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“Female intuition is real. It is valuable, and it is a crucial resource that we women have been told to ignore.”
I Have a Story for You is a podcast about power, environment, and the gap between the rules women were taught to play by and the rules that actually determine what gets recognized.
Hosted by Dr. Sonja Adzovic — doctor turned high-stakes decisions strategist — this show is for capable, accomplished women who are working harder without changing position, and who suspect the problem isn't their effort. It's the read.
Each episode begins with a story — personal, historical, or cultural — and follows it into the kinds of questions women carry privately:
Why do I keep over-functioning in rooms that don't reward it?
Why does competence stop translating at a certain level?
Why does the next move feel impossible to make from where I'm standing?
Why am I being told I'm "almost ready" by people whose feedback is operationally meaningless?
This is not a podcast about hustle, productivity, mindset, or confidence. It's about reading the system clearly — power, environment, identity, perception — so the next decision isn't shaped by an inaccurate map.
Expect research.
Expect pattern reads.
Expect the relief of finally having language for something you've been feeling but couldn't name.
I have a story for you.
Let's begin.
Audio file
Episode 10 Audio Version.mp3
Transcript
00:00:01
I'm Dr.
00:00:01
Sonja Adzovic.
00:00:02
This is I Have a Story for You.
00:00:07
Today's story, we're starting off with a fun one.
00:00:10
So it's one of those stories that's about something that happens and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity.
00:00:17
But that also means it's a once in a lifetime decision.
00:00:21
So it's one of those decisions where you know is going to impact the rest of your life.
00:00:26
So here we go.
00:00:27
Jasmine is 39.
00:00:30
She's built the kind of career most people spend their whole lives reaching for.
00:00:35
Now, she's in senior management and she's respected by everyone around her.
00:00:39
And she's good at what she does.
00:00:42
She's really good.
00:00:43
And she knows it, even if she's never bragged about it to anybody.
00:00:48
And she spent 15 years of becoming the person clients ask for by name in the company.
00:00:54
So at home, the situation is that she has a partner and she has a small child.
00:01:00
The child is still young enough that it feels like everything is going by too fast.
00:01:05
And she works hard.
00:01:07
She's careful about how she budgets her time because she knows that time is her most valuable commodity and then something happens.
00:01:16
this offer lands in her lap.
00:01:19
A male colleague that she's worked with for a significant number of years and whom she really respects comes to her with an idea.
00:01:28
The 2 of them out on their own starting their own business.
00:01:33
And it's not some sort of fantasy, some sort of crazy idea.
00:01:37
Between the two of them, they've built up enough of a client base that they could walk out the door and start with real work already in hand.
00:01:46
It's a good opportunity.
00:01:48
On paper, it's a good one however you look at it.
00:01:52
So Jasmine does what she always does.
00:01:54
She runs the numbers, a pros and cons list.
00:01:58
She thinks, will this make enough money because it has to.
00:02:01
She has people who depend on her.
00:02:03
There's the whole future she and her partner are building towards.
00:02:07
The money has to be there.
00:02:10
And also, how much time is all this going to take because she knows that with every startup, the hours
00:02:16
in the beginning are crazy.
00:02:18
60, 70 hours, weeks and weekends are always gone.
00:02:22
Even when you're not at work, you're thinking about work.
00:02:25
So this is something that she really doesn't want to trade right now, all this time, especially with her child being so young.
00:02:32
So that's not on the table these insane hours per week.
00:02:38
So she sits with the decision.
00:02:39
You have the money on one side, you have time on the other.
00:02:43
She builds a spreadsheet, she makes the list, best case scenario, worst case scenario.
00:02:49
And she decides that she's going for it.
00:02:53
Amazing.
00:02:54
And the next day she's thinking, okay, maybe not.
00:02:58
Actually, you know, maybe this isn't such a great idea.
00:03:00
This isn't the right time in my life.
00:03:04
And the next day she thinks, okay, no, actually, if not now, when?
00:03:07
Seize the moment.
00:03:09
There's always going to be things going on.
00:03:11
It should probably be a yes anyway.
00:03:13
So she's back and forth.
00:03:15
She can't really make it land anywhere.
00:03:18
No matter how many times she runs the list, she runs the numbers, she can't figure out what to do.
00:03:23
And it's not like Jasmine is an indecisive person.
00:03:26
This isn't like her.
00:03:27
She makes hard calls, hard decisions for a living.
