Pleasure and Leadership with Stephanie Redlener

Dusti Arab  

Hello, everybody and welcome back to referral worthy today. I have the wonderful pleasure of getting to speak with Stephanie Redlener, who I met when I was her roommate in Morocco late last year. So we just got kind of thrown into the thick of it in the best possible way. Stephanie tell all of the wonderful people out there what you do. 

Stephanie  

Amazing, so good to be here. And every good story starts with we were, you know, roommates in Morocco. So Right. It’s gonna Yeah, exactly. can only go up from there. Yep, so my name is Stephanie Redlener. I’m the founder of Lioness. We are an experiential company and community that brings together women leaders to step into their personal power and professional power. And we host luxury events and retreats and it’s really about bringing women together in ways so that they have more kind of pleasure and joy in their life and then therefore step deeper into their leadership. And then I’m also an advisor to, I work with a lot of highly ambitious female leaders as sort of a personal advisor, doing kind of coaching, advisory and holistic services, helping them navigate their life choices and their business choices, getting connected and more connected with their body really, sort of like looking at their whole life and making sure they’re, they’re in deep alignment as well. 

Dusti 

So instead of doing the thing where we’re workaholics and keep burning ourselves out, there is actually an alternative to that.

Stephanie  

There is, I swear. There is an alternative to burning the candle at both ends, like we’ve talked about, right? And there is a different way and I’m just so passionate about helping women rewrite the rules of what it means to be in power in a system that wasn’t built for us.

Dusti  

God that’s hot. Oh, yeah. Okay, so I would love to hear your origin story and how you started getting into this work. When did you start?

Stephanie  

My whole life? 44 years? Um, no. So I’ve been a kind of, all jokes aside, I think I’ve been a coach, I must have been a coach in a past life. I was like coaching my friends when I was five. I’ve always been the person that people come to with sticky problems, how to sort this out trying to think through their life. I was that person in high school. I was that person in college. I’m kind of constantly that and I think that I’ve like been on my own search. I’m a soul searcher, kind of constantly focused on “How do I pursue my passion and my purpose and feel the most free in my body?” and I’m really like a student of life in that way. And so it’s always been a thread in my career. And so that thread has taken me all sorts of places. I used to work in brand strategy and advertising. And in that role, it was like “How do we find that cultural space, where humans and brands and culture meet?” Right, it’s like questioning humanity in many ways. And then I was a talent agent for the advertising industry, helping people find careers of their dreams. I then worked in house at places like IBM and MetLife and Fortune 100 companies, always in the talent and culture function. How do we get people to thrive inside of organizations, and then I started working with founders and startups. Also like how do we get the best out of people and how do people get the best out of themselves? And so I’ve been very career driven myself. My origin story of why I started Lioness is like, I am highly ambitious. I really really care about my career. My career is a super important part of who I am. And I hit a point about 15 years ago, 10-15 years ago, where I was like, making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I had a really sexy LinkedIn profile. I had all the things and I had then the marriage and I was getting married and like all these things. I had all the kind of like external factors and I was fucking so burned out, and I was just like, never enough. I was constantly overwhelmed. I was constantly anxious, you would have never known I would have been like a smiling face inside of the party. Right? Life of the party, but like, inside I was just struggling and I didn’t feel connected to myself. And so in my own personal development work, it was about eight years ago when I was really feeling like, “What is the feminine? I want to get into women’s work. I want to feel more fulfilled.” Right? And I sort of found myself in women’s circles and sort of like trying to sort myself like blindly explore where to find myself and then I ran into this woman, Mama Gena, who you may or may not have talked about. I fell into a world called the School of Womanly Arts. And this was all about pleasure and how pleasure is our birthright as women, and it really changed the entire game for me. One, it made me realize how depleted I was and how much I was not taking care of myself. Two, it made me realize how I was prioritizing everyone else except for myself. And thinking that was the of service thing to do. Right? It helped me figure out how I was actually, my emotions were stuck inside of me. And so there’s just a lot of stuff that opened inside of me in this personal pursuit. And as I started to come more alive and as I started to get more lifeforce in me and sort of through these various multiple, like women’s avenues of women’s work, I looked around to all of my friends and all of my clients at the time, especially the women, and they were like me – they were fucking miserable. They had fancy LinkedIn titles, they had, you know, the husband and the partner and the kids and the things and they had ticked all the boxes, but I got, you know, I had the privilege of speaking to these people in a very intimate way and kind of behind closed doors and I just saw one woman after another, miserable even though everything looks good on the outside. And so that’s when I was like, we can’t, I won’t do this anymore. We can’t do this. This is not what leadership should be. We can’t have women cutting themselves off, you know, from the neck down to be successful. That’s not what success like this looks like. And so I’m just super passionate on how we redefine the rules of what it means to be a woman in her power that are different from men. And I mean, we can get into this but even just like, and I’m fascinated about our bodies, right? You look at men’s hormonal cycles, and that’s 24 hours. Men are on 24 hour hormonal cycles, and we’re on 28 days. And the systems that were built around us are built for men, and I love men and no disrespect for men, but the systems that were built, you know, tens, hundreds of years ago just aren’t kind of conducive to how we thrive as women, and so that’s really the kind of foundation and the driving fuel for for what we stand for.

