I said I didn't need the trophy. I lied a little. (The problem we're solving - why women plateau at senior level)

Have you ever sat in a meeting, said nothing, then watched a man say the exact thing you were thinking thirty seconds earlier - and get credit for it?

Have you ever redrafted an email four times so it didn't sound "too much," then sent it and still worried it was too much?

Have you ever looked at the leadership team in your organisation and thought: I could do that job. And then immediately thought: but who am I to think that?

Here's something one of the amazing women on Rise Above, Sophie, said that's stuck with me ever since: by not choosing the good girl option, you're not necessarily going to be seen as a bad girl. We just assume we will. That assumption is doing a lot of unpaid work in your career.

And if you're self-employed, don't think you're off the hook - I'm nearly ten years into this myself, and conditioning doesn't need a boss or a boardroom to operate. It just needs you.

If any of that landed in your stomach a bit, this email is for you. Not because I want you to feel bad about it. Because none of that is a personality flaw. It's conditioning, and it's exactly what I've spent the last 18 months proving, with data, inside a real organisation.

I've written before about not needing external validation. That the work has to matter on its own terms, not because someone in a fancy tuxedo hands you an award for it.

I still believe that.

And last Wednesday, when Elevate, the programme I built with AND-E, won the Training and Development Award at the British Insurance Awards, I felt like a five-year-old getting a gold star. Because apparently that bit of me never fully grows up, and apparently that's fine.

(I also met Alan Carr at the awards, and for reasons I cannot explain, my accent went full Essex the second he spoke to me. Man's an absolute delight. Utterly fabulous evening.)

Alan Carr (my new bestie), Gemma Robinson, Pamela Avornyo and Ben Rose (who gave us the award!)

Here's what the award can't tell you, though.

It can't tell you that this programme started as a Google Doc I sent Gemma Robinson, AND-E's People & Culture Director, in November 2024. No deck, no proof of concept, just a theory. AND-E had plenty of women coming through at junior and mid levels. Then, further up, the numbers just... thinned out. Nobody could agree why. Was it capability? Confidence? Did women simply not want the senior jobs?

My theory was none of the above. My theory was that women were operating inside workplaces built for men, by men, and carrying a lifetime of conditioning about how they're allowed to behave inside them. The overthinking. The second-guessing. The perfectionism because "good enough" never feels safe. The people-pleasing. Getting quietly punished for asking for what you're worth, or for being visibly ambitious. Expecting fairness and, provably (gender pay gap, anyone?) not getting it.

Gemma didn't need convincing. She said yes to the doc. And that's where Pam Avornyo comes in.

Pam is AND-E's Head of Organisational Development, and she didn't just sign off on this programme - she co-created it with me. Elevate exists in its final form because of her thinking, her push-back, her insistence that it be built to survive contact with a real organisation and not just a whiteboard.

This was never designed as a programme to fix women. Women were never the ones who were broken. So alongside the cohort, we surveyed the whole organisation to understand what it actually feels like to be a woman there, and that data became the agenda for real workstreams, not a report that got filed and forgotten. We trained the Executive Committee, not just the participants, because a woman coming out of a room more confident means nothing if the room she walks back into hasn't changed. And it's a principle that holds for more than gender, too: whatever group a workplace wasn't built around, the same pattern shows up - the burden of adapting gets placed on the people the system disadvantages, instead of on the system itself.

The bit that actually gets me, though, is that Pam didn't just co-create Elevate. She went through it, as a participant, alongside the women she'd helped bring into the room. Her own conditioning score fell 45%. And I get to say this properly, in public, for once: watching Pam's growth over these two years has been one of the most quietly extraordinary things I've witnessed in this work. She went from a woman telling me, in her own words, that she felt broken and not enough, to writing this:

"I'm not broken, it's not just me, it's not my fault. I need feel no shame. Now we are rising collectively. We are strong, kind, capable, powerful, beautiful women - just as we are."

And then she kept going. Pam is now the world's first certified Good Girl Deprogrammer™ besides me, and she's the one delivering Elevate now, not me. Cohort 2 at AND-E is hers to lead. I get the enormous privilege of still dipping a toe in, but this is her programme to run, in her own right, on her own credibility. Watching someone go from participant to co-creator to the person carrying this work forward independently is, genuinely, one of the best things that has come out of the last 18 months. She is also, now, one of my closest friends. I love her, and I'm ridiculously proud of her.

Twelve women went through that first cohort. I could tell you what it did for them, but I'd rather you heard it from Alice Wilson, one of the women who went through it:

"Elevate has changed my life. Inside and outside work. I am doing things and having conversations that I was previously not confident enough to have. I feel more sure of who I am and my self worth has increased. I feel more able to face professional and personal situations with assertiveness, but I am still kind to myself. I've learnt more about myself in this short time than I have in my whole life and I am a different person because of it."

That's not a one-off. Across the cohort, conditioning scores fell by 44% on average, and every single woman said she'd recommend the programme.

And it's not just AND-E. On Rise Above (the public version of this work) one woman, Lorna, told me:

"I heard her voice saying: what would a mediocre man do? The answer was, he'd apply for the job. It wasn't about getting the job. It was feeling myself grow in self-esteem just by doing the applications."

She applied for roles she'd have talked herself out of a year before. Sophie's line and Lorna's story are the same thing, really - permission granted, then taken.

That's what the award actually represents. Not a trophy. Proof that the plateau was never a woman problem. It was a conditions problem, and conditions can be changed, just as surely as conditioning can be unlearned. As one Rise Above woman put it: once seen, it cannot be unseen.

Which brings me to you.

If any of those questions at the top of this email hit home, that's not a coincidence and it's not just you. It's the same mechanism, wherever it shows up.

If you're a woman ready to do this work for yourself: Rise Above Cohort 2 opens 9th September - https://www.michelleminnikin.com/rise-above-the-group-experience​

If you lead people or shape culture in your organisation: Elevate is the same evidenced programme, built for your team, working at the level of the system as well as the individual, with the same measurement and the same results. (More info) Book a call with me to talk it through - https://zeeg.me/michelle/30min​

Or have a go at the Good Girl Scorecard to see how your conditioning may be impacting you - https://goodgirl.scoreapp.com/ - it's free and you can do it as many times as you want (to track your progress).

Let me know how you get on,

Mx

PS I was worried about this newsletter being too 'braggy' - then had to give myself a talking to - FFS Michelle, it's not bragging if it's true!!

The slightly more 'professional' (I hate that word!) photo!