First-time manager coaching is structured, ongoing support that helps newly promoted leaders build the habits, judgment, and confidence they need to manage people effectively. Unlike a training workshop, coaching focuses on real workplace situations: the delegation conversation that went sideways, the feedback a new manager keeps postponing, the team dynamic that no one warned them about.

For HR professionals, coaching is one of the most practical tools available for supporting the individual contributor-to-manager transition. It bridges the gap between what a new manager learns in orientation and what they actually need to do on Monday morning.

Why First-Time Managers Struggle After Promotion

Promoting your strongest individual contributor is a reasonable decision. It rewards performance and fills a gap. The problem is that the skills that make someone an outstanding individual contributor (personal output, deep expertise, self-reliance) are not the skills that make someone an effective people leader.

• A substantial preparation gap exists: a Center for Creative Leadership study found that almost 60% of first-time managers reported receiving no training when they entered their first leadership role. Separately, Gartner found that 40% of managers with two years or less of experience struggled to support their teams; these findings do not establish a 60% failure rate within 24 months.
• Gallup’s research makes the business case plain: managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. When a first-time manager struggles, the impact is not limited to that one person. It ripples through their entire team, showing up in turnover, missed performance expectations, and disengaged employees.
• DDI’s 2024 coaching analysis found that 85% of HR respondents said coaching skills would be critical for leaders to develop in the next three years. It also found that 31% of frontline leaders wanted more coaching from their managers; DDI’s “nearly 40%” figure refers more broadly to leaders reporting inadequate coaching.

The transition is genuinely difficult. New managers must shift from “I succeed through my own work” to “I succeed by enabling others.” That identity change does not happen automatically, and it cannot be covered in a two-hour orientation session.

The Common Friction Points in New Manager Transitions

Most first-time managers run into the same set of challenges, regardless of industry or organization size. Understanding these friction points helps HR design coaching that addresses real problems rather than abstract leadership concepts.

• Letting go of individual work. High performers are often promoted because they do things well. Their instinct in a new management role is to keep doing the work themselves, because it feels faster and safer. Delegation requires trust, clear communication, and a willingness to let someone else’s approach be “good enough.” That takes practice.
• Giving feedback. New managers frequently know when something is not working but avoid addressing it directly. The feedback conversation feels risky. They do not want to damage the relationship or seem critical, especially when managing former peers. Without coaching, avoidance becomes a habit, and performance problems compound.
• Managing former peers. This is one of the most uncomfortable parts of the transition. Yesterday’s colleague is now an employee. Boundaries shift. Friendships get complicated. New managers need support navigating these changed relationships with both consistency and care.
• Setting expectations. Many new managers assume their team already knows what is expected. They do not clearly define goals, decision rights, or communication norms. When those expectations go unstated, confusion follows.
• Handling conflict. Most new managers have no training in conflict resolution. When team tension surfaces, they either overreact or avoid it entirely. Neither response builds team trust.

How Coaching Differs from Training and Mentoring

HR teams often have training programs in place for new managers. Those programs matter. But training alone rarely changes behavior, and confusing coaching with training leads to underinvestment in both.

• Training teaches core concepts, tools, and processes. A new manager needs to understand the performance review process, know how to document a performance issue, and be clear on company HR policies. Training delivers that foundational knowledge efficiently and at scale. It is a necessary starting point.
• Mentoring offers experience-based guidance from someone who has been in a similar role. A mentor can share organizational context, offer informal advice, and help a new manager navigate unwritten rules. This is especially valuable in the first few months, when a new manager is still learning how the organization works.
• Coaching is different from both. A coach does not give answers or share personal experience. Instead, coaching helps the manager reflect, practice, make better decisions, and build the habits that translate training into real leadership behavior. It works on the specific situation the manager is in right now: the difficult conversation they need to have tomorrow, the delegation challenge they have been avoiding, the team dynamic that is starting to create problems.

The strongest new manager support programs combine all three. Training covers knowledge. Mentoring covers context. Coaching covers application.

One more distinction worth making: coaching should be developmental, not remedial. Too many organizations only introduce coaching after a manager is already struggling, which makes it feel like a consequence rather than a resource. When coaching is offered as a standard part of the leadership transition, new managers are more likely to engage with it honestly and use it well.

The Coaching Topics New Managers Need Most

Coaching works best when it is grounded in real situations. The topics below represent the areas where first-time managers most consistently need structured support. HR can use these as a curriculum map, with the understanding that priorities will vary based on role, team size, and business context.

Role Clarity and Expectations

Many new managers start their role without a clear picture of what success looks like in the first 30, 60, or 90 days. Coaching can help them answer specific questions: What decisions are theirs to make? What requires escalation? What are the team’s current performance goals, and how does the manager’s role connect to them?

HR plays a critical role here too. Aligning the new manager, their direct leader, and the team on expectations early reduces the confusion that causes many early failures.

Delegation and Prioritization

New managers frequently try to keep too much work. They are used to being the person who executes, and handing things off feels risky. Coaching provides a space to work through questions like: What should only you handle? What work can be delegated for team development? What does “done well enough” actually mean for each type of task? How do you follow up without micromanaging?

This topic connects directly to workload sustainability. A new manager who cannot delegate will burn out, and their team will not grow.

Feedback and Difficult Conversations

The ability to give specific, timely, respectful feedback is one of the most important management skills, and one of the hardest to develop without practice. Coaching helps new managers prepare for real conversations: an underperformer who needs a direct message, a team member who missed a deadline, a peer dynamic that is creating friction.

Role-play is a particularly effective coaching format for this topic. Practicing a difficult conversation before it happens reduces anxiety, improves clarity, and gives the manager a chance to get feedback on their approach before the stakes are real.

Communication and Trust Building

First-time managers are closely observed by their teams. Every interaction sets a tone. Coaching covers the mechanics and the meaning of management communication: how to run one-on-ones effectively, how to listen rather than just respond, how to adapt communication style to different team members, and how to stay consistent between what is said and what is done.

Psychological safety, the condition where team members feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and acknowledge mistakes, is built or eroded through these early management behaviors.

Coaching Their Own Employees

One of the most underserved coaching topics for new managers is how to coach. DDI’s research found that coaching skills are among the most critical competencies HR leaders expect leaders to develop. Yet most new managers have never been shown how to ask a good coaching question, support a direct report’s development goals, or avoid the trap of solving every problem for their team.