00:03:31
but this one just won't stick.
00:03:33
Here's the issue.
00:03:34
What's actually going on isn't this issue that she thinks it is.
00:03:40
Jasmine keeps on teeter tottering back and forth because she's asking the wrong question.
00:03:46
She's built this whole decision around time and money and those matter, but they're not the real thing.
00:03:54
They're not the real question that settles the decision, that makes her decide, that makes the right choice.
00:04:01
voice for her.
00:04:03
And that's the reason why the spreadsheets keep flipping on her, why the pros and cons lists just don't work.
00:04:10
Thing is, you can't answer a question you haven't asked and expect the right decision.
00:04:16
She hasn't asked the right question yet.
00:04:19
And this isn't a small decision Jasmine has to make.
00:04:22
She knows this decision will affect the next 10 years of her life.
00:04:26
She can't afford to make the wrong decision at this moment.
00:04:30
So what's the right question?
00:04:32
What should Jasmine do?
00:04:35
So I love these sort of decisions, especially high stakes decisions, because they really do impact the trajectory of your life.
00:04:44
It's that moment where you're at a fork in the road and you have to decide which way to go.
00:04:51
It's like that Robert Frost poem.
00:04:53
Do you know that one?
00:04:54
Which is one of my favorites.
00:04:57
It was actually printed out and framed on my wall for 15 years of my life.
00:05:02
I kept it right next to my desk all throughout high school.
00:05:06
When I went away for university, when I went away to med school, I actually took it with me.
00:05:12
all the way abroad, changed continents.
00:05:14
I took it with me.
00:05:16
It's actually a really interesting story.
00:05:17
I remember one day in high school, it was up on my wall.
00:05:22
So it was fully framed behind glass.
00:05:25
And I remember waking up and an ant had crawled in and had actually gotten stuck and sadly passed away.
00:05:37
I mean, it's an ant, but And so it was stuck with the poem and it was almost stuck at the part where it said, two roads diverged in a wood right at that point.
00:05:52
And there was something about it that I almost felt kind of mystical, like it was like a sign from the universe to keep this poem up.
00:06:01
And so I did.
00:06:01
And actually I still have that poem in that frame and everything in the end is still in there, hasn't moved.
00:06:09
So anyway, I love that poem.
00:06:10
And not that you should always follow a poem when making these sort of decisions.
00:06:16
And that's why we talk about this here instead, how to make these high stakes decisions that affect the trajectory of your life to make sure that you're seeing the decision for what it is, that you're not misreading the situation.
00:06:29
Now I'm going to tell you another little story about me.
00:06:32
I've always had this really strong sense of intuition at key moments in my life.
00:06:39
It's like there have been these really odd moments in my life when I just had this gut wrenching feeling of the right answer, what I should do.
00:06:49
I had it when we were living in Toronto and thinking about moving abroad for a couple of years or maybe indefinitely, maybe permanently.
00:06:56
And it was this
00:06:58
overwhelming feeling that I had to leave and our apartment was facing south.
00:07:04
And I always had this pull towards the east.
00:07:09
Like I would sit on my balcony and just face east and felt pulled, pulled towards there.
00:07:15
And
00:07:16
I also had it, when I was signing up to work with certain coaches, when I would feel a very strong, overwhelming sense of it's a no or it's a yes.
00:07:25
And especially in the moments when it felt that it was a no, it was a very panicked backing away no.
00:07:36
The intuition just felt so insane.
00:07:39
And the thing is, that every time I didn't listen to my intuition, I was proven over and over again that I should have, even though it didn't make any sense in the moment.
00:07:50
Because what's so interesting is that so often the decisions that I was making, and even after I'd made the decision whether it was a yes or no, to stay or to leave,
00:08:02
it made sense logically on paper, even if the intuition was pointing me in the other direction.
00:08:08
So for example, like leaving Toronto to go live abroad, it didn't make sense.
00:08:13
I had a great job or leaving medicine, for example.
00:08:17
It's an amazing career and I loved so many aspects of it.
00:08:22
And on paper, it makes no sense to do that.
00:08:26
But the intuition was just so strong.
00:08:29
And for a long time, it was really
00:08:31
confusing and destabilizing when every part of me felt like I was saying a no or a yes when the logic said the opposite.
00:08:45
That's really, really confusing, especially for someone who has a background in science, who has spent so much time with numbers and formulas and thinking things through logically.
00:08:57
It was really destabilizing.
