Unleash Your Inner Leader: Traits of Empowered Women

Listen to Unleash Your Inner Leader: Traits of Empowered Women

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(00:01):

Well, hello everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Dana Byers, your hostess for this episode. If we haven't met yet, I am a certified life coach. I work specifically with women just like me, women who are unapologetically ambitious, who love Jesus, who love their families, who love to volunteer, who love the church. You might lead a business, you might be an executive, you might be brand new at your job, fresh out of college, or you might be a middle manager. Guess what? I have been all of those and I'm so thankful for all those work opportunities I've had over the years. This podcast is really just an overflow of the experiences, the lessons, the learnings that God has given me. In a couple decades of work experience, I was missionary overseas, I led in a nonprofit. I've had some corporate work. I've led in a couple churches and my husband and I run a private family foundation and I've got this little thing called Dana Byers coaching that I give a lot of time to.

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And my heart is in this business because I get to engage with incredible women and the only thing they typically lack is a little bit of self-awareness or maybe some experience or understanding. So these podcasts are, like I said, an overflow of the things I've learned, and they're really me very intentionally sharing things with you that I trust will help you get unstuck. I like to help people grease the skids in their lives, if you will, and I like to help people do that because I understand the value of it. Over the years, so many people have poured into me, whether they're hired coaches or leaders I've had in jobs, friends, loved ones, you name it. So many people have poured into the woman I am today and they're pouring into the woman I am striving to become. The woman that I believe is a woman after God's own heart, a woman who leads naturally from a rhythm of grace.

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I really am passionate about not hustling. And so it's very fun to navigate the difficulty of being an activator, someone who's in motion a lot, but also making sure that my efforts are things that God has led me to instead of just random ideas. I want to try and see how they work. That is a recipe for burnout. And I'm also unfortunately pretty familiar with burnout. I have not burned out since 2017, and I'm really proud of that. Not in a prideful way, but in a wow God, you and I did that together sort of way to be able to lead in significant ways, to love my family well, to honor God with my life and not burn out. That was something I did not think was possible years ago. And so to be able to live a

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Life that flows that way now is a miracle to me. It's something I'm so grateful for every day. And so I love talking about that and sharing every episode some things with you that I believe are going to help you on your journey of leadership. Today I want to talk about three traits of an empowered woman. And first, we've got to start with that definition of empowered. I'll be honest, I've led enough in the church that sometimes when we talked about empowered women, people get a little bit nervous. The hair's on the back of their neck raise a little bit. You know what I mean? They're like, oh gosh, what's she talking about? If a woman's empowered, what is she saying? Is she talking about someone coming in and taking over everything and being bossy and all these things? And of course, that's not what I'm talking about yet my experience is enough that I feel like I have to start with that first.

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I need to say that's not what I'm talking about. I think the best way to start something is maybe to define what I'm talking about. And I think the best way to maybe define what I mean when I say someone who's empowered would be to define the opposite of a woman who is living in an empowered way. So the opposite of that would be someone who's living a haphazard life. She might be unintentionally approaching her days. She might lack clarity and she might not really know herself very well, and I can relate to that. There are different seasons in different areas of my life where I have felt more empowered than others, and that's why I want to talk about that today because I think an empowered woman is someone who is able to approach things prepared. She is calm, she is confident, and even if things don't go as she intended, she knows herself well enough to know how to adjust so that the people she serves and leads are not experiencing a bunch of waves of confusion or frustration and she's not adding to their issues by the way that she responds to them.

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I think it's very important for us to intentionally focus on how to become empowered women. And really, to put it even more clearly, I want you to become the woman that you would want to follow. I want you to become the kind of mom that you would want to have. I want you to become the kind of leader at work that you would want leading you. I want you to become the kind of wife that you know is best for your marriage and all the giftings that you have to offer. I have a long list of things that specifically help a woman become empowered, and I'm going to tell you how to get that list soon. But I want to talk through three of those traits right now. The first trait of an empowered woman I want to talk about is she is someone who can get unstuck.

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There's nothing wrong if you get stuck. In fact, I would be concerned if you never got stuck. We all get stuck either in our eating and exercise habits. Occasionally we get stuck when we're trying to make a decision. I've been stuck before when I'm in a relationship that's frustrating and I care about the person, but I'm not quite sure how to communicate to them. We can get stuck in all areas of our lives. We can get stuck spiritually, but an empowered woman doesn't worry about getting stuck, but she's intentional about finding ways to get unstuck. She knows when she needs to stop something, when she needs to start something, maybe she needs to increase something in her life. I was a little bit stuck in my health goals recently, and I started noticing that if I exercised in the evenings, I was struggling to go to sleep.

