Have you ever felt like you're not qualified enough, experienced enough, or only one mistake away from being "found out"?

You're not alone.

In this throwback episode of the Made For More Podcast, Ally Nitschke sits down with Josephine Palermo to unpack one of the most common yet misunderstood challenges facing leaders and professionals today: imposter syndrome.

Together they explore why high-performing individuals often struggle with self-doubt despite their achievements, how societal expectations and workplace dynamics contribute to feelings of inadequacy, and why imposter syndrome can prevent capable people from stepping into leadership opportunities.

Josephine shares practical insights into recognising imposter syndrome, understanding where it comes from, and building the confidence to lead with authenticity rather than constantly seeking external validation.

This conversation is a powerful reminder that confidence isn't the absence of doubt. It's the willingness to move forward despite it.

Timestamps

[00:01:25] Feminine power in leadership.

[00:06:11] Feminine power in leadership.

[00:08:28] The relevance of femininity in leadership.

[00:12:29] Recruitment for leadership characteristics.

[00:16:05] Changing recruitment to support women.

[00:22:34] Open dialogue on gender expression.

[00:25:00] Gender parity and leadership challenges.

[00:28:40] Leadership tips for success.

[00:30:41] Teams and collaboration dynamics.

Connect with Ally Nitschke

Madeformore.com.au

Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Connect with me on Instagram and Facebook.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Connect with Josephine Palermo

Gearedforgrowth.biz

Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Connect with her on Instagram.

Hello and welcome to today's episode of

the Made For More podcast. I am Ali Nitchke,

your host for the show and today I'm very excited

to share with you a guest. So I am

interviewing a wonderful, wonderful guest

who is talking all things feminine power and

stepping into that as a leader, some of the unlearning that

needs to happen as well. It is a fascinating conversation

so much. So we are talking about what part

two will look like as well. But I did want to introduce her

to you. Her name is Josephine Palermo. She'll

correct me on the pronunciation in the main interview there.

But Josephine brings a deep understanding of

gender psychology and organizational dynamics to

her philosophy of feminine power. Her latest book,

Rising to Feminine Power, The Lesseau of Truth, documents

the journey women go through to achieve true feminine power

in their work and life and explains why many women

struggle with power. She's also the host of the

popular podcast called Gears Action Growth. shifting

business culture one conversation at a time. Josephine

knows how to build an engaging conversation and share her expertise, passion

and personality in a way that keeps audiences magnetized.

And I was certainly magnetized throughout our conversation today.

One of her key focuses is around how do women overcome

the barriers they face and use a positive feminine lens to

create and build collective power. If you

are listening to this and you're thinking yes, I want to know all about it. If

you are not a woman or someone who identifies as

a woman and thinking I don't need to know anything about this, I

will challenge you there and say listen in because there

is so many lessons to be learned around biases

are conditioning. And Josephine also talks a

little bit around, you know, some of the blueprint for, sorry,

the template rather, the template for modern leadership.

So if you are a leader already, an aspiring leader,

a seasoned leader, listen in to this one because I

think leadership is shifting and Josephine shares her expertise

on that today. Let's dive on in. As

always, please like this, leave us a review

if you enjoyed it, and don't forget to share it with your friends.

Welcome to the Made For More podcast. I'll

be sharing my experiences along with some actionable advice to

take your leadership to the next level. Introducing your host, it's

me, Ali Nitschke. I'm a leadership and courageous conversations expert

and a teller lover, a mother of four young boys, a wife and

a dance floor junkie. I'm here to give you the motivation you need to

level up, lead yourself, lead your team and your business. Let's

go. Welcome

to today's episode of the Made for More podcast. Today,

I'm very excited to have joining me, Josephine Palmero.

I'm good, Ali. It's beautiful, beautiful day. It's great to be here.