First-time manager coaching should include at least some focus on helping new managers understand what it means to lead with a coaching mindset. This has downstream effects on team development, employee retention, and the manager’s own effectiveness over time.

Self-Awareness and Leadership Style

Assessments can be a useful tool when used well. CliftonStrengths, DISC, 360 feedback, or leadership-specific assessments can help a new manager understand their natural tendencies and blind spots. The goal is not to label the manager but to give them useful information for reflection. A coach helps translate assessment results into specific behavioral commitments rather than abstract self-knowledge.

How HR Can Structure Coaching for First-Time Managers

The format of coaching matters as much as the content. HR teams can choose from individual coaching, group coaching, peer coaching, or a blended model. The right choice depends on the manager’s situation and the organization’s resources.

Start Before or Immediately After Promotion

Waiting until a manager is already struggling is a missed opportunity. Ideally, HR identifies likely first-time managers before a promotion is finalized and introduces coaching as part of the transition process.

Pre-promotion coaching topics include: motivation for moving into management, realistic expectations about the role, self-awareness about strengths and gaps, and readiness for people leadership. For high-performing individual contributors, this kind of early conversation can prevent the most common early failures.

If pre-promotion coaching is not feasible, the first 30 days after promotion are the highest-leverage window. That is when new managers are most open to input and most in need of structure.

Build a 90-Day Coaching Plan

A structured 90-day plan gives both the new manager and HR a shared framework for the early transition. Here is a practical model:

• Days 1-30: Role and Relationship Clarity Coaching focus: understanding expectations, meeting the team as a manager, establishing one-on-one rhythms, identifying early risks or concerns. Practice assignment: draft a listening plan for the first month. What do you need to learn, and from whom?
• Days 31-60: Core Management Habits Coaching focus: delegating one meaningful responsibility, preparing for a feedback conversation, setting team priorities, managing time and boundaries differently than before. Practice assignment: hold one structured delegation conversation and reflect on how it went.
• Days 61-90: Accountability and Confidence Coaching focus: addressing performance concerns early, navigating conflict, asking for feedback from the team and from their own leader, adjusting habits based on what is working and what is not. Practice assignment: run a brief team retrospective or pulse conversation to get structured input from direct reports.

New managers should leave each coaching session with one concrete behavior to practice before the next session. Reflection without action does not build habits.

Use Group Coaching for Shared Challenges

Group coaching works well when multiple new managers are navigating similar transitions at the same time. A cohort of newly promoted managers can work through common challenges together (delegation, feedback, conflict, communication) in a structured, facilitated format.

SHRM notes that group coaching creates a safe place for new managers to ask questions and learn from their peers. That shared context reduces the isolation that many first-time managers feel and normalizes early-stage struggles.

Effective group coaching typically includes eight to twelve participants, meets monthly, focuses on a specific topic each session, and builds in real scenario practice. This format is scalable and lower-cost than individual coaching, making it a practical option for organizations with limited budgets.

Use Individual Coaching for Sensitive or Complex Situations

Some situations require the privacy and depth of one-on-one coaching. These include confidence issues, difficult team dynamics, stakeholder conflict, performance concerns about a specific team member, or preparation for a stretch assignment or promotion conversation.

Individual coaching gives the manager space to work through the specifics of their situation without concern for how it looks to peers. PathWise’s career and leadership coaching offers personalized support with clear coaching objectives, progress evaluation, and optional assessments, well suited for new managers navigating complex or high-stakes transitions.

Pair Coaching with Mentoring and Direct Leader Support

Coaching is most effective when it sits inside a broader support structure, not as the only resource a new manager has. A practical model for HR to design around is a support triangle:

The coach focuses on reflection, skill application, and working through real situations. The mentor provides organizational context, navigational wisdom, and informal perspective. The direct leader is responsible for expectations, timely feedback, and accountability.

HR’s role in this model is to make sure each layer is in place and that responsibilities do not overlap or cancel each other out. A new manager who has all three types of support is significantly better positioned than one who has only training materials and a well-meaning manager who is stretched too thin.

HR’s Role in Making Coaching Scalable

Individual coaching relationships are valuable. But an HR team responsible for developing multiple new managers at once needs more than a case-by-case approach. The goal is a flexible, repeatable system.

Create a Manager Coaching Playbook

A coaching playbook does not need to be complicated. It should answer: Who is eligible for coaching and when? What is the expected cadence of sessions? What is the boundary of confidentiality? What topics are in scope? How does HR receive feedback on whether the program is working?

Documenting these answers reduces confusion, sets expectations with both managers and coaches, and makes the program easier to sustain as the organization grows.

Train Senior Leaders to Reinforce Coaching

Coaching will not hold if senior leaders model different behaviors. If a manager’s boss rewards individual heroics over team development, delegation will feel risky. If no one in leadership models feedback conversations, new managers will not prioritize them either.

HR can work with senior leaders to ensure they actively reinforce what coaching is building: delegation, regular one-on-ones, direct feedback, and giving new managers room to learn from mistakes.

Give New Managers Tools They Can Use Immediately

Alongside coaching, new managers benefit from practical tools they can reach for in the moment: a one-on-one meeting template, a feedback conversation guide, a delegation checklist, a 30-60-90 day planning worksheet. These tools extend coaching into everyday practice and reduce the “now what do I actually do?” anxiety that many new managers feel.

Connecting coaching to broader career development resources for HR teams ensures that new manager development is part of a coherent employee development system rather than a standalone intervention.

How to Measure Whether Coaching Is Working

HR teams are often asked to justify the investment in coaching. The good news is that coaching produces measurable signals at multiple levels, even if direct ROI calculations require careful interpretation.

Manager-Level Measures

Track self-reported confidence before and after coaching, completion of development goals, attendance and engagement in coaching sessions, feedback from the manager’s own leader, and 360 or pulse feedback from their team where appropriate. These signals tell you whether the individual manager is progressing.

Team-Level Measures

Track employee engagement or pulse scores within the coached manager’s team, team retention rates, internal mobility, performance consistency, and the frequency of escalations to HR. These signals tell you whether the manager’s development is translating into better team experience. Be careful not to over-attribute team outcomes to coaching alone, as many variables are at play.

