Up Close & Personal with Lauren Jane Heller, Executive Leadership Coach to High-Achieving Women

Lauren Jane Heller is a communications and storytelling veteran turned leadership coach who has spent the past 15 years helping people to find, understand, and tell their stories and become connected powerful leaders, brilliant communicators, and joyful, resilient human beings. Her direct, yet playful approach, alongside deep experience and knowledge, and gentle wisdom have brought personal and professional transformation to her clients across industries. Impressively, such industries include start-ups and VCs as well as universities, and non-profits.

Lauren Jane Heller ("LJ") launched Shine+Leadership in 2020 as a way to bring transformation to more people’s lives and build a strong community of connected leaders in the Canadian start-up and tech ecosystem. LJ's lifelong passions include reading and writing fiction (especially fantasy and sci-fi), traveling the world, making things with her hands, dancing, and singing. Before transitioning to the tech industry and running communications for one of Canada's leading VCs, she wrote two plays that were professionally produced, traveled the world with her husband and kids, and contributed to numerous travel, parenting, and culture magazines.

LJ has had an impressive career journey, and as an Executive Coach, she continues to work with high-achieving women. Her clients are typically female senior executives, founders and business owners.

WeWorkingWomen ("WWW") sat down LJ to learn how and why her career path led her to leadership coaching, and to gather some valuable advice for women looking to improve balance and alignment in their lives.

WWW: What does it mean to be a leadership coach? What is it is your specific role?

LJ:?A leadership coach is a person who helps other people to develop their leadership. For me it’s really important to help my clients develop self-awareness, confidence, and the ability to enrol other people in their ideas. That way they can show up as their best selves and make clear decisions, and not function from a place of scarcity, reactivity and fear that a lot of people spend a lot of time spinning in. I help leaders be the person that they want to be and create what they want to in the world rather than getting stuck with self-doubt.

I help my clients get clear on how they are relating to situations in their lives, and with other people. One of the first things that I do with people is to help them recognize the difference between facts and stories. The spin you put on whatever situation you're in is not necessarily the truth, but an interpretation of how that 'thing' happened through the lens of your personal experience; your childhood, your culture, your education and other factors. Once you start practicing and noticing the difference between facts and stories, you can start to get really clear on how you want to respond to things rather than going into a reaction mode, which can lead to a lot of regret, second guessing, or going back saying and saying, “Oh, I wish I'd done that differently”. You can create a buffer between yourself and the way that you respond so you don't end up in that cycle anymore.

As a coach, I act as a mirror for my clients so that they can see themselves and understand their patterns. I help them reveal the blind spots that everybody has, and then bring them more into integrity with themselves to identify what they are committed to, who they want to be, and how they want to show up in the world. We really practice a lot so that they can notice in the moment and say, “Okay, I'm not actually being the way that I want to be,” and bring themselves back so that they can communicate their ideas more effectively. The practice can help them make a decision that might feel hard, but is actually the right decision for them.

WWW: Who do you coach??

LJ: I coach a combination of ambitious women, typically mid-career, have already seen a lot of success. They are in leadership roles and looking to feel better in their own skin. In a lot of cases, even though they're making the money and have the status, there’s still a bit of imposter syndrome that they don't know how to shake.

I also do a lot of work with start-up founders. With them it often skews a bit younger, late 20s and 30s. I help them to see, “How am I showing up? How do I create a company that has the best values where we're not punishing people instead of celebrating them?” This can really help them get clear on how they're being intentional with their work.

Often what happens is people hire me to be better leaders, but as I help them to overhaul their whole lives, they actually feel happier at home. It impacts how they relate to their families and their friends, as well as how relate to their colleagues, employees and bosses.

WWW: You decided to transition into coaching at a time when you were at a peak in your career. What was the career success that you had attained at that point, and what drove you to make the transition?