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So to shift to have my exercise time be consistent in the morning is not only helping my sleep now, but I show up like today to record a podcast with a lot more energy, and I feel so great already having that done for the day. Now, that doesn't mean that would work for you, but I feel empowered to get unstuck by experimenting and trying different things in areas where I want to see improvement. So your ability to get unstuck by getting help or using resources or really just giving your time to sit alone and listen to your thoughts to pray and to ask God for input, that is a significant trait of an empowered woman. The second trait of an empowered woman I want to talk about right now is her capacity to understand and set boundaries. Yes, the B word, we love boundaries. I remember when I first read Henry Cloud's book about boundaries when I was in college, I just thought, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

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Why have I never heard about this? And I remember thinking at that naive young age, wow, now that I've got this figured out, the rest of my life is going to be so easy, and there is some truth to that. But a recent awareness I really had to work through was the awareness that as long as there's breath in my lungs, I will be improving at setting boundaries. I will never arrive. I'm working towards mastery, which means I won't get it perfect, but I'm going to keep developing my craft of setting boundaries so that my personal, my physical, mental, spiritual, emotional energy can stay pretty steady, but also so that people know what to expect from me. So our relationships are authentic and honest. When we think about boundaries and being an empowered woman, we have to know who is it difficult for us to set boundaries with and why is it difficult?

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And it's not just people we set boundaries with. We have financial boundaries. We have boundaries on maybe the foods we eat when we eat. Like I said, when we move our bodies, when we exercise, we have boundaries at work and our schedules, the time we spend and how much we're willing to engage or invest. And I think a lot of us have an awareness maybe of what those boundaries might be, but we haven't actually written them out or shared them with other people, and it can be so freeing to identify those, to really have clarity on that. I'm going to share with you a story about a time. I think this was probably in 2016. I was the executive pastor at a wonderful church and I was think the first teaching pastor there who was a woman. Now, I'm not trying to get us into a debate about that.

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I personally love seeing women lead in the church, but this is not specifically about that theological issue. I don't think it's a sational issue, but I'm sharing with you the context of the story, which was I was very well received by many people in the church, but on occasion there would be an individual who really struggled with me having been hired and invited to lead and to teach God's word to our church. So one Sunday morning I was getting up to teach. I would teach twice on Saturday nights and three times on a Sunday morning. So there was a volunteer behind the desk who was helping me get my microphone, and he said to me, Hey, now that you're at this church, I'd love to have you and your husband over for dinner to get to know you better. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's so kind of you.

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Thank you. And he said, and then I want you. And he pointed to my face to tell me, and he pointed to his chest why you should be able to share God's word from my church's pulpit. And I went, oh, okay. Honestly, my first thought was, seriously, you're going to approach me with this now while I'm about to get up and preach, I've got three messages of teaching to do over the next few hours. There are people all around us as he's confronting me and I'm just trying to figure out the microphone. And I just looked at him because I had done some of this boundary work and I felt appropriately empowered to respectfully say to him, you know what? That's not going to happen. You are welcome to talk to our senior pastor about that church's decision, but for right now, what I need to do is get focused so that I can share God's word.

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So I took the microphone, got it all connected, went to the lady's room, and just took a few moments to take some deep breaths. And you know what happened? A young girl from our church who was volunteering walked in, and she looked at me and said, I heard what happened back there, and that was amazing. She said, thank you so much for that example. You knew what to say and you were kind of respectful, but you also stood your ground. And I've got to tell you, even to this day, I'm still so emotional remembering that moment because I angry I wasn't hurt, but I was so thankful I had done the work. And you know why? Yes, because I was able to honor this man who confronted me, but especially because this young woman saw me respond in a way that inspired her to be able to be empowered to do the things that God has called her to do.

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This is why it's so important for us to do the work, to sit with God, to understand how he created us and how we can lead and do that in a way that honors other people, honors ourselves, but of course also honors God. So I want you to think about your boundaries and what's important to you. The third trait I want to talk about today about an empowered woman is that she is someone who knows how to process her emotions so that when a very stressful moment or a crisis or a big change comes, she is able to know exactly what to do. She's able to think, you know what? I knew this might possibly happen, and here's what I decided I would do if this would happen. So an empowered woman is someone who has created safe spaces already. She has nurtured the relationships with safe people in her lives, in her life.

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I have people that I'll text when something happens and I'm like, Hey, can't give you a lot of details right now. Would you please pray for this? I'll catch up with you later. And they know they can do the exact same with me, and I love having those relationships. It's so rich. You can't put a price on having a support network and understanding what you need when times get rough because they will get rough. Knowing how to process your emotions well and how to handle crisis means that you've identified healthy ways to care for yourself so that when a stressor does come, you are able to talk to that friend or journal or maybe go for a walk instead of grabbing a bag of pretzels from the pantry. Pretzels are not a bag thing, but maybe eating a whole bag of pretzels instead of processing the emotion or a stress you're feeling is not the healthiest approach you could take to experiencing something like that.

