Beneath the Burnout: Rebalancing Masculine and Feminine Leadership

The world doesn't need more women trying to be men. The world needs women who know who they are and how to lead in a different way. Hello and welcome to Unlearning and Progress, a podcast for women rising, not just in title, but in self. I'm your co-host Jamie Waterfield and I'm your co-host Angela Cope. Together we're Unlearning and Progress. Today's guest is Julie Santiago, a former Wall Street executive and founder and CEO of We Are the Women, who helps high achieving women overcome burnout and lead fulfilling lives without sacrificing their health or happiness. After graduating at the top of her class from Johns Hopkins University and rising to vice president on Wall Street, Julie experienced burnout at the height of her success. That experience led her to question everything she believed about achievement and ultimately inspired her to found We Are the Women. Since then, she has guided more than 50,000 people through transformational work and holds over 10,000 hours of coaching experience. She's a member of the Forbes Coaching Council and has been recognized on the Inc. 5,000 list of fastest growing companies for four consecutive years. Beyond her work, Julie is deeply devoted to the inner world that sustains it, the spiritual dimension of life, her roles in mother and wife, and she's a lover of nature, chalates, and all things cozy. So this is a really special episode for me. I've known Julie for a little over two years now and I can honestly say that I credit her and her work through We Are the Women as truly life-changing for me. And I've been pretty open on this podcast about my story with burnout, the resentment, the strain it put on my marriage, the guilt I carried about the kind of mom I felt like I was being. And for more than 10 years, I struggled silently with that. I got stuck in the same cycles and I didn't really understand the root of why I kept ending up there. And so joining We Are the Women and being a part of this beautiful community that Julie built really helped me finally confront those root causes in a way that I couldn't do alone. And so Julie personally through your teaching, your presence, your ability to make people feel deeply seen and valued. It has given me so, so much. You are just truly a gift and I am so proud to call you a mentor and a friend and I'm super excited to share you and you're was known with our listeners today. I'm so happy to be here, Jamie. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you, Angela. Julie, one of the questions we've gotten from some listeners of this podcast because it's come up before. This idea, like masculine energy and feminine energy, you know, we still very much work in a male dominated industries. And so women have to sort of shapeshift. We have to bend to fit into this mold to climb that ladder. And that's what we're conditioned to, but what you teach is that there's a different way. And the first part of that is recognizing these differences in these energies. So for our listeners, like how do masculine and feminine energy show up differently in leadership? And why is that such an important piece to understand as it's contributing to why women get to a certain point and kind of feel tired? I love this conversation and it's really nuanced. This conversation about masculine and feminine qualities is not about sex. It's not about gender. It's not about being a man or being a woman. That's a very important distinction before we talk about this. That there are certain qualities that we could name as more masculine qualities. And there are qualities that we could name as more feminine qualities. Now beyond the binary of that, we all have both of these energies and qualities inside of us. For example, single focused. That's a very masculine trait. I'm going to go from A, I'm going to go to B. That's actually the way that the male brain works, that it's more single focused. Whereas women have the ability to hold multiple threads at the same time. That's why women are like, oh, we can multitask. I can hold what's happening at work, what's happening at the home, what's happening in the neighborhood, what's happening with these people. There's a diffusion of focus for women. We have different types of brains. You might even name something like data, numbers, bottom line, outcome based as more of a masculine quality. Whereas you might say a more feminine quality is relational. Outcome doesn't matter process matters more. These aspects of masculine and feminine qualities live in all of us, whether we have a male body or a female body. It's important. The issue that we come across as women working in the corporate world is that the corporate world was built by men and for men. That is just what is true. These companies were built that way. I say this not from a place of blame or finger pointing. I am married and I love my husband. I have a son and I adore my son. This is not about men or women. This is about understanding that we as women who have worked in the corporate world are working inside of a system that was fundamentally not built for the qualities of the feminine. Now, if we take a big further further step back, we have been in an age where for thousands of years, the principles of potria, the principles of masculine have been elevated over the principles of feminine. Some would call that patriarchy. Some might call that the impacts of capitalism, colonization. There is a real power over. Can I accumulate more wealth at the expense of anybody? Can I get more land? Can I get more territory? Can I climb the ladder no matter who I'm stepping on? These are distorted ways in which we find ourselves in this world now. They're distortions of healthy aspects of the masculine, but they're distortions. And so as women, we find ourselves in this system and if we're a high achieving woman who finds herself in the corporate world, we have very developed inner masculine. You can get this enough done. You care about the numbers. You care about the data. You're very linear. We can do the things. But what happens is when we ignore this equally important part of us, whether we're in a woman's body or a man's body, but only ignore the aspects of