Dusti  

God, and there’s so many good things here. I love what you said about those cycles not being built for us. And because there’s so much research coming out right now that really backs that, too. I was just looking at a study the other day, talking about how women need one to two hours more sleep at night, like particularly if you’re on your menstrual cycle. And I was like, yeah, obviously, and like it is 2024 and we are only just starting to study women’s bodies in the same way that we have men’s bodies even. And the way that that is impacting everything from the moment we wake up even if we’re feeling like we don’t or aren’t getting enough sleep for instance, how are we supposed to be like showing up as our top performing leaders anyway? Like none of the systems are there to help.

Stephanie  

Exactly, exactly. And they just sort of squash us and want us to, you know, leave ourselves at the door when we walk into that boardroom and company.

Dusti  

Right. And yeah, that doesn’t. That doesn’t work for me.

Stephanie  

Yeah, and you know, it’s interesting. Another thing that I saw and I remember sort of, you know, it was like in my early 30s, when the kind of dream of Lioness was starting and bubbling and I would look around and I would see all these women that I looked up to that had jobs that I thought were really sexy and like cool. And I would look at their face. And I would see so much grayness, right? Like, there’s something about when a woman just is not taking care of herself, right? There’s this kind of grit and I was just like, “Where are the women leaders that are fully alive, that are like, they’re magnetic.” Right? These magnetic women leaders, and it’s just like there’s so few women that I could find and see that sort of embody that and I, again, like our magnetism is part of our leadership, I think and a much needed skill set.

Dusti  

That’s so interesting to me. So when you say magnetism, Can you unpack that a little bit more?

Stephanie  

It’s so confusing. So it’s just like when someone walks in the room, and I would say men or women, like someone walks in the room and you’re like, “Who is that?” Like, and they just have that spark or they just have a glow to them. And it comes from like, an inner confidence or something. They feel comfortable in their skin, whatever it is. It’s like they’re not anxious and there’s just something about them. Like that’s how I really look at magnetism. It’s that, like, special sauce like, “What is that? Who are they? What are they doing?”

Dusti  

I want what she’s having.

Stephanie  

I want what she’s having, I don’t know what it is, but I want that alright. It’s like that and that’s how I would describe magnetism.

Dusti  

I love that. I feel like is that what the kids are calling rizz these days?

Stephanie

Possibly. I’ve aged out of that.

Dusti  

I just heard my 12 year old say it. I was like, that sounds sexual. I know it’s not but like it just like I can’t, I can’t with you. 

Stephanie

What is that? 

Dusti

It’s like rizz, like charisma. 

Stephanie

Oh, okay. Okay.

Dusti

But it’s R-I-Z-Z. Like, good God. Can we not? 

Stephanie  

Yeah, yeah. It’s true, though. It’s like you look at charisma, right? Charisma is also like, somebody who’s feeling good. And that’s like a big philosophy of what we teach at Lioness and what we really feel is like, how we feel, it’s also a leadership right? How we feel about ourselves and how good we feel is part of the thing that we aim towards when we work with women, right? When we work with women. We want women to feel good in their bodies as much as they feel good, you know, walking into a boardroom or whatever.

Dusti  

So for someone who’s trying to tap back into that, where do you start with them?

Stephanie  

I mean, it’s always, always good to start with a holistic look at life. Where are you thriving? Where are you suffering? Where are you stuck, right? So really, always start with anyone like, let’s get a lay of the land. Right? And even though I tend to work with a lot of leaders, right, who businesses their priority, I always take a holistic approach because yes, we are at any given moment we’re a mom, a business owner, a leader, a daughter, you know, like a partner, like we can’t actually like take away our roles. And so I really like to look at a woman’s whole life and sort of like, “Where are we thriving, where are we not? Where are we putting attention? Where are we not?” So really kind of doing some assessment there and then depending on that, you know, it will kind of guide what we work on. And then I really like to start to work with a woman and getting clear on what she wants. And this sounds so simple, such a simple question. What do you want? But it’s the hardest, so hard, right? And it’s sort of like we’ve been conditioned to not necessarily want things or we feel bad about what we want or we have followed the path that our parents told us to follow.