00:09:00
And I had to learn in all of this whether my intuition was just a fear of the situation and I was backing away from it for that reason.
00:09:14
Or was it based on some sort of wisdom, some sort of decision-making potential that I consciously wasn't accessing?
00:09:25
Now this potential is not just about intuition.
00:09:28
It's about answering a key question.
00:09:32
Do women have biological differences that give them advantageous leadership skills?
00:09:41
That's what we're talking about today.
00:09:43
Now, this question has been around for a long time, the differences between men and women.
00:09:48
Are there any?
00:09:49
You know, there's that really famous book, Are Women from Venus Men or from Mars?
00:09:54
Is that really the case?
00:09:56
Well, yes and no.
00:09:59
We've often wondered, are there cognitive differences between men and women?
00:10:04
Again, yes and no.
00:10:06
There are some actually.
00:10:10
So research has shown a very good research study showed that women retain emotional events.
00:10:18
So emotional events, so the memories of emotional events much more than men.
00:10:25
So think about really either really, really positive emotional or really traumatic emotional events.
00:10:32
Women hold on to the details of these memories so much more than men.
00:10:37
And when they recall them, the memories come back richer and more intense.
00:10:43
So that's the first cognitive difference.
00:10:46
Why does it matter?
00:10:47
We'll get to that right away in just a second, because there's a few more.
00:10:51
The second is that another research study showed that the corpus callosum communicates or talks more in women than in men.
00:11:01
So your brain is split into two parts, 2 hemispheres, and between them there's a bridge
00:11:07
that takes information from one side to the other.
00:11:10
So sometimes in patients who have this cut, they know what they're doing, but they don't know why they're doing it.
00:11:18
So there was this really interesting study again in these patients that had this corpus callosum cut where researchers found a way to talk to one side of the brain.
00:11:28
So they would give the person a task to do that they knew processing of that task would be
00:11:37
done on one side of the brain.
00:11:38
So for example, they asked the person to go get a Coca-Cola.
00:11:42
And the person would go up and go to get a Coca-Cola.
00:11:46
And when they came to the door, the researcher would ask them, hey, why are you going to get a Coca-Cola?
00:11:52
And they couldn't remember because that's actually in the other part of the brain.
00:11:57
So it's in the other hemisphere that the researcher told them to.
00:12:01
But the brain compensates so well
00:12:06
that on the spot they'd make up a reason that made a lot of sense.
00:12:10
They'd say, oh, it's because it's really hot outside and I'm really thirsty.
00:12:14
They were really, really quick to make up for that and they weren't lying.
00:12:18
This was their brain actually compensating.
00:12:22
So a lot of the times they know what they're doing but not how or why rather.
00:12:27
And they know or they know why they're doing something but not what they were going to go do.
00:12:32
So it's really, really interesting.
00:12:35
And what this means is that the coordination between the two hemispheres, the two parts of the brain, is much more fluid in women's brains.
00:12:48
This is not to say to extrapolate this, we have to be really, really careful with science.
00:12:54
We cannot extrapolate that, because women's brains, two sides of the hemisphere talk so much more, that women know always what they're doing and why, but men know either what they're doing but not why.
00:13:09
No, that's a very severe case when the corpus callosum is cut.
00:13:13
This is just showing that there's more coordination between the two hemispheres.
00:13:18
So while in men's brains there's more coordination within one specific localized region, in women there's much more coordination around the whole brain.
00:13:30
That's what the science purely shows.
00:13:32
Now another thing is that women do better than men on verbal fluency on average.
00:13:40
and also on reading comprehension, writing, fine motor coordination, perceptual speed, and retrieval from long-term memory.
00:13:50
Now listen back to that list, okay?
00:13:53
We have long-term memory, so storage of long-term memory, retrieval from that memory.
00:13:59
The memories that does retrieve are filled with so much more details.
00:14:03
Details matter, right?
00:14:05
It's not all just a vague picture.
00:14:08
And in terms of retrieval, it doesn't matter if you have a huge storage base if you can't retrieve it.
00:14:13
And when you do retrieve it, you have to have all the details.
00:14:16
If you look at that list, these are all the prerequisites for really valuable, holistic leadership.
00:14:27
Because leadership isn't built on knowledge alone.
00:14:30
If it was, the professors from universities would lead countries, they would lead industries, they would be CEOs.
00:14:37
But it doesn't work like that.
