Episode 8

Leadership visibility is one of the most misunderstood skills in a woman's career, and Nicole Johnston has spent 30 years figuring out exactly why.

Nicole Johnston is a women's excellence and leadership speaker, TEDx speaker, bestselling author of Taboo Topics, and a certified coach who spent three decades in consumer products at companies like Procter and Gamble, Kimberly Clark, and Hershey Foods. She was often the only female sales leader in the room. What she saw there shaped everything she now teaches.

In this episode, Natalie Davis and Nicole Johnston go deep on the real reasons women get passed over for promotions, underpaid without knowing it, and burned out before they ever get the recognition they have earned. This is not a surface-level conversation. It is a direct, data-backed, and actionable look at the patterns holding women back and what to do about them.

In This Episode:

Why promotions are based on the perception of leadership potential, not task completion, and why that distinction changes everything about how you show up at work.

The 720 hours per year of invisible, non-promotable work women carry at home and in the office, and why it is directly connected to burnout and career stagnation.

How to identify your self-sabotaging behaviors and use role play, journaling, and audio recording to build the muscle memory for difficult conversations before you ever have them in real life.

The difference between a coach, a mentor, and a sponsor, and why women who do not build sponsorship relationships are consistently left out of the rooms where decisions get made.

Executive communication skills that shift how leadership sees you, including what clear, concise, and compelling looks like in practice and why women are socialized to communicate as doers, not leaders.

Nicole Johnston's book, Taboo Topics: Things Women Should Talk About But Don't, is available now. Each chapter addresses a real workplace challenge with practical next steps, including email templates for asking for a raise and tools for identifying the mental load you carry.

Connect with Nicole Johnston:

Instagram: @nicolejohnstonspeaks

LinkedIn: Nicole Johnston

Connect with Leadership That Shines:

Website: ⁠www.l⁠⁠⁠eadershipthatshines.com⁠⁠⁠⁠

Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠themagic@leadershipthatshines.com⁠⁠⁠⁠

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