Nicky Lowe [00:00:00]:
Foreign hi, it’s Nicky Lowe and welcome to the Wisdom for Working Mums podcast show. I’m your host and for nearly two decades now I’ve been an executive coach and leadership development consultant. And on this show I share evidence based insights from my coaching, leadership and psychological expertise and inspiring interviews that help women like you to combine your work, life and motherhood in a more successful and sustainable way. Join me and my special guests as we delve into leadership and lifestyle topics for women, empowering you to thrive one conversation at a time. I’m so happy that you’re here and let’s get on with today’s episode. Welcome to this special episode of the Wisdom for Working Mums podcast. Now today’s episode is a little different because I’m not the host but the guest. I had the incredible honor of joining John Gomes and Scott Allender on the Evolving Leader podcast and I’m really thrilled to share that conversation with you here because if you’ve not come across their podcast, it is incredible and they have phenomenal guests on.

Nicky Lowe [00:01:13]:
So I had that little moment of oh my gosh, they’ve invited me on. So if you’re not familiar with John and Scott yet, let me introduce them properly because they are the real deal. So John is a New York Times bestselling author. He’s a trusted advisor to CEOs and senior leaders around the world. His book Leading in a Nonlinear World is one of the most profound resources on leadership mindsets of the future. And Scott is the Senior Vice President of Talent Strategy at Warner Music. He’s an expert in emotional intelligence, personal growth and creating powerful people centered leadership. And I’ve been lucky enough to have both John and Scott as guests on this very podcast.

Nicky Lowe [00:01:55]:
So John joined me in episode 113 to talk about the future of leadership and Scott shared with game changing insights about emotional intelligence in episode 160. So when they invited me on the Evolving Leader podcast, it was a true pinch me moment. I have so much respect for them, their depth of thinking and their generosity as hosts. So in our conversation we explored my personal journey from burning out as a new mum to transforming that experience into this resource and the work that I do to help others thrive as leaders, mothers and women. And this conversation is really honest and vulnerable and it’s also empowering. We dive into female well being leadership and how that shows up both in our work and our personal lives. And I’m really proud to share it with you here. So whether you’re out on a commute, out for a walk or taking a quiet moment for yourself.

Nicky Lowe [00:02:52]:
I hope it resonates and reminds you you can lead powerfully without sacrificing your well being. So I won’t keep you any longer. Let’s dive in.

Scott Allender [00:03:02]:
Nikki Lowe has joined us. Nikki for the last 20 years has been supporting leaders and some of the world’s best known organizations to thrive, both personally and professionally. She’s an award winning executive coach whose focus is now increasingly on helping women leaders to thrive and create an environment in which more women can lead our organizations and institutions while enjoying positive well being. She’s her own living laboratory, constantly learning and applying new tools to her own life. So she lives a life she’s proud of, including being a mom and making a huge impact to all of her clients. Nikki, welcome to the Evolving Leader.

Nicky Lowe [00:03:41]:
It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jean Gomes [00:03:43]:
Nikki, welcome to the show. How are you feeling today?

Nicky Lowe [00:03:46]:
I’m feeling, I can really relate to what you said actually, John. I’ve had a lovely Christmas, had some time away with my family and come back in January. I’ve created a lot of white space at the beginning of the year, intentionally so. I’ve been enjoying that white space, been doing thinking and planning and going fairly slow into the new year, knowing that literally around the corner it ramps up. So I’m trying to put all the foundations in place to protect my well being as the year ahead looks incredibly busy. So I’m feeling really good, I’m feeling energized, I’m feeling really excited about this conversation. So yeah, great to be here.

Scott Allender [00:04:24]:
Well, before becoming an executive coach, as I mentioned in your, in our opening remarks, you had a successful corporate career and can we start with that? Like what, what was that experience like and how did it lead you to doing what you’re doing today?

Nicky Lowe [00:04:38]:
Yeah, so I started my career working for a Silicon Valley tech company and I joined in the late 90s at a very exciting time in tech because it was just before Y2K. So if everybody remember we were going into year 2000, everybody thought all of these computers were going to kind of have a glitch and the world would stop. So each of our customers was upgrading all of their IT systems. So we were in this massive boom period and it was a fantastic time to be joining it. And I worked for a really entrepreneurial company. Our founder was very much like in the same category as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs went to university with them. So it was this hugely entrepreneurial maverick. And I worked in the UK for them and found myself in my very early twenties, being promoted into quite senior roles.

Nicky Lowe [00:05:31]:
So in my mid twenties, became an accidental leader. And it was a really interesting time because professionally it was phenomenal. I was being paid a massive salary, all of the benefits of working for like a really kind of fast growing corporate company. I was getting to do some really exciting work. I was selling high end IT systems into big global companies, massive revenue targets. But kind of, as I say, it was this kind of booming time and I found myself, as I say, being an accidental leader. So I was managing account teams globally, managing people twice my age, twice my experience in quite a male dominated environment. So I had this really steep learning curve of leadership because I found myself in a role where I kept kind of looking over my shoulder going, somebody’s going to find out I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.