Dusti  

It’s too selfish. I can’t have that. 

Stephanie  

Things that we think we should do, right? So really helping my clients really articulate and get clear on what they want is a huge like, kind of the next step of sort of like, where are we in life? Where are we trying to get to? And again, so it’s one, all the social conditioning that comes into that, and then it’s also when we start to articulate what we want, all the fears that come in. Usually, the thing we most deeply want is most deeply connected to our greatest fears. So then we start working on that and then again, that kind of guides where we go from there.

Dusti  

Okay, so when you started Lioness, what, what fears came up for you? Like when you finally were like, “Okay, I’m gonna pull in all of these other practices into the work that I’ve been doing.” What was that like? 

Stephanie  

Well, it’s such a funny story. Yes, because I remember starting it, aka I had a website, and then I went to Burning Man. I put on my website, and then I went to Burning Man, and I didn’t tell anyone for I think 6-9 months that I started this company. Like I was just like, oh god, oh god. Oh god. It was like me, it was basically me stepping forward my dreams and like, I felt so vulnerable and so nervous. And so like, even though I believed in it so deeply, it was something I felt so exposed. So no one knew I started a company for about nine months until I actually like started to tell people. I was like, “I started a company, just kidding, or I’m not going to tell anyone, I’ll just like let it live there” and stuff like that. And I think it took me a long time to even update my LinkedIn. Oh, that was just like the fears of actually stepping forward into a bigger version of ourselves, right every time we expand. It’s normal for our body to experience those fears. But I really ran with those fears for a while.

Dusti  

It’s incredible. Well and like I appreciate how brave you are admitting that now because it’s true. I mean all the standard small businesses advice, it’s like, you got to tell your friends and family you got to start talking about the thing to everybody you meet, you’re like, Nah,

Stephanie  

I’ll just run away from it. I’ll put it over here and run as far away as I could, you know, and so, for me, my business, and I tend to work with, the way I talk about my clients too is like I really tend to attract and work with kind of the business artists, right? And so I am very much in that realm. Like Lioness is not just a random company I started, it is a company that means so much to me, and I believe in it so deeply. And I believe in this work, right? So it’s very, it’s close to me. It’s like a version of my self expression in some ways as much as it’s a business, right? So it’s very, very tied to my passion and my purpose and the need in the world and all of that. So, a lot of times when I work with clients they have the same, right, like when we’re doing something we really care about. It’s like it’s not just a random business idea. It’s like something that means a lot to us. So there’s like a lot of a lot of layers baked into that.

Dusti  

Okay, so when you think back to that version of Stephanie, what do you wish you knew back then? Like, is there anything you would tell your younger self?

Stephanie  

Okay, well, always. This mantra that had gotten me through, has gotten me through everything is “Your timing is perfect.” And just like I’ve had to tell myself that over and over and over again. I was, you know, before I started my company, I had a zigzag career kind of. I wasn’t a one track woman, right? Like I try this and I’d work this and then I’d have a lot of friends who took the straight edge path, you know, straight arrow paths. Then they were really high up and I was sort of meandering and wandering and finding my way and, and really just like trusting like learning to lean into the trust. Like when it happens, it’s going to be perfect. And I needed to go through that windy path and I needed to start my company and run away from it in the beginning, right to like, just let it breathe and let it live and just trusting myself that my timing is perfect. And, you know, I can still say that to myself now. Like it still feels good, right? It’s just like that it’ll evolve and it’ll grow in the way that it needs to and wants to. Like, “Trust yourself, baby girl” is what I would say, “You’ve got this. It’s all unfolding perfectly.”

Dusti  

That’s beautiful. So when you were getting started, how do you… Well, I guess the question here is twofold. One, where do your clients come from now. And two, if you had to start from scratch today, where would you go looking for clients?

