Born to Lead | with Suzanne Nadell

Do women need permission to become who God already wired us to be?

For a lot of Christian women, that question sits underneath our people-pleasing, fear of conflict, overthinking, and the pressure to stay “small enough” to be accepted.

In this episode, journalist and ministry leader Suzanne Nadell, author of Wired to Lead: Being the Leader the Church Didn’t Think You Could Be, talks about leadership, approval addiction, critical thinking, and the damage done by teaching believers not to question.

We explore:

• Why many Christian women struggle to trust their own judgment
• The difference between humility and learned powerlessness
• How approval addiction and lack of boundaries shape leadership
• Why critical thinking should not scare Christians
• The danger of outsourcing discernment to authority figures
• What journalism often gets right about rigor, debate, and asking questions
• How fear of conflict creates false peace inside churches
• Why people walk away from faith when they are not allowed to wrestle honestly

If you’ve ever felt torn between honoring God and fully using your voice, this episode invites you to rethink what healthy leadership, discernment, and maturity can look like inside the church.

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Learn more about Suzanne and her work:

• suzannenadel.com
• sheleadschurch.com

If you care about Christian communication done with more creativity and integrity, come see what we’re building at contrarytopopular.com. 

Transcript

Suzanne 0:02

As a woman, we don't want to be perceived as too aggressive or too bossy or too much. And if you're waiting for permission when you're confident that you can do it, you're just gonna get really resentful.

Julianne 0:13

For a lot of Christian women, the desire to lead is there. The gifting is there. But somewhere along the way, confidence starts feeling almost dangerous. And assertiveness can even be considered a character flaw. I'm Julianne Rhodes, and this is Contrary to Popular. Today I'm talking with Suzanne Nadell. She's a journalist and author of the book Wired to Lead. She talks about what happens when women are taught to wait for permission instead of learning to trust the gifts God gave them. And why critical thinking, honest wrestling, and healthy disagreement may be more important to the future of the church than we realize. Suzanne, thanks for joining us. Tell us what inspired you to write Born to Lead.

Suzanne 0:53

This book I had on my heart for a very, very long time. I was raised a preacher's kid, natural born leader. They say every preacher has one kid who has the gene very strongly. And that was definitely me and my family. However, in the circles that I grew up in, because of a woman, my opportunities of leading the church were more limited. So I went to college, waived my options. I fell in love with TV news, watching 2020 with my dad when I was in high school. And of course, when I went into TV news, I wanted to be a reporter on TV because that's what everyone wants to be, right? Uh, but I was quickly embraced in the TV news circles as a leader. And people pulled me aside, even from the first two years, being like, okay, you go the producing route. You're gonna go as far as you want to be. You know, being called tenacious, all these like, all these compliments for being who I naturally was that I really hadn't felt like I had heard much before. You know, it was always bossy or felt something was wrong because I managed to go to a Christian college and not get married, you know, but in a newsroom, very much embraced for being the leader I was wired to be. As I went up in news, I will say there was a period in my life where I became very resentful towards the church because I would see how men were welcomed and they were given immediate positions and all of these things. And it just kind of sat uneasy with me. And I to be honest, I think I went through a period where I was like, well, if if the church isn't gonna accept all of me, I don't know if I'm gonna give the church everything.

Julianne 2:28

What do you feel like causes people to look for permission to be the way they are? What is it that's driving that longing for permission?

Suzanne 2:38

Oh, wow. I love that actually. An article about this. I think a lot of it is especially as women, the way we're conditioned. Like, I'm not conditioning is the right word, but the way we're raised. It's to always, you know, be that good girl, make everyone happy, and you don't want to upset folks. I remember my first few years of journalism, you speak to anyone, their first few years of journalism are rough. I mean, you're making no money. I mean, it's really hard. And back in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, HR was not what it was now. And the things people said to you in a newsroom were hard. And I almost didn't survive my first two full years. And I called my dad to ask him if he would be upset with me if I left TV news to go into PR. But at the heart of it was, you know, we we want to please and we want to stay in line. And as a woman, we don't want to be perceived as too aggressive or too bossy or too much or any of those things. So we always feel like we have to navigate it and navigating that for us and feeling like we're doing it in a safe place often requires permission. And if you're waiting on for permission when you're confident that you can do it, you're just gonna get really resentful. Like I know I can do it, but nobody's giving me permission to do it. So now I'm really angry. Now I'm really just upset that I'm ignored.

Julianne 4:00

Yeah. And I feel like that leads to sort of a loss of agency and being able to trust yourself at all, trust your own judgment, trust the Holy Spirit in you, right? To be able to make these decisions if you feel like you have to always outsource them to the leaders in your life.

