Season 1 Finale: The Corporate Confession I Never Thought I’d Make

Hi there and welcome back to the Lucy Gernon show. I am your host Lucy Gernon and my God, we have made the season one finale. I cannot believe we’re here when I launched this show on the 1st of April. Yes, April Fool’s Day, which of course feels very unbranded for me. I had no idea how it was going to land and I am so, so grateful for every one of you who have been here for every single episode.

 

Every guest this season has genuinely blown me away. And I’ll be teasing what’s coming out for season two at the end of this episode. So stay with me. But first, I have to keep it real. And this is my final confession of season one, and it is a big one. So had a show before this for those of you who are new here called the 360 Leadership Podcast.

 

And I rebranded it because I felt like I wanted to bring in a little bit of different energy and kind of reflect a little bit more about where I am now. And I did a corporate confession series. So if you haven’t actually listened to that on the old show, we link it in the show notes. Literally just search on my website for corporate confessions. You’ll find it. Or if you’re listening or watching on YouTube and you scroll back up, you’ll see it within the same feed. I spoke about a rubber duck.

 

a pink suit and an agar plate crisis. But they were all from years and years ago, like probably like a decade or more ago. And this one today is different. And I’m sharing it because it’s happening right now. And I’m sharing it because I’m speaking to so many other women leaders who are feeling the same as I am. And I guess I’ll kind of bring it back a little bit that in 2025, I hit a wall and I need to be honest and I need to share that with you. So

 

Essentially, in 2025, my business was scaling, 360 leaders slope was growing, my corporate work was growing, my keynotes. We were getting so many inquiries in and it was amazing to see the impact that the work that I do with women in leadership to support them to lead a little more confidence and less self sacrifice and all of that good stuff that I do. And so I needed to bring in some experts. And even though I worked in corporate leadership,

 

for like two decades. My very first leadership role was a director role back when I was 20, 21. And even before that, I was running restaurants and, you know, doing finance and all these things from really, really young. And I’ve always had that leadership book in me. But when I started my own business, that was mine. I assumed that experts knew better, which any entrepreneurs who are watching or listening to this will know. It is the one thing you’re taught as an entrepreneur is to trust your own

 

trust your vision, lean into it. But of course, I didn’t listen. And I hired a lot of experts to come into my business who were absolutely fantastic. All women. think I have only men. I think I all women. And they were amazing at what they did. And I was listening to mentors and I was watching, you know, taking different trainings and telling me how I should structure my business. So I implemented systems in my business that were not what I grew up with.

 

It wasn’t the good old spreadsheets. wasn’t the tried and tested way of running big corporate departments and big corporations. And the instability that followed in twenty twenty six or twenty twenty five was something that I have never experienced before, because I have ADHD and I crave structure. I need structure to thrive. And when I have structure, I absolutely fly it like a lot of you. But when things are not structured and things are a little bit.

 

up in the air and you’re kind of developing processes. Like, I don’t feel good. I don’t feel like I’m a good leader in those situations. And last year was really kind of challenging because we were in constant reactivity. We were, you know, we were firefighting. And at the same time, I felt like a total hypocrite because I was teaching my methods to women leaders to help them to not do this. But here I was in the background for

 

a couple of months in the same situation, feeling like a total hypocrite because I was going, you are preaching this stuff, yet here you are and you are firefighting. So I. In the middle of all of that. I made a decision that essentially I needed to tear everything down, I needed to really pause and get really strategic, I needed to just stop.

 

And I looked at everything, all the systems that had grown and morphed. And any of you who have businesses or you run divisions or you run departments, you’re going to know that as a business is scaling, you know, your processes need to iterate. You need to revamp you. What got you here, as the saying says, won’t get you there. And so I needed to rebuild from scratch. I needed to basically go back and look at what was working, what wasn’t working and.

 

You know, lot of my background is I’m very operational. very, I think very operationally and I think very strategically. And as opposed to giving everybody away the things that I’m good at, I decided to kind of take back control because honestly, like it was affecting me. was affecting my energy levels, how I was showing up. I was watching the team in turn. were, people weren’t sure where they were to focus, what their priorities were. Things were changing and you know, with AI coming in, there was so much change. So

 

Essentially, what I did is we rebuilt the entire business governance. We implemented a whole new governance process for the business. We implemented all of our business processes again from scratch across all my different departments. You know, obviously I have sales, have marketing, I have my operations, I have 360, I have my pipeline lead management, all of those. Every single department needed a good deep dive. And that’s exactly what I did with my team. But in the middle of all of this,

 

Somewhere in the middle of all this craziness that was going on, I had the most humbling realization of my entire career that I have spent years helping high performing women stop fixing everything for everyone and stopping the one who rescues and holds it all together and stop being the answer to every problem. And then I looked in the mirror and I realized that I had slipped back into fixer mode.

