Hormone Cycles and Leadership

Leading from the Power of our Female Cycles by Amy Jackson.

Article originally published in The Lunch Mag, Issue 4, July 2024.

As women, we are extraordinarily influential leaders in our business, our communities, and our families.

The way we show up can have a ripple effect on every person we connect with, how they show up in their worlds and the impact that they can have in their circle of influence and control. And the way we show is deeply personal. It is connected with our state of being on any given day – our mood, our sense of confidence and, where we are in our cycle.

Thinking and working with hormonal cycles and leadership is theory in action for me at the moment. I recognise that it’s different for every single one of us, that it is indeed deeply personal, and that if we start playing with this thinking, it can be personally transformational. I notice I am getting kinder with myself, and more effective in all aspects of my work across the month, and it’s really reducing my stress.

But this is really new for me! Whilst I have been focused on my self-care and reducing my stress for decades, my approach to thinking about leading myself, what I expect myself to be able to do each day, how I expect myself to show up and the ways in which I reward or judge myself, if I’m really honest, I’ve been expecting myself to be capable of meeting the same expectations day in day out.

That’s what we’ve been encouraged to do. As someone who has committed my life to helping people achieve potential, I have been a part of this common story of efficiency and productivity tools and consistency of habits so that we can get more done each and every day.

Time and again – for myself, and for my clients, we show up one week smashing out all those expectations, and then couple of weeks later we feel like we have been failing in all of them!

It’s been niggling at me for years to try to understand what’s going on here, and last year as I was reading the brilliant, Fast like a Girl, by Dr Mindy Pell, it slammed into me and quite literally stopped me in my tracks.

The male hormone cycle is mostly diurnal – same hormones in about the same up and down cycle each day. The female cycle is monthly-ish- 3 different hormones going up and down at different times across a 4 week-ish cycle.

I’ve spent years trying to avoid my up and down cycle at work, find ways around it, ignoring it, pushing on through it, generally pretending like my boy was the same day in day out, to ensure I could deliver, fit in, be seen as a strong woman.

As I have followed Dr Mindy’s work and started paying real attention to my own cycles, and dived deeper into this world, I reckon that sticking my finders in my ears and La La La-ing about my cycle is part of the fuel of my self-doubt. That in all the work we do to build up our confidence, in ignoring our cycles, we create unrealistic expectations, and we just can’t deliver. On some days. On other days – I’m a hero girl!

The science here is complex, and the truth is we still don’t really understand it, because of course, most of the research on productivity, efficiency and biology has completed ignored the differences in female bodies! But – here’s what I’m starting to play with to help my clients, my team (and me!) Lead ourselves differently…

The individual differences are enormous, both between us and across our own lifetimes, but in the broadest sense there are 4 phases to our cycle.

They’ve got technical names, Dr Mindy has given them names to help us think about it from a food and fuel perspective. I’m using the names below to try to help female leaders have easy access to the framework.

Leading with:

In the first phase, from Day 1 bleed, our oestrogen is increasing.

Oestrogen influences every single system in our body (ask any Perimenopausal woman and she’ll tell you the havoc the loss of oestrogen is causing!) and as leaders, we are great collaborators in this phase. Our body is primed to have collaborative conversations, we are likely to step forward to initiate new discussions and to reach for connections to solve problems. As leaders in this phase, I think we need:

Connection & Action

Leading Forward

In the second phase, our Testosterone is peaking.

This is the stage that we feel like we are flying! We feel unstoppable, we thrive in tackling the hardest stuff. We can easily show up as the leader we want others to see us as being, we can easily work long hours, have really tough conversations and strive into new initiatives. As leaders in this phase, I think we need:

Challenge & New Opportunities

Leading Progress

In the third phase, our testosterone is coming back down again, and our oestrogen is slowly falling.

We might be missing the feeling of being awesome, but we’re still feeling on top of things. We are once again great collaborators in this phase, and we thrive here if we can see tangible progress on the things we have started. As leaders in this phase, I think we need:

Action & Accountability

Leading Thoughtfully

And then the wheels fall off the bus! In this phase testosterone is gone, oestrogen is at its lowest and our progesterone levels are rising.

This changes the whole balance of what our body needs. To build progesterone we need calm and rest, in Dr Mindy’s words, we need to “Nurture” ourselves. I reckon we’ve all had these weeks – when we are likely to over-react if we are expected to move fast (snappy B mumma for me!), it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, over stretched and like we’re under-delivering on everything! But if we lead from this space, recognising that we need:

Deep work & Reflective Space

Then we can excel as strategic leaders! We are likely to be highly contemplative, capable of deep reflection and big picture thinking – but without the space to work with where our brains are at, we can quickly enter a cycle of self-judgement, not good enough shouting at us every time we turn a corner.

Without the down time of his phase, we enter the new cycle a little broken. It can take days to recover, and we can miss most of our leading with phase – leading to this niggling frustration that we just aren’t cutting it.

I’m not advocating that we talk about all this at work, or let our colleagues know where we’re up to in our cycles (though if you are in a team full of women, I don’t think that conversation has the potential to be a game-changer!).

I am advocating that we start paying attention to our own bodies as female leaders – cultivating our own self-awareness and richening our self-care toolkits so that we can support ourselves to be at our thriving best as leaders, wherever we are up to in our cycles.

Taking our fingers our of our cards, and instead of just pushing on, we ourselves – what do I need, in this moment, so I can step in anyway, working with my body right now.

I think this could help us build confidence in ourselves, to show up more grounded, more authentically, and with more impact in all the ways that we want to change the world – Leading from the Power of our Female cycles.

Amy x

To learn more about Amy’s transformative programs, designed to help you think strategically, communicate with impact, and lead complex teams with confidence, visit her website.

Whether you’re looking for a deep dive into leadership with her 2-day intensive in-person experience—where you’ll develop practical tools, powerful mindsets, and habits to grow your career and influence—or want to explore other offerings, Amy’s programs will equip you to lead with confidence, influence upward, and elevate your team’s success.

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Amy’s article: Leading from the Power of our Female cycles was originally printed in Issue 4 of The Lunch Mag.

Amy joined Ladies Who Long Lunch hosts Kirsty Fields and Jo Stevens at the Manly Long Lunch as an Empowerment Panelist. She continue to attend many events annually, as guests and friends to many in our community.