And I've just realized I pronounced your name incorrectly. Can you, can you correct

me on that? I know you've got to roll the R. Palermo. Oh,

Palermo. Yes. I'm going to have to practice that a

little bit later. It is wonderful to have you here. Thank

Oh, look, it's great to be here. And I know we're going to talk about some things

that we're both really passionate about. So I'm really looking forward to the conversation to

So why don't we actually just kick right into it? Can you

share a little bit with the listeners and those who are watching? Where

I love those questions. So I'm

a daughter of a migrant Italian family. And a lot of

my ideas about what I didn't want to do come from there.

in some way. So, I grew up with role models

that didn't express my idea of what it was to be a

woman, what it was to achieve as a woman. And so, really,

my whole life purpose was to look for other role

models, but also to do things differently. Because in my family, you

know, traditional Italian family, Southern Italian family,

that the women were very oppressed or

suppressed by the men. They were in service to the men in that

family. And that was just tradition. And it was what you did. And

I knew that education was my ticket out. So I I

was really focused on school. I got a PhD in

education. I thought, I'm going to get out of here. I'm going to do it differently. And

so when I did my PhD, I actually studied gendered psychology

and I looked at what kind of impact women had in

the workplace and particularly women in management and what

was that feeling of marginality that they had and how did

it impact them, particularly being different, you know, rather than

rather than being part of the major group, which we know, you

know, there are more males in management. So 20 years

on from there, I've had a whole career, I've been an academic, I've

worked in corporate, I've had very senior roles in

corporate. Australia, leading large teams,

leading leadership development, as well as cultural and

strategic change. And I thought, you know, it's time to write a

book that people will actually want to read, because nobody reads

your PhD, all the publications that come after that.

I mean, they're very academic, and so it's not accessible to everyone. So

I really wanted to write a book that was about what can you

do at a very practical level to strengthen

our ideas about femininity and what it

means for women in their work lives, in their their

family, in their life in general, when we bring our

whole selves to everything. What does being feminine really mean and

Can we think about it differently? I love this. I'm so glad

that we're having the opportunity to talk about this today because I

hear this a lot and I think it's becoming more and more mainstream. I

know you mentioned you've been doing this for the last 20 years. I feel like sometimes experts,

which you are in this field, you're going, yeah, but I've been talking about this for decades.

Everyone's only just kind of catching on. So very, very

timely. And you really touched on it

just in your intro there around what does this actually mean for me?

So do you think for our listeners, you could sort of share the idea around

femininity and feminine power and then the yin and the yang for that,

the masculine and the masculine power and sort of how you've seen

that play out over the last couple of decades. specifically in

that corporate space, in that leadership space, what are the roles

And unfortunately, I have to go to a definition first, but then

I'll tell a story. Excellent. So femininity and

masculinity are gendered identities. So

they're not related to our biological sex. They can

be. And often females born with female sex

organs are are

culturated or we socialize girls to be feminine

and we socialize boys to be masculine. And

in fact, we treat babies differently depending on whether we

think they're boys or girls. There's been some really, really interesting research that

shows that we will pick up a baby that we think is

a girl in a different way to the way we rough handle a

baby we think is a boy, regardless of whether they're actually a boy or

a girl. So these socialization practices,

the way in which we we think of the gender divide happen very

early in life. It's the early experiences that form our perception of

what men and women are. But when we think about psychological gender,

both men and women have masculinity and

femininity. We can express both of those things, but women

will express femininity more so than men will, and men will express

masculinity more so than females will. So there's that. So

when we separate out, gender from sex, there's

a bit more freedom there. So then we can start to question,

well, why are women in roles that are

more passive? Why are women in

roles where the majority of their work roles

they tend to be clustered in areas in

an organization that has the less paying jobs. Why

are women there? Why are men in positions of

power more so than women? Why do we

only have 18% of women in the Australian C-suite?

What is going on? When we actually look at the characteristics of

femininity versus masculinity, we don't see that

femininity is irrelevant to leadership and

work. In fact, we see femininity as being very relevant to

particularly the adaptive problems that we face today in

leadership. Because when we think about it, leaders are facing into

a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of adaption and

innovation that they need to drive and really feminine characteristics

of relationship building, collaboration, working in

a more collective sense. thinking of power in a

more collective sense, empathy, understanding

each other and really leaning into feelings. We

need all of those things for the future capabilities that

we know are important for leadership. And we need all

of those characteristics, those particular traits. for

those problems that we're going to solve. Because the problems we're solving are

really complex problems. You're not going to solve them with

the same information that you used, you know, back

when we were dealing with just complicated problems. So femininity,

particularly when we think about it that way, is almost

like the template for modern leadership. And yet we still see

a lot of females, a lot of women, not in those roles,

and we still see a power differential. And that's because of

stereotyping, biases, It's the way in which all

of our structures in society and at work have been

developed to really be biased against femininity. And

so I wanna make a case for femininity. I wanna say,

we need to think about which of those structures in our workplaces,

in our family life, in our home lives are structured and

biased against femininity when that's actually really what we need. Oh

Oh, let me just, let me just, let me just calibrate that with my own understanding of

