Renee Shea On Self-Promotion Sisterhood for Impact-Led Women

Renee shea is the founder of promote her, a membership-based site where women can lean on a truly inclusive community for support and guidance and an alumni of the elevate+ accelerator program 2022.

Renne believes that organisations that are committed to equity and inclusion know the impact of diverse representation at all levels of the business. From financial performance, workforce innovation, employee satisfaction, retention, growth and psychological well-being; yet the gender gap still exists.

With an extensive background in human resources consulting and coaching women in business, Renee works with future leaders and change-makers to build their presence and visibility at work. This in turn supports greater diversity in leadership.

She created a powerful platform called Promote Her that focuses on empowering women to define and shine their light. Renee brings together the trifecta of self-confidence, personal brand and visibility strategies. This enables and supports women to believe in, trust and articulate their innate strengths, talents and value in a way that is authentic and relatable while learning to navigate the systems and biases that exist in workplaces.

She thinks that it is only by recognising the need for change that, together, we will give women the skills and space to take their turn to rise.

Renee discusses Her experience and insights into her work in empowering women to define and shine their light; and her key learnings after participating in the Elevate+ Accelerator program.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Eliana Cruz] - Could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion in women’s personal brand coaching and career development?

[Renee Shea] - My background started with me working in human resources, and I did that for many years mostly in recruitment and training roles. I had a bit of a career side step for a while and went into working as a portrait photographer, which was a bit of a jump. I specialised in women's headshots and business brand photos. When I went into that line of work, I started to see how there was an overlap between how women felt about themselves and their confidence in what they could achieve. That impacted what their brand was and how they showed up to work; whether that was for a business they were running themselves or for their career (if they had one) where they´re working for somebody and they are trying to climb that corporate ladder. That overlap between how they feel about themselves, what they knew of themselves and their confidence really had a strong impact on how they showed up. That sent me down a very specific path about looking at those three elements, and seeing the need to help women, including myself (because this is my story as well), to really understand and promote what they can do in a clear way.

As the Founder at Promote Her, can you please tell us more about the projects and work you’re involved in?

Promote Her is a community safe space, where we offer networking events, online training courses, and face-to-face training courses. The idea is that, more than anything else, we as women have the skills we need to achieve what we want to achieve. We have the knowledge for work, we know what we need to do, but sometimes it's that trust in those skills and the ability to confidently get up and share those skills that stops us. It's about how we share, articulate and think about what we can do. There's a gap there I find about how much we trust what we can do.

All of those things, whether it's the community building, workshops or the online training, is focused on helping women get in touch with their strength, but also to articulate and share it in a way that is aware of the dynamic of the world we work in, where we've got systems such as racism or gender inequity at work. It's about how we can share those skills we have in a way that helps us navigate through all of those biases and systems that exist. That's pretty much what Promote Her is about, and that's what we're trying to achieve.

What have your biggest challenges been on the Promote Her journey so far and what have you learnt as a result?

One of the biggest challenges I've had is that we (of course, I'm generalising here), don't like the idea of promoting ourselves. We don´t like the idea of promoting ourselves. It's a concept that gives us a very icky feeling. We prefer to let our work speak for ourselves. There is a social belief if somebody is promoting themselves, then they're bragging or showing off. That creates this atmosphere around the work of self-promotion that is saying, “I don't want to do that”, “I don't think I need to do that”, “I'm not that kind of person, so I don't want to” or “I don't want to get involved in those kinds of things”.

The irony is that the reason why we find self-promotion “icky” is because of the cultural stereotype about how women should behave.

We have this idea we shouldn't promote ourselves because of the stereotypes we are living in and we behave in, and that as a result is having a flow on effect to our careers and businesses. One of the tricky things has been being able to think of ways we can explain what self promotion is, how it can help you, how you're not being a bragger, and how you're not being all of these other icky things we tend to think of just by performing self-promotion.

Having recently finished the Impact Boom Elevate+ Accelerator, what were some of the key lessons that came out of the program for you that would be valuable for other impact-led entrepreneurs?

One of the key lessons I've gotten out of that program (and I smile because there's a bit of irony) were largely ones around confidence and trusting that I can do what I need to do.

There is this sense of second guessing the knowledge we have or second guessing the impact we could make through our work. This is not just for impact led entrepreneurs, but particularly for female entrepreneurs.

I found one of the biggest challenges I had to face during the Elevate+ program was trusting I had done the research and that I have ideas worth sharing. That was one of the biggest challenges I had.

The benefit of the program is that because you were in a room with lots of other people facing the same challenges, you didn't have that sense of being alone. You weren't facing these challenges on your own and trying to figure out how to deal with them; you could see the journey other people were going through at the same time. That's a really important thing for any entrepreneur, but especially in an emerging industry like impact-led businesses, that sense of not being on your own.

What advice would you give to other female founders who are working hard to create a positive impact?

One of the main ones is to trust yourself. As I was saying before, we have a strong tendency to downplay the skills we've got or to not trust the experience, knowledge, and wisdom we already have. The first thing would be to absolutely trust yourself. The other thing I would say is to lead from the heart. Working in any business, you need to have a lot of sticking power; you need to be able to work through the thick and the thin.

When you are doing work that is impact focused, sometimes there are a few extra challenges that get thrown your way. You need to have the resilience to keep going, and that resilience comes strongly from having a focus on what is the outcome and knowing that the impact you want to achieve aligns with your values and what's important to you.

I feel that's where we get a lot of our ability to keep going, that's where we get our resistance from.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently which are creating positive social change?

I tend to do a lot of work with a Brisbane based not-for-profit here called Ethni. Ethni has a focus to work with young women from refugee and migrant backgrounds, helping them with development of life skills to take advantage of and live the life they're dreaming of. I've been doing some work with Ethni recently, where we are collaborating to build programs around helping young women with their tertiary education, personal branding, career development strategies and establishing networks and mentoring relationships. We want to get at that level of the beginning of somebody's professional career, to help them set themselves up for success. It's a really exciting program, because I get to use a lot of the skills and background I've got within recruitment and training while also overlaying that with personal brand topics such as knowing yourself, trusting in your skills, and being able to articulate those skills. We are helping this generation of young women feel confident in doing that from the start of their career instead of learning these things in their mid-career, like many of my clients or myself. With these skill sets, it is exciting to imagine the distance young women can go in their careers and the changes and impact they can make through their work.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I can't not say the Impact Boom Podcast, because it's one that I've definitely listened to and dipped in and out of for a number of years now. A book I have resonated with and I would recommend is The Awakened Woman by Dr. Tererai Trent. I think that is one of my favourite books about finding your calling, what you want to change in the world, how you want to show up and how you want to make an impact. Another book is the Beginner's Pluck: Build Your Life of Purpose and Impact Now by Liz Forkin. She shares her story about starting a for-purpose organisation and some of the challenges she faced.

Also, she shares the importance of understanding the people you are trying to make an impact for, and starts to break down some of the biases you might have internally about the folks you're trying to support and what might work for them. The other thing I would definitely recommend is that you tap into your local business network, because they are an amazing resource of information, understanding what's happening locally, but also creating a support network around you. Sometimes in impact-led businesses, we tend to to connect only with other impact-led businesses. But I think there's a strong call for all businesses to be impact-focused, and I think the way we can do that is by creating networks and leaning more into other business groups as well, so that we can learn from them and also share some of the knowledge that impact-led businesses have in how they can achieve their goals.