Nicky Lowe [00:06:22]:
And they have promoted me way beyond my capability because at that point I didn’t know what my strengths were. So I wasn’t the most technical and I wasn’t the most commercially savvy. I didn’t really understand the value that I was bringing and what other people were seeing in me. So I found myself working harder and faster and longer to really prove to myself that I could do this. But what it meant is I got really, I got really curious about, well, how can I add value as a leader? Like what is a leader, what is leadership? What does great leadership look like? And so I went on this journey. I’m naturally a learner. I’m a learner at heart. Like I love to, I just love to absorb information.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:03]:
So I went off and tried to read and listen and learn as much as I possibly could. And I found myself on a training course and a fantastic training course about managing cross cultural virtual teams. And they did an hour on this two day training course on coaching. And I kind of sat there and had this epiphany moment where I realized that actually my natural leadership style had been coaching because I couldn’t tell people what to do. They knew, you know, they were far more experienced than me. But actually that was my natural style as well. And it kind of planted this seed about falling in love with coaching and bringing that into my leadership and seeing the benefits of it and applying it in the real world. But it was what led me then to kind of leave that corporate environment was I think I knew that at some point I wanted to become a coach, but I was a bit of a corporate prisoner.

Nicky Lowe [00:07:57]:
I was on this massive salary. I’d started to build a lifestyle around that salary. We’d bought a house in the countryside. We were converting and I knew that I wanted to get out but I hadn’t got a clue what I could do and what would pay me as just as well. So I kept thinking I’ll just do another year and I’ll figure it out. And I was on holiday. I’d booked this kind of holiday to the Maldives. We were a week into a two week holiday, sat in paradise and I got a call from my brother to say that my mum had passed away really suddenly, really unexpectedly, in her 50s.

Nicky Lowe [00:08:29]:
And I remember sitting in paradise looking out, kind of just having one of those soul searching moments of like, what is this all about? Like I’d built external success but I was really kind of suffering on the inside. I wasn’t enjoying it. I certainly didn’t have well being. I’d become a person I didn’t like and my last interaction with my mum wasn’t one that I was proud of. So I like, I really had this soul wrenching moment of what, what, what was the lesson in all of this and I think in that moment it was my mum’s death was a real call to say you got to start living like this, that you cannot carry on like this. So I made a decision before it was 24 hours before I could get a flight home and I made a decision that I was going to leave the corporate job and take a, you know, invest in myself and take a risk on myself and retrain as a coach and take it from them. So that’s what I did. And then, so that was 20 years ago this year and I took a year out to qualify as an exec coach and actually at that point I had a lot of resentment towards the corporate world and thought I just want to become a life coach, I just want to help other corporate prisoners, you know, find their kind of sole purpose.

Nicky Lowe [00:09:46]:
And I think but at the heart of it was this piece about how do you do work that you love but also be able to show up personally in the way that you want to. And I think I couldn’t work out at that point how to do it because I wasn’t doing it. And very quickly I realized that I did want to work in a corporate environment and I did want to help other people to do that. And so the last 20 years really has been about doing that, going into organizations, working with high potentials or senior executives around how do you live and work well and follow your ambitions, progress in your career, but also not sacrifice your well being or sanity along the.

Scott Allender [00:10:26]:
Way you said coaching’s your natural style, what do you think’s behind that? What motivates that style for you?

Nicky Lowe [00:10:33]:
A huge curiosity, I think. I am curious and I’m. I’m naturally non judgmental. I’m like, I kind of get that each of us are different and we think in different ways. And I’m just curious about that. So how do you see the world? How do you walk in the world and what impact is that having? So I think it’s that natural curiosity.

Jean Gomes [00:10:58]:
And before we get into the kind of more current stuff that you’re doing, I’m interested to, to get a sense of in that journey because that’s a long time, a lot of experience, a lot of, you know, highs and lows in that. Can you give us a sense of, you know, some of the shifts that you went through as an individual in that journey to where you are today?

Nicky Lowe [00:11:18]:
Yeah, great question. I think what I now know, looking back, but I didn’t have the language for at the time is in that corporate, kind of into the last couple of years in my corporate job, I was burning out, but I didn’t have the language for that or the knowledge of what even what that was at that point. And I think I didn’t know what to do. So at the time I’d gone out and I’d hired an occupational psychologist to think, actually help me figure out who I am and how I apply that to my work. And it wasn’t particularly helpful. I actually then went and hired an executive coach and that was transformational. But what it made me realize was I’d got alignment burnout or lack of alignment burnout. And I realized that actually I wasn’t working in alignment with my values and how important that was.

Nicky Lowe [00:12:05]:
So I think that start of my journey taught me this piece around what I call core alignment. And I almost use the analogy of Pilates that, you know, most people kind of now know that if we want to pick up a heavy weight, it’s not our muscles that do it, it’s our core stability. And if we’ve got that kind of core strength, we can approach any weight and not injure ourself. And I think that’s what I started to learn at that point is if you can work in alignment, you can take on the challenging roles. It’s not that you need to lean back from the challenges, but if you can do it in alignment with your natural preferences and kind of find your zone of genius with your personality and preferences and skills and align that with your Values and your purpose, like that’s really, really powerful. So I think that kind of alignment burnout or misalignment burnout started to teach me that. And then I thought, oh, actually if I just put myself into the right environment, I’ll be, I’ll be great. And so I, you know, I set up my own business.