femininity. So I'm not sure if you know this Josephine, but I've got four sons who

Yes. So I'm deeply invested in making sure that

they aren't necessarily only put into that stereotype of

boys being boys. And all of my sons proudly

wore tutus right up until, well, they probably still do. On

the weekends, we're painting nails and it's interesting how you say how

society teaches little boys and little girls differently because

I've got a, my third son, he's six at the moment, but he's

got this beautiful golden long hair, blonde hair, very,

very long, you know, halfway down his back. And when we're out at

the shops with all of my children, so all four sons, people

treat him very differently. speak to him differently

and then they find out that he's a boy or he identifies as

a boy and it is fascinating to watch people just

completely change their demeanor, their tone, the way that they even approach

him. Uh, it's a, it's a very good lesson in how we

are conditioned to think. Yes. Yes, absolutely. What

I'm hearing is it's one of those things that, you know, when we talk about nature versus nurture, by

the time people are entering into the workforce, what do you think is

sort of some of the key things that leaders need to be thinking about, uh,

when we're talking about this template for modern leadership, which a

hundred percent, we need more caring. We need a lot more problem solving

as we get into more of those complexities and complications. What

do you think are some of the keys that leaders need to be able to identify and

perhaps even unlearn as part of the next

era, the next iteration, evolvement or evolving leadership

There's a few. There's a few. I think that firstly, we

need to, we need leaders to be recruiting for these

characteristics and a lot of our recruitment processes

don't do that. We still have a lot of recruitment processes that recruit

on the things you know. In other words, the technical expertise

versus some of these capabilities, which are more intangible in

a way, but more relational, more about the way in which you

are in the world rather than what you

know. So, I think leaders need to steer away from this competency

compulsion that we have where we feel like

if we just get the right person with the expertise, the

technical expertise, that'll be right. And in particular, what

we have to acknowledge is that women have had less

of an opportunity because of biases, because

of our socialization and

also just a lack of opportunity to practice

leadership. So there's no point recruiting, particularly

to leadership positions, there's no point recruiting based on past experience

only on that, when you know that for some

women who have had career breaks, et cetera, who have perhaps not

put themselves up for a position in the past because of

lots of self-doubt around imposter syndrome, etc., which

is not about what they think of themselves. It's what others think

of women and gender stereotypes that they then internalize. what

we have to do is actually think about what are we recruiting for? And

for example, I'll give you an example. When I was at Telstra, I

was a general manager in charge of strategic change

for Telstra operations. And we had apprentices that

were coming in to their technical roles at Telstra, the

kind of network engineering roles. And we weren't getting

enough female applicants. So the first thing we did was change

the photo in the ad because the ad had, you know, the

recruitment ad had a photo of a boy with tools. So we

changed that too. And then, so that meant

we got more applications from girls who

were eligible. However, they weren't getting the positions. And

so when we looked into that, what we found was that the interview process

was based on what was their experience handling technical tools.

So, if you want to get girls into apprentices, into apprenticeships, you

don't ask them about experience where they've

had more limited opportunity because of what they've been handed to

them. You know, the opportunities that they've been handed to in high school, in

their family life, they're going to have less opportunity to perhaps

handle tools. It doesn't mean they're not interested in it. It doesn't mean that they're