Program-Level Measures

Track overall participation rates, promotion success rates among coached managers, time-to-confidence (which can be assessed through self-report or manager feedback), manager retention in the 12 to 24 months after promotion, and common themes emerging across coaching cohorts. Patterns across cohorts can also inform improvements to training content, onboarding, and manager development planning.

Research on career coaching and employee retention consistently shows that structured development support improves both manager effectiveness and retention. Coaching is not a cost. It is an investment in the people who most directly shape employee experience.

Common Mistakes HR Should Avoid

Even well-intentioned coaching programs fail when the design misses a few key points.

• Waiting until a manager is struggling. Late coaching can feel punitive, like something reserved for people who are not doing well. Coaching offered early, as a standard part of leadership transition, normalizes it and increases honest engagement.
• Treating coaching as a replacement for training. New managers still need foundational training on company policies, performance processes, compliance requirements, and core management skills. Coaching is not a substitute. It helps apply what training teaches.
• Leaving the new manager’s leader out of the loop. If the direct leader is not setting clear expectations, giving timely feedback, and reinforcing development goals, coaching is working against a headwind. HR should treat leader support as a shared responsibility, not delegate it entirely to the coach.
• Offering content without practice. New managers do not need more information. They need repetition, reflection, and real-world application. Coaching that stays in the abstract, talking about feedback without practicing it or discussing delegation without making a real commitment, will not produce behavior change.

Sample First-Time Manager Coaching Plan

Here is a practical framework HR teams can adapt:

• Month 1: Clarify the Role Coaching focuses on understanding expectations from the manager’s leader, meeting team members individually, establishing a regular one-on-one rhythm, and identifying early risks. Practice assignment: draft a team communication plan or a first 30-day listening tour.
• Month 2: Build Core Management Habits Coaching focuses on delegating one meaningful piece of work, preparing for a feedback conversation, setting team priorities, and discussing time management and boundaries. Practice assignment: hold one structured delegation conversation and reflect on the outcome.
• Month 3: Strengthen Accountability and Confidence Coaching focuses on addressing any performance concerns early, navigating conflict that has surfaced, asking for feedback from both the team and the manager’s own leader, and adjusting leadership habits based on what is working. Practice assignment: run a team retrospective or brief pulse conversation.
• Months 4-6: Deepen Leadership Effectiveness Coaching focuses on team development, stakeholder management, learning how to coach direct reports, and setting longer-term manager development goals. Practice assignment: build a development plan for one direct report.

Build Better Managers Before Problems Escalate

First-time managers do not need to figure it out alone. They need a structured support system that turns leadership concepts into daily habits, before the pressure builds and the team starts to feel the gap.

HR’s role is to build that system. Training covers foundational knowledge, coaching handles real-world application, mentoring provides organizational context, and direct leader support creates accountability. When those pieces work together, newly promoted managers are far more likely to build the confidence, competence, and team relationships that make them effective.

For HR teams looking to build stronger new manager development programs, PathWise’s support for organizations and HR professionals offers career development resources, structured learning, and practical tools designed to help employees grow at every stage of their careers. Individual new managers ready to accelerate the transition can explore 

PathWise’s personalized coaching services to work through real leadership challenges with an experienced coach.

Early career development programs are structured support systems for students, recent graduates, interns, and junior employees in the first few years of work. They combine learning, coaching, mentorship, and feedback into a deliberate framework that helps people build the skills and direction they need to grow.

These programs serve two audiences at once. For employers, they reduce turnover and build a more capable internal talent pipeline. For universities, they help students and alumni move from campus to career with greater confidence and clarity. The most effective programs bridge both sides of that transition.

Who Counts as Early Career?

“Early career” covers more ground than most program managers assume. It includes current students in internship or co-op roles, recent graduates entering the workforce for the first time, junior employees in their first two to three years at a company, alumni returning to work or making early pivots, and career changers who are new to a specific field or industry.

Eligibility should follow program goals, not age or graduation year. A 35-year-old entering a new field for the first time has early career needs. A recent graduate in a senior-facing role may not. Define the audience by where participants are in their career journey, not when they were born.

Why Early Career Development Matters Now

Engagement and retention are urgent business problems. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report, global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, with lost productivity estimated at $10 trillion. Manager engagement fell from 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025.

Early career employees absorb this most directly. Early-tenure attrition is a material risk: Work Institute’s 2025 Retention Report estimates that as much as 40% of overall employee turnover occurs during the first year of employment.

In Work Institute’s 2025 Retention Report, career was the largest reported category of 2024 departures (18.9%), followed by work-life balance (11.9%) and management (9.7%); total rewards accounted for 8.2%.

On the university side, employers increasingly expect graduates to arrive with more than academic knowledge. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) updated its Career Readiness Competencies framework in December 2025, defining career readiness as the foundation from which college-educated talent can demonstrate the core competencies needed for workplace success and lifelong career management. 

The eight NACE competencies are career and self-development, communication, critical thinking, equity and inclusion, leadership, professionalism, teamwork, and technology.

LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report adds that career progress is the number one motivation for employees to learn. When that progress stalls, they leave. Organizations classified as career development champions deployed 33% more career development practices than peers with less mature programs, and were 42% more likely to be frontrunners in AI adoption.

Set Goals Before Choosing Activities

The most common mistake in early career program design is leading with activities. A mentorship program, a speaker series, and a rotation schedule are means to an end. Program design should start with outcomes, not programming.

Before choosing any activity, answer two questions. First, what does the organization need from this cohort in six months? In two years? Second, what does the participant need to feel capable, confident, and committed?

Outcome Goals for HR and L&D Teams

Employers should tie program goals to measurable business results. Common targets include reducing time-to-productivity for new hires, increasing retention at the six-month and two-year marks, improving readiness scores before promotion decisions, building a more diverse internal pipeline for management roles, and reducing dependence on external hiring by increasing internal mobility.

Many HR teams now combine structured learning with individual development planning to align employee growth with organizational skill gaps. For a practical framework on this approach, the skills-based career development model provides a useful starting point for connecting participant growth to business capability goals.