Nicky Lowe [00:13:02]:
I, I built it up to be really successful in those first 10 years, was traveling the world and then I got married and decided to have children. And I thought, I’m in a great position personally, I’m in a great position professionally like this. This is going to be great. And at that point I was actually working with senior female leaders and big organizations and was helping a lot of women manage that transition into motherhood. So although I wasn’t a mother at that point, I thought I was well positioned, I’d got a good perspective on this. And I look back and I don’t have to laugh or cry at that naivety now because I had my first child who’s now nearly 12, so 12 years ago, returned back to work and literally burnt out. So I got really, really ill and didn’t know what was going on. Kept going to the doctors, having blood tests and like, you’re just a new mum, all new mums are tired.

Nicky Lowe [00:13:55]:
And I was like, this is not tiredness, this is another level of kind of. It was like every cell of my body had not got energy and I just kept being told I was an E mum. And I. And I got to the point where I thought I must have a serious kind of illness that nobody can detect because I knew that I wasn’t well. And I ended up finding somebody to go privately and get tests. And I got diagnosed with adrenal fatigue, it’s now not called that, but effectively I’d burnt my adrenal system out. And it was a huge wake up call because it blindsided me, did not see it coming. And as a coach as well, I did that whole, I should know better, you know, this shouldn’t be happening to me.

Nicky Lowe [00:14:33]:
So I got fiercely curious at that point about how the hell did this happen? Because it was a two year actual recovery to get my, to get my physical wellness back. So it was, it was kind of quite a long journey of kind of peeling back the layers of how did this happen? You know, to begin with, I did that. I’m somebody that’s got quite high efficacy, I’ve got high personal power. And I was like, obviously I didn’t eat enough kale and do enough yoga and do Enough meditation. And so I went down that route of kind of beating myself up and looking at the psychobiological side first, but then started to see the psychosocial aspects of being a working mum and how that had impacted me and how I tried to still be the ideal worker of like approaching my work like nothing else mattered and then tried to show up as the ideal mother of, you know, I’m, you know, trying to turn up like I didn’t have work and I’d kind of got squeezed in that, those two paradigms. So that then opened up my, my kind of my eyes and my awareness and my curiosity to that side. So a long kind of answer to your, to your question, John. But I think what I’ve, I’ve learned along the way is I’m probably predisp to burnout if I’m not careful.

Nicky Lowe [00:15:44]:
You can pretty much put me into any environment and I am conscientious, driven, I’m a people pleaser. All of these little aspects that when you combine them, if I’m not careful and put the guard raids in, guard rails in place, I can push myself beyond my limits.

Scott Allender [00:16:02]:
So knowing that, how do you, what have you learned in terms of how does that inform the work you do now? How does that change how you approach your work?

Nicky Lowe [00:16:09]:
Yeah, so I used to be very much in the intellectual space. Like I lived a little way from my body. I was always in my head, you know, willpower, intellect. I’ve become a lot more connected to my body. So that interoception that you talk about, you know how important that is. And I realized that over the years how I’d become disconnected from my body. And I think this is quite interesting in the topic we’re talking about, about how I think a lot of women potentially have become that way because culturally and some of the experiences that we have that we tend to have to disassociate, particularly if we’re trying to show up in a male environment. And a lot of the culture is about how can we show up as a man to succeed in a male dominated environment.

Nicky Lowe [00:16:56]:
We might have to disconnect from our bodies to try and navigate in that way. So what it’s taught me is to be a hell of a lot more connected to my body, my somatic awareness and practices. I have to build in to stay connected because I still notice how, how disconnected I can be and almost to protect myself from myself because yeah, I, I have kind of daily, weekly, monthly practices that are now just non negotiables for me that I have to put in place. Otherwise I can find myself in, in the burnout kind of funnel.

Jean Gomes [00:17:29]:
What, what. Out of all of those things, what’s the kind of non negotiable, what’s the most powerful one for you?

Nicky Lowe [00:17:34]:
Oh, there’s a couple of things, one of which is one you taught me, John, which is that body scan of a morning. So literally before I get out of bed, I will intentionally go connect to your body before you do anything else. Because even getting out of bed I can go to my to do list, right? You’ve got to do this like and I can power up and get into my adrenaline system kind of straight away. And then another practice I have is I’ve got a seven minute non negotiable which is I spend seven minutes every morning stretching. And if that’s the only thing I can do for my body each day, it’s. And I, it’s the kind of if I can’t find seven minutes then I almost don’t deserve to have this body functioning. So I have a seven minute where I just stretch. And a part of that is keeping me flexible and agile, but also it is just intentionally going, there’s a body here, don’t forget me.

Jean Gomes [00:18:26]:
You. I mean, I think you just alluded to this idea that we generally have become disconnected from our bodies and there’s this massive source of information out there about how to manage well being, how to, you know, everything, you know, TikTok, YouTube, everywhere, television and so on. And without that connection, it’s just knowledge. It’s not never going to be actioned. But you alluded in an early conversation that we had about the Global Leadership Wellbeing survey that you had been involved in. And I’m truly interested to understand what the data shows there about the gap in gender wellbeing.