not going to be great at it, but they've had less opportunity. So, what we

did we changed the recruitment process to a group

assessment process where we could view those potential

candidates in a group activity and

see how they related to each other, are they likely to be

able to speak to customers, etc. And what we found was

that more girls were being recruited because they kind of really

blitzed the group assessment, whereas they weren't doing

as well in the individual interview. So that again, it's, you

know, we just changed a little thing to create a higher

level of access for those jobs. And so firstly

for leaders, definitely looking at all of those systems that perhaps

bias women even getting there, even getting their foot in

the door and then Secondly, you need to create an

environment and a culture that helps people flourish, helps

all people flourish. There are a lot of non-conforming men

who would love to express femininity more so

than they are allowed to or feel like they're allowed to do in cultures that

perhaps are more focused on competition and

domination and more assertiveness. I'm

not saying that competition is irrelevant or

unnecessary. There's really good uses for competition in

corporate Australia, in global corporates as

a cultural characteristic. But if you're totally focused on

expressions of power, which are about competition, at the

detriment of expressions of power, which are about let's work together on

something, let's have a collective impact, then you're not going to,

you're not going to firstly attract the kind of people that are more likely

to feel comfortable in that environment, but you're also not going to be

setting up the conditions for people to succeed, who

are perhaps who have those characteristics, who want to work more

collectively, who have empathy, who are who

scan their environment and really are great around relationship

building. And perhaps, you know, they don't

have that natural inclination to compete

at all costs. I don't think we, you know, we know, again, many

organizations fail when they have that kind of culture because,

you know, individuals just don't thrive and they don't come together to

solve problems. They might have had

that special source when they were dealing, again,

you know, back in the day when we were dealing with very complicated problems. Engineering

problems are complicated problems. The world of AI and

technology is a complex problem. Those things don't

Oh my goodness. So what do you think when it comes to, like

that's obviously when leaders or new leaders are joining an

organisation as part of the recruitment process, What about some

of the unlearning that needs to happen at those more senior levels of

leadership? I know I work with a lot of women through our

exec summit, and I have a lot of private clients, which are women, and

all of them are going, I work in a male-dominated industry. We're trying

to disrupt sort of the quotas, for lack of a better word.

What do you think is some of the key things

that some of those people that are already in those leadership roles, and

I'm talking those men that need to become allies or would benefit from

So, it's a difficult one because they are

behaving in ways that that gave them successful outcomes

before. So, you know, it's rational. It's rational for

them to continue to behave in those ways. But

I think more executives and more executive teams

are really grappling with some problems that

require greater collaboration, that require greater interdependencies

between the functional roles that executives have. So

I think they're being challenged. They're being challenged around vulnerability and

more personal leadership. So I think these trends are

already here. So there's a case made for that. And

we need to make it in some ways beneficial for them to

lean into that and to do things differently. And

I think that other women can be part of that solution.

So, sometimes we find it uncomfortable to negotiate

or even go into a complex, what we feel like might be a complex

situation, when we see something happening, when

we don't call out the behavior, we don't know how to, we

don't know how to have that conversation, Or we don't know how

to perhaps circle back and do it later.

I'll give you a really good example. In the

book I recently wrote, I asked women

to talk about their experiences of power. And one of the contributors, she's

a beautiful, beautiful woman. She's in Hong Kong.

And she wrote about the fact that she was in a meeting

with a male executive, a senior female

manager, senior male manager, and she was junior at the time. And

what she saw was the executive come in, and he was

berating the male manager about a stakeholder that

the male manager didn't want to deal with, you know, this guy

was avoiding the situation. And so the executive said to him, Oh, come

on, just grow some balls. And the male manager sort

of just chuckled or whatever. And then the senior woman

said, hang on a minute, that's, that's, that's not on what

you just said there. Just stop a minute. And the executive kind

of didn't know what was, you know, what sort of said, what, what did I do? What did I do? And

he actually walked off because he didn't care. And, and

this is the other thing. It's not my job to change you. It's

not my job to change anybody, but you can call out when

something that when you notice that something is actually not

right. And then the male manager turned to

the two women who were left in the room and really, in

a very authentic way, turned around and said, why isn't that

right? You know, we say that all the time around here. What

is it about that that isn't right? And that was the first

time that she'd actually seen someone lean in with curiosity, because

we're not going to get it right. You know, at the moment,

we are so scared to talk about gender and get the pronouns wrong

and, you know, be an offend people that we're just not

having conversations. I'm not an expert. at

all around all of the nomenclature around

gender. You know, I don't think anyone is. It's evolving every

moment of the day. How can we be? But what I am

is curious, and I'll ask an open question. And so

isn't that a beautiful question from him? Because he said, why

isn't it right? know, with curiosity. And I

think, so rather than thinking about changing behaviors, it's opening

up dialogue. What are we doing? What if

we did it differently? What are we doing that we could change?