Outcome Goals for University Career Services

Career services teams face different pressures. Their goals typically center on improving career readiness scores and self-efficacy for graduating students, increasing employer placement rates and alumni employment outcomes, strengthening employer partnerships and alumni mentoring networks, and scaling career advising beyond one-to-one appointments.

Build the Core Program Architecture

Once goals are set, the structure follows. Strong early career development programs combine five core components. The weight of each depends on the audience and program length, but all five should appear in some form.

Career Readiness Curriculum

The curriculum answers one question: what do participants need to know and be able to do? For employers, this maps to technical skills, company-specific knowledge, and core professional competencies. For universities, the NACE framework provides a ready structure.

Effective curricula go beyond one-time workshops. They sequence learning across the program timeline so skills build on each other. Communication and professionalism come early. Decision-making, self-advocacy, and leadership concepts come later, when participants have enough workplace context to apply them.

Coaching and Career Navigation

Early career employees often know what they want to do next week. They rarely know what they want in five years, or how to get there. This is the gap that career coaching fills.

Career coaching helps participants understand their strengths, articulate their interests, and map available options to real career paths. Assessments used early in a program give both the participant and their manager useful data about working style, values, and development priorities. Without this layer, many early career employees drift rather than grow.

Mentorship and Peer Networks

Mentorship provides something curricula cannot: access to lived experience. A mentor who navigated a similar transition can reduce the anxiety of uncertainty and give concrete advice that no training module can replicate.

Effective mentorship in early career programs is structured, not accidental. It includes clear expectations, a consistent meeting cadence, and conversation guides that keep discussions productive. Peer cohorts add a second layer, connecting participants with colleagues who share similar challenges and can hold each other accountable.

Both matter for inclusion. Underrepresented talent often lacks access to informal networks and senior sponsors. Structured mentoring relationships reduce that gap in a way that organic networking cannot.

Manager Enablement

Programs often fail not because the curriculum is wrong, but because managers are unprepared to support it. A participant who attends a skills workshop on Monday and has no follow-up conversation with their manager by Friday will not retain or apply what they learned.

Manager enablement means giving supervisors the tools they need to be active participants in development. This includes check-in guides for development conversations, prompts for structured feedback, guidance on scoping stretch assignments, and clear expectations about their role in the program. When managers are prepared, learning transfers. When they are not, it stalls.

Experiential Learning

Early career employees learn by doing. Case studies and lectures build awareness; projects and rotations build capability. Programs that include real work, such as cross-functional assignments, capstone projects, job shadowing, or presentations to senior leaders, produce stronger skill development and higher engagement.

Stretch assignments are particularly effective. They signal trust, create visible accomplishment, and give participants something concrete to discuss in future career conversations.

Sequence the Learning Journey

Most programs run better when they follow a deliberate arc rather than offering disconnected activities month to month.

• Phase 1: Onboarding and Belonging (weeks one through four). Start with orientation, expectations, manager alignment, and peer connection. This phase is about reducing anxiety and establishing psychological safety. Early wins matter here: small, achievable tasks build confidence and signal to participants that they belong.
• Phase 2: Skills, Feedback, and Exploration (months two through six). Introduce career courses, assessments, coaching sessions, and structured feedback conversations. This is where most of the curriculum runs. Participants should be actively exploring what they are good at, what they enjoy, and how those connect to potential paths inside the organization.
• Phase 3: Mobility and Next-Step Planning (month six onward). Shift focus to career path conversations, internal mobility options, individualized development plans, and longer-horizon goal setting. For university programs, this phase often involves alumni engagement, employer connections, and transition support for students approaching graduation.

Tailor the Program by Audience

For HR and L&D Professionals

Employer-run early career programs benefit most from a blended delivery model: self-guided digital resources, cohort learning events, live coaching, manager guides, and periodic pulse surveys. This structure scales without requiring a full-time program manager for every cohort.

The business case should be assessed with organization-specific retention and mobility outcomes. In LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report 2025, career-development champions were more likely to be confident in their ability to retain qualified talent (67% versus 50% among other respondents), though this association does not establish a fixed retention rate for development or mentorship programs.

Linking program participation to measurable outcomes, such as retention rate, internal mobility, and promotion readiness, gives HR leaders the data they need to sustain budget support year over year.

Explore career development resources for organizations to see how PathWise supports scalable employee development programs for HR teams and people leaders.

For Colleges and Universities

Career services teams often run lean. A single advisor may be responsible for hundreds of students and alumni simultaneously. Scalable resources such as articles, assessments, career courses, and online events extend the team’s capacity without adding headcount.

The university-to-employer transition is one of the most disorienting career shifts a person navigates. Students know how to succeed academically; they are far less certain how to succeed professionally. Career readiness programming that runs throughout a student’s enrollment, not just in the final semester, produces significantly better outcomes than last-minute placement support.

Find out how PathWise helps institutions amplify career services impact for students and alumni through scalable career resources, events, and development tools.

For Joint University-Employer Partnerships

Some of the most effective early career programs live at the boundary between campus and employer. These partnerships may include employer panels embedded in career services events, alumni mentoring networks that connect graduates with current students, co-branded internship readiness workshops, and structured post-graduation transition support.

Both sides benefit. Employers get earlier access to prepared talent. Universities demonstrate tangible career outcomes to prospective students and accreditors. The shared investment produces stronger results than either party achieves working alone. The broader strategy of future-proofing employee careers applies equally to how universities prepare students for the workforce.

Measure Program Success

Participation rates are a floor, not a ceiling. A program where everyone attended every session but no one applied anything is not a success. Measurement should track behavior change and business outcomes, not just completion.

• Engagement metrics provide the baseline. Track attendance, course completion rates, coaching session usage, mentoring connection rates, and event participation.
• Development and readiness metrics reveal whether participants are growing. These include pre- and post-assessment scores, manager feedback ratings, self-reported confidence in specific competencies, and career plan completion rates.
• Talent and business metrics connect the program to organizational outcomes. Track ninety-day and one-year retention rates for program participants versus non-participants, internal mobility rates, promotion readiness scores, and for university programs, employer placement rates and alumni engagement levels.

The Deloitte 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which surveyed more than 22,500 respondents across 44 countries, found that only 25% of Gen Z workers and 21% of millennials prefer rapid career progression. 

