SoulFIRE Leadership, LLC Announces New Book and Leadership Model for Senior Women in Finance and Tech

SoulFIRE Leadership: The Leadership Model Women Were Never Taught, endorsed by Jack Canfield, draws on founder Amanda L. Christian's 33-year corporate career to challenge the leadership models women have historically been expected to adopt.

RANGELEY, Maine, Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Women now hold 29 percent of C-suite roles in corporate America, according to McKinsey and LeanIn.org. In financial services and technology, 2024 World Economic Forum data put women's representation in senior leadership at 29.7 percent and 26.4 percent, respectively. Separately, experimental research from the University of Pennsylvania found that a committed minority reaching roughly 25 percent of a group can begin shifting established social norms.

Executive coach, author, and speaker Amanda L. Christian, CMC, IGNLP, argues that the convergence raises a question that representation numbers alone do not answer: If more women are reaching positions of influence, what happens if they no longer feel compelled to lead according to models they had to adopt to get there?

Christian, founder and CEO of SoulFIRE Leadership, LLC and creator of the SoulFIRE Method™, has released her new book, SoulFIRE Leadership: The Leadership Model Women Were Never Taught. Written for high-achieving women in male-dominated industries, from finance and technology to construction and manufacturing, the book examines what happens when professional success requires years of adapting, translating, and suppressing parts of how a woman naturally thinks, decides, and leads.

Christian's perspective is built on 33 years inside banking and technology. Over the course of her corporate career at the bank now known as Wells Fargo, she managed data centers, led teams of nearly 100 people across multiple locations, and at one point reached two levels below the CEO. She also co-authored the company's technology disaster-recovery plan and personally executed it during Hurricane Floyd and the September 11 attacks. Earlier in her career, mergers, leadership changes, and the loss of key sponsorship, among other factors, altered her trajectory and pushed her back down the organizational ladder. Those experiences now inform her work with women navigating many of the same structural dynamics.

"Women don't need another leadership model that teaches them how to become more acceptable to the system," said Christian. "Many of us became extraordinarily good at translating how we think, communicate, and make decisions into whatever the organization rewarded. My question is what becomes possible when enough women stop assuming that translation is the price of leadership. Representation matters. What we do with that representation matters too."

That distinction is central to SoulFIRE Leadership. Christian does not present the 25 percent social-change threshold as proof that women reaching a particular percentage of leadership will automatically transform an organization. Instead, she uses the research as a lens for examining critical mass: what may become possible when enough people stop reinforcing an established leadership norm and begin demonstrating a viable alternative.

The book carries an endorsement from Jack Canfield, co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and author of The Success Principles™. "Amanda L. Christian has written the book I wish every woman in leadership had read twenty years ago," Canfield wrote.

Early readers have described recognizing experiences they had struggled to name. "This book gave language to an experience I'd lived for years but couldn't articulate," said one early reader. "I finally understood that what I thought was personal failure was actually survival inside a system not designed to hold my brilliance."

Christian is a Master Life Coach certified through Elementum Coaching Institute, a certified Master NLP Practitioner, and a certified Impostor Syndrome-Informed Coach. Through SoulFIRE Leadership, she works with senior women in finance and technology, including directors, vice presidents, and C-suite leaders, helping them examine the gap between the leader they have learned to be and the way they actually think, decide, and operate.

Readers can access the book's introduction and first chapter free at amandalchristian.com/the-soulfire-leadership-book.

About Amanda L. Christian

Amanda L. Christian, CMC, IGNLP, is an executive coach, author, and speaker and the founder and CEO of SoulFIRE Leadership, LLC. Drawing on 33 years of leadership experience in banking and technology, she created the SoulFIRE Method™ to help senior women examine the patterns that can make professional success increasingly costly to sustain. Her work focuses on helping women align how they lead with how they are designed to operate, so success no longer comes at the expense of energy, clarity, or life outside work. She is based in Rangeley, Maine, and is the author of SoulFIRE Leadership: The Leadership Model Women Were Never Taught. Learn more at amandalchristian.com.

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