 

I had slipped back into fixer mode because some of my team were new. I didn’t want to put too much pressure on them. I wanted to make their job easier because I felt bad that they were overloaded and all the things I talked to my clients about in 360 leaders club. And I realized that I went with my family as well. There was a lot of stuff going on in 2025 with my family, too. And at work, at home and my business, every room I worked into, I seemed like

 

The one thing I hadn’t really looked at in a while that mattered the most was myself. So if you’ve ever said to yourself, I’m the one who sorts everything or I very rarely say no, or maybe even when I’m on and off, like I can’t just stop. This episode is definitely for you because I see you because I literally have walked the walk. So this April.

 

I did something that I have never done before in my business. And I made a decision because I was hearing so many women are interested in my membership 360 leaders club, which for those of you who don’t know, it is a professional development membership for women in senior corporate and business leadership who want to lead more confidence with less self sacrifice. And we do advanced leadership training in terms of executive presence, in terms of communication.

 

workload management, conflict management, all of the things that keep us in firefighting and keep us stuck. And we do lots of amazing coaching sessions and mindset sessions and all of that. But I kept getting asked the same question, which was, have you got any taste for sessions? Is there a way I can get a taste of this before I commit? Because it’s an investment. When you work with me, it is an investment.

 

When you put your money where your mouth is and you put your time where your mouth is, I promise you it pays back in dividends. So I decided to open up the doors for the very first time to a guest pass session for 360 Litres Club just for one session because I do a bonus mindset coaching call every month and I rotate the topics between perfectionism, limiting beliefs, boundaries. We cover all of that in the bonus session. I just like to give it to my members as it’s a little add on outside of our

 

professional development stuff as well. And I taught something publicly for the very first time and I called it, stop fixing and start leading. it was based on, I developed the framework based on how I got myself out of that hole recently. And I felt like, okay, more women need to know about this. And the women in the room were, you know, my clients and we had VPs, we had directors, we had executives from pharma to tech to finance. And they were sitting there going, my God, this is me.

 

And I got some messages afterwards and honestly, one lady actually made me cry because it just, it really landed the structure I was able to kind of provide really, really was supportive for her. So the fixer to leader framework, I’m going to share a little bit about what that is today. And if you are a woman in leadership and you find yourself rescuing or fixing or people pleasing or drowning in detail when your team should be more empowered to take that from you so that you can be the strategic one.

 

So you can focus on the work that matters. So, you know, you have something left to give at the end of the day for yourself. This is for you. So the FIXR, FIXR, it’s a leader framework. I’m going to share the three steps with you now, because I think just naming them is going to stop you in your tracks. So step one is a little bit, I’m going to say a little bit controversial, a little bit contrarian is probably the right phrase to use.

 

One of my core messages is about, you know, leading authentically and leading with confidence and setting boundaries and all of these things so that, you know, without self-sacrifice. But what I realized was it was a total lie. I know now in business that there are times where self-sacrifice are required and me coming out with a generic marketing statement about without self-sacrifice is not accurate and it doesn’t sit well with me.

 

So you’re to hear me say from now on with less self-sacrifice because step one in the fixer to leader framework, I call a strategic self-sacrifice. It’s a strategic self-sacrifice. So here’s the counterintuitive thing. The first step isn’t to actually stop fixing. It is actually to strategically get off the hamster wheel, define a period of time that you are going to go all in. Like I told my team and my husband, I was like, listen,

 

I’m going to go to ground, as I said, for 10 days. I’m talking weekend. Like I do not work weekends. You could pay me 10 million euro. just I just it’s not what I do. I enjoy my family. I enjoy my life. I just my weekends to me are are important time. But for this period of time, I was like, look, guys, I have got to get strategic here. I’m telling you, I’m going to be like a psycho for the next two weeks. I’m going to be really busy.

 

Here’s everything I’m doing to set you up for success in the meantime. But here’s what I need from you. I need you to problem solve. I need you to, you know, look at these things. I needed, you know, I drafted my assistant in to help me more. I did loads of different things to ensure that I could do this. And essentially what you need to do is you need to strategically get off the hamster wheel, make an empowered decision with a plan, with a timeline, with an end date where it’s not endless.

