The Quiet Warrior Podcast with Serena Low

107. Shaping Change and Breaking Barriers in Women’s Leadership with Ros Cardinal

• Serena Low, Introvert Coach for Quiet Achievers and Quiet Warriors

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After more than 20 years in senior HR and organisational development roles, a life-changing cancer diagnosis inspired Ros Cardinal to step out of corporate and into her true calling: transforming leaders and reshaping the way organisations handle change.


Ros is an award-winning executive coach, author of The Resilient Employee, and creator of the Women’s Leadership Archetypes model, now used worldwide to help women discover and embrace their authentic leadership strengths.


In this inspiring conversation, Ros shares her journey from “accidental HR” professional to leadership mentor, her research into women’s leadership styles, and why introverts and quiet achievers are uniquely positioned to lead with authenticity, courage, and wisdom.


Key Takeaways from this episode:

  • Change begins at the top – organisational culture and transformation only last as long as leaders remain invested.
  • Women in leadership still face barriers – from outdated expectations around work–life balance to systemic structures that don’t support those with families or outside commitments.
  • Introverts can be powerful leaders – their thoughtful, measured approach often leads to deeper impact and stronger trust.
  • Too much / not enough paradox – women in leadership are often labelled either too loud and bossy or not assertive enough, making self-trust and resilience vital.
  • The Women’s Leadership Archetypes model – eight archetypes (four empowered, four shadow) that reveal both the strengths and challenges women experience in leadership.
  • Trauma responses at work – patterns like overachieving, people-pleasing, or withdrawing often trace back to childhood conditioning; awareness allows leaders to interrupt these cycles.
  • Energy management for introverts – pacing, picking your battles, and choosing when to speak up are essential to sustaining leadership presence.
  • Creating psychologically safe workplaces – leaders must integrate humanity back into work, allowing people to bring their whole selves instead of leaving emotions at the door.


Connect with Ros Cardinal


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This episode was edited by Aura House Productions

SPEAKER_00:

Hi, I'm Serena Lo. If you're used to hearing that introverts are shy, anxious, antisocial, and lack good communication and leadership skills, then this podcast is for you. You're about to fall in love with a calm, introspective, and profound person that you are. Discover what's fun, unique, and powerful about being an introvert and how to make the elegant transition from quiet achiever to quiet warrior in your life and work, anytime you want, in more ways than you imagined possible. Welcome. Hello and welcome. Today's guest on the Quiet Warrior Podcast is Ross Cardinal. After more than 20 years in corporate human resources and organizational development roles, a successful battle with cancer gave Ross the nudge to take her passion for transforming leaders and improving how individuals and organizations cope with change in a new direction. Leaving her senior corporate role in 2012, Roz established her consulting business, Shaping Change, to achieve her goals. Roz is a solution and results-oriented facilitator with expertise spanning strategic planning, leadership development, organizational culture, change management, emotional intelligence, and employee engagement. She is also a talented and multi-award-winning executive and leadership coach with coaching clients at executive and senior levels in government agencies, private enterprise, and the community sector. Ross is the author of the Resilient Employee and Creator of the Women's Leadership Archetypes Model, used worldwide by women to discover how they can better leverage their natural strengths to lead with purpose, authenticity, and integrity. Welcome, Ross, to the Quiet Warrior Podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. It's lovely to be here.

SPEAKER_00:

Ross, I want to start by asking you about your professional journey and what led you to what you now do. What was the problem that you noticed?

SPEAKER_01:

Look, my I suppose I'll start back before I started my business. So I was a um started my career in the Australian Public Service when I was uh, I don't know, 17, 18. And it was kind of an accidental career in terms of the fact that, you know, I got to the top of the list for the public service exams and they rang me and offered me a job, and you just took whatever they were offering you at the time. So they put me into what was called personnel back in those days, which evolved into human resources and then into people and culture. So um, even though that was an accident, it turned out to be a really fantastic move for me because it was an area that I fell in love with and found that um I just really I think that the big thing for me was helping people, helping people perform better, helping leaders lead better, helping organizations do things more effectively and and with more humanity in it. And that sort of led me over the years to learning and development, then organizational development, and then finally into my own business. So it's um, like I said, it was an accident at the beginning, it was a happy accident.

SPEAKER_00:

As many of the big life changes work out. I think we always start with a personal level and then we have this ripple effect that goes outwards that we want to spread to others. So, what were some of the problems or barriers you noticed around leadership that led you to start your business?

