Feminine Frequencies Episode 3: Matriarchal Leadership: The Mother We’ve Been Waiting For
What if the leadership model the world desperately needs has been here all along?
In this Mother’s Day month episode of Hodge Pod / Feminine Frequencies, Ellen Johnson and Katie Bull sit down with Susie Fishleder, founder of Rebel Leaders, for a conversation that feels both urgently timely and deeply ancient.
Susie is an ICF certified executive coach and activist scholar with a Master’s degree in Women, Gender, Spirituality, and Social Justice. After fifteen years leading high stakes projects in male dominated industries she hit burnout and began asking a different question: why are we playing a game we were never allowed to win? That question sent her back to school to study how patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism created the very systems we are told to succeed within. As a Gestalt trained coach and certified yoga teacher she believes true leadership begins in the body, in our values, our intuition, and our embodied wisdom, not just our minds. Since 2020 she has been coaching leaders, mothers, cycle breakers, and organizations who are ready to dismantle outdated structures and build something better.
Find Susie and explore her work at rebelleaders.com, follow Rebel Leaders on Substack at rebelleaders.substack.com, and on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susie.fishleder/
In this episode we explore:
The Indigenous societies where matriarchal leadership was a living practice rather than a theory, and what those systems actually looked like on the ground.
Why the capacities we are scrambling to reclaim as our human advantage over AI, empathy, intuition, embodied presence, relational attunement, are the very things women and caregivers have been practicing forever, mostly without credit or pay.
How matriarchal leadership rooted in collective wisdom, embodied intelligence, and long-view thinking is a direct antidote to the global rise in authoritarianism.
What it means to reclaim nurturing as a universal principle belonging to all people rather than an unpaid burden assigned to one gender.
How matriarchal leadership addresses the still unresolved tension between motherhood, career, creativity, and freedom structurally rather than asking women to simply cope better.
This is not a conversation about replacing one broken system with another. It is a conversation about building something genuinely different, and about remembering what we already knew.
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If this conversation sparked something in you, we would love to have you as part of our growing community. Hodge Pod / Feminine Frequencies is a series dedicated to exploring the intersections of creativity, healing, wisdom, and the feminine in all its forms. We bring together voices from across disciplines to find solutions, ask better questions, and imagine a world that works for everyone.
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