tolerance for imperfection. This is the capacity that women who are taken seriously, this is the trait that they learn, right? To learn how to trust themselves even when they're making mistakes. In the rooms I lead and where I coach women, we practice visible imperfection. We talk about it deliberately. We discuss how making mistakes is making us stronger and more powerful. We celebrate making mistakes. We switch the thought process around it. And we recondition ourselves to embracing being bad, to learning, to growing, to giving us that ability to learn to trust ourselves.
We let women speak before they feel ready, share before they feel polished, hold eye contact when it feels uncomfortable. Because authority is built through imperfect action. It is not built through perfectionism. It is not built through polish. It's built through repetition under discomfort.
So this week, I want you to take this seriously, take this trait seriously. Replace, "Does that make sense?" if you say that. Oftentimes people are saying that in meetings. "Does that make sense?" Instead of, let's move forward. State your recommendation before your reasoning. Stop sending follow-up emails that re-justify your position. You'll feel exposed. You'll feel on your edge, but this is good. This exposure builds range. This is you inviting discomfort into your life, assuming other people will rise to it and you're no longer asking for permission.
Again, that is trait two, self-trust that doesn't ask for permission. This is your ability to go in it, do it, make mistakes, learn, be bad before you're good. And this builds on the emotional containment too because the more reps you get, like the more reps that I had making mistakes and being able to notice myself when my authority was leaking, the better I was able to contain my emotions when it did happen. The better I was able to say, "Whoa, I just noticed that where I want to ask for permission." And the more I didn't allow my missteps or imperfect action to derail me. I was like, this is just part of it. And that emotional containment really helped that and over time it built that self-trust in myself.
So the third one, and this is so important. Women who are taken seriously, they do not do it alone. They create safety for themselves within themselves, but also externally through strategic alliances, through getting support from people who've gone before them. So here's the part most high achievers resist. Independence is not leadership. Isolation is not strength.
The women who are taken seriously have strategic support, not cheerleaders, not venting partners, strategic mirrors. They process before they react. They ask, "What am I not seeing? Where are my blind spots?" They build alliances intentionally. I used to go into meetings and know, whoa, what I'm about to say is going to really trigger people because what I have to say is powerful. Now, who can I socialize this with beforehand so that they are part of my alliance, so that they know that I am going to speak up and say this and they are going to also say, "I recommend what Yann says. I trust what she says. I've seen it myself," right? This is about building strategic alliance before the meeting even begins. This is how you show up even more powerfully.
And women who are taken seriously, they invest in environments that stretch their emotional capacity. They do not try to outwork bias alone. Because when you process everything internally, you exhaust yourself. And exhaustion leads to exiting and burnout. That is why senior women are leaving, not because they can't do it, because they've been doing it alone for far too long.
In the spaces I facilitate, something shifts quickly. Women realize their emotional patterns are predictable. Their overexplaining is a pattern. Their reactivity is a pattern. Their self-doubt spikes at the same moments. When you can see this pattern, you can interrupt it. And when you interrupt it consistently, your identity changes. Not your confidence, but your identity, your ability to show up for tough things. And if you're emotionally triggered consistently, I always tell my clients, this is a good thing because then you're going to know how to support yourself in that emotional trigger.
So before your next high-stakes moment, text someone you respect and ask, "What blind spot should I watch out for?" That question alone builds power. It has you starting to go to school on yourself. It has you experimenting with yourself. And it has you creating the type of support that will have you feeling like you are ready, able, arms out, strong, embracing for what's coming next, not bracing for it, but really embracing what's next.
Let's let this land clearly. Emotional capacity is what separates the women who advance from the women who quit and burnout. I want you to ask yourself this question. How much discomfort can you hold without shrinking? How much criticism can you absorb without spiraling? How much imperfection can you tolerate without losing self-trust? Capacity determines trajectory. Not intelligence, not experience, not credentials, capacity. And capacity is built intentionally.
This is what I do with women that I coach every single day in my containers. We are building their emotional capacity to contain, to trust themselves. And of course, to not do it alone, to normalize it, to understand that they are part of a bigger game here and that the rules that they've been playing by aren't the rules that they need to continue playing by.
So I want you to ask yourself these questions again. Take this podcast seriously if it's touched something in you. If you want to be taken seriously, you've got to take this work seriously. Where are you leaking authority? Where are you still asking for permission? Where are you trying to prove instead of simply lead? Being taken seriously is not about being louder, it's about being steadier. And steadiness is trained.
If this episode felt precise, not motivational but clarifying, that's intentional. Because advancement is not about doing more, it's about becoming different. And when you expand your emotional capacity, you don't just get taken seriously, you change how the room responds to you.
All right, that was today's episode. I want you to go to school on yourself, notice yourself, get the transcript to this, ask yourself these questions and connect with me if you want to take this work deeper for yourself. This is the exact thing that I support women to do who truly want to be taken seriously and are willing and ready to invest their time, energy, financials and get the most out of their life as possible.
All right, have a beautiful week ahead and continue showing up and taking yourself seriously. I'll see you soon.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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