SPEAKER_01:

It's for me, I spent a lot of time in male-dominated industries. Uh, I spent the last 15 years of my career in the electricity industry, which is very male-dominated. And um, we did some really great work there. Um, I was looking after culture change, amongst other things, leadership development, culture change. We ran a really amazing culture change program that ran for about probably about five or six years. It was at least five years. And one of the things that I really loved about the program was how life-changing it was for people. So we did get people who, you know, left the business and started doing something completely different as a result of the program. So we had someone who was an accountant who left to become a doctor in, you know, she was in her mid-40s and just quit her accounting career and went off and studied to become a doctor. We had somebody in marketing who quit to go off and uh start his own business. So we were getting stories like that, which obviously the organization wasn't that thrilled about. But for me, it was that beauty of watching people suddenly go, you know what, this isn't what I really want to do. I want to do something completely different. But one of the things that I found over the time of running the program is that it started to lose traction because the leaders lost interest in it. It became just something that something that just happened as part of the organizational way we do things, not something that really stayed front of mind for them. And as soon as the leaders lost interest in it, it really started to stagnate. So we were still getting people coming through the program and you know having these great success stories, but then it wasn't bedding down back in the business. And for me, that was, I think, one of the key things that I've really noticed in all of my career around culture change, around any kind of change in organizations, is it's only as good as the attention that leaders pay to it. And that was really, you know, that was, I suppose, the reason for starting my business and calling it shaping change was around this idea of how do we do change better. And of course, you know, culture is part of that. But that was the really the big issue, I think, that I really wanted to solve. And that was what led me to to leave my job and start a business was this idea that we've got to start doing this differently, we've got to start doing it better. I'd almost run out of, I think I'd run out of steam in the business I was working for. It was that sort of sense of staying here isn't gonna make any more of a difference. I think the difference I was gonna make was done, and it was time to go on and make that difference somewhere else.

SPEAKER_00:

So it was about finding a new platform, a new context for you to apply, something that you had become very passionate about. Can you talk to us about some of the barriers for women who are advancing in leadership and how have things changed over the decades?

SPEAKER_01:

There's still a lot of issues that women face in leadership roles. Um, that was one of the big callus for me around getting me to focus more in on what was happening for women in particular, was the fact that my daughter started work in engineering and was experiencing the same issues that I'd experienced in my career. And I sort of thought nothing's changed in a generation. And, you know, we did certainly made some fairly big strides in terms of women's representation in leadership over the years, you know, probably a generation or two before that, you know, there was this sense of you know, women suddenly were allowed to stay in the workforce once they got married. That was a really big thing. Women actually weren't expected to just leave work because they had children, they were staying at work, you know. Certainly my generation did that. So we've made some really big strides. It was almost like we sort of stalled and things weren't really changing that much for women. And I was talking to women who were coming to me for coaching, and they were getting frustrated with the system. It's like I've got a lot to add. I feel like, you know, I'm ambitious, I want to do more here, but I'm being held back by the fact that my organization really doesn't support women who've got families as an example. We say all the right things, but it doesn't flow through into what we actually do. And so I'm finding women were saying things like, I'm finding that you know, I've having to choose between my career and my family life, and I don't want to do that. Is there a way we can actually have both? I remember MCing a conference, and one of the topics was around work-life balance. We had, you know, a couple of men and a couple of women who were talking about what it meant to them. And really the conclusion in the room was that we can't have it all. And there was this almost like you could almost feel the air go out of the room. It's like this big deflation moment where everyone, because they were all sitting there going, they're going to tell us the big secret, how we as women can have it all. And all of a sudden the answer was you can't. And so for women, the challenges are, you know, they've certainly changed over the years. Like we're no longer, like I said, having to leave work and we got married, but it's a different set of challenges. It's around how do women um become leaders, how do they maintain that ambition and that leadership drive when they're being told that they, you know, I've got to choose between work and family. And the women who are sort of going, well, actually, no, I'm choosing my family, and they have big career breaks, or they sort of hold back their career because they feel like they can't be leaders in the environment that we've created. And for me, that's a really big frustration because we've created a way of doing work that doesn't suit anybody who wants to have a life, you know, who wants to have a family, who wants to have hobbies, who wants to have something else outside of work, because we've created a system where in order to be successful, you've got to give everything to the job. You're expected to work insane hours, take on big responsibilities, to be available 24-7, especially now we've all got email, you know, on our phone, so it's there 24-7. And so we've created this system that really doesn't work for people in general. I'm not just talking women, but just people. And that's my my big quest, I suppose, at the moment is how do we change the system? You know, how do we actually all recognise that this isn't healthy? It's not a, it's not a it, it's not good for anybody, it's not good for men who don't, you know, there's men out there who don't see their kids, you know, who work, they're at the very top of organizations, you know, captains of industry, they never see their families. I had a man say to me a while ago that he the only time he saw his kids was when they went on their annual holiday. And he made sure their annual holiday was something really special. They went overseas and they did really fantastic things, but like they see their dad for four weeks a year, which was just you know, I it was heartbreaking, really, it really honestly was, because I could see that even though he was making a choice, it was coming at such a cost.