What are my biases? How does that impact you? Just

open dialogue. And I think that then

we start to get an understanding and we do it with compassion, Because

I think men and women are, you know, we're all grappling with

the same problems. But I think men in particular are really grappling with

this because we're at a crossroads at the moment where they're

getting a lot of information about, you know, new ways of,

in some ways, expressing power through these new gender expressions.

And, you know, unless we have an open dialogue with the

men in the room, how do we expect them to gain an understanding or

even to, you know, gain that pathway

forward for them? You know, it would be a very scary time, I

think, without that. So it's compassion. I think we just need

Oh my gosh, so much to unpack there. And gosh, you literally read

my mind when I was thinking, oh, there's going to be some listeners that are going to

be questioning whether we're being, you know, the Made for More podcast

is being diverse enough around gender labeling pronouns. And

I just want to clarify that, that we're talking about feminine

and masculine energy and how people show up in the world. And

I think you're right. It's a continually evolving topic. There's

so much fluidity in it and we are still learning and I'm not an expert and

don't pretend to be an expert. by any means in that

space. And there certainly are some great experts to draw on.

And I think it's going to be a continual conversation that will evolve even

outside of what we're already talking about right now.

You said something really interesting there around having

some vulnerability. And I think that's it as well. It's

very much, and I think leadership in itself is shifting, not

necessarily the people so much in it, but leadership in itself is shifting

from a do as I say, not what I do, to how can I

actually have a conversation, open up some of that dialogue and

get curious and heaven forbid, not be the expert and not know

all the answers. So I love that there's that story in

your book. When you were talking around the statistics of around

17% of women in the C-suite in Australia, do you think or

do you know, have you come across this? Has that gone backwards since

the pandemic and people did start working from home? I know certainly

in my group of colleagues and in my group of

friends, there were a number of people that had to

either step back, pull back to part-time or reduced

work hours purely on a logistics game. I've

read a few articles around what that has meant

in terms of equality and what it's meant for women getting

a seat at the table. Have you got any qualitative bits

You know, I don't have the most recent statistics, but when

you look at the globe, not in Australia, but when you look at the global statistics, really

the gaps are not, they're not getting any

smaller. So while it didn't go backwards necessarily

after COVID, we didn't get this surge forward as well. It's glacial

movement. And according to the

global OECD report, we will have

gender parity in terms of positional power and

pay gaps as well in 135 years. Yeah,

Yeah, I agree. And yeah, it's interesting when we talk about

conditioning. I mean, you talked about conditioning in your own family. You're

a daughter of migrant. I'm the daughter of a mother,

a woman who was a scientist in her

field back in the sort of 70s and 80s when women were not scientists.

I also grew up on a farm and, you know, was welding. playing with

pumps and doing all sorts of things that little girls shouldn't be doing in

my childhood. So my conditioning has been very much around, well, you know,

anything you can do, I can do as well. But I know that that's not

the same for so many. So I'm always very grateful for that unconditioning

early on. Do you think there's a, is there a bypass?

Is there a workaround to break down some of this conditioning? Because often the

biases, we're not even aware that we're holding onto them until you go, oh

gee, let's get a bit vulnerable. Let's get a bit curious. Is there

any kind of circuit breaker that you've come across to just

Yes, so awareness is really important. Because

stereotypes are cognitive functions that

really help us. We go through life making

categorizations and interpreting and making

assumptions because we would have cognitive overload

if we didn't do that. We wouldn't be able to think as quickly. But what happens

particularly is when we're tired, when we're stressed,

that kind of frontal brain that

tunes in on reasoning and rationality kind of shuts

down. And so particularly when we're under pressure, we're

going to those stereotypes are going to come up to

the fore even more. And so really what we need

to do is slow things down or have an understanding that when

we are under pressure, if we're going to make decisions, we're

most likely going to be affected by

biases and stereotypes even more so. So that's

something to really watch is And that's why slowing things down

and that open dialogue and questioning

is really important. And particularly having more

people involved from different backgrounds in decision-making is

always going to help as well. Um, because you're, you're diluting

some of those assumptions that you make across, but most of the time, you know, we're

