Why So Many Women Who Lead Don't Believe They Are Good at Leading

Have you ever felt unsure about your leadership instincts? Do you question your decisions because they don’t align with traditional expectations? In this episode of Leadership is Feminine, Kris Plachy dives into the challenges women face when self-doubt creeps in and disrupts their confidence as leaders. She examines why so many women, despite their success, find it difficult to trust their intuition, especially when navigating the complexities of leading a team.

Kris highlights a powerful truth: “The common theme of the women that I work with has nothing to do with skill or ability, but has everything to do with what I would call learned self-doubt.” Through this lens, she explores how conditioning erodes confidence and teaches women to second-guess their instincts, even when they have proven their capabilities time and time again.

Kris emphasizes the importance of breaking these cycles by embracing self-belief and standing firm in your vision—even when it feels isolating or unconventional. She redefines leadership as an act of nurturing accountability, showing that feminine leadership is not about pleasing others but about setting clear boundaries and holding people—including yourself—accountable to their commitments.

If you’ve ever questioned whether you’re “doing it wrong” simply because you’re doing it differently, this episode offers validation, empowerment, and actionable insights to reclaim your confidence as a leader. Join Kris to discover how embracing your instincts and breaking old cycles can not only transform your leadership but inspire others to do the same.

Key Takeaways From This Episode

1. Challenges for Women in Leadership: Societal conditioning leading to self-doubt in adult women.

2. Self-Doubt Arising When Scaling and Needing a Team

3. The Impact of External Opinions: Exposure to differing opinions leads to women questioning their mission and leadership ability.

4. Encouraging Women to Trust Their Personal Intuition and Decisions

5. Misconceptions Around Accountability in Leadership

6. Encouragement for Breaking Cycles of Self-Doubt and Setting an Example of Self-Belief

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Transcript

Kris Plachy:
Well, hello and welcome to Leadership is Feminine. I'm your host, Kris Plachy, and I'm so glad that you're here. This podcast is launching the week of my birthday. 55th birthday. Holy smokes. That's crazy. It just has sort of hit me as a reality. Wow.

Kris Plachy:
It goes quickly, y'all. So important to do what we really say we want to do because it goes fast. So what do I want to talk about today? You know, I was getting ready as- it's interesting. Does anybody else have this happen? I literally turn on the shower and ideas start flaming through my brain. And then I was listening somewhere to someone and it, and she said that water actually stimulates her ideas. And I thought, wow, I think that might be true for me, which seems so odd because I've never really put-

Kris Plachy:
put attention on it. But the truth is, when I get in the shower, I have all these crazy ideas and I never really affiliated or associated it with water. I thought about it more as just being in the shower. But there's a truth to being near running water or oceans, waves, those kinds of things, where ideas really come. So anyway, that's a side note, you know, that for those of you who've listened for a long time, a lot of the work that I do with my clients is through Voxer. Voxer is a walkie talkie app. It's - to simplify it - it sounds very basic, but since 90 plus percent of my clients are verbal processors, Voxer tends to be where we can meet and work through ideas and thoughts and challenges and concerns.

Kris Plachy:
And we do it asynchronously, although I'm relatively available on Voxer, so it seems and feels a lot like a conversation with a little space in between, which gives you some time to think about what you say before you start talking. Which, I think in most conversations, a lot of us wish we had just a breath or two before we had to speak. We could think. Right. So anyway, I, you know, I never know what's going to come through the lens of the Voxer. Every day it's a new conversation with new client with different clients. There's something else going on. But I've been doing this work and now, of course, working with so many women for so long that there's just a common element that I know I've touched on and-

Kris Plachy:
But I really want to. I think it's just so much more relevant even now. Why do so many more women struggle with leading a team, by and large, by more so than men do? And that doesn't mean that there's not men who struggle. So I'm not, I'm not negating the truth about that. It's just, there are some very real realities for women. And the common theme of the women that I work with has nothing to do with skill, ability, but has everything to do with what I would call learned self doubt. Because I think if you met young girls, little girls, there's very little self doubt and little girls, there's very little self gaslighting lack of self belief. In fact, I think if you meet most little girls, they're quite sure of themselves, confident, they have their own ideas, they say them out loud when they believe themselves.