 

it and, you know, unconsciously doing it the way most of us do it. It’s you essentially go to ground, you audit what’s broken, you build the systems and then you step back, which is what I did. And I went through, like I said at the start, every department, I went through everywhere we were reporting things, things that would take teams months to do. And the reason I did this is because I heard Elon Musk talk, somebody talk about Elon Musk and his main job is he goes into his companies

 

every single week and he fixes one problem that keeps recurring. And I think sometimes we expect our teams to be able to fix problems, but they don’t really get the impact and the urgency and the churn that we see as leaders when you’re looking across all of your departments or all of your teams or, you know, all of your team members, whatever way your role is. And I could see the impact of this was having on this. I could see that, you know, I could see the confusion. I could see

 

the duplication, I could see the inefficiency, I could see all of it. And I was like, I just need to get in here and fix this, which is exactly what I did. So that brings me closer to step two, which is to stop rescuing and start coaching. So once the systems exist, so once you build the systems that are missing and and, you know, in 360, I was sharing a lot about how to do this. OK. And if you’re in 360 and you miss that.

 

please talk to me. I’ll explain exactly step by step what I did, how I used AI to help me, the prompts I use. I will literally give you the cheat sheet if that’s what you want if you’re in 360. So please feel free to chat with me on a coaching call about this because I so many resources to share on this one. But when your systems do exist, you want to stop being the answer to every question. You stop being the one that everyone runs to and you start developing the people around you instead.

 

And I am obviously a qualified executive coach. I have trained with the International Coach Federation Training to PCC level with over 500 coaching hours. I have no idea how many I have now. I definitely have over a thousand at this point. But even in 360, that’s why we do coaching training for our members as well. do the actually the master coach who train me and who is my coach supervisor actually delivers this training for our members, which is amazing. And that’s going to be coming up.

 

I think it’s actually this month. So if you’re in 360 or if you’re not in 360 and you’re interested, you can just go to the link in the show notes, visit 360leadersclub.com or you can see the link in the show notes. And coaching your team is so, so, so important, which is about, you know, empowering them to make decisions, asking them powerful questions to help them to problem solve. But you cannot do that unless you’ve put the systems in place so they can make the decisions.

 

I don’t think anyway. So that’s the first step. The first step is strategic self-sacrifice. The second step is to stop rescuing and start coaching your team. And the third step, and this is a big one, is to lead as yourself. Lead as yourself. What do I mean by that? This is the identity piece.

 

Because when you’ve spent your whole career being the fixer at work and at home, there’s a question underneath all of that that nobody ever asks you. Which is, who are you when you’re not fixing?

 

Who are you really stripped of that big title that you swore when you got there, it would be the be all and end all. You wanted to get to this VP, director, entrepreneurial level. It was like your biggest mission in life. Now you’re there. You know, is it really all it’s cracked up to be? For some people, it’s not. And if you’re stripped of the title and you’re stripped of the performance and the end is doing, who are you?

 

because that’s where the real work begins. And that’s exactly what we went into. Not only at that session, that Taster session I did in 360 on the stop, fixing, start, leading. But I also went deep on this in my annual retreat, which also happened in April, which was just an amazing experience to see the shifts in the women to really know that it was OK for them to, you know, push back. They didn’t have to be the one who was

 

jumping in and solving every problem because they didn’t want to overload their teams. They could lead from their values, like they could lead from their strengths, they could lead from who they really were, are, and really remember what that is, right? They actually remembered what that was. And to me, that is, you know, I think it was Oprah said it, that your number one reason for being on this earth or like the thing that we all need to do is to live your life

 

as the highest expression of who you are. That’s what you’re here to do. Like you have gifts, you have talents, you have ambitions, you have dreams. Who are you to achieve those dreams? Like if you’re if you’re if you’re constantly fixing for everybody and you’re constantly pleasing and you’re constantly worrying about everybody else, you cannot live that highest expression of yourself. So that’s my

 

invitation for you is to really reflect on that because here’s what I know to be true. If you’re a high performer and you’re a senior leader in a corporate or in a business environment, or if you are an entrepreneur with a scaling business, I know that you’ve probably built your entire identity around this career part of you, the one who fixes, the one who holds it all together, who protects everybody.

 

But that identity will eventually cost you if it hasn’t already, because it’s cost every single woman I’ve ever worked with and it costs me. And it’s not at a cost to you. It’s it’s actually sorry. It’s only at a cost to you. It’s not to anybody else, because your family will always be fine because you’ll always take care of them. Your team will always be fine because you’ll always make sure that you’re protecting them.