00:14:38
It's not just about a vast amount of knowledge.
00:14:43
We all know that knowledge isn't the only prerequisite for leadership.
00:14:48
Look at the company where you're working.
00:14:51
It isn't always the hardest workers, the most knowledgeable who rise in leadership.
00:14:57
It isn't.
00:14:58
Leadership requires so much more than that.
00:15:03
One of the things that's really key for leadership is if we think about leadership as the captain of a ship, right?
00:15:13
Look at it as leadership is the captain of the ship.
00:15:16
And we have people who are taking orders from the captain and executing those orders.
00:15:23
But it is the captain who's determining where the ship is going and why and where the best place
00:15:32
for the ship to go is depending on certain criteria, depending on where they want to go, what they want to achieve.
00:15:39
Do they want more land?
00:15:41
Do they want more treasures?
00:15:44
The captain has to make these sort of decisions.
00:15:47
So if we look at leadership and wisdom in that way, one of the key things for it is memory and pattern recognition.
00:15:58
Or if we're going to think about someone else,
00:16:00
Think about Miranda Priestly.
00:16:03
She's up there making directional decisions.
00:16:06
She's not in it.
00:16:07
She has assistants to do all the stuff.
00:16:09
She has a ton of staff.
00:16:12
She didn't even know they had a cafeteria.
00:16:14
She's deciding where are we going and why.
00:16:18
She has memory.
00:16:19
She can look for patterns to decide what is the next step forward.
00:16:23
Miranda Priestly is actually a really, really excellent example, or the real life Anna Wintour, an excellent example.
00:16:32
So memory allows for the vast storage of information.
00:16:36
And what's interesting is that some of it is subconscious, some of it is conscious.
00:16:41
We'll get to that in a second because that matters.
00:16:44
It matters whether it's conscious or subconscious and both have their inherent value.
00:16:50
It's not that one is better than the other.
00:16:53
So we have memory as a key part for leadership skills and this is something that women truly excel at.
00:17:00
And then we have pattern recognition.
00:17:03
Again, that's scanning.
00:17:05
Think about
00:17:06
something that you just naturally do, right?
00:17:08
Scanning.
00:17:09
Where have we been?
00:17:10
Where are we going?
00:17:11
What is happening right now that might indicate where are we going forward?
00:17:15
You use this normally in your everyday life.
00:17:19
That's what's so interesting.
00:17:21
When you're thinking about from the smallest things about whether you're making really, really almost insignificant decisions, like what are we going to, what is the family going to eat this week or
00:17:34
maybe touch more significant, like what am I gonna get my mother-in-law?
00:17:40
You have pattern recognition.
00:17:42
You know you're the one getting your mother-in-law a Christmas present from the family.
00:17:46
So, you know, that sort of pattern recognition is something that you naturally do, but your potential to do this in leadership, to make these directional decisions,
00:17:59
has been negated, this natural ability that you have.
00:18:03
Where have we been?
00:18:04
Where are we going?
00:18:05
What is happening right now that might indicate where this is going to go?
00:18:10
And to do pattern recognition, to make these directional decisions, you need a vast amount of memory to base this on, a vast amount of knowledge to base this on.
00:18:23
That's what pattern recognition requires.
00:18:26
and then the ability to retrieve all this information.
00:18:30
to retrieve all this memory, organize it, move it around, and project that pattern forward.
00:18:37
Now, there's actually also a third thing.
00:18:39
So we have so far pattern recognition and memory, but also what's important, this is a side note, what's important is that you have to have the self authority to put yourself in those positions.
00:18:57
to raise your hand, to stand up and actually say the thing.
00:18:59
So like I was saying, you're already doing this in your regular life.
00:19:02
You're analyzing your relationship, other people's relationships.
00:19:07
You're making all sorts of directional decisions for your life, your family and everything.
00:19:14
But when it comes to the workplace, when it comes to leadership, whether you're your own boss, whether you're the CEO, whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you're climbing the corporate ladder,
00:19:25
You have to make sure that you don't do authority self-betrayal, that you have enough trust in your own perception of a situation to raise your hand.
00:19:38
to act on that perception, act on that knowledge without waiting for other people to confirm it.
00:19:44
You don't wait for other people to confirm what you already know in your own life.
00:19:48
So why would you wait for ChatGPT for someone who's more knowledgeable than you, someone who has more authority than you, someone who is higher up than you so they must know better?
