Sima Newell: The Power Code to Lead Without Burnout

Inside the signature method transforming how women lead, communicate, and thrive, without compromising their wellbeing.

In a world where high achievement often comes at the cost of burnout, Sima Newell is flipping the script. A former C-suite executive turned leadership coach, Sima knows firsthand the pressure, politics, and personal toll of climbing the corporate ladder. Today, she’s the visionary behind Executive Reflections and the Speak Up & Stand Out method — a transformative framework helping ambitious women lead with clarity, confidence, and healthy boundaries. From boardrooms to global coaching sessions, Sima is building a movement rooted in ethical leadership, communication mastery, and personal sustainability. For the woman who wants it all — success, purpose, and peace — Sima’s work offers more than coaching. It offers liberation.

What inspired you to transition from a C-suite executive role to founding Executive Reflections?

In short?  I was harassed in my C-suite role.  That was the beginning of a major life transition for me.  Looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened, but of course, in the moment, it felt so dark and heavy and bleak.

I was harassed and burned out.

To start the story from the beginning, some 20 years prior: I trained as an engineer, with a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from McGill University, graduating just in time to ride the new .com wave in the mid 1990s.  I got an 8-week contract in one of the UN agencies and moved from Canada to Switzerland. Fast forward 18 years, I was then Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS, and I was being professionally harassed by my supervisor, and I went on burnout leave. This was the moment I knew something had to change.

I’ll never forget the moment: I was upstairs in my mezzanine office, and I could hear the giggles and singing of my then-young daughter wafting up to me.  It was silent and snowy out, and the warmth in my home contrasted with the freezing at the window next to me. 

Inside, I was in turmoil, scared.  I was about to press send on a 1000-page harassment and bullying complaint against my then-boss, an Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations.

And I did it.  Because, to put it simply, my ethics conflicted with what I saw going on around me.  Perhaps you’ve also been in this kind of situation where you see executives leading with ego, making messes and expecting others to mop them up?

One door has to close for the next to open.

I felt compelled to speak up about what was going on and to ask for a better future. 

Long story short, I left that organisation and I took what I loved most from my leadership role – coaching and mentoring my team – and combined it with my long-lost dream of starting my own business, and my executive coaching business started. I started first with a partner, and then we both felt it was better to go separately and lead with our gifts, and so Executive Reflections was born.

They say one door has to close for the next to open, and that was exactly what happened for me. 

Your Speak Up and Stand Out method has transformed leadership communication for many women. What makes it so effective?

Before I can answer that, it’s important to understand what has been holding women leaders back.  The women who come to me tend to be told they are too direct or even aggressive (when men acting the same way would be called “assertive”), or they are so accommodating and willing to go the extra mile for results, that they wind up with all the projects but not the promotions.  

What holds women leaders back probably isn’t what you think.

And these women wonder what they are doing wrong, and it’s probably not what you think.

Here’s the real deal: We know from psychology and neuroscience that trauma crosses generations.  Our values and beliefs are easily traced back three generations in families.

The same goes for business.  Except in leadership, the “generations” in business are longer, usually 30 years.  So three generations back puts us directly to about… 1935? So our mentorship and our values that we are taught in leadership have deeply embedded masculine and industrial-revolution roots.  Nothing wrong with that at the surface, yet women’s strengths, on average, are different.

An example of that is from the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal.  VW’s then-CEO, a man by the name of Martin Winterkorn, was following in the footsteps of his mentor: Ferdinand Piëch.  Piëch’s mentor was his grandfather, Ferdinand Porsche, whose mentor was… Henry Ford.  That’s it. Three generations, and you’re in 1930s Detroit, living and working in the industrial era assembly lines. 

Today’s leadership demands exactly what women are best at.

And the thing is that in today’s VUCA world – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (and becoming more and more so at a very rapid pace) – all modern leadership research points to the most highly effective leaders being… Compassionate. Empathetic.  Low-Ego. Collaborative. Systems-Aware.  Having a Growth Mindset. Giving (with boundaries).  All things that women should excel at.

Except.

The rules have been stacked against us for hundreds of years. 

That’s where the Speak Up & Stand Out approach comes in. Rather than being told to raise our voices more (for the quiet ones) or to be more demure (for the louder ones), we need a different approach to communication.

I’ve taken everything I learned at work that got me up the ladder from individual contributor to manager, leader and C-suite, with an international flair as a diplomat, and everything I’ve learned training as a coach, and realised…. They are the same! The coaching training gave names and structure to techniques I had already been using and mastering, and that had served me in my leadership career.  