Kris Plachy:
But the world in general, and I am generalizing, but the world in general starts to teach us that we're all different based on our gender role in the world. And over time, girls who identify right as girls and even those who don't are taught through all sorts of media conversations, relationships, education, culturalization, religion, that their way of thinking, their confidence in themselves, their belief in themselves, their knowing what they know to be true is questionable. Now, not all women. This is not true for all people who are women, but it is true for a lot of us. And over time we doubt ourselves and there's a lot of people in systems around us who echo it, who reinforce it. And so as we grow, so, so let's just use the, the hypothetical - but potentially very real - scenario of a woman who has this incredible idea to start this beautiful work in the world. Whatever it is that she says she wants to do and she believes it wholeheartedly. So she starts with her heart centered vision, which is what most female entrepreneurs begin with. It's a solution to a problem that stems from a passion because it's either an experience that she had or someone that she loves had, or just that she's witnessed.

Kris Plachy:
And she decides, "I'm going to provide this solution in the world". And it's driven out of a belief and a knowing in an intuitive sense of how much it needs to be on the planet. And it doesn't matter if it's a trade, if it's a technical skill, if it's a product, if it's a service. Most women come from this space and she does pretty well. She gets the traction, she sees it working and then doubt hits. And it's usually when we start to build the team. So if it's just me white knuckling to get what I want done, I'm pretty good at it. I'm pretty confident because I don't have to rely on anyone. I don't have to ask anyone, I don't have to leverage anyone else.

Kris Plachy:
I don't have to get their buy in, I don't have to get their opinion. I don't, I don't have to do any of that. I could just do it myself. And when I do it myself, it works. But then I have to get to, I get to a point where I can't do it all anymore. And for all of us, that hits different, depending on where, what kind of business it is that you've built. Sometimes it hits you at $500,000 in revenue, sometimes it doesn't hit to like $2 million in revenue. It doesn't-

Kris Plachy:
There's not really a magic formula here. It just does hit. And you have to start to leverage the hearts and minds and hands of other people to achieve the goal of the work that you want in the world. And that's when the self doubt hits in a way that you maybe haven't felt it before. She starts to question herself. Because why? There's more people now in her orbit who have different opinions, who think differently, who questions what she's doing. And that's when we realize that we don't know what we're doing or we start to think we don't. We don't know if we're doing it right. We don't-

Kris Plachy:
"How do we know if we're doing it right? What if I'm doing it wrong? I want people to like me. I don't want people to be mad at me. I, I just want people to do what I've asked them to do. Well, I don't want them to think I'm a bitch. I want them to, you know, be happy." And then we start to read all these people that we're working with now and they're not happy. So then we feel like we have to be different so that they can be happy. And we start to doubt our own knowing, we start to question our own intuition.

Kris Plachy:
We start to wonder if we really do know what we're doing. And sadly, a lot of women question the mission. They question the service, they question the product, they question their ability to be the one who could do it. They question the viability of the idea. They question their own capacity to lead, even though up until this point they've been very successful.And this is that intersection where I meet so many of my clients. And sure, I know that there are really key elements to building a- it's a framework, right, to help people thrive, help a team understand what we're doing together in order to achieve the outcome we have agreed to. And it's why I wrote the One Hour Leader and it's why I created the Leadership is Feminine, you know, results oriented model.

Kris Plachy:
Like, I know this is true, but just like anything else, having the framework, having the model doesn't do you any good if you don't believe in yourself. And so, so much of the coaching and support and advisement that I provide isn't about tactically what you should do. It's reinforcing the validity of what you already believe and know is true but you are so doubtful of it. And when we doubt ourselves, we don't believe ourselves. That transforms or that translates into different kinds of behaviors that I've witnessed. So for some of us, when we don't believe ourselves, so we, we know something is true about someone on the team, about the way that people are acting on the team, the results that people are getting, the decision that you want to make about, you know, who to hire, or who not to hire, or when to fire someone, or how much to pay someone, or if to give someone a raise, or all those things that I know that you have. Like, this knowing when you do doubt or when you, or when you don't believe yourself. Like that hit, that hit of intuition that you get, like, "This person is not right.