LJ: I worked for three years as Director of Communications for Real Ventures, which is one of the leading early stage VCs in Canada,. I love helping people to see things differently, and it was a platform where I could help entrepreneurs to succeed. I really did love the work that I did there. But, one of the big things that happened during that job was that I burned out. Burning out was a wake-up call for me. You can be a super overachiever; you can get it all done, but, if you're waking up at four o'clock in the morning, and adrenaline fuelled going all the time, that's not balanced. That's not a quality of life. It helped me to understand that a lot of really successful people are actually functioning this we. If that's success, then it's a weird measure of success.

So, yes, I had the job, I had the accolades, and I was making the money, but I was exhausted and really worried a lot about whether or not I could actually pull things off. That set me on a big journey of personal growth. I got a therapist and then I was introduced to conscious leadership for the first time. THAT was life changing. I realized, “Oh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing!”

Earlier in my career, I became a writer and a communicator. I worked in documentary film, because I wanted to help change people's minds and change people's lives. But, I always struggled a little bit with not being able to get direct feedback, not knowing how people were feeling reading what I wrote. With coaching and group facilitation, I get to be there while they're having the breakthrough - or the breakdown. I get to support them through it so that they can integrate whatever it is that they've learned in a way that's going to be more meaningful than holding information in their heads. Now the work that I do lights me up. I get to see in real time the impact that it makes on people.

WWW: WeWorkingWomen is a global Chinese women’s network, and many of our subscribers are immigrant women who find their education and professional background are not sufficiently recognized in their new home countries. As a result, some turn to business ownership and entrepreneurship. What are some of the main challenges you see women business owners and entrepreneurs facing? ?

LJ: I think one of the first issues that comes up for people is their beliefs about what is possible. If you were raised in a family where you had to do certain things a certain way in order to be recognized for it, well, as an adult, that's the programming you have. At Real Ventures, I noticed that a lot of founders, despite having raised millions of dollars, were still operating from scarcity. They were feeling like if they didn't 'get it right', if they didn't prove themselves and if they weren't better than everybody else, they were going to lose. They were operating in a model of winner-takes-all, and competition is the only way to operate.

I think what's refreshing and more common among with small business owners, is that you start looking at who are my potential collaborators are. They ask, "Who are the other companies or other business owners that I can partner with?" They see opportunity where they can promote what they're doing and develop symbiotic relationships to carry themselves forward.

Something I recognized as getting in the way of founders was wanting to impress people, and wanting to prove themselves to their investors. There's a big approval piece of, “I need to do it right," and, "I need to be the right kind of founder,” rather than asking, “Who am I as a founder?” and “What are my superpowers?”

Then there’s the security piece. We have to raise this much money, but what if we run out? The money thing is really touchy for people. It can be cultural, and it can be based on family. I do a lot of work with my clients around their relationship with money because a lot of the time we don't realize that it is a relationship, just like you have relationships with people. We have a relationship with money and we interact with it in a certain way, usually based on how our parents interact with money.

Then there’s control. Depending on the business owner or the founder, there's a large degree of, “How do I make sure everything goes the way I want it to?” Approval, security and control underpin the issues we have as human beings.

A lot of time people grasp their ideas really tightly, rather than just recognizing I can hold my idea loosely, and it's still there. I can actually see it from different angles and be much more open to the possibilities of what can come. There are always factors you can't control that can change your outcomes. If you're gripping so tightly to the control, it's going to be way harder for you to come up with innovative solutions or see other angles or ways to approach solving problems.

In the start-up world and the world of creating businesses there are a lot of stories about how hard it is and how you have to grind, hustle and be ruthless. I don't actually believe that's true. I've seen people have a lot of success by getting really clear on how they're going to build their business, how they're going to treat their customers, and how they're going to treat their employees. You don't have to follow somebody else's map, you can make your own.

The other thing that comes to mind thinking of founders I’ve worked with is recognizing that if you're always looking to everybody else for advice, you're going to be on a wild goose chase. You're not going to know what direction to move in because everybody's going to have different advice. You can listen to advisors, and you can hear your investors out, but ultimately you have to recognize that YOU are the person who knows your business the best. YOU are the one who needs to be making the decision and be accountable at the end of the day. Your decisions have to be what actually feels right to you; not based on what your investor told you, not based on the fear of somebody telling you're doing something wrong, but based on what you know to be true.