Nicky Lowe [00:19:08]:
Yeah, so the Global Leadership Wellbeing Survey was created to really help leaders understand about wellbeing. And it looks at physical, psychological, intellectual wellbeing. It looks at all the different sources of wellbeing. There’s 121 questions to kind of capture how do we live and work? Well, so it measures it in both of our personal and our professional domains. And there’s about 5,000 professionals and leaders that have gone and completed this survey. So we’ve got about around about half a million data sets that we’ve analyzed and looked at how gender shows up in this. And what we can see is that there is a significant and growing gender wellbeing gap. So we know about the gender pay gap and we know that it’s closing, but really at glacial speeds.

Nicky Lowe [00:19:57]:
Actually the wellbeing gap’s increasing, which I find really worrying and fascinating. And what we know mostly is that it’s psychological well being that’s the biggest impact. So women are experiencing more stress, more anxiety, and that is mostly cultural driven. You know, women often are carrying the double shift, so they’re carrying most of the domestic load. Even if they’re senior leaders, the data shows that women still carry the majority of the domestic load in their home, that they experience more work life conflict than men. Often and particularly through the pandemic, what we saw was that the social wellbeing, realizing that actually women rely on social wellbeing far more than men to kind of navigate those challenges. So we were more significantly impacted in lockdown because of that kind of isolation. Piece about actually it takes a village and how much we rely on our villages.

Nicky Lowe [00:20:59]:
And what we also know is when we look across the decades, there’s a happiness paradox in that each decade where effectively women are getting more equality in the workplace, we have kind of more tools in the home to help us. You know, washing machines, dishwashers. Actually women’s happiness is declining. And that again is fascinating because again you would expect it to be going the opposite way, but since the 70s it’s been declining. And this piece about actually because we can now have it all, we should be doing it all, but we’re trying to do it on our own and we’re holding ourselves to really, really high standards about kind of having the perfect home, having the perfect body, but also showing up and having this phenomenal career and that squeeze of actually conditions in society haven’t really caught up with the opportunities that we now have. And how do we navigate that in a way that supports us? So that’s the piece where I am really curious about and really do a lot of my work with female leaders about actually if we are going to perform at these senior levels, what do we need around us and what are the conditions that need to be in place, that it. We’re not experiencing the kind of psychological wellbeing decline and the happiness like I, I realized that I had what I would call toxic success back in my career. On the outside it looked great, but on the inside it was, it was shallow, it was hollow and actually it was quite distressing for me.

Nicky Lowe [00:22:30]:
So how do we help people find that sweet success where it’s sustainable, it feels good as well as kind of looks good on paper?

Jean Gomes [00:22:38]:
Is there any difference in the generations in this survey.

Nicky Lowe [00:22:44]:
It’S an interesting question because I think actually we haven’t got a wide enough distribution of the generations. So I think there’s a piece of research there about looking across the five generations to see that. But what we do know from things like McKinsey Women in the Workplace report is that more of the younger generations that are coming through are going, I don’t want to pay the cost of what we’re seeing our senior female leaders pay. I don’t want to go there. So again, the data shows for every female that’s making it to a senior leadership level, two are deciding to step back because they’re not willing to pay the cost or it’s taking too much cost on them. So again, that’s where we’re like, actually we’re never going to, you know, we may take one step forward, two step back. We really need to be paying attention to this because the long term impact of it is quite worrying.

Jean Gomes [00:23:40]:
When we talked a few weeks ago, Nikki, we talked about the four M’s that we need to surface, to normalize and to solve for in transforming the future of female leadership. Can we briefly outline the four M’s and what the big challenges are that we need to solve across each.

Nicky Lowe [00:23:58]:
Yeah, so when we look at, there’s a really interesting debate out there about leadership development of should there be female leadership development or is it just leadership development? Like it’s not about fixing the women, is it about fixing the systems? There’s this really interesting debate that goes on and actually we don’t want to kind of go, women need different leadership because they’re broken in some way. But we do need to pay attention to actually some of the psychosocial and psychobiological aspects are different. And one of those aspects is this thing that we talked about called the four M’s. And this comes from the work of a lady called Joy Burnford from Encompassing Quality. And she talks about, actually for women, they will experience at least two, if not all of these four M’s, which is monthless, which is the menstrual cycle. It’s miscarriage, motherhood and the menopause. Now all women will have to navigate in some way, shape or form their menstrual cycle and the menopause. And they may choose to or may not be able to have children.

Nicky Lowe [00:25:04]:
So there’s that in the mix along the way. But each of those has a significant impact on our well being. And as I mentioned earlier, that actually a lot of women we’ve detached from our bodies, we’ve disassociated it’s interesting because I was running a female leader retreat actually with our good friend James Glover a little while ago and just before Christmas and we had these senior female leaders and we were talking about what’s their experience being a female leader in their industry. And they all kind of said, well, we don’t want to be just treated differently to men. We, you know, we have a similar experience and talked about some factors that were more kind of psychosocial around the culture. And then I asked them the question and how does your menstrual cycle or the menopause impact this? And they were like dumbstruck. Like literally took a breath and went, I’ve never considered that. And when we dived a little bit deeper, one of them responded by, but I don’t want that to be an excuse about why I can’t be a leader.

Nicky Lowe [00:26:05]:
I don’t want to be seen as weaker. I don’t want it to get in the way. And I could really relate to that about. And that’s that disassociation piece about. Yes, it’s there, but it’s an annoyance, it’s an inconvenience. I’ve got to kind of, I’ve got to detach from it because I don’t want it to hold me back or be perceived as a potential weakness. And so a lot of women, I believe, are more disconnected from their bodies because of that. And that we know has an impact on their well being and also their performance.