the feminine, we have tilted too far on the scale to only 50% of the qualities we actually need to feel whole. In order to feel whole, in order to actually feel harmony, to feel balanced, I need to care about the numbers as much as I care about the people. I need to care about the bottom line as much as I care about the impact. I need to care about the fact that you didn't hit a KPI just as much as I care about the fact that your mother is sick right now. I need to read the data, but I also need to learn how to listen to my intuition. What is my gut saying? And inside of the systems that almost all of us still operate in or have been influenced by, we lean so heavily on this way that we forget the other way. We're hearing how you explain this, Julie. There's two things that bubble up for me that I think are under the same umbrella, which is this uncomfortability with this concept in a way. So we've had different guests come on and they've sort of talked about these two energies and I had somebody reach out to me. I had a very quick comment about masculine and feminine energy and she was having a hard time processing it, but also for me, I've had such masculine energy in myself show up and then also in the leaders and the teams that I've been a part of and over the course of the last couple of years in my career. I made the shift to find that balance and more feminine energy. But then it felt like this real tug of war internally of showing up every day and game almost like, am I crazy? Should I just be all about the number? So I think that there's so many different layers to this and with the over abundance of masculine in our world, shame, embarrassment, the desire to not want to sit in that space for so many reasons. I'm curious, I'm hearing that like, is this something that you've heard from the tens of the clients that you work with? How does that land? This is so nuanced. Most people's brains are like, well, you must be talking about men and women and that's very hard for like the idea of like the feminist. It doesn't mean that we aren't as amazing, but we are not amazing in the way men are and men are not amazing in the way we are. So I understand that this is a very push button conversation because it's so nuanced. One of the ways that I've really learned to wrap my head around masculine energy, feminine energy is that the masculine energy is really the energy of doing. And the feminine is the energy of being and for most of us, we have avoided just being at all cost. We sit still, we feel guilty. We have five minutes to ourselves and we don't know how to put down our phone. And so when you're saying I felt shame, I feel like maybe I'm crazy. Can I really be this way? That's normal because we still live in a society that says your worth is based on your productivity. So go do some more stuff. And then you might find yourself in certain scenarios where the aspect of the movement is going to be. more relational aspects, these feminine leadership qualities aren't honored or respected. And so yes, you would feel gaslit and you would feel a little crazy and you would feel maybe a little shame. In my work, I'm not attached to whether or not you stay inside of the system or you leave the system. Some people wanna stay inside of the system, the right system that they can try to instill these feminine leadership principles inside of the system. Some people are like, no, this is not a healthy environment for me because now that I am allowing myself to feel this more and honor this of these other qualities, I can't deny myself. I can't not show up in that way. It would be out of integrity for me to push that away and to keep pretending. And I think the older we get, the more advanced in our careers we get, the more advanced we get in life, the more wisdom we gain, the less we tolerate BS, the less we're willing to tolerate things that are not in integrity for us. And sometimes that does mean making the challenging decisions to walk away from something, whether that's a career or a relationship, but what I say in our work is, I always wanna make sure I walk to the end of the line before I pull the rip cord. And if I'm willing to do that work, the outcome of whether you stay or go, doesn't really matter. But the what you're describing, I think is the way that many women are gasslet inside of industries and companies, which is saying that that way you wanna do this is wrong. And then we try to do it the way other people tell us to do, but we can feel that it is wrong. And it feels like we get stuck because we wanna do it this way, but we feel like we can't. And so then the work for us is to find the places that we can bring back. Julie, you've worked with tens of thousands of women. I've walked alongside hundreds of women. And there are women doing this work quite successfully, living in that feminine energy and strong leadership positions, thriving in their corporate environments. I got to this point and I kept pushing and ultimately I left and I started my own business. And we highlight a lot of those here on this podcast, but just as important, probably more so because are the women that are staying that have found a way to incorporate this harmony of when to work in the masculine, when to work in the feminine, this human-centered leadership style and they're exposing it to more people and showing. Showing that it can be done and you can be just a successful or I'd argue more successful through the approaches of focusing on how are people really feeling and being authentic and vulnerable. Can I say two things about that? The first thing I think this is really important is there is no one right way. It was so right for me to leave my Wall Street job. It was not my Dharma, it was not my life's path or purpose to stay in that job. It was to have it to experience what I did, to leave it, to burn out there, to burn out and building my own business and do the work that I'm doing now. That is very clear. For other women, their path might be to leave just like all of ours was, Jamie Angela. Me, right? Other women's path will be very clearly, no, I am here to stay. I want that steady paycheck. I want to impact the system that will be their path and there is no one right way and I think