WWW: You have an international background, and have been a newcomer in a new country more than once. Can you share how your upbringing and early years impacted your career development?

LJ: I'm South African originally. I lived in South Africa until I was four and then we moved to Toronto. Living in the suburbs of Toronto as a little kid in the late 80s and early 90s was fantastic. Then we moved back to South Africa. I was eight years old, and I went into what was still a pretty colonial system. Apartheid was not over at that time, so the society there was quite rigid, chauvinistic, and racist, though it was starting to get better. For me coming in as this super outgoing little girl, I got crushed. I went from being really confident to being wrong all the time. People said I had an American accent – I was just different. I very quickly internalized that being different was not okay, and that I needed to fit in and assimilate to make myself normal. I had also skipped a grade which doesn't help with making friends.

The coping mechanism I created was to be the best and to get the best grades. Even though I was younger than everybody else in my class, I was still going to beat them academically. I was going to be as talented as I could be. I pushed really, really hard.

That experience influenced how I saw the world and how I saw myself as I related to the world. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I realized I had been practicing being a chameleon to fit in wherever I went throughout my childhood. I was always getting really clear on how much space was appropriate for me to take up in a room. Could I be my very outgoing self or did I need to kind of make myself smaller so that I wouldn't be too much?

Even when I moved back to Canada as a teenager, because this had been the program running in the background for so many years, I continued to need to be on a pedestal and excel academically. People even used to say that I was perfect, but on the inside, it was exhausting. As a teenager I got really sick from an autoimmune disease. I can say now that it was definitely linked to how stressed out I was because of my need to excel and be perfect.

Approval seeking and being in control was a big deal for me. I got good grades and controlled the way that I ate; but underneath it was really about showing off, getting approval, and jumping through the hoops that were set out for me in society.

Once you get really good at jumping through hoops, it becomes really hard to choose what you want. I finished university and there was this moment of, “Now what?" There were no more hoops to jump through! I wanted to make documentary films, but there was no direct path. I didn't have the courage to just go out in the world and make documentary films and take risks and invest in myself financially. I'd spent so much of my life kind of asking for permission to do the things that I wanted to do. I went to grad school for communications and got an internship at a documentary production company. It was really fun working there, but I still wasn't in that place where I had the courage to say, “This what I want to do.” I was waiting for somebody to tell me that I was ready.

I had my elder daughter when I was almost 26, and we bought a van and went on a road trip around North America for four months. I wrote a blog about it and then I got funding to write a book. Then, when we had my younger daughter I wanted to make a travel show. But, because I was so used to doing everything right, I didn't know how to be innovative. I was waiting for the instruction manual. So, I didn't actually do any of those things. I hustled and I wrote, but I didn't know how to monetize it. I didn't see myself as a business person. But because I worked my butt off, I got recognition, which was probably what I was seeking. I started working with a marketing agency and things kind of just grew from there.

I'm really grateful for that childhood of being a people pleaser and an approval seeker; getting the gold star, and the checkmarks, and the good grades. Because, when I finally got into the start-up scene, it became very clear to me that that's not actually how you get ahead in life. I discovered that most entrepreneurs are C students, because the C students are the ones who don't do things conventionally. They're not the ones who are jumping through hoops, they are the ones who are finding the loopholes. They're identifying how they can get away with something or do something differently. That's actually the greatest strength in a person who's going to start a business and believe in themselves, because they're not looking for approval. That's not to say that somebody who got straight A's in school can't be an amazing founder. But I think that there's a place for doing things the way that that YOU feel they need to be done - being innovative, breaking things, taking risks, and ultimately, treating everything as a science experiment, rather than like a process that has a set rhythm to it.

WWW: Your childhood experience is very relatable to people who grow up in the Chinese culture and feel so much pressure to perform academically and be perfectionists. How should we reframe perfectionism to understand how it can be an obstacle to progress and growth? ?