Nicky Lowe [00:26:33]:
So for a lot of women, the menstrual cycle is almost about what sanitary products do I need and how does it affect my conception. And that’s really the only attention that we’ll ever pay to it. It’s seen as more of an inconvenience. And what I’ve come to learn is actually the more that we can tap into the power of our cycle, the more powerful we can be. So women cycle and this is a kind of, it’s, it’s a very dumbed down version of something. I suppose that’s a lot, got a lot more intricacies to it. But just to keep it at a high level, women cycle under 28 days, men cycle over 24 hours. So you could think women are more like the moon, men are more like the sun.

Nicky Lowe [00:27:14]:
So it’s more easy for a man to show up consistently. And I’ve got clients, I’ve got a woman I was coaching early last week and she was frustrated that she was being inconsistent in her words. Some days she could show up and was really focused Some days she could show up and do these client calls and was like nailing it. And then other days she didn’t want to do that, she didn’t want to make client calls and she was beating herself up for being inconsistent. And I just kind of used the lens of looking through her cycle and again, she’d never ever done this. Because if you imagine the female cycle is almost like the. Throughout those 28 days you go through almost these seasons of a year. So you’ll be in your spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Nicky Lowe [00:27:58]:
And each of those phases of your cycle you bring different strengths. And what was happening for her was that she was expecting herself to show up on this 24 hour cycle and just be able to be consistent in that way when she could tap into. So in our summer we are great for like customer facing engagement. Like that would be a great time for me to be doing a podcast, public speaking, you know, that type of customer interaction. In our winter, we’re much better at interoception, reflection, just going inward and listen to in our intuition and just knowing that a it stops you beating yourself up for not being this kind of robot that can just show up, you know, consistently. In that way it also allows you to harness the power of where your cycle’s at and just connect to your body. So for example, my personal trainer now I’ve educated him on my cycle at different points in my cycle we do different training regime and there’ll be times when I’m really good at working out and there’s going to be times when I’m better at working in Both need movement, but there’s different types of movement and there’s a lot of research coming out about this now. And so the more that we can tap into that, I think the more powerful we can be in terms of our own well being and our performance.

Jean Gomes [00:29:16]:
I love the, I love any kind of way of thinking about things that gives people a greater sense of control over what’s happening. What can we, can we flip it for a second in this conversation? Just think about, you know, what’s in it for the man in this relationship either, you know, partner, colleague, friend, how do we make it not just about what I have to do as a woman to kind of take control of this.

Nicky Lowe [00:29:40]:
Yeah. And I think for men just even listening to this, just hopefully just having that awareness may spark some kind of interest and curiosity. I was always taught growing up that treat people how you like to be treated and that’s a really good thing. And I always held onto that as A value until I learned more about human behavior. And I realized actually if I treat you how I like to be treated, I’m assuming you’re like me. So I think for any man listening, it’s just not assuming that you experience the world in the same way as anybody, you know, male, female or whatever. You know, just that getting curious about what somebody else’s experience is, knowing that actually people might experience the world in a different way. And I think, you know, if you take it as somebody that’s a partner, just recognizing that, oh, you know, I think men can often see women as this.

Nicky Lowe [00:30:30]:
Like you’re just one day you’re this and one day you’re that and, and just knowing that that’s psychobiologically, that’s something that happens for, for us and it’s, you know, it’s part of our power and probably the confusion that we might create if you were somebody’s partner and just asking, because as my experience, my cycle were very different to another woman’s cycle. So just getting curious and being compassionate, you know, in that curiosity and I think as leaders, again, recognizing that there’s some huge superpowers and if you can give, be inclusive in just again recognizing. And this isn’t just for women because the more we know, the more human workplaces are, the more it benefits everybody. So just again, recognizing that people are having different experiences, how can we understand that and leverage it for performance and well being?

Scott Allender [00:31:28]:
It seems there’s so much taboo around a topic like this that it’s preventing the education and that sort of knowledge.

Jean Gomes [00:31:35]:
Right.

Scott Allender [00:31:36]:
I’m learning from you right now. But you know, in other environments that would feel like a taboo subject. So how do we break through in an appropriate way, kind of some of these taboos?

Nicky Lowe [00:31:44]:
It’s a really great question. And I was saying to John, I’ve got a post that I’ve been sitting on, literally and wondering whether to post about my own cycle and putting it out on kind of LinkedIn and just like, oh, that feels really kind of courageous to do it. And it’s like, oh, isn’t that interesting? You know, just that because it is such a taboo and I think for women there’s probably a lot of shame attached to it and that piece of I don’t want to be perceived is different. And we’re already trying to struggle in a kind of, you know, patriarchal world. So, you know, does it add another kind of nuance to that? But I think it comes back to all the stuff that we know about great leadership, about how do we create psychologically safe environments where people can show up as their full selves and have the kind of conversations that we know are going to support us to do our best work and have the best impact? So I think if we think about it generally like that, I think the more that we can as leaders role model that and show ourselves and our full humanness and be vulnerable, I think it helps to shift that forward. And I think it takes people, you know, and I say this, it takes people and it’s making me go, I just need to share this post and be willing to take that risk to go. Actually, if we start talking about it, how can we start to shift the conversation in a helpful way and an appropriate way? You know, not over sharing, but sharing enough that kind of just raises awareness.