SPEAKER_00:

I think what we are lacking is a holistic approach to work. So what is it that keeps people Well we s we keep having these conversations, you know, publicly, and there's a lot of acknowledgement, there's some awareness that things are not as healthy as they should be, or what needs to be done or what needs to happen for those for that talk to flow through into action.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a really tricky one, and one of the things that I found in having these conversations with women first and then some men is that when I talk to women about this, they go, Oh God, that makes total sense. I would love it if we could, you know, reframe the way that we work. Like I've had women say to me, I just love it. I'd love to work in an environment where if my kids got sick, not sick, sick, you know, really ill, but if they were, you know, unwell and just couldn't go to school, I could bring them to work. And there was this place where I could put them where they could just sort of, you know, watch TV or read a book quietly and I could check on them. I've had women say things like, I'd love to have a daycare center really close to my work so I could just duck out and go and breastfeed rather than having to sit on the toilet in the sit on the toilet in the in the um disabled toilets and express milk to give to my baby when I get home. And so women sort of talk about it as they'd love to have this world where we could integrate all of life, you know, work, family, etc. But one of the things I found is that the people in who the people who can make the difference are invested in the way it currently is. There's a degree of power in the way things are, there's a degree of control in the way things are. And certainly we've seen some companies make some really dramatic changes during COVID, which some of them were amazing changes. I had a client organization who basically didn't go back to the office. They said it's been working so well for us with everyone working remotely, we want to continue to do that. So they downsized their office space in Melbourne from, I think they had five floors of the building, they went down to two, and they've got meeting rooms and hot desks because they said it worked so well, you know, giving people that opportunity to work into to work flexibly, work independently, you know, have their kids with them, have their pets with them. And they didn't see any sense in going back to the way it was done before. And that's but it's only a small example of it being done better and being done differently. And I certainly know, like, there's a wonderful woman leader that I know who uh took over as managing director of a company and again completely changed the way they did things. And she was, you know, she said women embraced it and loved it, but she said with the men, she had to push them out the door. It was kind of like it's three o'clock. You said you had a soccer game to go watch, what are you still doing at work? And then once they started to realize that they could work like that and it was actually okay and it was actually working really well, and they were being really productive, they started embracing it as well. So I think there's an element of the way we've always done things, and there's also an element of people in very senior positions being very invested in the way things currently work. And I think those are the big blockers that we have to overcome.

SPEAKER_00:

We know that it takes years for systems to change, and it's easier to work on one person at a time. Do you think there's a difference in the way women lead and the way men lead that might contribute to the way this problem is being addressed?

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I started asking that question myself back in 2016 around is there a difference between how men and women lead? And I ended up with 538 women from around the world who contributed to focus groups and interviews and filled out surveys for me and so on. And out of that we've got a very distinctly different model of leadership for women. So, what does it actually look like? So I asked them the question of what does it look like when you're at your best, when you're not constrained by the environment, you know, when you can just be you. And I spoke to women who own their own businesses and women who'd set things up to work the way they want it to work. And women's leadership, the I guess the fundamental difference is that women don't tend to be hierarchical. It tends to be very flat structured and very um collaborative. I always look at it as men's leadership, men's style of leadership is being very that sort of pyramid structure, that traditional hierarchy, whereas you go up the ladder, there are fewer and fewer jobs. Whereas women's leadership is like a Venn diagram, there's lots of interconnection and very flat structured. That's one of the major differences that I found. And um, we went on to release a model and an assessment tool back in 2018. We've had over 10,000 women take the assessment now in 98 countries we're up to. So I've got this lovely database of women, women's leadership, like what does it really look like when it's at its best? And there are certainly elements that are in common between the two, you know, the masculine style and the feminine style, but it's expressed differently. So one of the things I found is that when it comes to power and status, when you look at the way women lead, it tends to be very much about power for the good of the collective as opposed to personal power. Certainly women can do the personal power, you know, don't get me wrong, because we certainly found some aspects of women's leadership that were quite negative. But in terms of things like that, um the underlying motivation is the same, but the way that it comes out is quite different. So, for example, you know, the competitiveness of a male structured format versus the collaboration of a woman's format. There and the real thing that came out of it though is that both types are equally valuable and both types deserve to be heard. And research has shown us fairly recently that organizations with an equal representation of men and women at the senior executive table and on the board have better financial performance than the industries than companies who don't. So there's actually evidence there to show that these companies are performing better. So this isn't an either or, this is a both. How do we get both voices equally valued? How do we get women's leadership valued in a way that women can be themselves authentically without being told that what they're doing is wrong? And that was the challenge I find for women in senior roles is they're quite often told that they're either too much or not enough. You know, they're too aggressive, too bossy, too loud, too outspoken, or not assertive enough. Um they're not, you know, not seen as leadership material necessarily. And so that's the big issue here is how do we come up with a system where both types of leadership are valued equally, not seen as a because there's more men in the room than women, that the male um style of leadership is dominant.

