Why Sustainable Leadership Starts with Knowing Your Hormone Cycles

By Sarah Vancini

Strong leadership, to me, starts with the ability to zoom out and see the bigger picture while following through on the details. The core competencies I believe define strong leaders are strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, clear communication, adaptability, accountability, and self-leadership. 

It is not just about being productive or organized. It is about knowing how to guide people, make sound decisions, and create momentum in a way that is sustainable.

I care about learning how to work with our hormonal cycles instead of against them. 

I have found that leadership is more effective when I align the type of work I am doing with the phase I am in. When I feel more energized, social, and externally focused, that is often the best time for client calls, pitching ideas, presenting strategy, or leading collaborative discussions. When I am in a more inward and reflective phase, I am stronger at reviewing systems, refining messaging, and making decisions.

I have seen this play out in my work. Building marketing infrastructure projects, like setting up hidden fields in Typeform and integrating Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Google Ads tracking, and Zoho CRM across multiple forms, required precision, patience, and systems thinking. Working with a B2B electrical equipment distributor shifting from word-of-mouth and cold calling to paid media across Google, LinkedIn, YouTube, and retargeting required more big-picture thinking, planning, and growth strategy. Strong leaders know how to move between those modes.

I believe women develop strategic thinking by creating more space to think beyond immediate execution. A lot of women are incredibly strong operators. We know how to get things done. But strategic thinking grows when we ask better questions: What problem are we really solving? What will matter six months from now? What patterns are showing up? What would make this easier to scale?

That kind of thinking has been critical across my work. Building campaigns for luxury beauty brands required a very different kind of strategic thinking than promoting SaaS educational products. One was about luxury positioning, brand perception, and sales psychology. The other was about community trust, education, and local relevance. In both cases, strategy mattered more than tactics.

I have also had to strengthen this skill through product and business development. With an AI marketing tool we launched, strategic thinking meant looking beyond deliverables and thinking through pricing, subscription tiers, projected growth, and long-term positioning. That kind of work forces you to think in systems, not just tasks.

The habits that strengthen leadership effectiveness are the ones that build clarity and consistency. For me, those include regular journaling, intentional planning, energy awareness, clear communication, strong boundaries, and continuous learning. I have found it especially helpful to track when I feel most creative, analytical, or outward-facing, because that helps me schedule the right work at the right time.

I have seen how important those habits are in client work. When evaluating underperforming ad funnels or improving campaign performance, leadership means not reacting emotionally to results but instead stepping back, looking at the data, and making grounded decisions. The same was true when I created segmented email campaigns for a Fortune 500 medical device company across different customer behavior groups. That work required me to hold multiple audience journeys at once, stay organized, and communicate clearly and compassionately.

One underrated leadership habit for women is treating rest as part of strategy. I do not think effective leadership means showing up the same way every day. I think it means understanding your rhythms and using them wisely. 

For me, syncing work to hormonal cycles has made leadership feel more sustainable, intuitive, and effective.

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www.storieswithsubstance.com