Jean Gomes [00:33:11]:
Yeah, I mean, I’m. I think this is a brilliant conversation. I think, you know, what gives me hope around this is that there has been progress in and it’s rapidly picking up across lots of different domains. There’s probably a whole bunch of, you know, kind of huge historical, political, religious, all sorts of things that are kind of holding this back on so many different levels. And it’s easier not to talk about because of that.

Nicky Lowe [00:33:37]:
Yeah.

Jean Gomes [00:33:37]:
But you know, when we, when we think about the topic of menopause that’s recently become more discussed topic in a really healthy way, where do you feel we’re on the journey to normalizing and positively adapting around that one?

Nicky Lowe [00:33:48]:
Yeah, I think, you know, the data that we’re now getting is really supporting this. So I think that the, the stats for just the UK alone is there are around 900,000 women that are have looked step back from the workforce because of their menopause, either because of symptoms or because of the lack of support. And so it’s significant numbers. And I think companies are now recognizing that. And I think for me, there’s this piece about actually when we’re hitting that as an age, as women we’ve got all this wisdom, all this experience that’s so valuable that’s kind of getting lost and there’s a whole again cultural piece around, you know, we don’t honor women aging as much as we honor men aging. So there’s this whole kind of, there’s layers to this, as you’ve said, cultural, religious, political, all of that piece. But I think now we’re getting more data and the light’s been shone on it. I think what we’re seeing is that organizations recognizing if we’re getting these women that are getting to leadership positions in that kind of midlife.

Nicky Lowe [00:34:50]:
And they’re bringing all that expertise and wisdom and we’re losing it. There’s like a massive leak in the leadership pipeline for females. How do we start to address it? So the conversations that are going on and the organizations that are doing awareness raising, I think it’s fantastic. I think again, the fact that we’re creating the environments where we’re having those conversations about actually what is it that we need, what is the support, whether it be the health care support, whether it be just kind of the human conversations that say, what do you need right now? I think it’s interesting because I talk about AI is my perimenopause partner. Like, AI is brilliant for me when I’m in my brain fog and I just need kind of help me, help me launch my thoughts. Like, I think AI is going to be phenomenal for that. And I was only having a conversation with some uni, old uni friends on WhatsApp and we were all saying that. But like, actually this midlife and AI colliding is pretty good.

Nicky Lowe [00:35:46]:
We can use this well. So I think it definitely is something that needs to be addressed because we will, we will see a real negative impact over time if we don’t. And, you know, 50% of the population will go through it. So. And the fact that organizations are recognizing that, I think is great. But again, it comes down to, are we creating the environments where we can have the kind of conversations where we can address it in a safe and appropriate way and get the performance impact that we’re all looking for?

Jean Gomes [00:36:23]:
I’m guessing, you know, the kind of the. Another driver around that will be the aging workforce.

Nicky Lowe [00:36:29]:
Absolutely.

Jean Gomes [00:36:30]:
The population is changing dramatically from a composition perspective. So it becomes something that there’s going to be more opportunity around as much as.

Nicky Lowe [00:36:38]:
And that kind of loops back to one of the other ends, which is around the motherhood piece. Because we’re still seeing a huge motherhood penalty in the workplace. The statistics show that 60% of the gender pay gap is down to the motherhood penalty. We’re seeing huge maternal bias still in the workplace. And actually what it’s meaning is more women, when they become mums, feel that the only option is to kind of downgrade their career or lean out completely or the next generations are kind of going, I’m not going to have children because I can’t see how I can make this all work. So when you look at we’ve got an aging workforce and we’ve got a lowering birth rate, it’s you know, that’s. It becomes a real really difficult kind of societal thing for us to navigate because economically and just are there going to be enough to people to support the aging population? So, you know, from a purely selfish perspective, we need to address kind of motherhood in the workplace and parenthood more generally because it’s still a huge issue.

Scott Allender [00:37:46]:
The third M you mentioned is an incredibly painful one for many, which is miscarriage. How should we be talking about. What do we need to be discussing in this topic?

Nicky Lowe [00:37:58]:
Yeah, I think it’s another real taboo subject. So the statistics show that one in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage, but what we think is actually that number’s far higher. But often a miscarriage happens before there’s kind of a known pregnancy. So there’s a really high percentage that might navigate this at any point. Myself, I actually had recurrent miscarriage. So I had, my eldest is 12 and I then had recurrent miscarriages and was told that I’d got secondary infertility, that I couldn’t have another child. And luckily I went on to have another child. I’ve got a six year old but.