SPEAKER_00:

You mentioned women not being enough. And I think a large proportion of our listeners who are introverts and quiet achievers will be nodding their heads and very excited about what you're saying. Can you talk to us about how being a quieter person, as well as a person in leadership, as well as a woman? How how do all those things intersect?

SPEAKER_01:

Women, um, I'll start with the quiet piece first. Certainly, introverts can be incredible leaders. And when you look at a lot of the really great leaders of throughout history, a lot of them have in fact been introverts. And there is a strong correlation between introversion and effective leadership because of the fact that introverts think before they speak, so they form their ideas fully before they come out with them. You know, they've quite thoughtful and measured in their ideas, they tend to speak when they have something really important to say as opposed to filling the void with noise. And I don't mean this to be a criticism of extroversion, it's just you know one of the things that happens. So introverts can be incredibly effective leaders, but one of the things about being a woman in leadership is this too much or not enough. And women are often seen as not assertive enough. And so the woman starts to be what she would think is assertive in order to be heard, but it ends up being labelled too loud and too bossy because when she starts to take up space, it starts to become uncomfortable for the people around her. So in coaching women in leadership roles, that's one of the most common things that comes up is how do I get my voice heard? How do I stop being spoken over in meet in meetings? How do I um put forward an idea that people accept rather than sort of brushing me aside and then you know a man will say the same thing five minutes later and they think it's the greatest thing they've ever heard? And so a lot of that is about um for women in leadership, about finding the right time to speak up and having the right words to say at the right moment. So it's often about, you know, scripting. It can be around, like, for example, want to being spoken over or being having a man take their idea. An easy script for that is to say something like, you know, hey Jim, isn't it great we're on the same page with this idea? It's fabulous you're building on what I started. Let's get together outside of the meeting and flesh this out so we can bring it back as a business case. And that's a really clear, assertive way of you know, putting your mark on it and saying, actually, that was my idea, without being seen as you're whinging or whining or making a fuss. So a lot of women find that when that happens to them, they often shut down because of the sheer audacity of it. You know, they're gobsmacked by I just said that a few minutes ago, and everyone just brushed it off as if it wasn't important, and now all of a sudden they're thinking it's this amazing idea. So part of that um working with women leaders is about that, you know, it's almost like expect the unexpected, that sort of stuff is going to happen to you and being prepared with the right words at the right time. So there's definitely a space for women leaders, and there's definitely a space for introverted women leaders. Um, we see that we can even see them on the world stage. I'm very introverted. You know, in fact, I, you know, when I did when I first did Myers Briggs a long, long time ago, I actually scored, you know, zero for extroversion. And um, but I speak up because it's become important. It's one of those things where people often say to me, you know, how come you can get up and speak on stage and how come you can facilitate conferences with thousands of people? And it's just I the work is so important that I've had to learn to speak up. But it's not something that's ever, it's not something that comes naturally to me.

SPEAKER_00:

I think that's a good important, very, very important point to highlight to people that are listening, that just because you're not naturally wired a certain way doesn't mean that you can't learn the skill or that you can't allow the purpose and the meaning of what you're doing to become more important. I think sometimes we do ourselves a disservice in the way we hold ourselves back at the slightest um confrontation or pushback or discomfort. And I think if we hang in there, if we keep working on, you know, regulating ourselves emotionally, um, putting ourselves out in those uncomfortable situations and slowly building that muscle and that courage, I think it's more courage than confidence actually that we need. It it actually helps. It actually helps to tie it to something emotionally that's bigger than ourselves. So when we look at ourselves, we think, well, you know, who am I too? But then when we realize by not speaking up that we are robbing, potentially robbing someone else of airtime or you know, some something in a spotlight that needs to be amplified, then that becomes greater, more important than what we are personally inconvenienced by.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And that's the thing is that we need to um, and certainly that's what happened for me is this the need to get the message out to actually have an impact to help other people was bigger than my need for introversion. And, you know, because introversion is about energy. It's one of those things where if I've spent a day facilitating or a couple of days facilitating, when I come home, um when I walk in the door, I say to my husband, don't talk to me, you know. And he's gotten used to that. He's gotten used to the fact that I'll walk in the door and he'll I'll just need to go away and sit and do something in my little cone of silence for a while to get my energy back. And I've learned to sort of pace my work around my energy level. So if I facilitate it for two days, I won't book anything else for the rest of that week because I know I'm just not going to have the energy to do that. So A lot of this um energy management piece for introversion is really important too. And it can be if you're working in a difficult situation, like say you're in a leadership role and you are finding that you may be the only woman on the executive and you're you're struggling to sort of have a space. It's often about picking your battles because as an introvert, you only have the you only have a finite amount of energy to extrovert to be out there in the world. And it's picking the things that are going to be the most impactful rather than fighting every battle. And that's again something I quite often work with women leaders on is around you've got to really pick your battles as choose the battle to win the war, not kind of going to battle over everything that you see.