Kris Plachy:
"This person is probably not going to work out. But I need to keep them because if I let them go, it's going to upset everybody else. Or if I let another person go, it's going to make me look like I don't know what I'm doing. Or I should pay them more so that they want to stay. Or I should, I should compromise what we're, the quality of what we're doing. Because it's so hard to find people. And if I don't do what this person wants me to do, I'm going to lose them and then I'm not going to be able to have anybody." Right. Whatever that is. I see tha

Kris Plachy:
that translates into a couple different kinds of behaviors.The first kind of behavior that translates into when we don't believe ourselves is we do compromise and we tolerate. We stop standing in a position of authority and leadership in our own company and we forget that we created a business. We created this thing on the planet to serve a result, to ensure this result in the world is achieved. We did not create the mission of this business and the service of this business or the product of this business to make employees happy, unless your product is a product for employees to be happy. You do not serve at the pleasure of your employees. You do not serve. You do not function.

Kris Plachy:
You do not exist for the pleasure of anyone but yourself. But, see, women are not- women are taught insidiously that they do exist at the pleasure of and for the pleasure of others. So that's pretty hard when you now run a business and you have a lot of people there. Even if you only five people or if you have 50 people. If you are in the business of trying to make everybody happy, you're, you're gonna lose mama, because that's not possible. Because where does happiness come from? It's an inside job.

Kris Plachy:
So the best way to ensure that we hire people who are aligned to the vision is to be crystal clear on it, and who are aligned to the values and the agreements that we make for how we work together is to be crystal clear on them, and who are aligned to the effort that the role, the promise of the role that they have said yes to, if they're aligned to that, is to be crystal clear on it. And then that invitation is honest, and it's out of your knowing and your belief, not what they think that they should have. And then if we're really clear about it, then we're extending an invitation that if someone says yes to it, they're really clear what they said yes to. So the first behavior that I see when people don't believe in themselves is they tolerate and they accept this belief and this behavior that they are not worthy of the results, of the performance that they believe is possible. And there's another behavior that sometimes this belief translates into, which is exhaustion, overwhelm, resentment, fury. It's like one of the women I just hired to,

Kris Plachy:
She and I are partnering together. She's helping us with marketing. And she said, "I just didn't realize the visceral fury that so many women feel because we did a survey". Seething was the word she said, period. Just resentment. Just outright fury and resentment directed at people who you hire to work for you because they're not delivering on what you have believed is possible. But yet they stay.

Kris Plachy:
Why do they stay? Well, they stay because you're afraid if you fire them, you won't find anyone else. And maybe that's been your experience. And I can hear you listening to me or watching this video, and you're like, "Listen, Kris. I have done this, and I'm running out of people to hire, and you- and that becomes a reason to tolerate poor performance." I think that's a terrible belief. It's just like if you are dating and you're like, I don't know, I can't meet a really good one, so I'll just settle for this one who treats me like crap. No.

Kris Plachy:
Wouldn't we rather be alone than be treated like crap? I would.The third behavior that I witness in people who lack self belief is anger, hostility, short, abruptly dismissive, difficult to work for. Women get closed off. They're finally done emotionally when what they have believed in for so long, they no longer believe is possible. So please understand me.

Kris Plachy:
This is directed. This is our work. When you finally just are like, it's not- clearly it's not possible. The hostility can be directed at the people who you hire. And there are times when those women are hard to work for. And I guess there's probably one more, which is confusion and change all the time. Change, erratic change, frenetic change.