that's very important to hear. We didn't leave our careers because we couldn't cut it. It's just where we listen and that's what I love and this is the second thing that I want to say, this podcast is about unlearning. No matter whether or not you stay or grow, it really is all about unlearning. Unlearning the things that don't work, becoming who we're here to be. And for some of us as we do that, that will spiral us out of the corporate system and for some of us it will spiral us deeper into it. But the theme is the same, which is all of us really truly remembering our power as women. The world needs women who know who they are and how to lead in a different way because we're not in a great place right now when it comes to this global system. And so something new is being called for and I think that's where women come into play. Like we are here to do it differently and we will face challenges because there is an old system that is dying right now. What do you still notice being pulled into those old systems and patterns? One of the patterns that I've noticed in myself lately is that I still have some flavor of a story that if I'm not solving problems, I'm not useful. Particularly in the business, I can unconsciously create problems that don't exist. And so I'm unlearning what is it like for me to stretch my own nervous systems capacity for peace, for stability, for consistency, for steadiness. You've heard me share this quote by Gabor Mate, who says peace feels like boredom to those who grew up in chaos. So learning how to rest in stillness, learning how to rest in slow and steady, learning how to rest in, I can trust this piece. It's a new level and angle that I'm looking at right now in my life and my work. I was having a tea the other day and needed a moment just to sit in peace. And as I was sitting there, I can hear my brain go, okay, maybe I should journal, maybe I should meditate, maybe I should go to yoga and it's like, wow, even in my resting state, my brain's like, maximize my rest. It's even in that I'm just sitting there like, Angela, just take a breath girl. So real. There was a time you were a woman leader on Wall Street, on paper, that's highly impressive in and of itself. Certainly you had to have been proud of yourself, you know, felt successful. What did that success look like when you were starting out? How were you defining it then? And where did you get to a point where you're like, oh, wait, that's this can't be it. I also joke that the first addiction I ever had was achievement. Like that was my purpose. My purpose was achievement. My purpose wasn't, oh, I'm really good at this. So let me go do this or oh, this really lights me up. So let me go do this or oh, these are my values, not that. So let me make this decision instead of that. That's not how I lived. I don't think most of us live that way. You tell me how to win this game and I'm going to win the game because we're a type A successful women. Never mind whether or not it's actually a game we want to play. And so it was a very typical do this, then this drive. Climb the ladder, got to the top of the ladder. And I was like, I don't think this is my ladder. I am empty, I am exhausted, I'm unfulfilled. You know, I kind of hit this point in my career where I was like, okay, how can I be grateful for where I am? Check, did that. How can I learn what I need to learn? Okay, but I left my Wall Street job thinking that leaving the Wall Street job was going to be the answer to the problems. But what happened is I, when I left that job and let go of that paycheck and started to build my own coaching practice, I was just a Wall Street version of a coach. And that's where it was this big light bulb moment for me. It's like, oh my gosh, you can take, you can take the girl out of Wall Street, but you can't take the Wall Street out of the girl. The job wasn't just the problem. It's also my high achiever DNA. And unless I get to the root of that and start unlearning some of those patterns, then I'm just going to repeat this again and again and again, whether I work for myself or someone else or whether I work in Wall Street or in the tiny apartment that I was living in at the time, it didn't matter because wherever I was there I was. So you're out of Wall Street, you open your own coaching business. You're now realizing now there's still all this DNA inside of me. I'm still showing up in the same ways. The outside setting is different, but the inside is still what it is. What shifted there for you? It was a huge awakening. It was a big shock to my system. Like, oh gosh, if it's not the job, it would have been much easier if it had been the job. If I had quit the job and all the problems went away, that would be so much easier. That's the easy button in a way. But to be like, oh, I am actually contributing to this, whether I'm working on Wall Street or working as a coach, running my own thing, and that's just that is the high achiever DNA. And so the journey that I had to go on in those years afterwards, well before I taught anybody else these things, was to get to some of the roots of why I was this way. And we talk a lot about the idea of these pitfalls that most high achievers have certain pitfalls. Perfectionism is one of them. People pleasing is another one. Overfunctioning is another one where we're doing more than our part. Being the helper, being the nice girl. And I had to get to the root of why I was that way. Why my identity was so wrapped into overgiving, overachieving. Why I was so afraid to go of control. I might be this way because of my family of origin. I might be this way because of the society that I live in. Like, we all still swim in a very male-dominated world. Whether we subscribe to the idea or not, women still are having to work harder and prove more to have the same seat at the table. So there's this level of inadequacy. Stories we tell ourselves, I need to be on all the time. Are they're not going to think I'm serious about my job? I have to respond. I have to be the go-to person. I need to be the one with the answers. So the first thing that I did, which is the first thing we all have to do, is we have to start questioning these narratives. Is it true that I must say yes? Is it true