Lynn Horan, PhD Leadership & Life Development

ABSORBING OTHERS’ EMOTIONS is a key category that emerges in my research and coaching work with empathetic women leaders, who consistently do the emotional labor of navigating and deescalating highly-anxious workplace and relational systems.

This intense and often invisibilized work can feel like:
➡️ Holding others’ discomfort
➡️ Shutting off my emotions
➡️ Being the softest version of myself
➡️ Not taking up space
➡️ Harmful humility

Identifying these patterns and social narratives is an important step in transitioning from SURVIVAL EMPATHY to SOVEREIGN EMPATHY.

Learn More:
The Sovereign Empath:
Compassionate Leadership without Cost of Self
6-Week Individualized Coaching Program
https://www.lynnhoran.com/sovereign-empath.html

I just had an impactful conversation with a coaching client who was starting to question her capabilities as a leader, because of targeted BACKLASH within her workplace context.

Mid-career women leaders with proven LEADERSHIP STRENGTHS can be seen as threatening and destabilizing to those who have benefited from patriarchal models of leadership, power, ego, and control.

RECLAIMING these leadership strengths is a key part of RECOVERING from toxic workplace culture:

⭐️Power WITH instead of power OVER
⭐️Bringing more VOICES to the table
⭐️Permission-giving and INCLUSIVE approaches to leadership
⭐️TRANSPARENCY and holding others accountable
⭐️Relationality alongside healthy BOUNDARIES

For those who are RECONSTITUTING SELF beyond toxic workplace environments, RE-CLAIMING your identity and value as an effective leader, communicator, and problem-solver is an important part of the recovery process.

Leadership Strengths of Mid-Career Women Leaders (and who feel threatened by it) For women leaders who have been scapegoated, derailed or otherwise targeted in their professional contexts, and important part of recovery is RE-CLAIMING you...

BOOK RELEASE THIS AUGUST!

It's such an honor to be a contributing author in the upcoming anthology "INSPIRATIONAL WOMEN LEADERS: The Challenges and Rewards of Religion, Spirituality, Purpose, and Calling in Leadership," the final book in the International Leadership Association’s Transformative Women Leaders Book Series (Emerald Publishing).

Learn more:
https://www.lynnhoran.com/transformative-women-leaders-book-series.html

I just finished Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff's well-researched historical exposé "The Witches: Salem, 1692" and found some striking similarities to my research on the gendered scapegoating of mid-career clergy women in today's Protestant church culture.

GENDERED SCAPEGOATING is a widespread phenomenon in which self-differentiated women leaders who exhibit healthy boundaries and promote mutual accountability can become a LIGHTNING ROD within toxic social systems with deep-rooted conflict around female agency, resulting in intense criticism, targeting, institutional blame, professional defamation, and EXECUTIVE DERAILMENT.

Through in-depth interviews, dimensional analysis, and a feminist-intersectional approach to René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism, my research addresses the root causes of the systemic expulsion of high-functioning, competent, and empathetic women leaders in professional sectors with engrained narratives of feminized servanthood.

Thank you to the courageous women leaders who have shared their experiences, and for the support, solidarity, and visibility it has brought women leaders across all sectors, in their own process of healing, recovery, and organizational accountability.

Learn more:
www.lynnhoran.com/dismantled

Leaving an abusive workplace comes with feelings of unmitigated SHAME, HUMILIATION, ANGER, CONFUSION, and SELF-DOUBT.

CLOSURE is hard to find, much is left unsaid, actions are not addressed, accountability is lost, reputations are broken, false narratives are spread, and years of heartfelt commitment, valued leadership, and organizational impact are dissolved in an instant.

My research and coaching work centers the lived experiences of self-differentiated women leaders who have been the target of GENDERED SCAPEGOATING, executive derailment, or “push-to-leave” forces within abusive workplace environments.

For those who have experienced workplace trauma, the process of RECONSTITUTING SELF is NON-LINEAR and EMBODIED.

Closure doesn't happen overnight. Instead, it looks more like this –

🌿 Reorganizing underneath your bathroom sink and embracing the freedom of making concrete decisions on what to throw out, without being criticized as too bossy, entitled, or assertive.

🌿 Going to an annual check-up and your doctor saying, “What’s changed? Your blood pressure is significantly lower than last time.”