Most prefer gradual growth and lateral moves to build skills for long-term success. Programs that measure only promotion rates will miss this reality. A participant who moved laterally into a better-fit role is a program success, not a retention failure.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Using generic content. Leadership development modules designed for mid-level managers rarely serve a 23-year-old in their first full-time role. Early talent needs content scoped to actual early career challenges: professional identity, workplace norms, feedback literacy, self-advocacy, and early career decision-making.
• Treating mentorship as the whole program. Mentorship is valuable. It is not a program by itself. A mentor can offer perspective and connection, but cannot replace curriculum, coaching, or structured feedback. Programs that consist entirely of a mentor matching system underdeliver on development.
• Skipping manager and advisor enablement. The people responsible for daily contact with participants need tools, not just intentions. An unsupported manager defaults to existing behaviors. An under-resourced career services advisor defaults to appointment-only support. Both groups need structured guidance to play an active role.
• Measuring only attendance. Attendance proves people showed up. Outcomes prove people grew. Build a measurement model before the program launches, not after, so you know what data to collect from day one.

How PathWise Supports Early Career Development

PathWise offers a flexible support layer for both organizations and universities running early career programs. For employers, PathWise provides career resources, online events, short courses, coaching packages, assessments, tools, and templates that extend a program’s depth without requiring everything to be built in-house. 

For colleges and universities, PathWise helps career services teams reach more students and alumni with structured, self-guided resources that free advisors to focus on higher-value, personalized engagement.

Whether your program is early-stage or ready for its next evolution, explore career development resources for organizations or reach out to PathWise to discuss how to support your early talent goals.

Books to improve communication skills work because they slow down a skill most people only practice under pressure. A reader can study how to listen, ask better questions, and handle conflict before trying those moves in a real conversation. That preparation turns vague advice into a specific, repeatable behavior.

The goal is not to memorize a script. The goal is judgment: knowing what to say, when to say it, and how to say it so another person actually understands you.

Why Reading Changes How You Communicate

Communication breaks down for a small number of predictable reasons. People assume instead of asking. They react instead of listening. They reach for vague language when the moment calls for something precise.

Books help because they name these patterns before you meet them in real life. You can read a chapter before a difficult conversation, then try one technique instead of guessing. That repetition, spread out over weeks instead of crammed into a single high-stakes moment, is what makes the change stick.

Aura Intelligence’s year-end analysis of U.S. job postings found that communication accounted for 25.5% of listings in its most recent benchmarking report, ahead of management and customer service (Aura Intelligence). Employers are not asking for charisma. They are asking for a skill that can be studied and practiced like any other, which is exactly what the right books to improve communication skills are built to teach.

What Recent Research Says About Communication Skills At Work

The evidence for treating communication as a trainable skill, not a fixed personality trait, keeps getting stronger.

Even as generative AI reshapes daily work, human communication remains the skill employers say they cannot automate around (Castrillon).

Listening specifically has a measurable effect on trust. Leadership research firm Zenger Folkman found that managers rated as poor listeners ranked in only the 15th percentile for trust among their teams, while managers who listened well reached the 86th percentile (MacArthur).

That gap is not cosmetic. Trust affects whether people tell a manager about a problem before it becomes a crisis. Listening is a large part of what closes that gap, which is why several of the books below spend more time on hearing people out than on speaking well.

Quick Self-Assessment: Name Your Communication Bottleneck

Before picking a book, name your problem as a behavior, not an identity. “I’m introverted” is not a bottleneck. “I avoid speaking up in meetings” is.

Match your pattern to one of these categories:

• Clarity issues show up as long explanations, vague requests, or messages that need several follow-up questions to make sense.
• Connection issues show up as polite but distant responses, where people answer your questions without ever opening up.
• Confidence issues show up as over-preparing for simple conversations or staying silent when you have something useful to add.
• Conflict issues show up as escalation, or the opposite: going quiet and withdrawing the moment someone disagrees with you.
• Influence issues show up as hearing “no” repeatedly without ever learning what is actually driving the resistance.

Once you know your category, the reading list gets much shorter.

How To Choose The Right Book For Your Specific Goal

The right books to improve communication skills depend on the moment where you struggle most. That keeps you from reading five overlapping books that all say the same thing in different words.

If starting conversations is the hard part, look for books built around openers and social comfort rather than general theory. If disagreement is the hard part, prioritize books built around conflict, not books about charisma. If your goal is workplace impact, look for books that teach clarity, feedback, and influence specifically, since general social skills do not always transfer cleanly to a meeting room.

Best Books For Active Listening And Being Fully Present

Active listening is the skill most communication problems trace back to, and it is also the most trainable.

Just Listen, by psychiatrist Mark Goulston, builds around a simple idea: people resist you less when they feel heard first. The book’s core technique, mirroring back what someone just said before responding, works because it lowers defensiveness before you say a single word of your own.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, is built around a concept the authors call the “pool of shared meaning,” the idea that a conversation improves as more relevant facts and feelings get safely into the open. The book is built for exactly the moments where pausing before you react matters most: performance conversations, disagreements with a boss, and conflicts that have been avoided for too long.

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, by Marshall B. Rosenberg, teaches a four-part structure: observation, feeling, need, and request. It is slower than natural speech at first, but it removes blame from requests, which is why it works well for reflecting meaning back to a speaker during tense conversations.

Best Books For Small Talk And Everyday Conversation Comfort

Confidence in casual conversation comes from curiosity, not from memorized lines.

How to Talk to Anyone, by Leil Lowndes, offers a large set of concrete behaviors: how to enter a group conversation, how to exit one gracefully, and how to read a room before you speak. Treat the techniques as prompts to experiment with, not a script, or they will sound rehearsed. PathWise has seven practical tips for starting any conversation that pair well with the book’s more detailed behavioral breakdowns.

The Fine Art of Small Talk, by Debra Fine, breaks ordinary social moments into steps: starting a conversation, sustaining it, and exiting without awkwardness. Fine’s most useful point is about silence. A pause is often the other person processing, not a sign the conversation has failed.

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, remains one of the best-selling nonfiction books ever published for a simple reason: its core advice, showing sincere interest in other people and avoiding needless friction, still holds up.

Best Books For Deeper Connection And Trust

Depth in conversation depends on safety. People share more when they believe they will not be judged or rushed toward a solution.