Stephanie  

Um, my clients come from a lot of different places, but a lot of, well it’s funny we’re on this podcast, a lot of word of mouth. It has to be the kind of primary way if someone has met me somewhere or heard me speak or saw me do an event or just sort of met me and were inspired by me and have like sent people my way. I get a lot of clients from former and current clients or you know, women that have, just yesterday one was like, “Oh my God, you have to meet this person.” And I think because I bring in, so one of the things I didn’t say is in terms of my background, I am really really steeped into spaces. I am a business coach, a leadership coach. I have worked inside organizations in every single area. I know business, I know strategy. I know all of that. I know vision, all of that very, very deeply. And then I have eight years in the sex and sensuality and sort of body category. And so I’m a sexologist, I am an erotic blueprint coach. I work with Mama Gena, as a pleasure coach. I have a Kundalini, I do work with a lot of energy and somatics and I work on women’s bodies and so I have this very unique skill set that is kind of in feminine practices and business practices. And so the clients that people tend to refer me to like, “There’s this woman, she’s so disconnected from her body, she’s got a big vision. She’s just getting into her body. She’s overworking herself.” Right? So it’s like these unique people with kind of unique problems or dreams or big dreams that are sort of more holistic they tend to be the people that get referred to me. And so when my friends or clients call me, “You have to meet this woman. You’re gonna love her. She just had a baby but she’s also starting a business and she’s trying to navigate that.” Or “She is in the middle of a divorce. And she’s business partners with her husband” So it’s like I get kind of, I tend to get women that are wanting to see business and their whole life all in one.

Dusti  

That’s very cool. Okay, so the second part of that question, if you had to start from scratch today, where would you go get clients? Where would you start?

Stephanie  

I’d say, “Dusti, do you know anyone? Dusti, do you know anyone?” I would start with the people that love me. I would go I mean, I’m really privileged and lucky enough to say I have an incredible friend group and support group and a lot of very incredible leaders in their own right are my sort of peer groups and friend groups. So I would start there. And see who, because they know me so well, and see who they know. Another thing and this is, I’m not not starting from scratch, but if I was starting from scratch I’d still do this, is I host monthly dinners bringing female leaders together in New York City and so I would do that because it, for me, I really like the one on one. I like to be in person, you know, I just like really getting to know people and having a way to meet them. I’m not like an online mass marketer kind of person. I really like and prefer the one on one contact.

Dusti  

Right. I know I feel like there are so many people who tried to skip that part. And for me, it’s my favorite part. Like I would rather go, like I don’t want to go wide I want to go deep, like every every time.

Stephanie  

Exactly. I would start or I would host workshops at venues that I think that people go to that I would want to work with, or I would go to conferences and speak and host workshops, you know, things like that and kind of finding where these creative business owners are, where these women who have big dreams are. You know, working like that.

Dusti  

What’s your favorite thing about hosting these dinners?

Stephanie  

The depths that we get to go to. They’re called Behind Closed Doors. They are a place for women to take their armor off and to take their titles off and I really started them five years ago because of my own desire. I was a new mom and business owner and I was like, “Okay, there’s business networking groups. Great.” And that’s like surface level. “Hi, what do you do?” And then there was mommy groups, and you know, shoot me. And I was like, “Where’s the fucking, where’s the place where I can be a grown ass woman and like, talk on one hand of like, this part of my life is feeling really hard or this is thriving. And this is complicated. And this is confusing.” And get to kind of learn and speak and connect with women again. Like yes, I work with founders and I work with execs and I work with leaders but like, also they’re mothers and they’re, you know, they have partners or they have divorced, right? Llike there’s like a whole bunch of things, aging parents, right? So it’s like, we cannot separate who we are as women from what we do. And I really, really kind of selfishly wanted a place where I could have those conversations for me and feel less alone. And so that’s where, that’s what we do there.

Dusti  

All right, Stephanie, last question. What makes a business referral worthy to you?

Stephanie  

What makes a business referral worthy is, I would answer is like, “How do I… Why would I refer a business?” Okay, so for me, it’s like, if I try something and loved it, and it changed my life, and it had a big positive impact, I’m like, immediately want to share it. With everyone. So that I have had a direct experience about something or let’s say a therapist that I love, like I’ll tell all my friends with a therapist, right? Like I want them to experience too. So what makes it referral worthy is to have a deep impact in my life that makes me want to share it out with the world.

Dusti  

Amazing. Stephanie, where can people find you online if they would like to get to know you better and engage with your work?

Stephanie  

Great, they can come check out Lioness.com and also find me on Instagram at StephanieRedlener and then LionessLeadership are the two Instagram accounts. And if they want to get on, if you’re a woman and in New York City or, we will be traveling soon, and are interested in attending a dinner just get in touch and we’ll get you on the waitlist for that as well.

Dusti  

Incredible. Thank you so so much for coming on today and taking the time. This was incredible. 

Stephanie  

Thank you so much. It’s so fun. I was like, when you said last question, I was like “No, ask me another question.” It’s so fun. Thanks. Dusti.