INSIDE THIS WEEK'S EDITION:

😤TRENDS TO SKIP 🗳️POLITICS & BIZ 🔢NUMBERS THAT MATTER 🔥ONE MOVE
​🛠️TOOL I'M TESTING 🌙COSMIC CORNER

Happy Tuesday, Reader!

This week on the podcast, I talked about the Heroine's Journey and honestly, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's in the stories but also in your business, career, volunteer work...the whole arc of how you got here.

So this issue is for the women who've been leading hard, building something important, and occasionally wondering why it still feels like something's missing. Let's dive in! 🏊

😤TRENDS TO SKIP

"Leadership Style" Quizzes that Tell You to be More Like a Man

I keep seeing these floating around: Are you a Bold Leader? A Collaborative Leader? An Assertive Leader? And they all have one thing in common. The framework was borrowed from corporate structures that women never designed and were never fully welcomed into. Yes, even today, there are tons of doors that are still closed to us, no matter what the HR paperwork says when we sign on.

Those structures operate in the quiet, unspoken moments. And you're encouraged to take on more and more masculine approaches to business and leadership.

But back to those quizzes. If you look closely, the "good" answers almost always skew toward traits that have historically been coded as masculine: decisive, direct, competitive, commanding. The "softer" traits get a polite nod and then quietly ranked lower.

You know you don't need a quiz to tell you how to lead. You need to know your values and be willing to build your business around them. That's it. That's the whole framework. And if you want to take a quiz to learn about your leadership style, try one from a woman, like the one I created here!

🗳️POLITICS & BUSINESS OWNERSHIP

The Quiet Roolback

Here's something that's been happening without a lot of fanfare: corporate America has been dismantling the women's advancement programs that took decades to build. Women's career advancement is now a high priority at only 54% of companies, and just 46% prioritize it for women of color. In 2019, that number was 87% across the board. That's not a dip. That's a full-on reversal.

And I want to be honest about why I'm bringing this to a room full of small business owners: because this is the argument for what you've already done. You left (or never joined) a system that is actively deprioritizing you. You built something where you set the culture, you write the policies, and nobody is rolling back your advancement programs because you are the program.

That said, we don't get to be smug about it. The rollback in corporate spaces affects the pipeline of women coming up behind us, the clients we serve, and the talent we might want to hire someday. The more you know, right?

🔢THE NUMBERS THAT MATTER

60% of Senior-Level Women Report Frequent Burnout

That's compared to 50% of senior-level men at the same level. For senior-level Black women, that number climbs to 77%. This is from the McKinsey & LeanIn 2025 Women in the Workplace report, the largest study of its kind.

In the Heroine's Journey, which I'm talking about on the podcast this week, there's a stage called the Descent. It's the moment after you've done everything right, built the resume, hit the milestones, earned the title...and something in you goes: is this it? It doesn't feel like failure. It feels like emptiness. And it's actually the turning point of the whole journey.

I think a lot of women in leadership are living in that number. They're not burning out because they're weak. They're burning out because they spent years succeeding inside a framework that was never built to sustain them.

THE DESCENT IS THE PIVOT, NOT THE END!

🔥ONE MOVE, ONE MINUTE

Map Yourself on the Heroine's Journey

The Heroine's Journey (Maureen Murdock, 1990 — go find it) describes a cycle that a lot of women in business will recognize immediately. One of the stages is called Initiation and Descent: you've achieved what you set out to achieve, and it cost you something you didn't mean to give up. A value. A boundary. A way of working. A version of yourself.

Here's your one move: write down one thing you gave up to "make it" that you want back. Maybe it's slowness. Maybe it's saying no without a paragraph of explanation. Maybe it's a type of client you stopped working with because someone told you to niche down in a direction that never felt right.

You don't have to do anything with it yet. Just write it down. That's where the next chapter starts.

🛠️TOOL I'M TESTING

Getting ClickUp Power User Verified

Ok, this one isn't new — I've been using ClickUp for a while. But I just got my Power User verification and I have thoughts!

To become a verified "Power User," you have to be among the top 10% of users using ClickUp. That's kinda nuts to me that I qualify, but there you go. Using a new tool (to work with a client's ecosystem) forced me to actually learn the features I would never have dived into myself. Turns out, I had been leaving a lot on the table.

Before you go hunting for the next shiny project management tool, I'd genuinely recommend going deeper with whatever you already have. There is almost certainly a feature in your current stack that would save you time this week, and you just haven't met it yet.

Mastery of one system beats a graveyard of half-used ones every time.

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🌙COSMIC CORNER

The Full Moon in Scorpio is Here to Shake Things Up!

Scorpio full moons reveal what's hidden beneath the surface, so whatever you've been pushing down, repressing, and trying to ignore is likely to make its reappearance around the end of this week (the full moon is on May 1st, aka Beltane!). What should you have let go of a long time ago? Now's the time to actually release!