Women in Leadership Mentoring with Yvonne Cohen
You’ve ascended into leadership but being a woman in that seat often carries hidden expectations, invisible friction, and additional weight. You don’t need more generic advice. What you need is mentoring designed for the realities you face. Yvonne Cohen offers confidential, executive-level mentoring for women leaders across Australia helping you grow influence, sharpen clarity, and lead on your own terms.
Lead Without Compromise. Rise With Clarity.
Leadership for women still comes with systemic complexity. In Australia, women hold under 20 % of CEO roles and fewer key management positions than their male counterparts despite making up half the workforce. Women who lead often balance extra questions about authenticity, voice, visibility or “fit.” The mentoring here is built to address those layers not by layering on more, but by helping you see with more clarity, act with more authority, and retain more of yourself in the process.
Why Women in Leadership Choose Yvonne
You may be feeling one or more of these:
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Ready for the next step but feeling overlooked or blocked
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Under pressure to deliver while carrying invisible burdens
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Curious how to raise your profile without sacrificing authenticity
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Juggling leadership and identity with intention
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Wanting clarity on how to step into larger roles or board positions
If any of that resonates, you’re not alone and you don’t have to go it alone.
Decision Point: Women in Leadership Mentoring Guide
Designed specifically for ambitious women leaders, this guide addresses the unique challenges and opportunities faced when navigating career-defining decisions. You’ll find insightful reflections on aligning your choices with personal values, strategically evaluating alternatives, managing risks, and leveraging your unique strengths. Empower yourself with the clarity to confidently shape your career trajectory, assert your leadership style, and make authentic decisions that resonate deeply.
This is the Work We Do Together
My mentoring approach is tailored and it flows through three core dimensions:
Strategic Positioning & Next Moves
We clarify what’s next for you not what others expect. Together we map out the leadership path that aligns with your values, strengths, and ambition.
Executive Presence & Influential Communication
Many women leaders feel their voice isn’t heard in the way they intend. We strengthen the way you show up be it in boards, major presentations or stakeholder conversations—so your presence carries weight and nuance.
Resilience, Boundaries & Sustainable Leadership
I believe leadership is more than performance. We tend to the inner work: boundaries, self-care, alignment between role and identity so that your leadership doesn’t burn you out.
How Mentoring Works
Yvonne’s mentoring is not prescriptive. It’s personal. She listens with precision, reflects back what matters, and helps you make career-defining decisions with strength and clarity.
Every engagement is bespoke, confidential, and outcome-driven. Our conversations become a safe space you can bring your most complex, nuanced challenges and get reflection, clarity, accountability.
Sessions often include diagnostics, scenario work, leadership narrative design, and coaching on high-leverage skills. We work at a pace aligned to your realities: so momentum builds without overwhelm.
CASE STUDY
Executive Preparing for a CEO Position
Challenge
A senior female executive in a large public sector agency was preparing to apply for a board seat. Despite her strong track record, she felt overlooked, unsure how to articulate her candidacy, and uncertain how to shift internal perceptions to support her transition.
Approach
We began with a series of diagnostic conversations to clarify how she saw her leadership value and how others perceived it. Together we refined her leadership narrative, rehearsed panel and interview conversations, and built positioning statements that aligned her strengths with governance expectations. We also worked on her executive presence ensuring her voice carried authority and confidence in influential settings.
Solution
The mentoring provided a tailored framework for visibility and influence. She gained clarity on how to present her leadership story, tools to engage stakeholders with credibility, and strategies to strengthen her impact at governance level. The process gave her both practical preparation and a deeper sense of alignment between her identity and leadership goals.
Experience
Within months, she successfully secured a non-executive board appointment and was later shortlisted for another. More importantly, she reported feeling a shift from “hidden candidate” to visible, decisive leader.
“Working with Yvonne gave me the clarity and confidence to step into governance spaces I had long considered out of reach.”