Supercommunicators, by Charles Duhigg, argues that every conversation is really one of three types: practical, emotional, or social, and miscommunication often happens when two people are having different types of conversation without realizing it. Naming which type you are in changes what “listening well” even means in that moment.

We Need to Talk, by Celeste Headlee, focuses on habits that build trust over time: staying present, asking clear follow-up questions, and resisting the urge to fix a problem before someone has finished describing it. Depth also needs limits. Empathy without any boundary becomes emotional overload for the listener, and Headlee is direct about that tradeoff.

Best Books For Professional Writing And Workplace Clarity

Workplace communication rewards clarity over eloquence. People need to know what you mean and what you want them to do next.

The Pyramid Principle, by Barbara Minto, teaches a structure used widely in consulting: lead with your main point, then support it with grouped, logical evidence underneath. It is one of the more mechanical books on this list, which is exactly why it works for reports and executive summaries.

Everybody Writes, by Ann Handley, is built for anyone who communicates mostly through email, documents, and messages rather than meetings. It is direct about cutting throat-clearing sentences and getting to the point faster, which is useful for anyone who wants to sharpen unclear writing at work without sounding curt.

Best Books For Leadership, Influence, And Negotiation

Ambiguity from a leader gets expensive fast. When leaders are unclear, teams fill the gap with assumptions, and that slows execution.

Radical Candor, by Kim Scott, argues that feedback should be caring and direct at the same time, not one traded off against the other. Scott’s framework is one of the clearer answers to how to give feedback that is honest without being harsh.

Influence, by Robert B. Cialdini, explains the principles behind why people say yes, including reciprocity, social proof, and scarcity. The book is frequently misread as a manipulation manual. Cialdini’s actual argument is closer to the opposite: influence works best, and lasts longest, when it is used transparently.

Never Split the Difference, by former FBI negotiator Chris Voss, treats negotiation as a form of tactical empathy rather than a contest. Voss’s central technique, naming the other person’s emotion out loud (“It sounds like you’re worried about the timeline”), defuses tension before either side has to make a concession.

Best Books For Public Speaking And Thinking On Your Feet

Public speaking becomes manageable when you lean on structure instead of hoping for inspiration in the moment.

Talk Like TED, by Carmine Gallo, breaks down recurring patterns in memorable talks: a strong opening story, a small number of core ideas, and language built for listening rather than reading. The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking, by Dale Carnegie, is older but still useful for its emphasis on preparation and repetition over raw talent.

Best Books For Emotional Intelligence Under Pressure

Emotional intelligence changes how a charged moment plays out. It is the difference between naming what you feel and simply reacting to it.

Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence remains a common entry point for understanding how emotion shapes behavior before logic gets a say. Emotional Intelligence 2.0, by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, turns that theory into a daily practice, with specific habits for self-awareness and self-management rather than abstract concepts. A fair test of progress with either book: can you say what you feel without attacking, and ask for what you need without demanding it?

Best Books For Body Language And Reading People Accurately

Nonverbal signals shape trust because people look for consistency between what you say and how you act while saying it.

What Every BODY Is Saying, by former FBI agent Joe Navarro, explains common nonverbal cues while stressing that context matters more than any single gesture. Use it to build awareness of your own signals first, since that is where the highest return is.

Talking to Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell, comes at this from the opposite direction. It examines why people are so often wrong when they try to read strangers, arguing that most of us default to believing people are telling the truth, a tendency that usually serves us well but occasionally fails badly. It is a useful corrective for anyone who thinks they can accurately read a stranger in a first meeting.

Best Books For Difficult Conversations And Conflict Repair

Most people either escalate a conflict or avoid it entirely. Both responses skip the part where the actual disagreement gets addressed.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen, separates every hard conversation into three layers happening at once: what happened, the feelings involved, and what it says about each person’s identity. 

Naming which layer is actually driving the tension is often the fastest way to de-escalate it. It pairs naturally with Crucial Conversations and Nonviolent Communication, covered above, since all three treat conflict as a skill rather than a personality trait to manage around.

How To Turn These Books Into Real Skill

Reading is step one. Practice is what turns an idea into a skill you actually have.

1. Pick one technique from a chapter you just read.
2. Use it in one real conversation that same day, even a low-stakes one.
3. Write a single sentence afterward about what changed.
4. Repeat with one new technique per week instead of trying to apply an entire book at once.

This method works well with Crucial Conversations and Nonviolent Communication in particular, since each chapter maps to one specific, rehearsable behavior.

Recommended Reading Paths Based On Your Goal

Pick the path that matches your biggest bottleneck, then commit to practicing it before moving to the next book.

• Social confidence: How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), then The Fine Art of Small Talk (Fine).
• Conflict skill: Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg), then Crucial Conversations (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler).
• Workplace clarity: The Pyramid Principle (Minto), then Everybody Writes (Handley).
• Leadership: Radical Candor (Scott), then Influence (Cialdini).
• Public speaking: Talk Like TED (Gallo), then The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking (Carnegie).

Common Mistakes People Make When Applying Communication Advice

The most common mistake is sounding scripted. A technique should support your own voice, not replace it.

The second is ignoring context. A direct style that works well in a status meeting can fail badly in a personal argument, and a warm style that works with friends can read as vague in a negotiation.

The third, and most common, is treating this as a speaking problem when it is usually a listening problem first. Confident speakers who read Just Listen or Crucial Conversations are often surprised by how much of their communication trouble was actually about attention, not vocabulary.

Turn Better Communication Into Career Momentum

Strong communication only pays off if you can use it under real pressure at work: in a meeting, a written update, or a conversation you have been avoiding. 

The books to improve communication skills above build the framework, but practice under real feedback is what makes it stick. Explore career services for coaching that turns a chapter into a habit, or reach out to the PathWise team to build a plan around the specific conversations you find hardest.

An internal mobility strategy is an organization’s deliberate approach to moving employees into new roles, projects, and development opportunities without losing them to a competitor. It includes promotions, lateral transfers, cross-functional rotations, stretch assignments, mentoring relationships, and internal gigs. The goal is to make growth inside the company as visible and accessible as growth outside it.

For HR and talent leaders, this is increasingly the clearest answer to a persistent problem: high-potential employees who cannot see a future with their current employer will build one somewhere else.