SPEAKER_00:

So it's your passion. Yes, that makes a lot of sense because we have finite energy and we want to be quite discerning about where we place that energy and what we use it on. Now that you mentioned energy and and you know, battles and picking your battles and war and all that, talk to us about your women's leadership archetypes model. What is an archetype and how does this play out in the leadership sense?

SPEAKER_01:

So an archetype is just simply a pattern of behaviour. So um Jungian archetypes are very well known. And if we talk about something like the hero, or we talk about somebody being a princess, you know, people have a mental picture of what that actually looks like. And so that's what an archetype actually is: is a pattern of behavior where you give it a label and people then know what it means. In terms of the work that I did, we end up with eight archetypes. So we've got four empowered archetypes and four shadow archetypes that happen we're not at our best. So I'll run through them really quite quickly, but it's if you can imagine a model shape like a diamond shape. And at the very top of the diamond, we've got the sovereign archetype, and that is represented, it's a representation of women at our absolute best. So we know distilled the what does women's leadership look like. This is about self-leadership. So it's about being empowered, being self-actualised, being the best you can be, choosing passion and choosing purpose. And so women who represent that sort of sovereign archetype are very um purposeful, they live by their values, they're very clear about what they um stand for and what they will will and won't do. They've got incredibly strong boundaries. They often look to other people like they're extremely brave because they do a lot of things that other people don't do because fear doesn't hold them back. They will, you know, take on new challenges, they'll do new things, they have quite interesting lives because they they just do things that other people probably wouldn't think of doing. You know, if they take they don't say no to things, it's just they take on the challenge. And it is that sense of being self-actualised, being you know, choosing to be our very best in every moment. You know, how do I how do I be the very best I can be in this moment? And then underneath that, the next layer down, we've got three other archetypes, which are almost like situational leadership styles. Now, women do have um tendencies to, you know, one or more of them, but in general, the idea is if you can use all three of these, it's like the right style at the right time with the right people for the right reasons. And if we start over on the left-hand side, we've got the warrior archetype, and she is very goal-driven. So the warrior is about setting goals, delivering, she's um working very hard, she's achieving things, but it comes from a space of joy, not a space of trying to prove herself. She does it because it just feels good. She's motivated by achieving. She loves the feeling of you know getting something really big and tangible done. So when we need to achieve something or get something done in our lives, that's the archetype we lean into. How do we actually focus in on that? What would a warrior do right now? How would she set the goal? And then we've got our wise woman archetype, which is about women and power. And I said earlier that women's power is very much about uh power for the collective, power for the collective good. But a wise woman, what one of the things I found is that women's power quite often comes from knowledge. Women are powerful because they know something, they're an expert in something. So when you think back to, you know, prior to the Industrial Revolution, women who led in their communities were often the healers or the midwives, valued from their not for their knowledge. And that's what really came through is that women being valued for their knowledge. So the wise woman archetype is a lifelong learner. She she's always learning and collecting new knowledge, but she also disseminates it to other people. She's like a conduit for knowledge. So she's happy to mentor, grow, support, develop. Um, you know, she's happy to share the knowledge with everybody because the idea is that she's not threatened by the idea somebody might know more than her or learn more than her. It's just lovely, she just wants to see people grow. And then we've got the tribe builder archetype, which is about women and building collectives, so bringing people together and forming teams and forming communities. And a tribe builder has got that lovely energy of just she just loves people and wants to be with them. She wants to see people thrive and be their best. So she brings people together, like I said, and creates this wonderful community feeling. And so you can see again that each of these three archetypes are things that you could use in different situations. And then beneath those are the four shadow archetypes, which is what happens when we're not doing well. And the warrior archetype turns into the tyrant, which is where the need to achieve becomes an overwhelming drive. It's like I, if I'm not hyper-achieving, I feel like I'm not valuable. So the woman's always looking to do more, to be more, to be delivering more. And so she drives herself really hard, she drives her team really hard if she's got a team. Um, often you see perfectionism sits there, imposter syndrome sits there, this feeling of I'm not doing enough and I'm never going to be enough. And the trouble with perfectionism is that you can never be perfect, so you'll always feel like you're failing. And so there's a real sense of urgency in the tyrant space. It's always really urgent energy. Everything's got to happen now and quickly, even when things aren't urgent, it gets turned into an urgent task. And then the wise woman turns into the lone wolf, which is that lovely sense of sharing knowledge becomes I've got to hoard the knowledge in order to be powerful. So I'm not going to share, I'm not going to delegate, I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing. I'm going to keep the knowledge, you know, hoarded within me. Because if I'm the only person who knows how to do this, then I can't be replaced. And the lone wolf needs to feel in control, you know, what's going on. I need to control everybody and everything in my sphere. So when I'm in control, I feel safe. But if I lose control, I start to not feel safe. The tribe builder archetype turns into the um the martyr, and that's about people pleasing and sacrificing self in order to be liked. And so you get that sense in organizations and in leadership of women who are just super nice. They're too nice. They're offering to do things that are outside of their job description, they're kind of bending over backwards to make everybody happy. They're the ones who organise morning tea all the time, and then they're the ones who pack the dishwasher afterwards and you know, pack everything up and throw everything away, and nobody says thank you. That sort of space of um, you know, really feeling taken advantage of at some time, you know, in some times because um boundaries are really weak. It's this sense if I say no to people, they won't like me, so I need to keep them happy. And then right down the bottom of the dime, we've got a hermit archetype, which is like withdrawing into a hermit cave. It really is that sense of procrastination, putting things off, avoiding things. I don't want to be involved in that, I don't want to see people, you know, whatever, whatever that the focus is, but they'll really withdraw from the world. And I had a um, I was talking to this about a woman, talking to a woman about this recently. She's one of my accredited practitioners in the model, and she said to me, I really get a sense of when I'm in the hermit. She said, I really know what it's like. She said, I have days when, like everybody does, when sometimes you just need a rest and you just want to lie on the couch and watch, you know, watch movies and eat biscuits or something. She said, I but that feels very different to the hermit. She said, When I'm in the hermit, she said, it's almost like I can't help it. I know I should be getting out of it. I know I should be taking action. I know I should be dealing with whatever it is that's out there, but I just can't. And that is the real differentiator is this feeling of I can't deal with it versus I'm choosing not to. You know, I'm just choosing to have a do in a day versus I can't get out of bed because the the idea of getting out of bed is too hard for me. So that's kind of their model in a nutshell, I guess. It's the very short version of it.