00:19:57
No, authority is something you decide to put yourself and not something you wait until somebody gives it to you.
00:20:04
Nobody's thinking about you.
00:20:05
Nobody's going to
00:20:06
come to your desk and be like, hey, I'm going to give you authority now.
00:20:08
No, you put yourself in these situations.
00:20:11
So there's a certain amount of self-responsibility that you have to do.
00:20:16
You can't have authority, self-betrayal.
00:20:19
So even though you have these amazing skills of memory and pattern recognition that are to your advantage, you have to put yourself in the right rooms and have enough self-authority
00:20:36
to do something about it.
00:20:39
And just think back if you're thinking, well, I don't know if I actually do that.
00:20:44
Think about if you've ever been in a meeting or some sort of situation at work where you saw a pattern, saw where the ship is headed, saw that it's headed towards the rocks or saw that it's headed in the wrong direction and there's actually something much, much better this way.
00:20:59
And nobody really saw it, but you did.
00:21:03
That moment is a moment where you're going to decide if you're going to have self-authority or if you're going to do authority self-betrayal.
00:21:11
Are you going to act on your own perception of the situation as enough to act on without needing anybody else to approve that decision?
00:21:21
That's self-authority.
00:21:22
So it's that combination, your innate skills plus your initiative to act on it.
00:21:30
That's the winning combination.
00:21:31
Your innateness is your female biology.
00:21:34
It gives you these skills, these cognitive skills with this vast amount of memory and pattern recognition.
00:21:41
And then you have to take the final step of having the self-authority to act on it.
00:21:47
And this is actually exactly what makes women phenomenal at directional decisions, at leadership, is having these abilities to see the bigger picture, to steer the ship, to be the Miranda Priestlys of the world.
00:22:02
Now we're coming into something that is so interesting.
00:22:05
We're going to be talking about something right now
00:22:08
that women have been ridiculed for, told that doesn't count, and yet it is a crucial skill that gives them an insane edge.
00:22:20
Women can do something amazing.
00:22:22
They have, we have rather, the ability to store these vast amounts of knowledge, whether it's knowledge that you've gained through experience, through books, it doesn't matter.
00:22:32
Knowledge is knowledge.
00:22:34
Women have the ability to store these vast amounts of knowledge, but a lot of it is subconscious, a lot of it.
00:22:43
Thankfully, because if we think about just how much we know consciously, I don't want to know everything that I know subconsciously.
00:22:51
So I'm just going to step back for a second, actually.
00:22:53
So just think about
00:22:56
conscious and subconscious knowledge as a mountain that's in the ocean.
00:23:01
So you only really see the peak and then there's like all this stuff underneath.
00:23:05
So when we combine woman's ability to store vast amounts of knowledge subconsciously and we combine this vast amount of knowledge with how women are able to retrieve it and process it without knowing it's even there,
00:23:24
Women can do this.
00:23:25
And this is the basis for female intuition.
00:23:30
Female intuition has been ridiculed, has been told doesn't count, has been told logic is the only way forward.
00:23:38
But female intuition is real.
00:23:40
It is valuable and it is a crucial resource that we women have been told to ignore.
00:23:46
It is not based on woo.
00:23:47
It is not based on the universe dropping something down on your head.
00:23:51
It is not divine.
00:23:54
It is literally so much knowledge that is subconscious and that is what you are retrieving.
00:24:01
And you're like, I don't even know how I know this, but I just know this.
00:24:05
And this really fascinating article by Sinclair and Eisenman came out that showed that intuition, the thing that countless men have joked about, is not to be taken lightly.
00:24:21
It's real and it carries leadership potential.
00:24:25
So women process information more completely and contextually than men.
00:24:32
And we're more sensitive to subtle bodily and emotional cues, which leaves us open to more information.
00:24:43
And we're more perceptive about the relationship between pieces of information and about anomalies.
00:24:49
So essentially what you have is you have this vast amount of subconscious information.
00:24:57
And we are able to access this subconscious information without knowing that we're accessing it.
00:25:05
And we can then use this information and we feel it
00:25:10
And that's those feelings, those bodily cues, right?
00:25:13
Like, tightness in your stomach or tightness in your throat or tenseness in your shoulders or even like sadness or fear.
00:25:22
That is how that subconscious information comes up into awareness.
00:25:28
And that is the importance of being able to register these bodily cues and emotional cues as information.
00:25:37
and not, oh, you know, I'm just scared or oh, you know, I just feel like crap.