Explore More
Real stories of change across industries
About Yvonne Cohen – Executive Mentor
Visit our articles & media
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I find a mentor who can help me get promoted into leadership roles?
Finding the right mentor is partly about alignment and partly about courage. Start with defining what you need: experience, sector insight, leadership style, chemistry. Reach out in your network, industry circles, women’s leadership forums or via referrals. In a discovery call, I’ll ask you thoughtful questions and we’ll both assess fit because the best mentoring only works when there’s trust. If it’s not a match, it’s not a failure, it’s clarity.
What should I expect to ask and explore with my leadership mentor?
Your questions will range from tactical (“How do I frame my promotion case?”) to internal (“What voices are holding me back?”). You might work on executive narratives, stakeholder mapping, dealing with bias, or ways to step visibly without overexposure. A good mentor helps you ask the questions you haven’t thought of yet and supports you in answering them with confidence.
How do I increase my visibility and influence within my organisation as a woman leader?
Visibility is more than being seen it’s being seen in ways that reflect your leadership value. We’ll work together to identify high-impact arenas (projects, committees, public interactions) aligned with your strengths, map out who matters in your ecosystem, and build your narrative intentionally. The aim is that you show up in those rooms with authority not permission.
How do I successfully ask for a promotion or a larger leadership role?
Asking for promotion is as much about narrative as it is about performance. In mentoring, we’ll prepare your case: define the value you bring, align it with organisational goals, anticipate objections, and frame it as a mutual opportunity. The approach is never aggressive; it’s strategic, clear, grounded in evidence, and tied to the future you and the organisation share.
How do I manage imposter syndrome or self-doubt as I step into senior roles?
You’re not alone in experiencing that. It’s common, especially when the stakes are higher. In mentoring, we’ll explore the narratives underpinning that voice, create evidence-based reframing, and gradually build resilience through action and reflection. Over time, you’ll develop a voice that leans into your authority rather than being muted by fear.
How can I lead without burning out balancing demands, boundaries and wellbeing?
Leadership isn’t sustainable without boundaries. We’ll co-design guardrails: rhythms, decision filters, energy management practices tailored to your role. The aim is to strengthen your capacity to lead from presence, not just performance. Leadership doesn’t cost your peace, it supports it.
What tangible results can I expect from mentoring as a woman leader?
Every engagement is bespoke, but common outcomes include clearer leadership direction, stronger executive presence, more decisive communication, smoother transitions into higher roles, and deeper alignment between your aspirations and impact. You won’t just feel differently, others will see the difference too.
How do I overcome gender bias or unconscious barriers as I advance?
Bias doesn’t dissolve overnight, but you can build strategies to navigate and shift it. We’ll examine structural and relational dynamics in your context how decisions are made, how authority is perceived, how gendered assumptions show up. Then we’ll build signal strategies (your language, posture, influence pathways) that help you move through or dismantle those barriers, while staying authentic.
How often should I meet with a mentor, and for how long does mentoring last?
I typically work on three-month or nine-month engagements, meeting monthly or fortnightly depending on demand, transition points or intensity. That rhythm gives us space to reflect, try, adjust and deepen. Some leaders choose ongoing mentoring as part of their leadership practice; others engage more intensively at pivotal career stages.
What if I sense the mentor–mentee fit isn’t working for me?
Fit is vital. If after a few sessions you feel misaligned, we’ll pause and honestly review. I’ll invite your feedback and we’ll decide whether to recalibrate or conclude respectfully. You deserve a mentoring relationship that feels generative, safe and valuable, not forced.
Invitation to Work Together
Yvonne Cohen works by invitation or referral.
To get invited to have Yvonne as your mentor, she will first invite you to answer 7 questions so she can review and understand your challenges, your goals and objectives, and your timing for when you’d be able to start mentoring together—plus the timing for accomplishing your goals or objectives.
She will respond within 24-hours via email and provide you a booking link for you to choose your best date for a private first conversation.
Looking forward to achieving your goals together,
Yvonne