 

The business will always be fine because you’re going to hit those metrics no matter what it takes. But what about you? So the frameworks that I’ve created exists to change that. The coaching that I do with my clients and the training exists to change that. And the community of women that I work with in 360, they exist to help us help you to change that. But I can’t want that for you.

 

Now, I don’t know whether I’m going to open that guest pass session again. I genuinely don’t know. But what I do want you to know is that if you’re sitting there listening to this and you’re thinking, OK, Lucy, I’m tired of being the one that everybody comes to. I am tired of fixing everything for everyone. I know I need to do something. I’m a bit of a reflector and I put myself on the long finger.

 

put everybody else first, but deep down your instinct is going. I know I need to do something about this. The best thing that you can do is reach out to book a call with me. All you’ve got to do is go to lucygernon.com forward slash call or we will link the link in the show notes and you can book a call with me if you are ready to resolve this and I can listen to your challenges. will listen to your goals and I can share all about.

 

how 360 can support you if I feel like if it’s the right fit. If it’s not the right fit, I will recommend something. I will never leave you hanging. And, you know, I’m very discerning about who I work with because I only work with action takers, women who are not procrastinators, because if you’re a procrastinator, lovely lady, nothing’s going to change, right? But if you’re ready to take action, I invite you to reach out and book a call with me and let’s see if.

 

360 leaders club is the right fit for you and find the right coach for you. Because honestly, you deserve that. You absolutely deserve that. Now, if you’re not quite there yet and you’re like, okay, I’m not listening to this show long, not ready to speak to this woman that I’ve just met, get onto my email list. So I send out a weekly newsletter. And if you just go to lucygernon.com forward slash newsletter, you can sign up.

 

And you can, you’ll get lots of free content, lots of free resources. I will let you know if we are ever opening up guest passes again for 360. And all you’ve got to do that is just go over and get on the list. That’s it. That’s all I’m asking of you. If you’re not ready yet, just no pressure, nothing like that. But I suppose I just want every single woman in leadership to realize that it’s not your responsibility to fix everything for everybody. Like I made that mistake. I don’t want that for you.

 

and I can provide the accountability and the tools and the support to support you because if this is going on a long time, like isn’t it time you did something about it? Isn’t it time?

 

So that’s it for season one. I hope that you found today’s episode valuable. I’m so proud of this show. I’m so grateful for all of the feedback. We launched with some incredible guests. had Enya Martin, we Deirdre Martin, had Emma Butler, had so many. Jess Kelly, Katie McPhee. It was just such an incredible, incredible season.

 

And every single one of the episodes since then has been a conversation I just didn’t want to end. And as I told you at the start of the year, if you’ve been here for a while, if not, go back and listen to the other episodes of the show. My word for twenty twenty six is fun. And after that really, really, really difficult twenty twenty five, I was ready to reclaim myself, coming back this year as who I really am and being real and vulnerable along the way, documenting the whole

 

messy, beautiful thing. And honestly, that’s what this show has been. I hope that you’ve enjoyed it. I hope that you found it authentic and I hope you found it inspirational. Season two is going to be coming later this year. We don’t have an exact launch date, so I can’t tell you everything yet. But I will say that the conversations that I had at my retreat, there is content coming that is going to stop you in your tracks. Literally stop you in your tracks. I have some amazing guests.

 

I have some fantastic things coming up later on this year as well. And I’m actually doing the biggest thing of my entire career later on this year in quarter four as well. I am so excited. I can’t tell you much here right now because it’s top secret. We have people signing NDAs and everything. But what you can do is go over and get on my email list. So go to lucygernon.com forward slash newsletter.

 

and you’ll be first to hear about what’s coming. It is. It’s really big, like, like it’s really big. It takes a lot to excite me. This just feels really exciting. And I’d love for you to join me on that journey over in my emails. And if you’re not following me on Instagram, you’ll get a lot of behind the scenes, raw content like this. If you want a little bit more polished, you can head over and follow my content on LinkedIn. I do both, right? Because I think it’s really important for leaders that, you know,

 

There’s a professional part of me. Yeah, I have the master’s degree in science. I have the accolades. I have loads of awards of all these things with the business. Who cares? Like at the end of the day, who cares? I just like to be real. And that’s what you’ll get on Instagram. And you’ll also get on my emails and LinkedIn too. So make sure you’re subscribed. lucygernon.com forward slash newsletter. And thank you again for joining me on season two. I’d love to hear from you. I hope you really enjoyed it.

 

So until next season and until the big thing that’s coming, same time, same place, bye for now.