00:25:43
No, this is this could be something and you can you can tell the difference.
00:25:46
And the more attuned you get to it, whether this is intuition and it's that thing that I was telling you about where I was where when something was a no, I felt my body like pulling away.
00:26:02
I, you know, I shouldn't do it.
00:26:05
And then what I mentioned about we can look at nuances a lot more than men.
00:26:14
It's not like a whole jumble.
00:26:16
We can look at anomalies and factor them into our decision making, even though it is subconscious.
00:26:23
And so we look at a decision much more comprehensively than men.
00:26:28
We're able to see, okay, that really doesn't fill with the decision.
00:26:31
That's an anomaly.
00:26:33
But how it works with the whole, we're not, we like the gray almost a lot more than just the black and white.
00:26:41
This all goes to show that female intuition feeds directional decision making and problem solving that's more comprehensive and whole.
00:26:52
And that's a source of really valuable leadership potential and wisdom, the ability to see everything comprehensively and holistically.
00:27:02
Now men on the other hand are much more selective.
00:27:05
So their decision making, their decisions tend to be based on relevant cues.
00:27:12
So the ones that point to an existing model.
00:27:16
That's kind of where that phrase comes like, we've always done it this way.
00:27:20
It's decisions that tend to benefit the status quo rather than moving left and right.
00:27:26
Again, these are averages.
00:27:28
This isn't about everybody, but as a whole, this gives us enough information to go on.
00:27:35
So men
00:27:36
are able to more ignore anomalies, ignore things that are telling them something should be different than the existing model.
00:27:44
And this is valuable too.
00:27:46
Like this has a place in the world as a whole as well.
00:27:50
This isn't something to say, oh, men aren't good at leadership.
00:27:54
No, this isn't what it's about.
00:27:56
This is, there's a place in it.
00:27:58
This is a part of a whole system where everybody has their part to play.
00:28:04
It's just that male intuition supports more expert behavior and efficiency, right?
00:28:11
That sort of doing, right?
00:28:13
The doers, the experts.
00:28:15
That's a different place in the whole.
00:28:19
And another thing, the whole point is that previously
00:28:24
Intuition has been looked at this sort of emotional, oh, you're just being sensitive thing where really now we see and you see now, it's a source of valuable information.
00:28:39
It is not something to be ignored.
00:28:42
It is not you being afraid or fearful of the situation.
00:28:45
It is not a moment
00:28:48
For you to say, just tough it out, just ignore this.
00:28:50
Just ignore this.
00:28:51
Like this isn't useful information because you can't explain it with numbers or a spreadsheet.
00:28:57
This is valuable information based on knowledge that you're not aware of that has a huge amount of leadership potential.
00:29:04
Now another aspect that has been shown that women are so fantastic on, and it's been shown in research that spans economics, psychology, public policy,
00:29:17
is that in decision-making, women prioritize collective long-term well-being.
00:29:24
So collective for everybody long-term well-being.
00:29:28
So things like environmental sustainability and social equity, we prioritize those things in our decision-making over things like short-term individual profit-driven gain.
00:29:44
So for women, it is not profits first, people second.
00:29:48
It's people first, profits second.
00:29:53
A super important caveat.
00:29:55
Profits are important.
00:29:56
Don't let anybody tell you otherwise money is important.
00:29:59
Profits are important.
00:30:00
If you don't have profits, your company closes down and then you don't have any people to pay.
00:30:05
You're not helping anybody.
00:30:06
Profits are important, but not at the cost of everything else.
00:30:12
Women, again, across all these different industries, different research studies in different fields have shown that women are exceptionally good at making decisions that benefit, yes, profits, but also the collective, the environment, people.
00:30:30
This is a leadership skill.
00:30:33
That is so important.
00:30:34
And I always go to Instagram on The Hollywood Reporter.
00:30:38
There's this video of Will Ferrell saying, you know what?
00:30:41
It's time for women to lead.
00:30:43
And it's true.
00:30:46
Like, look at everything we've talked about.
00:30:49
Women have the ability to lead so well and make directional decisions that benefit everybody.
00:30:57
And we're so much better at doing it.
00:31:00
We have intuition, we have pattern recognition, we can store vast amounts of memory consciously, and then even more subconsciously, we can retrieve it, organize it, look at all these anomalies and make decisions that are absolutely fantastic.
