By Natalie Johnson
Amanda L. Christian has a name for the effort many senior women spend reworking how they naturally think into something their workplace will accept: the translation tax. Helping a woman recognize where she pays it is the job of one of the six pillars at the center of Christian’s coaching.
Christian, an executive coach and the founder of SoulFIRE Leadership, lays out those pillars in her book, SoulFIRE Leadership: The Leadership Model Women Were Never Taught, written for high-achieving women in male-dominated industries. Together, they are meant to move a woman from understanding where she stands now to leading and living in a way that is more aligned and sustainable for her. On a first pass, each pillar builds on the one before it.
Christian spent 33 years as a leader in banking and technology, including years at the bank now known as Wells Fargo, where at one point she reached two reporting levels below the CEO. A Master Life Coach certified through Elementum Coaching Institute and a Master NLP Practitioner, she now works with senior women in finance, technology, and other male-dominated corporate environments.
Six Pillars, Built in Sequence
The first pillar, the Awareness Shift, is about getting an honest read on where a woman’s life actually stands: what is working and what is not, at work and outside it, and how she naturally operates as a leader.
The Core Code separates authentic values from the ones absorbed from family, school, peers, and corporate culture. The Mindset Revolution, which Christian distinguishes from reciting affirmations, focuses on stopping the fight against the way a woman naturally thinks and processes information. “I call that constant effort to translate your natural intelligence into a more acceptable form, the translation tax,” Christian says.
The Vision Blueprint asks whether the goals a woman is chasing are hers, or ones she absorbed because they looked like the next logical definition of success. The Influence Code addresses how she builds influence without performing someone else’s version of leadership, bringing emotional intelligence, analytical thinking, and authentic presence together rather than treating them as competing skills. The sixth pillar, the Expansion Effect, is about making success sustainable. It challenges what Christian calls martyrdom leadership: “the belief that your value is somehow proven by how much you can carry, how available you are, or how much of yourself you’re willing to sacrifice.”
Christian ordered the pillars so that a woman knows where she stands before she makes decisions about what to change. From there she can examine her values and the thinking patterns that pull her away from them, and only then decide what she wants and how to sustain it. Skip a step, Christian says, and “you can end up solving the wrong problem.” A woman might reach an ambitious goal and realize she never wanted it. Or, as Christian puts it, “you might become much better at influencing people while still saying yes to work that is draining you.”
In the book, the pillars appear as a staircase, but Christian describes them as a never-ending spiral. A reader works through them in order at first, then returns to them as her circumstances and understanding of herself change. “I don’t really view the framework as six boxes you check off once,” she says. In coaching, the pillars work together from the start, and Christian compares the process to peeling an onion: a woman who feels she has resolved something may find herself back at it months or years later.
Where Clients Get Stuck
Christian says it depends on the client, but she points to the Core Code and the Mindset Revolution as the pillars women struggle with most. The Awareness Shift can be difficult too, especially in one-on-one coaching, where she works to get to the root of what is driving a client’s behavior. The Core Code asks women to distinguish what they value from what they have been rewarded for. “You can’t get straight A’s in corporate,” Christian says. “They don’t assign straight A’s.”
The Mindset Revolution examines why women keep acting against what they say matters to them. It can look like sitting at family dinner while mentally still at work, accepting another assignment before checking capacity, or spending the evening finishing work that was supposed to be delegated.
One client with a strong perfectionist streak could identify her pattern and explain its cost well before she could change it. She later reported delegating work she previously would have handled alone. “Recognizing a pattern gives us something to work with,” Christian says. “And we still have to examine what keeps it in place.”
Christian traces her focus on root causes to her first job after college, as a counselor in a group home for young women ages 11 to 18.
What She Would Have Used in Banking
Christian developed the framework largely from a close look at her own career, along with her coach training. Looking back, she says the Mindset Revolution and the Expansion Effect would have served her best. She sees the two as closely connected, and both speak to a habit from her corporate years: “I measured my value by how much I could handle,” she says. Early on, she was relied upon for difficult, politically complex, and sensitive work. “I accepted assignments because I knew I could do them.”
Inside a Culture She Can’t Change
A woman working inside promotion practices and cultural norms she does not control will not overhaul an organization on her own, Christian acknowledges. The pillars instead help her get clear about how she will operate inside those conditions: naming what the environment is costing her, identifying what she is no longer willing to abandon just to fit, and asking whether the way she is succeeding can actually be sustained.
None of that guarantees the organization will reward her differently. “I never promised that changing our mindset will make an unfair company fair,” Christian says. Sometimes the outcome is a change in how she works within the company. “Sometimes it’s deciding that the environment is asking for a price she’s no longer willing to pay.” Even then, she says, the decision has to account for income, family obligations, and the options actually available.
The First Step
For a woman who wants to start this week, Christian points to the Awareness Shift. Her advice is to set aside quiet time and take stock on paper of everything, not just the job: health, relationships, finances, enjoyment, personal growth, environment, community, and the other areas that can disappear behind a demanding career. “Don’t type it on your computer. Write it down,” she says.
Christian expects many accomplished women to assume they already know where they stand. She recommends the exercise anyway, because the rest of the framework builds on it. Without that clarity, she says, any change stays at the surface, and a woman risks putting real effort into the wrong problem.