Suzanne 4:16

Right. And depending on your tradition and what you've grown up on, it's even clear into adulthood. Like you're not the leader of anything. So then, yeah, you question yourself. And you know, approval, addiction, people pleasing, lack of boundaries, all of those things. Those are things that especially Christian women struggle with. And it starts when we're little girls in Sunday school.

Julianne 4:40

And we don't grow out of it unless we work on it, right? Yeah, exactly. It'll always rear it. Yeah. I don't know if you've used the term learned powerlessness. Do you feel like some of what we call humility is actually holding us back? We call it humility, but we were just trained to behave this way, almost trained to be powerless.

Suzanne 5:04

And it's safe. It's safe and you're rewarded for it. And then our children see it. And if you have no other picture or example, then you really do feel alone and out on a limb. And if you have any sense of approval addiction or anything like that, it's gonna be really hard to do what you feel led to do. And use those gifts that God gave you. I mean, at the end of the day, he wired you to be the way you are for a reason. God made you that way. Use it. He didn't wire you that way to sit on your talents.

Julianne 5:41

Yeah. So how would you instruct someone who's trying to discern if they're really trying to live up to a certain character trait to be like Christ, or if it's something they were just sort of taught to do that it isn't actually internalized?

Suzanne 5:58

You know, wise counsel always at such a church word. Find a variety of people who you respect and can give you the feedback. One of the things the newsrooms did very well is I had a lot of female bosses ahead of me. And whenever I was told by a male boss that I needed to find my softer side, my two female executives, and I told them that story, they're like, oh no, oh no, what you did was absolutely correct. There was nothing wrong about what you did and how you did it. You did it with compassion and respect. You're not going to hear that feedback if you continue just to surround yourself in the same circles. Again, that's why widen your circle. Reach out to them. There are a lot of great organizations for women Christian leaders that are bubbling up, including the one I'm part of. She leads church. Uh, that's a little plug. Uh, you need help navigating those situations. But you also need to pray. Maybe there is something that I need to change in my approach. Katie Cole, who wrote a foreword to my book, I hired her as my coach and I did a whole life plan liturge. And she says, What about when you start to play victim? Oh. Okay. She caught that in conversation already that I have that tendency to play victim. And you know what? She wasn't the first person who said it. And they were all different people from different perspectives. And it was a real aha for me on how I was looking at myself and others in the words I was using.

Julianne 7:29

Yeah. That hits right to the heart, right? You can't escape it when you start hearing it in multiple places. Yeah.

Suzanne 7:36

Yeah. Yeah. What I do encourage anyone to do, no matter how you were raised, is to really study the context and the meaning of what you were reading in all parts of the Bible. What were the original words? There is nothing wrong with being a critical thinker as a Christian. Nothing wrong with being a critical thinker. Jesus challenged people all the time. There was critical thinking going on all the time. So to take a phrase from my mom, use your noggins. You know, somebody asked me once, we were having a news meeting, so we didn't know what protocol was. It's a protocol was to use your head. Um, but read with a critical lens and read different viewpoints.

Julianne 8:19

Do you feel like that's a skill that a lot of Christians struggle with? Just that that very critical wrestling sort of stance.

Suzanne 8:27

Yeah, because I think it's you're often taught not to question. Respect your elders, what they tell you. It's not a healthy submission. It goes down to the things that we're told as kids that it's wrong to question. You start kids who are very deep critical thinkers. You take boomers, you told them something they believed it, they would do it forever. So I think often some of that snapping about don't ask the questions is because the people they're asking don't even know. It's just what they were told. And the people above them were told not to ask.

Julianne 9:00

Yeah. And part of the beauty of giving people all the facts and letting them decide what they think is that's very empowering to the person, right? They're not being controlled and told what to think, but they're being empowered to think and being given good resources to do so.

Suzanne 9:17

And then especially when you're thinking about our children, then when they're challenged and they come upon tough times, their faith is deeper. They can speak to people differently. They can live differently because it's not just what someone gave them, it's what they know for themselves and in their heart. It's theirs. It's not someone else's.

Julianne 9:37

Is that something that you think journalism does better than the church, from what you've seen as far as allowing people to equipping people to think?

Suzanne 9:46

Oh, yeah. I mean, we we would always say like the better the news meeting, the better the newscast, then the better the ratings. Um, meaning we encouraged rigor, we encouraged debate, editorial meetings where people would be so passionate there were like almost tears in conversations, critical conversations, fearless conversations amongst people where you may not even realize like what you're saying is highly offensive, and them being like, Do you know what you just said to me? I mean, that's how you get to the bottom of it by having those conversations. So yeah, I mean, it was good, healthy debate and rigor is encouraged in a news editorial process. I don't think it's, you know, we're afraid of we're afraid of arguing. Nobody wants to say no. They want to preserve the relationship. It's very passive, very passive aggressive often in the church world.