Nicky Lowe [00:38:37]:
And when I started talking about it, realizing how many of my friends and how many other women had experienced miscarriage and again, it’s a very unique, it’s a very unique experience depending on, you know, just your, where you are, who you are personally, where that miscarriage might happen in a, in a, in a pregnancy. But just knowing that that is happening to potentially a significant amount of women and they, again, how are we going to support that? Because if it’s happening, whether we know it or not, it’s having an impact whether we know it or not. And does somebody feel safe to share that and then ask what they need to get through that and feel supported, or are they going through it and silently suffering? And that from a human perspective is not right, but also from an organisational performance will be having an impact. But how are we creating an environment where we can raise those subjects and just let people know that they feel safe to voice it and feel supported? A lot of organisations are putting in policies around baby loss, around kind of miscarriage, around those kind of areas to say, look, there’s policies in place that you are supported, you can take time off, you can get the support you need and we’re here to support you. So just recognizing that that will be an issue. If you employ women, the woman will be going through it, but even if you don’t, you know, the father will be going through it and having their own experience as well. If the conversations we’ve been having on the Evolving Leader have helped you in any way, please share this episode with your network, friends and family. Thank you for listening.

Nicky Lowe [00:40:24]:
Now let’s get back to the conversation.

Jean Gomes [00:40:26]:
So onto motherhood. The counterpoint to this, which is the joy of all of that, but it also brings a whole bunch of new realities and there has been some progress in this. Also some weird things, like we won’t mention the name of the investment bank, but paying high potential women to freeze their eggs so that they don’t leave the workplace. What’s your state of the nation on motherhood and work?

Nicky Lowe [00:40:56]:
This state for me is that it’s promising and it looks optimistic, but we’re still in pretty dire, kind of archaic situation still. So what we know from the data of people like Pregnant and Unscrewed, the UK charity have done some massive kind of work in this area that, As I said, 60% of the pay gap is down to the motherhood penalties. So when a woman reaches childbearing age, even if she’s not yet had children, she often will be impacted by this. So we know that if somebody gets engaged, for example, it will be assumed that they’ll get married and have children and therefore might not be given promotional opportunities, that once somebody becomes a mum, they’re deemed as less competent, less capable and less committed. So therefore they are passed over for promotion or they are negatively assessed in their performance reviews. And there’s all this unconscious bias that exists that people might not even be aware of, even exists in their own kind of mindset. But from my own experience and working with thousands of women in this area, is that it is a. It is what I would term a vertical development transition.

Nicky Lowe [00:42:10]:
So, you know, we do have these horizontal development transitions where we gain skills or we get promoted sidewards, but kind of when we know that we have a promotion, it’s seen as a vertical development where we might be going from an individual contributor to a manager or a manager to a kind of functional leader. It’s recognised that there’s a change in values, beliefs, identity, and that support needs to be put in place to enable that smooth transition and really support that person. And I very much see the transition into motherhood and parenthood in that way. You know, our values often shift, our identity shifts, and for some people that is a fairly smooth transition. But for a lot of people it’s not, particularly when the environment is not deemed to be supportive, particularly if they’ve built their career up to that point. On strategies of what I would call the ideal worker. You know, I just work all the hours it takes to get the job done and kind of nothing distracts me from it. And then all of a sudden they’re like, oh, that’s either no longer what I want to do or it’s no longer sustainable.

Nicky Lowe [00:43:13]:
I’m paying a cost or my family’s paying a cost. And how do we make that transition to work in a different way that supports us still performing at work but also living well if we’ve, if we’ve sacrificed that part to have our success? And I think unless people are really supported through that transition, it’s incredibly hard. And I see mostly women really, really suffering in that transition, either paying the personal wellbeing cost of it, or fighting an uphill battle to have the authority and credibility that they once had in the workplace and being able to progress their career effectively.

Scott Allender [00:43:53]:
Where are you seeing examples of practices and organizations that are doing this really well and aren’t unintentionally potentially furthering polarization and sort of creating more taboos in the, in the fact that they’re trying to take this on in a healthy way? Where are you seeing successes, the great.

Nicky Lowe [00:44:13]:
Successes around organisations that are putting in equal parenting politicies. So they’re not kind of going, oh, as a mother you will get all this maternity leave, but as a father you’ll get two weeks. The progressive organisations are going, right, as a parent, we are empowering you to choose how you do that as a family and that as a father you have the same rights as a mother. And you know, organisations have taken huge risks and leaps and investment on this, but they’re absolutely paying off. I mean, people like John Lewis Partnership in the UK are doing phenomenal work around this. So those equal parenting policies are really important, but alongside that policies alone are not enough. It’s the education of leaders and line managers because what we know is men that have asked for shared parental leave, for example, experience the fatherhood forfeit of they’re then deemed as well. You’re not committed to your career.

Nicky Lowe [00:45:09]:
So there’s an education around the bias that still exists. So kind of I run a program called Parenthood Management Matters about how do you manage parents in the workplace effectively and remove those unconscious bias around.

Jean Gomes [00:45:26]:
If.

Nicky Lowe [00:45:26]:
You’Ve got somebody that’s a single parent, the support you they need is slightly different versus also solo parents that might not be kind of co parenting. They are literally the sole parent. You know that the support and resources they need are different. And every Family system is different. So just that again that curiosity and compassion to go, you’re a human, you have a life outside work. I don’t expect you to leave it at the door. The more people that can parent out loud, I think is really important as leaders to go, actually I’m going to go and do the school pickup today and not kind of feel that you’ve got to kind of move side with that of a meeting and hope nobody notices for fear that you’re going to be judged for not being committed. So those are the things that we’re seeing done really well around equal parenting policies, the education and unconscious bias training of leaders and managers and just that more human approach to how do we let people show up as their full selves.