Kris Plachy:
Well, I don't- when you don't believe yourself, you believe everybody else. You believe the last person who walked in the door, "Oh, you're right, we should do that. Oh, you're right, we should change that. Oh, let's revamp that." And it's this constant attempt to change things so that other people, people's ideas are going to be better than yours. You don't believe yourself. It takes a lot to believe yourself, in yourself, and to believe yourself when you have lived a life that whispers at you not to. So this isn't,

Kris Plachy:
There's nothing in here that's like meant to be accusatory or judgy. It's. It's just the truth I see. And so my work for me is always in the space of emboldening you to believe yourself first. If you really believed- so when you are sitting at your desk and you're like, "I know this is what I've got to do", the first thought that you have, "I know I need to get rid of him. I know I need to hire this new role.

Kris Plachy:
"I know I need to spend this money. I know I need to stop this thing. I know I need to call this person. I know I need to have this conversation." Whatever that is that hits you. And I know you know what I'm talking about because women are magic. And I know you know. But then maybe you talk about it with someone, they tell you, "I don't think I would do it that way. Or maybe you talk to the team about it."

Kris Plachy:
No, we don't. That's not- it's, you know what, that's gonna... Or maybe you initiate with the person, maybe you think, "Okay, I have to have this difficult conversation with this person." You start the conversation and then they attack you, they blame you, they shut down and then you question yourself. "Oh wait, oh gosh, maybe I was wrong". I don't think you were wrong. But I think you don't know how to believe that you're right or that you are choosing the best path. And therefore the path you choose is this hybrid.

Kris Plachy:
And this is why I believe that so many women struggle being in the leadership role. It's understandable for some people when I meet them, I think, God, it's amazing you have made it as far as you have with so the weight of so much self doubt. Because you know, the Byron Katie question is, who would you be - right - if you couldn't think that, if you couldn't believe that. So who would you be? If it was impossible for you to believe you didn't know what you were doing, if it was impossible for you to believe that you were incompetent, if it was impossible for you to believe that you're an imposter and you probably- everybody's going to feel- if it was impossible for you to ever feel self doubt, unworthy, who would you be? What would you do? What would that version of you do? I think it's a powerful question because the answer is actually very available to you. And I just want more women living into that answer because more women living into that answer changes the world. I did a little research because I was kind of curious and I'm probably going to do more. I don't know, don't quote me on that, but I probably will.

Kris Plachy:
And I did a little research on the word leader. And so the word leader doesn't actually appear anywhere until like the 1800s. In the 1300s there was a word like liadre or something that meant 'to unify' but not in the context of the person that we would associate with leaders. So now it's like modern day writings refer to emperors and kings and conquerors and whatevers as leaders, but those people did not. Okay.So the word leader sort of started to be more commonly used when we were talking about companies when the industrial revolution, we started to need someone who could lead the people of a company, the workers. Right? So even today the word is misused when we say world leaders as an example, right. As we say the president is a leader, he is not a leader, he is an elected representative. You and your company, you're a leader. You weren't elected you weren't selected.

Kris Plachy:
You are the leader of your business. But in a lot of the places where we've used that word to reference people who are men, this is, I think this is why it's very confusing. Because so many people who are considered leaders, even in history were by force or by election, but really up until not very long ago, mostly by force or by patriarchal family line. And so that definition of leader doesn't even really suit us properly because it's been contorted with history when historically that's not what they were called. They were called emperors, conquerors, kings, etc. They were in charge. They had a heck of a lot of power and authority.

Kris Plachy:
But the word leader isn't what those people called that person. Does that make sense? So we're defining it here. That's why this podcast is called Leadership is Feminine. Because leadership, when we really think about who people want to work for, people want to work for people who have empathy, who are compassionate, who are collaborative, who are cooperative, who are supportive, who are motivating, who are inspiring, who develop them, who help, who mentor them. Kings were not mentoring people. They were not there to inspire people. They had the power no matter what. In fact, they abused it.

Kris Plachy:
Most of them, tell me I'm wrong. So it's confusing because as most women, when we look at our feminine quality - and that's true for men too, right? Qualities, the way that we've defined them anyway in this modern society, right? Emotional intelligence is really just feminine leadership. Leading as a woman, leading feminine, using feminine attributes. That is what emotional intelligence is. Some dude in the 70s smacked emotional intelligence onto feminine leadership qualities and called it that, once again, negating something that is actually innate in you, that you have been taught through so many years of socialization about what leadership looks like that you don't under- you don't even believe that intuitive knowing, empathy, cooperation, collaboration is natural leadership. And so, of course, when you want to lead with that, you think you're doing it wrong.