What Is an Internal Mobility Strategy?

Internal mobility is not a job board. It is a system. Promotions are one form of mobility, but so is moving a project manager into a business development role, placing an operations analyst on a cross-functional product team, or creating a mentoring track for employees preparing to move into management. Each of these creates real development without requiring a resignation.

An internal mobility strategy formalizes how those movements happen. It defines the pathways, the eligibility criteria, the application process, and what role managers are expected to play. Without that structure, access to opportunity depends on personal networks and visibility to senior decision-makers. That means the employees most likely to move are often the most connected, not the most ready.

Research from LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found that about half of surveyed organizations are prioritizing internal mobility in the year ahead, with 55% of career development champions naming it as a higher priority than the year before. Organizations that embed internal mobility within a broader career development system report stronger employee retention and higher confidence in their ability to attract and keep talent.

Why High-Potential Employees Leave When Mobility Is Weak

Career Growth Feels Invisible

High-potential employees are often willing to be patient. What they will not tolerate is ambiguity about whether opportunity exists at all. When organizations do not communicate available roles, define what skills lead to advancement, or explain how internal candidates are selected, employees draw their own conclusions. Most of those conclusions lead to job searches.

Preventable turnover, including exits driven by career stagnation and weak management support, accounted for 63% of all exits in 2024, according to reporting from The HR Source on the 2025 Retention Report. 

The majority of those employees did not leave for a dramatic pay increase. They left because they stopped believing growth was coming.

Managers Hoard Talent

One of the most common and least-discussed barriers to internal mobility is manager behavior. Talent mobility research from Fuel50 shows that 50% of managers admit to discouraging employees from pursuing internal opportunities, and 74% of low-performing organizations identify manager talent hoarding as their biggest obstacle to an effective internal mobility program.

The cause is not usually malice. Most managers are measured on their team’s output and headcount, not on how many employees they develop and send elsewhere. That incentive structure makes blocking movement a rational response to an irrational system. Fixing it requires changing what managers are rewarded for, not just training them to behave differently.

Promotions Are Treated as the Only Growth Path

When upward movement is the only acknowledged form of advancement, organizations create a bottleneck. There are fewer senior roles than there are people ready for more responsibility. Employees who cannot get a promotion face a binary choice: wait indefinitely or leave.

Lateral moves, cross-functional rotations, and project-based work expand those options. They create genuine development without requiring a new title. But this only works if HR treats them as real growth, not as consolation. Employees notice when lateral moves happen only after a promotion falls through. The message it sends is that internal movement is second-best, and it accelerates exits.

Development Is Disconnected From Workforce Needs

Many organizations invest in learning and development without connecting that investment to actual internal opportunities. Employees complete training and earn certifications that do not map to any visible next step. When development feels abstract rather than directional, the motivation to engage drops.

A strong internal mobility strategy changes this by linking skills-based career development directly to role requirements. Employees need to see which skills lead to which roles. Managers need the information to identify who is ready. Without that connection, learning becomes a perk, not a pathway.

The Core Elements of an Effective Internal Mobility Strategy

Transparent Career Pathing

Employees need to see where they can go and what it takes to get there. That means publishing role families, defining competencies at each level, and showing both vertical and lateral options explicitly. 

Career paths should be documented in a format employees can access without requesting a meeting with their manager.

Skills-Based Talent Visibility

HR cannot match employees to opportunities without knowing what employees know and what they want to do next. Skills profiles, self-assessments, periodic career conversations, and manager input create the data layer that makes proactive mobility possible. 

This same information feeds succession planning and helps identify who is ready to cover critical roles before those gaps become problems.

Internal Opportunity Marketplace

A talent marketplace gives employees one place to see open positions, short-term assignments, project roles, and rotations. It removes the hidden-network effect that concentrates access among the most politically connected employees. 

Over 80% of organizations now identify internal talent mobility as a significant or critical part of their talent strategy, according to HR.com’s 2025 Talent Mobility Programs research. Despite that, only 25% of organizations fill more than half their open roles with internal candidates. The gap between intention and execution is largely a visibility and process problem, not a talent problem.

Manager Enablement and Accountability

Managers are the single largest factor in whether internal mobility works or fails. Training managers to have career conversations matters. Changing what managers are measured on matters more.

Organizations serious about retention include talent development metrics in manager scorecards. They recognize and reward leaders who develop and export talent across the company. When developing people becomes a performance expectation, talent hoarding carries a real career risk rather than remaining a safe default.

Learning, Coaching, and Career Support

Mobility works better when employees have substantive support, not just access to a job board. Employee career development programs that combine learning resources, coaching, tools, and templates give employees what they need to pursue opportunities with confidence. When HR connects that kind of structured support to the mobility program itself, participation rates increase and transitions go more smoothly.

Explore career growth solutions for employees and teams to see how structured career development resources can complement an internal mobility program at scale.

How to Build an Internal Mobility Strategy Step by Step

Step 1: Identify Retention and Mobility Risks. Review turnover data among high-potential employees. Run stay interviews to learn what employees would need to stay long-term. Analyze promotion patterns and exit interview themes to find where growth bottlenecks are most concentrated.

Step 2: Define Priority Talent Segments. Segment by high-potential employees, critical roles, emerging leaders, and scarce skills. Use documented, transparent criteria for who qualifies for accelerated development. Programs that appear exclusive or arbitrary lose credibility quickly and can lower engagement across the broader workforce.

Step 3: Map Skills to Future Roles. Identify what capabilities the business will need in the next two to three years. Build role profiles with specific skill requirements and connect your learning investments to those profiles so employees know exactly what to develop to qualify for roles they want.

Step 4: Create Mobility Pathways. Formalize the routes: promotions, lateral transfers, project-based assignments, rotations, mentoring tracks, and leadership development programs. Each pathway needs a defined process, including how employees express interest, how managers respond, and what HR does to support the transition.

Step 5: Remove Policy and Process Friction. Review eligibility rules, required tenure before an internal move, and how long the transfer process takes. Employees who feel penalized for exploring internal roles will stop applying. Internal candidates should be treated at least as well as external ones.

Step 6: Communicate the Program Clearly. Tell employees what exists, how to access it, and what success looks like. Share stories of employees who moved across the organization. Normalized internal movement signals that career growth inside the company is real and available, not something that only happens for a chosen few.