00:31:16
Those just by themselves, if nothing else, when we focus in on them, when we hone these skills, when we don't ignore them for any reason, this is the basis of great leadership.
00:31:30
and it is already within you.
00:31:32
have been told, you have been told to suppress it for logic, for spreadsheets, for pros and cons sheets, but sometimes your leadership potential, your ability to make decisions is already within you.
00:31:48
It just needs to be turned on, needs to be ignited, needs to be placed in rooms where it is going to be valuable, placed in rooms where you are going to have the self authority to do something about it.
00:32:03
And this isn't about throwing logic out the window.
00:32:06
It's not about ignoring profits, right?
00:32:09
We already talked about that.
00:32:11
This is about recognizing that you have leadership skills that give you an edge.
00:32:17
and to not ignore them any longer for leadership skills that have been deemed more appropriate by who.
00:32:25
And throughout history, women have been pushed and forced into ignoring a lot of these abilities, such as intuition.
00:32:32
We have been
00:32:35
positioned as less than, as not naturally capable of leadership, as being too sensitive.
00:32:42
But everything here tells us the exact opposite.
00:32:46
It tells us that women possess clearly innate leadership skills.
00:32:52
What matters is what you do now.
00:32:56
Do you continue playing on the rigged map?
00:32:59
Do you continue on the status quo now that you know all of this?
00:33:03
Or do you get an accurate read of your situation?
00:33:07
Do you act on your innate abilities and move forward from that?
00:33:12
Because at the end of the day, what it amounts to is that woman and everybody, everybody is evaluated on results, but how you get them is up to you and that's your edge.
00:33:28
Use it when you have it.
00:33:31
Now, going back to Jasmine, she still has a choice to make.
00:33:35
She's still wondering whether to take up her colleague on starting their own business together.
00:33:43
She still has to make that decision.
00:33:45
And we are going to go into how to navigate this decision for Jasmine, but also if you're in this kind of situation.
00:33:55
where you have the possibility of starting your own business, whether it's a partnership with somebody or whether it's your own business.
00:34:03
And the question so much navigates around, what about the money?
00:34:08
I will lose my corporate benefits.
00:34:11
Will I make enough money to pay all the stuff my life have to pay, my rent, my mortgage, groceries?
00:34:17
Or the question and or navigates around, will I have the time for all of it?
00:34:24
But those aren't the questions that will give you the answer that will actually point you in the right direction.
00:34:32
You have to ask the right questions.
00:34:36
Now she might make the right decision by mistake, but even the right decision made for the wrong reasons is going to end up being a trap if you're not in the right mental headspace.
00:34:47
If you go into it thinking, oh, you know, like let's say the right decision is to start the business, but she's going in thinking, oh, well, you know, like it'll make, you know, a million by year and then I can retire.
00:34:59
If you're not in the right headspace about it or you're not aware of how much
00:35:05
time is going to take her anything, it's still going to be a trap.
00:35:09
Without the right questions, you can't make the right decision.
00:35:15
And she can spend valuable amount of time not starting the business and missing out on that.
00:35:22
Or she could start the business from the wrong mentality and then she'll become bitter about it.
00:35:28
She won't have time for the kid, maybe it won't make as much money in the very beginning, or
00:35:34
She could just sit in indecision forever.
00:35:36
She can sit just sitting on it.
00:35:38
I don't know what to do.
00:35:39
I can't make a decision.
00:35:41
Either way, this is lost time.
00:35:44
Time is the only thing that we can never get more of.
00:35:48
It's lost time.
00:35:49
It's lost amount of mental health.
00:35:52
It's so much more stress.
00:35:54
And this has important implications.
00:35:57
If she starts a startup and it doesn't work out and she's just put in five years, those are five years lost.
00:36:04
And then it's maybe going to be tricky going back into corporate.
00:36:07
she's lost so much time working up that corporate ladder to a higher salary, let's say.
00:36:13
On the other hand, she might just stay where she is now and miss out on a really valuable opportunity.
00:36:18
Again, without asking the right questions, you can't make the right decision.
00:36:24
And if this is something that you're navigating and you want to see how Jasmine should navigate this decision and extrapolate it into your own situation, you can check out my Substack where we are going to go through this.
00:36:39
And the article is going to be called Jasmine, should I start a partnership or not?
00:36:46
You can find it on my Substack.
00:36:48
My Substack is Substack Sonja Adzovic.
00:36:51
You can find it in there.
00:36:53
I hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll see you next time.