Kris Plachy:
Now, I also want to say, if you look at, like, this is probably a little random, but if you look at, like the animal kingdom. Let's look at, like, especially the animal kingdom, that the mothers are quite involved. They keep their cubs or their babies for a while. Yeah, that's more like us. Yeah. Lionesses, chimpanzees, right? All of these little elephants. Like, there's a lot of nurturing, a lot of loving. But what does a lioness do when a cub up and takes off, does she talk nice to him and say, "Honey, Bunny, No."

Kris Plachy:
What does she do? She goes and gets that cub, picks it up with her mouth and brings it back to the den before one of the lions eats him. Right? Maternal, feminine leadership also has very clear boundaries, very clear accountability. And it's not because it's coming from force or power. It's becoming. It's coming from teaching and leading and guiding and mentoring. "No, honey, as a cub, if you take off over there, you're going to get hurt. Get back here." Boundary clear.

Kris Plachy:
You're running a company. You have team members who are not doing their job. But what do you think? You have to make them like you? You have to make sure they're happy to perform. That isn't your job. You know what your job is, is to help people understand, "Hey, if you want to do well in the world, you should meet your goals that you committed to when you accepted the job". And you as the leader should do the same. If you said this is what you're supposed to do in order to have this job and this compensation, then I need to hold you accountable to that.

Kris Plachy:
That's the agreement we made. But we're all confused because that feels like it's authoritarian or something micromanagey or something. No, no, that is Leadership is Feminine. I can love the crap out of you. In fact, the more I hold you accountable, the more I actually am showing you that I care about you. What if that were true? What if you could believe that? So your self worth, your self belief, your self doubt is at the core of so much of what you're struggling with as a leader. And that is solvable.

Kris Plachy:
But I have my- one of my most favorite authors to thank for this, Rebecca Campbell. She just wrote a new book. In fact, I have it sitting here. Your Soul Had a Dream and Your Life Is It. I just love her so much and I want to give her that shout out, but she talks about people being cycle breakers. And I think that as women, there are some pioneering, trailblazing women, so many of the ones that I work with, honestly, who also know, "I know I don't have to experience this self doubt.

Kris Plachy:
"I know I don't have to experience this lack of self belief. I know I can feel more worthy in this role and in my life. I know that I am not here for the pleasure of every everybody else. I am here to serve out whatever channel, whatever, whatever it is I'm supposed to do here. I am here to serve that out. But this belief system I have is interfering and I want to break it. I want to change it."

Kris Plachy:
There are people who are cycle breakers because when you change it, you change it for everyone else around you because you start to model something that has not existed for other people. So that is the very last sort of posit I would give you is, are you willing to break a cycle that isn't just you, love? It is part of a collective belief that women face all over the world. And we have a long way to go socially in all of our cultures because we are, we are salmon swimming upstream yet. And that's even true of other women. There are so many other women who are fighting those of us who want to believe in ourselves more and believe in more self worth and believe in more self power and believe in our own emboldened vision. There are other women who will tell you you're wrong. And that's what's the hardest right now. Are you willing to break the cycle? Are you willing to say it ends with me? I will learn who the version of me is that believes in herself first.

Kris Plachy:
I will learn who the version of me is who no longer tolerates being doubted. I will learn who the version of me is who stands confidently in her knowing and is willing to risk standing alone for it. Are you? It's hard. It feels easier to just give people what they want. Back off. Try and be nice. I know you know you're not winning when you do that.

Kris Plachy:
And you're certainly not setting up an organization that perpetuates success. But in the moment, I get it. It's an easier choice. But in the long run, it is a terrible choice. What do you need to do to believe in yourself in a way that you never have before? Because if you are one of those cycle breakers that I refer to, now is the time. If there was ever a time, right now is the time.