SPEAKER_00:

That's a very powerful model. So thank you for sharing that, Ross. I think those who love archetypes, or even those who are curious about patterns of behavior, or who love stories, love storytelling, who recognize themselves or recognize someone they know and work with in some of these archetypes. And the interesting thing I think is, you know, with a tyrant, with a lone wolf, with a martyr, I wonder if there is a sense of a not enoughness that's driven by you mentioned safety. I wonder if safety or the lack of safety is behind some of these uh expressions, these these unhealthy expressions. For instance, if I don't feel safe to to give myself permission to rest sometimes, then I will have I'll overcompensate by driving myself and my team too hard because rest equals not being productive, rest equals laziness, or rest is is makes me feel guilty. And that could also be due to our conditioning for some people from childhood, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01:

Totally. All of these things come from childhood. So um one of the things that was really interesting when I was developing the model and pulling it all together was overlaying other sorts of models to see where there are correlations. And one of the things that was really interesting is the fact that the four shadow archetypes actually correlate with the threat responses in humans. So we've got fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And the fight, the flight response is actually that tyrant, like you said, that fear of if I stop, I'm failing. If I'm not doing enough, I'm failing. So it's that sense of constantly being being on the move. So delivering and over-delivering is being on the move, which is really running away from whatever it is that's that's you know, holding us back. And the um fight is the lone wolf, which is she fights back, she gets combative, she starts withholding data, she starts being manipulative. The um fawn response is our martyr. You know, fawning is where you basically try to be as nice as possible to the people who are threatening you so that they won't hurt you. And then the freeze response is the hermit. And all of these are learned patterns from our childhood. It's uh it's the way that we do with trauma when it comes down to it. These are trauma responses. As very young children, we've learned this way of dealing with things that are threats in our lives, and they play out for us as adults as well. You know, we learn to do this because it's been something in the past that's helped us be safe.