making decisions as individuals and it's about definitely

Yeah. I've not heard it from that perspective before. Gosh, you're making my own

brain just have a little, have a little bit of a backflick. I'm like,

Oh no, Ali, slow down. Wait, we've got things to do. Uh, because it's

the energy, right. It's going get, get the stuff done. Actually, no, let's

make better decisions. Oh, my goodness, I feel like we're going to have to

have a Part 2 to this, because I've got, I've got further questions. So

we'll have to talk about that afterwards. But Jasmine, before

we say goodbye, what would be your top 5 tips, either that

you wish you knew when you entered the leadership world at

your beginning of your career, or some advice that you would have and like to

So the first one is perhaps, well, these are in order, but

perhaps slow down, like I just said, you know, and

I think, you know, I think I could have benefited from that

too. The second one is my feminine unique

strengths. are valuable for leadership. And

I wish I had known that early on, because for many years

I tried to fit myself into that round hole, and

I thought I was a square peg. And then I realized the hole

was the wrong shape. You know, I was perfectly round. It was

the whole of a square. And I didn't know that. And so I spent many years

just, you know, kind of battling that. So, so really, I'm really,

really believing that your unique feminine strengths are

valuable. The other one would be gaining

perspectives on biases where I can. So,

So being compassionate, self-compassionate, I

will have biases, I will make mistakes, and then starting from

there. So having more open curiosity from there. And

the next one, I think I'm up to number four. I think this is four, yes.

Motivate people through autonomy because they want to do

it their way. So you're in a hiding to

nothing if you're trying to control your environment and

motivate people at the same time. And the last one would

be focus on teams because that's where the collaboration is.

I think in organizations, even with leaders, we remunerate,

we recognize people individually. What if

we actually recognize teams for their collective achievements and

now our bonus structures were related solely

on that? And I know that that's been trialed and not done

well, but we also need to adjust

the way in which we see power in that context, because you

can't do that and still have hierarchical power. because

those things go, that's why it doesn't work. Those things are at odds, but

All right. That is, that's given me some ideas for our next step. Poor

Josephine, she's being locked in now because we're recording. No, we

will talk about this afterwards. And I mean, I think that's really interesting when

you're talking about teams and collaboration, because you touched on it earlier around

how do we reward People, normally it's through achievements, but if

that's not your motivator, that's not your intrinsic motivator, then why

would you participate in whatever it happens to be if it's not something that's

in alignment with you? So it'll be interesting to see

how that sort of unfolds over the coming time for teams

to go, yeah, actually we are better. and stronger together than

we are as individuals. And I think that's sort of a shift of going, are

we safe in the workplace to let some of that vulnerability show

and go, ah, yes, I do need my people. They are all important versus

watching our back for lack of a better word. Oh my

goodness. And now your book is up on here for everyone who's

watching, but for those that are listening, can you just share the title and

Yes, it's Rising to Feminine Power and

it's got a beautiful Linda Carter Wonder Woman on the front cover.

It's an original painting by Melissa Labazetta and

Brilliant and I'll add that in the show notes as well if

you'd like to grab a copy. And where can people find you Josephine?

I'm on LinkedIn, so you can find me, Josephine Palermo with

Excellent. I'll add that in the show notes as well. Thank you. Any

last words, any last tidbits that you wanted to leave as

Oh, you know, it's been a great conversation. I agree. We could keep talking

about this. I'm hoping that this has inspired some

people to just start questioning and think differently. So

Brilliant. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining me

today. If you enjoyed this episode on the Made For More podcast, please

make sure you subscribe to receive future episodes. And

of course, five-star reviews are always welcome on the Apple podcast.

If you'd like a copy of the show notes or any of the links mentioned today,

check out madeformore.com.au. And

of course, if we aren't connected already, you can find me in

all the usual places. Ali Nitschke on LinkedIn, ali.madeformore

on Facebook and Instagram. I hope you have