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I want you to have a way that you can process overwhelm so that it doesn't stack up in your body, in your mind, in your heart. It doesn't stack up spiritually. Instead, you're able to serve yourself and then you're able to serve the other people around you as well. I want people to experience you as someone who brings peace instead of someone who steals peace from an environment. One of the greatest compliments I ever received from a direct report I had years ago was when she said, Dana, you just bring such a sense of calm. What we're doing right now is really stressful, but with you leading this, I know we will be okay. And that was better than a paycheck to me because I so strongly value the capacity for any of us to be able to walk into an environment that's stressful and to

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Care for ourselves, process our emotions, work with our support network so that we can reflect God's peace in any environment. So I've just given you three traits of many that I've identified for empowered women, and I hope this example helps you understand these examples, help you understand that empowerment is not controlling others. Empowerment is not prideful. Living or braggadocious and empowerment is not trying to overshadow others' gifts. It's just showing up with a quiet confidence and who we are, where we're at, and what God stands ready to do in us and through us in the tables that he has us sitting at. So if my talk about what it could mean for you to be an empowered woman is of interest to you, I want you to know there's a very specific thing I've created that can help you become the type of woman you want to follow.

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And this is a free resource on my website. I'm going to put a link in the show notes here. It's at Dana by coaching.com/empowered. I want to help you become the woman you want to follow, and it all starts here. This is a guide that's about 30 pages long. It's going to help you check in with yourself on your satisfaction and key areas of your life. It's going to help you discover some boundaries that you need to set or that you have set that have helped you relieve stress so that you can celebrate that or prepare in some areas of your life that you might need some stress relief. It's going to help you identify how to support yourself in a crisis to assess your readiness for change. If there's an area in your life that you might be needing to make a change in, it's going to help you cultivate a habit of gratitude and to learn how to release something that's come to an end in your life.

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It's going to help you handle crisis events, understand yourself and the kind of self-care you might be needing in your life. It's going to help you do all these things and more. All you have to do is get this free download. I want you to make some time for you. I want you to print this out to grab your favorite pen and to get ready to continue on this journey towards empowering yourself. I am cheering you on here, and I'm putting this out there as a free resource because I think women's empowerment is something that can often be misunderstood or taken to extremes. So I want to share with you some of these coaching exercises that you receive in this guide that I've personally used to help myself gain a better understanding over the years. I've personally used them with some clients, and I'm offering this for free because it reflects a value of mine, which is generosity, but also hospitality.

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If you've listened to my other podcasts, you might've heard me say in some other episodes that the whole reason I'm sitting here right now in front of a microphone is because I am offering to sit at your table. I want to sit at your table and take up as much space as you'll allow me to. And here's why. Because your life and your leadership matter. I want you to do it with an intentionality. There have been years where I lacked intentionality, and I can't change that. I can't go back and shift that, but I can help others do it in the moment they're in, and I'm moving forward with intentionality as well. So inviting me to sit at your table and take up space means that you can grow, you can learn, you can become more empowered, and it's going to help you with the tables that you are sitting at to take up more space to speak up, to be empowered, to use the gifts that God has given you to lead well personally in your personal life at home, and also at work, and also in your church and all the places that you're volunteering and in your friendships.

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So this is my welcome, Matt, to you. This How to Become an Empowered Woman. This guide is my welcome, Matt. I am laying it out. I don't want to charge for it because I want you to get in there and wait around in the pool and start getting a better understanding of what being coached looks like and feels like you have such deep potential, and I believe I can help you tap into it. So when you're signing up for this workbook, you're not only getting the workbook, but you're going to start receiving my weekday emails, my email list, communication is where I think the magic happens. That's really where my heart is. This community is where I'm sending out things I'm learning, I'm sending out coaching ideas. I'm sending out prayers, challenges, and people reply back to me. This is where I get to know people, and it is so rewarding to learn from all the things that God is showing you through the podcast and through these emails, but also to be able to reply to you so we share and grow together.

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You see, an empowered woman doesn't give all of herself to others. So I'm giving myself on the podcast, I'm giving of myself. I'm giving of myself through the email list, but you won't see me a lot of other places unless we live together locally and do life together. I'm occasionally on social media, but I've inviting you to meet me where I'm at. I want you to be developed. I want you to take up space to grow, to really see God work through your life. And one simple way to do that is to take the next step to get this download, become the woman you want to follow. Go to Dana buyer's coaching.com/empowered. Sign up for my email list. Print out that guide, start working through it. Send me an email at dana@danabyerscoaching.com. Let me know what God is teaching you. I would love to hear it. I know there are great things ahead for you as you pursue being a godly, empowered woman. I'll see you on the next episode.