Julianne 10:41

As though being a peacemaker means we're not allowed to ever disagree. Right, right. And really there's no peace in that at all. It's a false peace, right? Because it's basically just sit down and be quiet. And that's that looks peaceful on the outside, but if internally people are not convinced, then that's going to cause chaos later down the road. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So this culture that we have that we're seeing in the church where people are not encouraged or allowed to question and wrestle and have rigor, how do you see that affect people's relationships with God and their trust in him? Greatly.

Suzanne 11:26

Because bad things happen. And it's hard in a world, especially where you see other people and you think you should be happy, and it's hard to be honest with God. It's okay to be upset at the situation and ask God why, and being like, Where's my green pastor, God? You're not here with me. Okay, what good are you doing me? Why am I even coming here? Realizing that the world's gonna be rocky and it's not gonna be fair, and bad things are gonna happen to really good people. But God wants us to be with him, and that's where he leads us to that presence of peace. And if you're raised in a way where you think it's wrong to be upset or question or do any of those things, they're just gonna walk away. They're not gonna work it out, they're just gonna walk away.

Julianne 12:14

And isn't that what we're seeing is so many people walking away with their questions.

Suzanne 12:18

Yeah, and finding comfort and things that won't last. Yeah.

Julianne 12:21

So if the church changed its approach and really was concerned about preserving the agency of those within the body, encouraging questions, encouraging debate, encouraging the wrestling. What do you think would look different in the Christian faith as a whole?

Suzanne 12:40

I think our churches would be fuller on Sunday. I think we'd have a lot less of what we're fighting over every day. I think a lot of what hurts us would be solved if the church lived out the fruits of the spirit. More people would be taken care of, there would be less hungry kids, there would be less people on the streets, but there would be a lot less of the things that we fight about if we thought about loving God and loving people first.

Julianne 13:06

So when someone finishes your book, what do you hope they will be able to do differently in their lives?

Suzanne 13:15

I hope they will be able to advocate for someone who they see great leadership in. They know how to speak up and be like, I see that in you. I hope the women who are wired to lead who read it realize they're not alone and they will take the steps to either start groups or look for other women who are like them to form that community, speak up, give each other that permission that they're waiting for, even though they don't need it. Because I do believe we as women can make a big difference right now. I think we will make a big difference.

Julianne 13:51

Do you have any advice for the woman listening to this who is scared to death because she doesn't want to step outside of what the Bible does instruct her to be and go too far, become rebellious, or what are any of the other labels that women are afraid of?

Suzanne 14:11

Yeah, you know, that's tricky. There are ways you can still lead and do things and embrace who you are, ways to use your gifts and not be a senior pastor. You know, so okay, so you're gonna lead the women's ministry. You're gonna use those gifts where you believe it's okay that God place you to be like to the fullest. Even if you think there are limits, there are still ways you can embrace the talents and not sit on the talents that God gave you.

Julianne 14:39

Yeah, and not sin, right? Because that's ultimately what we're afraid of, I think, as Christians, right? I was even thinking about the Proverbs 31 woman the other day and how, you know, that that story could have been different, but she was an entrepreneur. She was out there hustling, you know, she was she was working hard. Like, and I think that says something that that was sort of set up as a woman to model ourselves after. I mean, there is this big looming question are we as women allowed to be bold? Are we allowed to be confident? Are we allowed to be bossy? Are we allowed to have good ideas and and express them openly because we don't we don't want to offend God, we don't want to do it wrong. But man, we are wired to lead.

Suzanne 15:20

Yeah, we are, you know, and and I think, you know, part of also realizing is that we're not we're not all alike. And I think it's one thing that women, if saith, struggle with a little more, is realizing that we're not all a specific mold.

Julianne 15:35

Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Suzanne. This has been good and so important for women, especially to be talking about our role in the kingdom. Thank you.

Suzanne 15:47

Thank you.

Julianne 15:47

I appreciate it. So tell us where we can find you and your book online and how we can connect with you. Okay.

Suzanne 15:53

Oh, yeah. So you can find out all about me at suzannenadell.com. Uh, I do a lot of support systems and courses and products, all designed to help with a woman, who I say is the wife, mom, boss, your juggling fakes, family, and career. The book wired to lead. Being the leader, the church didn't think you can be. You can get on Amazon or where books are sold. My big passion thing right now is I'm the CEO of an organization called She Leads Church, and you can find that at sheleadschurch.com.