🌿 Starting a new job that doesn’t leave you waking up in a cold sweat because of an annual review that unfairly targeted your personality rather than addressing professional competence.

🌿 Running into a former colleague who shares, “When I saw how you were treated, I no longer trusted the people I work with. I left too.”

🌿 Looking in the mirror and, for the first time, recognizing something in your reflection that had been lost.

Learn more:
www.lynnhoran.com

ONE YEAR after its initial publication, I’m extremely grateful for the continued support of my research-based book “Dismantled: Abusive Church Culture and the Clergy Women Who Leave.”

This week brought two additional book reviews and an important meeting with a consulting firm addressing sexual misconduct and systemic gender bias in faith-based leadership.

I was invited to --
🔎 Share my trauma-informed research
🔎 Outline key areas of gender-based conflict in servant-leadership contexts
🔎 Recommend concrete areas of organizational and behavioral change
🔎 Promote my strength-based coaching programs for women leaders reconstituting self beyond toxic workplace culture

Thank you to the courageous women leaders who participated in my original research, those who have read my work and shared with others, and fellow change makers who are applying this work across various workplace sectors.

Learn more:
https://www.lynnhoran.com/dismantled.html

SACRIFICIAL EMBRACE is a highly gendered concept that I address throughout my research and coaching work. It is the process of OVERRIDING or minimizing chronic abuse within unsustainable workplace contexts, due to engrained EXPECTATIONS of the self-sacrificial woman, combined with a strong sense of PURPOSE or calling within one's work and professional identity.

What does this look like in real time?

“I know I don’t want to be treated this way, but maybe it’s just part of the job.”

“I feel like it’s time to make a career or job change but I feel guilty for letting people down.”

“I’m working beyond what is contracted in my job, but I have a strong desire to serve others, so maybe it’s okay.”

“My identity is so attached to this work, and even though I feel taken advantage of, I just can’t imagine doing anything else.”

It can be a PAINFUL PROCESS to come to terms with the immediate and long-term costs of sacrificial embrace. Not unlike the challenges of leaving an abusive relationship, there are complex feelings of GRIEF and GUILT when women decide “enough is enough.”

Identifying this dynamic and the underlying gendered expectations is the first step toward --

✔️ RECLAIMING core values and leadership strengths
✔️ REFRAMING gendered understandings of servant-leadership
✔️ RECONSTITUTING self beyond toxic workplace contexts
✔️ REIMAGINING leadership through embodied self-awareness

Sacrificial Embrace - When Serving Others Hurts Sacrificial embrace is the experience of OVERRIDING or IGNORING you...

Check out my updated coaching page!
www.lynnhoran.com/coaching

🌿Happy International Coaching Week 🌿

I believe in THERAPY. I believe that we don’t know all the answers. I believe we need trusted voices in our lives to help us overcome trauma and process deeply felt emotions, in order to live a HEALTHY and BALANCED life.

I also believe in COACHING. I believe we have a lot of answers deep within us. I believe we need empowering voices in our lives that help us remember what we’ve always known to be true, in order to live a VIBRANT and THRIVING life.

✨ Happy International Coaching Week ✨

Learn more:
www.lynnhoran.com

For empathetic women leaders looking to —

✔️ RECLAIM core values and leadership strengths
✔️ REFRAME gendered understandings of servant-leadership
✔️ RECONSTITUTE self beyond toxic workplace contexts
✔️ REIMAGINE leadership one embodied insight at a time

Latest publication:
https://www.lynnhoran.com/journal-of-management-spirituality-and-religion.html

✨ NEW COACHING OFFERING!✨

MOTHERHOOD & PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY
For Women Navigating Career & Caregiving Roles

Through an embodied feminist lens, this 6-Week individualized coaching path explores liberative and decolonizing approaches to compassionate leadership and empathy that move beyond harmful expectations of the self-sacrificial woman leader and mother.

Using a strength-based and embodied approach that leverages the unique leadership skills and expertise of motherhood, participants build agency, sustainability, and self-actualization in ways that honor the complex layers of personal and professional identity.

Learn more or register:
www.lynnhoran.com/motherhood-and-professional-identity

Learn more on my research on the shadow-side of servant leadership in workplace culture:
www.lynnhoran.com/journal-of-management-spirituality-and-religion