that I must respond in this way? Are these things the ways in which I've built my successful career? Still true. Because what happens for most of us as we get to a point in our career where the same skills that got us here will no longer get us to what's next. So the same traits that help us are ultimately the same traits that can really be our downfall if we don't know how to work with them. And this takes a tremendous amount of unlearning, a tremendous amount of unpacking, all the ways in which we've been influenced to live and to work in a certain way, all the ways in which we've been conditioned to believe that our worth and our value comes from certain things. And that's the renaissance of what if none of those things were true? What if all those things were created as ways to keep me small? And what do I want to believe instead? And that's not an overnight process. It took me a couple of years, many years, work with many, many people, many different modalities to get to the place where I felt like, okay, now I can take this all. And it makes sense. And here's this method and other people can learn it. Hmm. Your words are holding up a mirror. I mean, Julie, so thank you for holding up that mirror. Mm-hmm. Are there common trends you're seeing with women that are listeners maybe hearing and it's like, okay, this is something that I didn't really realize? Is causing this discomfort, but maybe it is something that I really need to sit down and unlearn like, what are those common themes that show up? If you want to try some of this on your own, grab a piece of paper, grab a journal, grab the voice note on your phone, if that's all you have. And ask yourself the question, what did I learn about rest as a child? That's first question. What did I learn about rest as a child? Second question would be, what am I afraid would happen if I slowed down? And if you just sit with those two questions to start, what did I learn about rest? Angela, what would you say? What did you learn about rest? Watching your grownups, the grownups you were around as a kid? All there was no time to rest. Even when I'm sick, you can get out of bed, you can go and go to school and go to your job. So even that messaging is great awareness. Oh, no wonder when you sit down, your brain is like, go maximize your rest, right? That is part of your unlearning. And then what do you want to believe instead? My gosh, Jamie is holding up a quote. Will you share this? This is so good. This is from two years ago. And as literally a sticky note I've had on my monitor, it's okay to rest even when there's work to do. It's okay to rest even when there's work to do, which is what the first program that you came and did with us. It's like, we talk about this idea that rest is revolutionary. And so even those questions, like, what did I learn about rest? What do I want to believe? Jamie gave a great example. I want to believe that it's okay to rest even when there's work to do. And then that next question about what are you afraid to happen? Or you slow down? We'll usually let us know. I'm afraid I won't be successful. I'm afraid I'll lose money. I'm afraid I'm this. I'm afraid I'm not. And that gives you a clue as to what you're holding on to. And why? Those are definitely the themes. I'm afraid to rest. I'm afraid to slow down. I'm afraid to be in the being of the feminine, because that's been made wrong for so long. I guess I'll just stay in the doing of the masculine. And then we wonder why we're all tired and burned out, because we're living at one speed. And we were never meant to live at one speed. We were meant to be seasonal, cyclical people. Like we're not mad that the tree loses its leaves in the winter. But we get mad at ourselves for being in winter. When you look at how you're leading today and the work that you're doing, what feels most true or aligned compared to earlier in your career? What I can say now is a woman who is very solidly in midlife, who has had a couple of decades of a professional career, whether that was in Wall Street or running my own business as a founder and a CEO. The thing that is most true for me now is that I feel most myself than I ever have, that there's something that has happened over these years where I feel like my outsides match my insides and my insides match my outsides. I'm not one person in private. I don't feel differently inside than my life looks on the outside. Those things are very much congruent. It doesn't mean I don't struggle, of course, where human, like we do, we will. There's always growth opportunities. But when I look back now, I feel so present for my life, whereas both at certain times in my Wall Street career or even an earlier entrepreneurship, there was always the sense of rushing, of something missing, like somebody knew something that I didn't know, a lot of outsourcing, my power, outsourcing, my voice, outsourcing, the type of life I wanted to live. The more unlearning that I've done, the more I've been able to make decisions in my life that have allowed me to be in alignment with my values for this season, for this stage of things. There's more there's more inner harmony. And that's what that's what feels really true. There's so much great advice in here. And a lot of tie-ins to past episodes. So if this is your first unlearning and progress episode that you're listening to, definitely go back. The nature episode was just teased. Love that. But we have a question that we always ask our guests before we wrap up, and you'll recognize the question from your own teaching. So we'll put it back on you. If your career were a season, what season would you be in? I feel like I'm in a harvest, a season right now. So a fall, it feels like fall feels like I'm not in the building of the spring or the summer. It feels like there's a real steadiness, a real, where the leaves start to change and you start to get cozy. And that's what feels true right now. It's just a good thing to admit to myself. It's like, yeah, I keep done it. You've come through spring. You've come through summer. Just sit down and have a cup of tea. Don't find a new problem to solve. Exactly. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, ladies. So much fun. Y'all are wonderful. [MUSIC]