Scott Allender [00:46:26]:
Let’s build on that a little bit because we have listeners listening right now who may not have direct influence over policy changes. So for somebody listening who says I want to make changes on my own team, I want to influence these kinds of things, but I’m not in charge in that way. What’s some advice you have for those leaders?

Nicky Lowe [00:46:45]:
Well, I think there’s a micro level around, you know, as a leader, how do I create the culture within my micro team that we can have those conversations? You know, I know people that work in organizations, organizations that might not be supportive but they’ve created their own like micro climate where they’re like, actually this is how I want to lead and show you that I’m a human and I’m going to respect you and give you the autonomy to get the work done. How you do it is up to you and how you choose to use your hours to do that. I’ll measure your output and the impact you have. I’m not going to measure the hours you’re here and that might go counter to the culture of the organization, but they’ve created those micro environments. But even if they’re not a leader, just to kind of start to share if it feels safe to kind of go, this is, this is how my life works. You know, I’m thinking of one of my clients. She, she took the leap of she was a female in a very male dominated industry. So she was one of the few only, so only females was one of the few only kind of parents and one of the few kind of only solo parents.

Nicky Lowe [00:47:50]:
And she started to just drip feed and just kind of go, just to let you know, like I, I don’t have any flexibility in that way. And her, her, her leader was trying to be really helpful in putting policies in place. But he didn’t understand the lived experience of being a solo parent. So she just started to kind of slowly and gently educate him. Not to say, you know, I deserve and I need, but just let you know, this is the kind of stuff I’m having to navigate. And this is why it sometimes might be seen as a little bit more difficult. I think that can work really well. Other things that I’m seeing done really well is where people are setting up kind of employee resource groups to start these conversations going.

Nicky Lowe [00:48:30]:
So it might be around kind of working parents or working parents and carers, or, you know, it can be around, you know, working parents with neurodivergent children. And I’ve seen kind of these little pockets of employee resource groups pop up where you’re finding your tribe, you’re creating safe environments where you’re kind of normalizing the shared experience that can work incredibly well to then make more of a macro impact, but you’re kind of creating your own kind of micro initiatives that support it.

Jean Gomes [00:49:02]:
I think, you know, one of the intergenerational challenges is always to try, and it’s not to kind of go, well, this generation is different. It’s also to recognize this generation is exactly the same, but in different context. Yeah, a lot of the time, sure, there are differences, but that’s the bit we, as leaders, we often forget. And I think bringing up children particularly is such a traumatic experience in terms of sleep deprivation and new stuff and conflicting, you know, commitments and so on, that it’s almost as if you just desperately want to forget it.

Nicky Lowe [00:49:36]:
Yeah.

Jean Gomes [00:49:38]:
And so when. When you, you know, your kids have left the house and so on, there’s a part of you that’s sort of free again, and you see other people going through it and you’re sort of going, well, wait and see what it’s really going to be like, and so on. So I think there’s probably an element here of remembering and sort of tuning back into that to be a great leader in this. Does that strike you as being, you know, something that we need to kind of.

Nicky Lowe [00:50:03]:
Yeah, and I think that’s a really, really interesting point because I think it can both serve us but be unhelpful in that. Recognizing our own humanness, I think, is so important in that. But what. As what we see play out a lot, actually, with female leaders so often the. The maternal bias and the motherhood penalty that women experience, the data shows that it’s often more from other female leaders with this thing of I suffered, so why should you have it Easier pay it forward. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, you see that potentially a lot. I’ve heard a lot of stories from the legal profession about I had to, you know, hire a nanny, never see my children.

Nicky Lowe [00:50:49]:
Why should you be able to see your children and work from home and work flexibly? And it’s almost like I’ve paid the cost and you, you have to as well. And so I think that bringing your own experience to it can be helpful but can also be unhelpful. And just knowing that and paying attention to it I think is really, you know, is really important.

Jean Gomes [00:51:10]:
That’s really useful to kind of bring back that kind of sacrifice mindset point. What’s next for you? What’s the next kind of challenge that you’re leaning into?

Nicky Lowe [00:51:21]:
At the moment I’m doing a lot around, as we said, female kind of leadership. And for me, I’m developing female leadership development programs. But that really, really are dialed down into evidence based that make a real life difference. Because I think there’s a lot of great programs out there, but I think there’s still a long way that we can go that’s bringing in the changes in the workplace, the changes in what we’re learning from neuroscience, from our psychobiology, from kind of all the menopause data and all of the information that we’ve got to create something really, really impactful. So I’m currently in the process of designing and working and collaborating around that.

Scott Allender [00:52:04]:
Wonderful how can people get in contact with you?

Nicky Lowe [00:52:07]:
Nikki so I’m on LinkedIn. Nikki Lowe on LinkedIn. My business is Luminate. So luminate-group.co.uk and you can find kind of all the information over there. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Wisdom for Working Mums, I’d love for you to share it on social media or with the amazing women in your life. I’d also love to connect with you. So head over to luminate-group.co.uk where you’ll find ways to stay in touch. And if this episode resonated with you, one of the best ways to support the show is by subscribing, subscribing and leaving a review on itunes.

Nicky Lowe [00:52:52]:
Your review helps other women discover this resource. So together we can lift each other up as we rise. So thanks for listening. Until next time. Take care of.