SPEAKER_00:

So, does your work also involve working through these trauma responses with clients?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, yeah. And that's the thing is that um unless we actually engage with what's happening beneath the surface there, people will always uh go there when things aren't going well. And so a lot of the work around coaching people into being, you know, more empowered is around actually dealing with how does this, how does this play out for you and giving in people developing ways of of effectively managing it because we're never going to get rid of the sort of things that have happened in our past, but it's about how do we deal with it more effectively. So, for example, if you know we look at the tyrant and that need to run away, you know, that sort of need to be driven and to be doing, you know, I've got to be doing in order to feel like I'm doing, you know, I'm um adding value. Sometimes that's just about you know, literally running away, like going, doing some exercise, going for a run, getting up and dancing, shaking it off. You know, they've actually found that you know, shaking yourself is actually a really good way of sort of dissipating all of the energy that goes with that. Um, you know, if we look at you know, cortisol and adrenaline, if we look at it in animals, for example, if an animal gets attacked by a lion, it's all over and done in a few minutes. It's either they're dead or they're not, you know, but they've actually used the running away as being the thing that's burnt off all of those, um, you know, all the chemicals. And in humans, we don't have that. You know, something happens that's stressful at work and we're sitting at our desk and we don't get up and go away or do anything. And so it plays out in terms of I've got to work really hard in order to sort of work off that it's it's but it doesn't actually work because we're not physically moving. And so just getting up and running around or you know, dancing or shaking, just shaking our arms and legs can be a really good way of actually getting rid of that energy. So things like that we can teach people to do.

SPEAKER_00:

It sounds to me that what you're saying is we actually need to re-look at the way we work because it's actually a very artificial system. It's not designed to help us thrive. If we are looking to nature as an example, we're actually doing the very opposite. We don't move enough, we internalize, we don't express, we hold back, we judge ourselves, we judge others harshly, and we don't have enough outlets to release, you know, and so we get stagnant or we get stuck or we get into these mental loops that are you know constantly negative, perpetuating a negative message either about ourselves or about other people. We don't have something that comes in to interrupt that. So, what can workplaces and what can lead us to differently or do better to ensure that the system is aligned in a more healthy way so that everyone can thrive.

SPEAKER_01:

And look, this goes back um, you know, years, generations really to when the industrial revolution started, where people left their families. You know, prior to that we worked and lived together in little communities. We lived and worked in small villages where we knew everybody, you know, and then we started leaving our family, or men did left their families behind and went to work. And so the system is very artificial, like you said. And a lot of it's been around the um this idea that you you don't bring your emotions to work, you don't bring your life to work. It's almost like when you get to the door of work, you take off your life and you hang it up in a locker and lock the door and you don't pick it up again until you leave work. And so we've created this expectation that we we park our emotional state, we park everything at the door and we just go in and focus on work. And that's not how humans work. We can't, it's all carried with us. And when there's no outlet for that in the workplace, where there's no safe space to say, you know what, I just had a really crappy morning. Excuse me, but that yeah, this you know, that sort of sense the morning hasn't been, it hasn't gone well for me. And you haven't had that outlet where it's safe to do that. So we bottle it all up, we kind of put the game face on, and it's like I'm at work, I better be really super professional right now. And so we we've created this system where we don't allow people to be human. And look, I'm not saying this is every workplace, some workplaces are actually really good at this, but there are lots that aren't where you like I remember being at um, you know, way back in my early career, and this sort of sense that if women were upset at all at work, they'd get you know told, oh, it's you, you know, that's just what women do, they're too emotional to be in the workplace, or you know, they must be on their period was a big thing that we used to get bandied about. And so women learnt to that there was shame in expressing emotion. We learnt that we needed to bottle it all up and again sort of put on that game place and act like a man. And we've created a system that's just not healthy for people, and we do need to unpack that, we do need to create more um space for humanity in the workplace, and certainly the conversations more recently around psychological safety are wonderful because that's the kind of thing we need to be talking about is how do we create spaces where it's actually okay to be human, to you know, bring your best self to work. But yeah, there's gonna be a time when you bring your worst your worst self to work too. And how do we deal with that? How do we help people with um you know, maybe it's coaches, therapists, there's practitioners out there who can support people who are experiencing trauma because traumatized people bring trauma to work and they cause trauma to other people inadvertently. You know, people aren't coming to work and going, I'm gonna bring my trauma and smack you with it, but it happens. And the more we can sort of focus in on the negative side of what it means to be human, the better off we'll be in terms of thriving.

SPEAKER_00:

You've reminded me that it's not just for us to wait for the system to catch up. I think on an individual level, on a peer-to-peer level, there are things we can do to create that kind of connection and caring in the office space. Because what you said were earlier on was that we've lost that sense of connection. We used to function in villages, in communities. Now we are sort of operating, you know, every man for himself and every woman for herself. But we're not we're not wired that way. Certainly, women are are wired to be a lot more collaborative and to, you know, work across rather than hierarchically. So on a individual level, what can people do differently to start becoming more empowered in the way they lead?

