Executive coaching · Melbourne & online worldwide

Executive coaching for women leaders

Senior women often carry a second job alongside the first one, which is the continuous monitoring of how they're landing. That monitoring is metabolically expensive, and most of the coaching aimed at it treats it as a confidence problem.

This page sits under the inner game of leadership, and it makes one particular argument: that a good deal of what gets labelled confidence in senior women is a nervous system running continuous threat assessment in conditions where that assessment has historically been accurate.

Two things are true at once

Some of what makes senior roles harder for women is structural. Organisations distribute opportunity unevenly, feedback lands differently depending on who's giving it and about whom, and the gap tends to open at the first promotion into management rather than at the top. No amount of individual coaching changes that, and any page suggesting otherwise is selling you a fix for someone else's problem.

The other thing that's true is that you're operating inside those conditions now, and what they cost you personally is workable. Coaching can reduce that cost and widen your options. Holding both of those at once is the honest position, and it's the one this work takes.

The double bind, and where it lands in the body

The pattern is well documented in organisational psychology. Assertive behaviour that reads as decisive from a man frequently reads as difficult from a woman, and warmth that reads as approachable can read as insufficiently serious. The band of acceptable behaviour is narrower, and its edges move depending on the room.

What that produces over years is a habit of calibration. Before you speak, some part of you is running an assessment of how it will land, who's present, and what it will cost. Individually each calculation is small. Running continuously across a career, it's a load.

By senior level the calibration is usually automatic and mostly invisible from the outside. What people see is someone measured and careful. What it costs shows up as fatigue that doesn't match the workload, as difficulty switching off, and as a strange delay before saying the direct thing.

Why confidence training misses it

Confidence interventions target belief. They work on what you think about your own competence, on the assumption that the hesitation comes from doubt.

For a lot of senior women the hesitation isn't doubt. It's an accurate read of a cost, learned through repetition, and it operates below deliberation. You can be entirely convinced of your own competence and still find yourself softening a sentence on the way out of your mouth.

That's a physiological pattern rather than a cognitive one, which is why it responds to being trained instead of being reasoned with. Somatic executive coaching describes the mechanism.

What tends to come up

• Prove-it-again. The sense that competence resets and has to be re-established with each new room, and the over-preparation that follows.
• The likeability tax. Softening, qualifying and pre-apologising, done fast enough that you catch it afterwards.
• Imposter patterns. Which look different at executive level, and are covered in imposter syndrome in executives.
• The internal standard. A voice that sharpened each time competence had to be re-established, which is the territory of working with the inner critic.
• Being the only one. The particular vigilance of being the only woman in a forum, and the way that vigilance persists after the meeting.
• Anger with nowhere to go. Legitimate anger about a situation, held in because expressing it would be expensive, and the physical cost of that holding.
• Visibility. Being watched more closely, which makes mistakes costlier and risk-taking harder to justify.

What the work does

It reduces what the navigation costs you. Not by convincing you the calibration is unnecessary, since sometimes it isn't, but by making it something you choose in the moment instead of something that runs automatically.

Practically, that means training the gap between a trigger and your response until you can feel the pull to soften a sentence and decide whether to. Most women I work with already know exactly what they'd say without the calibration. What's missing is the half-second in which the choice is available.

Alongside that, the ordinary work of executive coaching. Stakeholders, decisions, the conversation you've been putting off, and where you're actually heading.

What I bring, and what I don't

I'm a man, and I haven't lived this. That's worth saying plainly rather than working around.

What I bring is the nervous system work, two decades inside senior corporate environments across five continents, and a practice built on the observation that patterns which won't shift through insight usually live below it. What I can't bring is the recognition of having been in it yourself.

For some people that matters a great deal, and choosing a coach who has lived it is a good reason to work with someone else. The chemistry call is where you find out which you want. How to choose an executive coach covers what else to weigh up.

How the work runs

A free 30-minute call first, then fortnightly sessions over three to six months, with short daily practices between them and an honest review at the midpoint. Online across Australia and internationally, or in person in Melbourne. Fees are $550 a session plus GST self-funded and $750 plus GST organisation-sponsored, with detail on the cost page. What to expect walks through the mechanics.

Where an organisation sponsors the coaching, including inside a women's leadership programme, three-way contracting sets out what's shared with the sponsor and what stays between us. That gets agreed explicitly before the first session.

A note on scope

This is coaching. It works on leadership performance and self-regulation for capable people under pressure, and it stays outside the territory of diagnosis and treatment. If you're dealing with significant distress, discrimination or harassment, those warrant proper support, whether that's psychological, legal or through your organisation. Coaching can sit alongside it. No outcome is guaranteed.

Common questions

Why would I work with a male coach on this?

It's a fair question and worth asking of any coach. What I can offer is the nervous system work and two decades inside senior corporate environments. What I can't offer is having lived it. Some people want a coach who has, and that's a legitimate reason to choose someone else. The chemistry call is the place to test it.

Is this coaching about fixing me?

No. Some of what makes senior roles harder for women is structural, and no amount of individual work changes an organisation. What coaching can do is reduce what the navigation costs you personally, and increase your range of options inside conditions you didn't set.

I've done confidence training and it didn't help. Why would this be different?

Confidence training usually addresses belief, and the pattern it targets often isn't a belief. Continuous self-monitoring is a physiological state, and it responds to being trained rather than to being reasoned with.

Do you work with women's leadership programmes inside organisations?

Yes, both as individual coaching within a sponsored cohort and as part of a wider programme. Where an organisation sponsors the work, three-way contracting sets out what's shared with the sponsor and what stays between us.

Rudi Doku · Executive Coach (ICF PCC) · Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) · Melbourne, Australia · Coaching online worldwide