Lauren Paton Shares How Women Can Overcome Limiting Beliefs and Lead with Impact

Lauren Paton is an inspiring Leadership speaker, coach, and strategist who champions the visibility and influence of women in leadership. With a background in senior marketing roles at Amazon and Disney, she forged a reputation for strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and authenticity—earning recognition as a LinkedIn Top Voice for Gender Equity.

As the founder of Scout + Circle (formerly Unleashed), she combines over 20 years of corporate experience with hands-on coaching expertise to guide women toward greater confidence, impact, and self-belief—even when they’re outnumbered in boardrooms. Her approach blends straight-talking insight with radical self-care and leadership psychology.

In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Lauren shares her reflections on defining the future of leadership—from dismantling imposter syndrome to elevating women’s voices in the workplace.

Was there any defining moment that inspired you to start your business?

It wasn’t so much one moment as a series of moments and a series of realisations over time. I had recently left my role at Amazon, where I was leading a marketing team at Prime Video, and while I was doing some consulting and some freelance work I was spending time thinking about what do I want to do in the long term.

What I do now really is this intersection between the things I care about very deeply, which is women having more influence, women being at the seats of power, women being able to inform decision making, and using the superpowers that I have in order to help them get there. So that’s kind of where those things have come together.

I had been doing a lot of reflection around my own experience in the spaces that I’d been in, which were all male-dominated, particularly when you got to a senior leadership level. This had a knock-on impact on my beliefs on what I could do, what my abilities were.

There was also a style of leadership that was one that I was seeing most commonly, which didn’t really align with the core skills that I had as a woman but also a lot of the core skills that other women have.

And we’re not really seeing those kinds of skills being replicated at a senior level, and that also has an impact on how well you believe that you’re able to get there and that you have the same right and the same ability to sit in these spaces of power.

So I did a lot of work on my own limiting beliefs, the blocks that I had around who I was, who I should be, what I wanted, who am I really. And that in and of itself has been a really inspiring and revelatory process for me that has enabled me now to do what I do. And I really just want other women to be able to cast off this old stuff too, because I want more for women.

I think it’s more crucial now than ever that women have got more influence, more confidence, more money. All of these things I think are critical. So I know that it’s completely possible to do because I’ve done it myself, and that’s what I want to bring to other women.

Are businesses doing enough to support their female employees, and why?

Short answer is no, they’re not.

The reality is that women are able to demonstrate the most valuable leadership skills. So empathy, emotional intelligence particularly, are the skills that are seen as the most valuable, the most powerful. And all of the research supports the fact that women typically demonstrate these better than men do.

There’s a lot of history around that, there’s a lot of our social programming, our conditioning. It’s not necessarily about our natural ability, but that’s where we are. Businesses with more women in senior positions make more money, they perform better, their teams are happier, and yet only one in five senior leaders is a woman.

So we know that women are really good at it, we know that it has this knock-on effect through to the bottom line, past all your people, and yet we still don’t have enough women. So that in and of itself should tell us no, businesses are not doing enough.

There are obviously some businesses that are doing well and definitely there are more improvements being made. I think the conversations are being had, the awareness is there, but it is still slow.

In terms of the why, there are a variety of different things and they’ll all be different depending on what the business is and depending on what’s going on. But we’ve historically got one type of person sitting in the seats of power and decision making, and that limits perspective and that limits the ability to embrace things which are different.

There’s an assumption that this is the way that good leadership is, and this is the way that we need to be. That’s just a kind of historical impact. There’s also the threat that comes with change and the fear that comes from change.

I know that particularly post-pandemic a lot of businesses are being resistant to things around flexibility. “Well if we’re more flexible for you do we have to do that for everyone? Are people going to be skiving off work and not doing anything properly?”

People have got really comfortable, particularly those who have succeeded in these spaces. They’ve got very comfortable with “this is how it is and therefore that’s how it has to be.

We have to hustle, we have to work hard, we have to stress, we have to sit in this very particular way of behaving. And if we’re not doing that, we’re not working hard enough, we don’t deserve it. If we’re not really stressed, we’re not really succeeding.

I think there can be a fear and a threat to things being different, there being a possibility for a different way of leading, a different way of thriving. That can sometimes be it—there’s just that slightly more primal thing of “oh god, I don’t want to have to change.

I think there’s also a lot of people just don’t think it’s really an issue. There are blinders on. People will think that they’re just hiring based on the best person and not necessarily looking at all of the additional factors that are influencing it, and where the best person might actually still not be able to get in front of you for an interview, let alone actually get the job.

There’s that. I think there’s also a reluctance to admitting the impact of privilege. And that’s not just gender-based but across the board.

I think we’re all collectively conditioned into seeing a particular type of person as a leader. We’ve all got our own baked-in biases and baked-in conditioning around that when we think about a leader. There’s still this assumption that that is what we need to be in order to fit that, which we all have to undo and we all have to reflect on, but that can also take a little bit of time.

Sometimes there’s a reluctance to do the work—whether it’s “it’s hard, I don’t have time,” or “it’s hard and I’m worried I’ll get it wrong.” That’s a really big blocker for people, particularly people who are in more senior positions thinking, “God, I’ve got to do everything and I’ve got to do it all perfectly and I’ve got to get it right first time,” rather than looking at how can I start, how can I just start.

And the underpinning of a lot of it is sexism. Just plain and simple. This assumption that women cannot do these things as well as men. This assumption that there’s no female talent. This assumption that men are in these positions and they are the only ones who deserve to be there, and if women deserve to be there they would be.

This assumption that the way that women might want to work, the way that women might need to approach things like flexibility—because obviously women are typically carrying greater burdens when it comes to childcare, when it comes to home life and so on and so forth—and it’s just thinking that women don’t deserve to have a seat at those tables in a lot of situations as well.

You help women overcome their fear of doing inner work. What does “inner work” mean to you?

Inner work is, for me, about really exploring what’s going on with you and getting to know yourself better.

For a start it’s just being in a place where you can understand how you are feeling, what are the contributing factors, being able to identify that. And sometimes it means identifying things that might be uncomfortable to admit or uncomfortable to actually face.

What can sometimes happen is that someone will say “I know I’ve got this thing and I know where it comes from, but I’m not willing to face it, I’m just going to ignore it.” And there’s sometimes this worry that actually by doing some work we’re going to have to relive them and face them. We might end up having to face different contexts about a situation and challenge our beliefs about the way that something has always been. That can sometimes be uncomfortable.

So I try and make sure that women don’t always have to go back and relive that if they don’t want to. There are ways to process these kind of stuck emotions and let them go without having to go back through that.

It’s really important that we’re in a space where we feel like we’re safe and that we can be vulnerable so that we can actually move through this stuff, because on the other side is where things get much lighter and brighter.

I think also for a lot of women that I speak to there can be a reluctance just to be selfish—or what they see as being selfish—when you’re doing something where you are thinking about yourself or talking to yourself, talking about yourself.

A lot of women really struggle with that notion. You know, this idea of “God, I’m going to spend an hour with somebody talking about myself, I can’t do that, they’re going to be so bored. I never talk about myself, I never think about my feelings because I’m so busy thinking about other people.” There can sometimes be a bit of resistance to it from that point of view as well.

So I really help support women into the space of it’s okay for you to have time where you are thinking about what’s going on with you. It’s not selfish to focus on you for a little bit of time.

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This exclusive interview with Lauren Paton was conducted by Megan Lupton of The Motivational Speakers Agency.