LJ: I can actually remember after I had my burnout when I was at Real Ventures, my boss and I had a conversation. She's said, “Lauren, I don't need you to be perfect. You just need to make it good enough.”

It's the perfectionism piece that gets in the way. That's actually one of the things that I work on a lot with my clients. Somehow women seem to suffer from perfectionism a lot more than men do. I think it has a lot to do with how we're raised. But we need to recognize that perfect can be the enemy of starting the thing or doing the thing we want to do. So if you can just do it - if you can give yourself compassion for having those perfectionist thoughts and do it anyway - that’s going to get you ten steps ahead of all the other people who haven't started yet.

WWW: A lot of high-achieving women feel the need to prove our success, and show that we are excelling and doing well in everything. ?It’s a way to impress others and build connections, especially now - in the age of social media. How do you feel about that?

LJ: A huge shift for me was realizing that you don't create connection with other people by showing up perfect. You create that connection by showing up human. When I started allowing myself to be a little bit messy, to be vulnerable, and to be human, I actually became more relatable to other people, instead of being intimidating. Letting other people in and letting them see a little bit of imperfection makes you more trustworthy, more likeable, and creates more human connection. That changed everything for me because suddenly I could be all of the different parts of me.

I make a practice of writing about this so that the people who come to me realize that I'm human like anybody else. Some mornings I wake up and have a complete meltdown about whether or not my business is going to grow, or whether or not my kids are going to do okay at school. All that stuff is happening, but if we all keep it so close to our chest and behind the scenes, we just isolate ourselves. That’s why I run these small group programs with women. If you can have a sisterhood of say 10 other women who get to see you and learn from you and grow with you, you can also see that your problems are not unique. I don't think you have to be public about all of the things happening in your life, but if you have a few people you can share it with, you can see we all have the same human problems.

WWW: You are an entrepreneur a wife, and a mother of two. ?How do you balance the pursuit of your best self and showing up for the people you love?

LJ: Sometimes it can be really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of being a mother, or being a wife, or being a daughter, and go through the motions but not actually 'be there'. When I was working in previous jobs, I was often physically present, but not mentally there. I was thinking about, “What's the next thing I have to do? What are we going to do on the weekend? What's for dinner?” It was the laundry lists and mental and emotional processing that goes on in the background.

When I got into conscious leadership it became clear for me that the best thing I can do for my relationship with my family is to be fully present when I'm with them. We're playing together or reading together. We're really doing things together. I love picking my older daughter up from high school because we get this 25-minute drive when she tells me about her day.

My work has also transformed my relationship with my husband. We have a lot more tools with which to communicate more effectively and connect on a deeper level. When I'm having a hard time, I can I can tell him what's going on. I've learned a lot about showing up as the boss lady versus showing up as his wife and partner. When I’m in my 'Type A', 'go-getter' persona it's like we're the same end of a magnet and we repel each other. I have learned to let go of being the leader when I'm with him so that he can be the leader and I can feel held by him. It's also great to not have to be in charge all the time!

I travel a lot, and when I come home my family is always fine. They don't need me to be in charge of every little detail. In fact, they seem a lot more relaxed when I'm not doing that. For me, it's recognizing what's the balance so that I can serve my kids in the best way that I can, by creating an environment in which they can thrive. It's also important to me to maintain a relationship with my husband where we're not ships passing in the night. Instead of just functionally being partners, we are actually connecting.

It's interesting because there's there is this desire to do it all and be the perfect wife, the perfect mother and the perfect everything. For me, one of the biggest lessons I've learned is that I already am the perfect mother and the perfect wife. I just have to show up as I am, and be real with my kids. It’s a work in progress, but it feels it feels good to be able to actually recognize how I'm being with my family rather than just being on autopilot or of sleepwalking through my life.

Learn more about Lauren Jane Heller and Shine+Leadership’s Executive Leadership Coaching programs at: https://www.ooohshiny.com/

Join WeWorkingWomen's Livestream with Lauren Jane Heller, April 22 at 8:00pm EDT.