In communications, the subconscious is quick to judge.

Speak Up Stand Out offers fundamental communications skills that allow you to build almost-instant, subconscious-level relationships and connection and agreement with others.  And these are techniques that can be taught, practised and used by women to just side-step the whole problem. 

It’s like if you come to the edge of a raging river and it’s foggy and you’re trying to cross – either sloshing through thigh-deep, and getting soaked, or tip-toing on the rocks that are standing out, stuck in the middle, and wondering why you’re even there, when there’s a foot bridge 50 metres away, you just didn’t know because it was too foggy.  Take the foot bridge, and the problem is no longer a problem.  

My clients can manage conflict strategically.

My clients consistently come out of the programme being able to manage conflict effectively, understanding how to read personalities quickly and put that knowledge to strategic use, and they gain communication skills that boost their confidence, particularly when facing career changes or other sticky situations.

Because of everything I learned from the harassment, I’m also an expert in navigating toxic people and environments, and as a bonus in Speak Up and Stand Out, my women leaders learn to recognise what that manipulation game is and how to move right past it, using specific steps and techniques. 

Many women struggle with setting boundaries in high-pressure work environments. What strategies do you recommend?

The most important thing is that you know what you are setting boundaries around and why.  Part of this is getting to know yourself and putting your “Big Stones”, as Steven Covey covey called them first. What is important to you?  What’s simply not negotiable?

And then… what is negotiable?  What are you willing to trade in a pinch?  And monitor that.  Maybe even though you put family first, you’re willing to work the occasional weekend.  The problem happens when “occasional” slowly becomes “most” and finally creeps into “every”.  Then you have a problem.

So you need to know what’s important, you need to keep your bargaining chips, you need the powerful communications skills in place to negotiate confidently and effectively and in ways that won’t backfire on you, and you can set those boundaries.  

What shifts are you seeing in leadership styles as more women step into executive roles?

I see a bifurcation.  So many women told me that other women were their worst bosses.  And that was the case for me too, with my harasser.  Some women are so aggressive and so manipulative and so toxic, their leadership is devastating.  And I believe they learned that by following the masculine toolkit along with a great dose of aggressive ambition and high ego, with possibly a pinch of disordered personality thrown in to create true controlling misery.

Then, there’s another set of women – we are open, collaborative, compassionate, yet powerful and grounded and strong and don’t take BS.  These leaders have very high emotional intelligence, are well-connected, personable, and blend ambition with meaning in their work. They are inspiring. I call them the balanced powerhouses because they move the needle forward with a lot of power, while also being mothers, sisters, daughters and friends in a very open, kind and warm way.  It enables a healthy balance for their teams. 

You’ve worked with women leaders worldwide—what success story stands out to you the most?

It’s hard to choose – I’ve seen incredible transformations over the years.  But perhaps I’ll take a recent success story. I have one client, Shelley, who is a perfusionist. That’s the person running the heart-lung machines in the operating room.  She is a serious, steady, caring woman. 

Shelley became a first-time leader about 2.5 years before she joined the Speak Up and Stand Out programme.  At that point, she had been promoted from individual contributor, jumping a level and had become a Director, overseeing four teams of perfusionists in four hospitals.  

Shelley is the most generous giver

Shelley is the embodiment of a nurturing caregiver.  She is always thinking of others first and felt such poor confidence in herself when she joined.  She was also working nights and weekends and was on call essentially 24×7 because of a structural issue in the team she inherited. In her words, she felt overwhelmed, ill-equipped, and struggling to keep up at work.

Shelly is one of those lovely, kind people who always put others first – just the kind of person you want at your side in a medical emergency! But her giving nature was compounded by the nature of her job to create a disaster around work-life boundaries, and her health was suffering.

If someone has to respond to an emergency and a team member says they can’t then yes, Shelley will step in, drive to work, get herself decked out in the green scrubs, and into the OR. This kind of work makes work-life balance and setting boundaries even harder, because you can’t just say “no” in a situation like that.

In just six months, she…

… re-oriented a problem player

… got free time back

… leads with greater confidence.

Within only six months – Shelly is part of my Next Level programme for graduates of Speak Up and Stand Out – she had been able to secure a very important re-structuring, moved on someone who had been confusing the team, pitched and secured a new position reporting her, and finally began to feel true confidence in herself as a person and strength as a leader. She is setting herself up to have others spread the on-call load and to develop a healthy work-life balance.  And she has the knowledge, skills and confidence to do this. 