SPEAKER_01:

As leaders, we can certainly have an impact on our own team. We maybe we can't impact the system, but we can have impacts on our own local area. It's that sort of think local, you know, think global, at local thing of, you know, can we educate ourselves better? Can we learn to create safe spaces for people? Can we make it okay for people to talk about what's happening in their lives genuinely? Can we provide people with the support that they need? Um, one of the interesting things I remember reading a long time ago, and I cannot remember who said it, but it was a they were interviewing um a woman who was an anthropologist, and they said, at what time do you sort of consider, like how long ago do you consider that we became human? Like what was the sign that we became human? And they were probably expecting her to talk about the when we first started harnessing fire as a good example. But she actually said, and it was going back a really long time, I don't, I'm not gonna remember any of the details, so I won't get it wrong. But essentially she said the first sign of humanity was she actually uncovered a skeleton that had a fractured thigh bone and that thigh bone had healed. And she said, but what that means is because the person would have been completely incapable of moving around and doing anything for themselves, it meant that somebody looked after them. And she said that was the start of humanity. And I just love that the fact that somebody was incapable of doing things for themselves and that somebody looked after them. And that's I think the missing link for us as leaders is how do we ensure that the people around us are supported and healthy. And we're getting a lot better at it in organizations. There's certainly a lot of programs that have been put in place to support people, but there's always more we can do.

SPEAKER_00:

And I think the other missing link is also to make sure that we are paying attention to our own needs. So we're not bringing our trauma to work. That we're doing the inner work, we're reaching out to the coaches, the therapists, doing whatever it takes to get more movement in, to find creative outlets, to find ways we can discharge some of that, you know, nervous energy or you know, some of the negative emotions that come up in the course of a day. So, what is one thing you would like our listeners to take away from our conversation today?

SPEAKER_01:

I think the big takeaway is that that combination of looking after self and looking after others. It's about recognizing, and this is an emotional intelligence piece, is that the big bit is recognizing we're in a negative space. So you might, you know, once you've heard about the archetypes, for example, I get clients and I get my credit practitioners who are talking about things like I didn't have a great day today, I was very lone wolf, or I really felt myself slipping to the tyrant, or I had a martyr day today. But recognising being able to put language around it is really important. And then doing something about that, because just because we've experienced something that's created an emotion for us doesn't mean we need to take action on that. It's enough to just recognise the emotion and process it and let it pass by. So just say, for example, we get um just say we've got somebody who's naturally tends to the sort of tyrant energy that's sort of, you know, got to prove myself all the time. And something happens at work where she feels um, you know, devalued or that she hasn't added enough value. Now that can be the trigger for her to descend tyrant to really kind of drive herself even harder, but recognizing that and going, actually, that's not a healthy pattern. You know, I need to do something different now. And just because I feel like I need to do something doesn't mean I have to actually do anything with this. And that's the, I suppose, the discernment point is recognizing you don't have to take action on the way that you feel.

SPEAKER_00:

It sounds to me, well, what you're saying is there needs to be that self-awareness and then the ability to interrupt your own pattern, to almost be the observer. I think you notice this is coming up again. I've been through this before, I know what happens next, and I'm going to do something right now to interrupt that. So that is that is extremely useful. So thank you for that. What is the best way for people to connect with you and work with you, Ross?

SPEAKER_01:

I'm on LinkedIn, is probably the main place you'll find me on socials. I do have presence on a lot of other socials, but I don't tend to spend a lot of time there. Um, I've got two websites. I've got my consulting business, which is shapeandchange.com.au, and the women's leader archetypes have their own website, which is women'sleaderarchetypes.com.au. So you can find me at either of those places as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Brilliant. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you, Roz, for sharing your time and your wisdom with us today, the sharing the women's archetypes in leadership model and explaining to us, you know, all the all the ways in which childhood conditioning and our environment can result in us unconsciously bringing our trauma to work with us and how important it is to be self aware, to take self responsibility, but at the same time, too, for leaders to be to think more holistically and healthily about the way we are looking after all of our employees. So, if you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to leave a five-star rating and review to help the Quiet Warrior podcast reach more introverts and quiet achievers around the world. And for recommended resources on how to thrive as an introvert, make sure you're subscribed to the Visible Introvert newsletter at Serenalo.com.au. See you on the next episode. I'm so grateful that you're here today. If you found this content valuable, please share it on your social media channels and subscribe to the show on your favorite listening platform. Together we can help more introverts thrive. To receive more uplifting content like this, connect with me on Instagram at Serenalo Quiet Warrior Coach. Thank you for sharing your time and your energy with me. See you on the next episode.