What daily or weekly habits do you recommend for maintaining resilience and preventing burnout?

I love systems, and I have a whole system connecting the daily to weekly to quarterly to yearly for my clients.  It’s so beautiful, my teenage daughter had me make quarterly planners just for her.  When she learned that planning is about emotions, not just time-keeping, she was hooked.  And this is the key to maintaining resilience.

Quarterly time to reflect

Perhaps as a preface, it’s important to set yearly personal goals and to reflect at the end of each year on what worked and what didn’t.  Burnout creeps up on us, so creating that sense of a positive future is so important.

Then, to move your year forward, you need to plan each quarter.  I recommend a process of reflecting both on what you want to do and what you want to let go of.  What are you grateful for?  And what do you need to accomplish this quarter, both professionally and personally?

Weekly celebrations & power questions

Which brings us to the weeks.  Each week, it’s important to write down the five things that happened last week that you can CELEBRATE!  We all forget to celebrate our wins.  Yet our brains won’t focus on the wins if we’re not intentional about it.

Then, I love to start my week with five questions:
1. How are you feeling?
2. What is already stressing you?

3. What would make that less stressful?

4. What are your top three focus areas this week (the must-happens)?
5. What self-care activity will you do daily this week?

These questions cut through all the planning nonsense and help you feel well.  I go much deeper with my Next Level clients on this, and we revisit this process each quarter so they are set up for success.

Daily journaling, meditation and gratitude

Finally, the daily habits:  in the morning, I recommend Julia Cameron’s morning pages routine.  Take 10 minutes and write your train of thought out. This gets all the gunk cluttering your head out on paper and frees your creativity and empowers you.  It’s not literature; you don’t need to keep it; you can burn the pages later if you like.  I find a diary dump makes meditation easier because the spinning thoughts are safely captured on paper, and your mind is free to calm down.

For bad days, when you wake up feeling awful, here’s what I recommend: take a sheet of paper, and write the numbers 1 through 25 down the paper.  Then fill it in with 25 things you are grateful for.  Start each statement with “thank you”.
It might be something like…
“1. Thank you for my eyesight.
2. Thank you for the running water in my house.
3. Thank you to my friend for listening yesterday. Etc.”

You may feel hard pressed at first, but after getting started, most people find it’s easy to continue and go past even 25 things.  And at the end, you feel GREAT and BOLD and POWERFUL and HAPPY and even in the dark times, this really works.  It doesn’t remove the problems you have, but it does give your brain a lot of other things to focus on that are happening at the same time. 

I do have a burnout-proof boundaries guide available for free on my website, under “resources.”

As a side note, I find the link between improving communications and increasing resilience to be fascinating. So many women come to me for communication up-levelling, and they are at the point where they are already compromising their boundaries and their health and teetering on burnout. 

How do you help women leaders navigate workplace politics while staying true to their values?

The first step is to know yourself.  What lights you up?  What is your deeper purpose as a person and a leader?  There’s a process I go through with my Next Level clients and my private clients to draw this out.  

Values alignment is essential

And then… What are your values?  We list them and prioritise them.  And there’s a way to do that productively, because what many coaches and clients come to find is that what comes up first often isn’t the most important values someone has, so you need to keep digging to find what’s important and meaningful. 

Then we explore where those values are not being honoured at work, and why?  Is it a values misalignment?  If that’s the case, we explore what that means for you in terms of short and long-term consequences and what to do about it.

Leading with curiosity goes a long way

Or perhaps, you need to uplevel your curiosity and understand the reasons behind the politics?  Why is this other position being taken?  It’s like a disco ball with thousands of little mirrors all reflecting different things.  And your side is reflecting one set of things, and the person with the politics may be seeing something different.  When you understand that and master your ability to connect and be assertive and authentic at the same time, then it is much easier to navigate the politics.

So in the first case, there is a values-level issue, and in the second, it may seem like a values-level issue, but it’s actually solvable by engaging and communicating more openly and with curiosity.  These are the skills I teach in Speak Up and Stand Out, with what you need for everyday alignment, and how to effectively handle difficult conversations or conflict.

In either case, the short-term solution is going to be around communicating and negotiating and advocating to ensure your core needs are met.  So that’s where the right process – something like Speak Up and Stand Out – is so valuable, because it gives you the confidence to handle any situation well and to stay authentic and in integrity towards yourself and others.