How HR Can Retain High-Potential Employees Through Mobility

The most effective retention intervention is a proactive one. Career conversations should start in an employee’s first year, not when they hand in a resignation. Holding them consistently, at minimum twice annually, surfaces aspirations before frustration sets in.

Career coaching for employee retention is most effective when it begins early. Coaching helps employees clarify their direction, identify readiness gaps, and prepare for moves before a specific opportunity opens. Reactive coaching, after an employee is already disengaged or actively interviewing externally, is significantly less effective at producing lasting commitment.

Normalize lateral moves by recognizing them publicly. When the organization celebrates an employee who moved from analytics into a strategic planning role, it signals to the rest of the workforce that growth here does not require a linear path. Reframing lateral mobility as deliberate career development rather than a workaround changes how employees interpret internal movement.

Connect mobility explicitly to succession planning and the leadership pipeline. Rotations, stretch assignments, mentoring, and coaching are not supplemental HR programs. They are the mechanism through which future leaders build breadth, judgment, and cross-functional credibility. Organizations that treat these as optional miss their most reliable tool for developing leaders who are ready when they are needed.

Common Internal Mobility Mistakes to Avoid

• Creating an internal job board without a strategy. A job board is infrastructure. Without manager enablement, skills visibility, and proactive career conversations, it shows employees what they are not being considered for without explaining what they can do about it.
• Letting managers block movement without accountability. Without governance structures and escalation paths, manager resistance quietly kills programs. Pairing accountability mechanisms with incentives for managers who develop exportable talent produces better results than training alone.
• Prioritizing only top performers. Programs that serve only a designated high-potential group send a message to everyone else: development here is conditional on being selected. Broad access to career resources keeps engagement higher across the full workforce, even when targeted coaching is limited to specific segments.
• Failing to measure outcomes. Without data, internal mobility becomes a feel-good initiative that gets cut when budgets tighten. Measurement is what transforms a program into a business strategy.

Metrics HR Leaders Should Track

• Retention metrics: Retention rate among high-potential employees, overall regrettable turnover rate, and retention rate in the 12 months following an internal move. If employees who move internally stay significantly longer than those who do not, the program is producing its intended effect.
• Mobility metrics: Internal mobility rate, internal fill rate, time to complete an internal move, promotion rate, and lateral move rate. A healthy annual internal mobility rate sits between 15% and 20%. Rates below 10% typically indicate the program is not reaching enough of the workforce to create meaningful cultural change.
• Development metrics: Learning engagement, coaching participation rates, career conversation completion rates, and measurable progress against identified skill gaps. These leading indicators predict future mobility and retention outcomes before they show up in turnover data.
• Equity and access metrics: Mobility participation rates by department, level, and demographic segment where data is appropriate and legally permissible to track. Programs that concentrate opportunity among employees with the strongest networks or most visible managers reproduce the same inequities they were designed to address. Watching for those patterns is part of running a program that actually works.

For additional context on how organizations are using AI-driven skills matching and talent marketplace tools to accelerate internal candidate identification, see internal mobility in the AI era.

How PathWise Can Support Internal Mobility Programs

Internal mobility programs work best when employees have substantive support, not just access to information. Structured learning, career coaching, tools, and community give employees what they need to identify their direction, close skill gaps, and pursue opportunities without waiting for their manager to initiate the conversation.

PathWise provides career development resources for HR teams, including courses, coaching, frameworks, and community, designed to support employees at every career stage. For HR and talent leaders building or strengthening a mobility program, scalable infrastructure like this reduces the burden of trying to deliver individualized development support with a lean team and a constrained budget.

Build Careers Employees Do Not Have to Leave For

High-potential employees stay when they can see a future inside the organization. That requires more than a promise of growth. It requires transparent paths, skills visibility, manager accountability, structured development resources, and measurement that proves the program is doing what it was designed to do.

The organizations with the strongest retention records are not waiting for disengagement to surface a problem. They are building environments where career growth is visible, supported, and achievable without switching employers.

If your organization is ready to strengthen its approach to employee development and internal career support, explore PathWise for organizations and HR professionals or contact us to discuss how PathWise supports career growth at scale.

Career coaching and training are not rivals. Training builds specific skills at scale, teaching many employees the same knowledge or process in a consistent way. Career coaching is personalized, helping one employee apply growth goals to their own role, challenges, and next career move.

For HR and L&D leaders, the better question is not “which one wins?” It is “which one fits this growth goal, this employee segment, and this business outcome?” Training is stronger when many people need the same capability. Coaching is stronger when the need is individual: clarity, confidence, behavior change, or readiness for a bigger role. The decision usually comes down to five factors: the goal, the audience, the scale, the complexity, and the kind of change you want.

What HR and L&D Leaders Are Really Comparing

This is not only a format comparison between a workshop and a one-on-one session. The real comparison sits underneath the delivery method.

The choice usually breaks down along four lines:

• Standardized learning versus individualized development
• Knowledge transfer versus behavior change
• Short-term capability versus long-term growth
• Scalable rollout versus tailored, high-touch support

Most learning and development strategy decisions are a trade between reach and depth. Training reaches many people quickly. Coaching goes deeper with fewer people. A blended learning approach uses both on purpose, matching each to the barrier it solves best.

According to the Association for Talent Development, training is just one form of employee development. Coaching, mentoring, informal learning, self-directed learning, and experiential learning sit alongside it. That framing matters: training and coaching are both tools in the same development toolkit, not opposing camps.

Quick Decision Rule

Use training when many employees need the same knowledge or skill. Use career coaching when employees need clarity, reflection, accountability, or guidance specific to their situation. Combine both when employees need to learn a skill and then apply it to career growth, leadership readiness, or a real workplace challenge.

What Is Traditional Employee Training?

Traditional employee training is structured learning built to teach specific knowledge, skills, processes, or behaviors. It is competency-based and designed to be delivered the same way to many people.

Common formats include workshops, learning management system (LMS) courses, webinars, certifications, compliance modules, instructor-led sessions, and self-guided courses. A skills gap analysis often drives what gets built, and completion data shows who finished. Training tends to be event-based or program-based, with a clear start, content, and assessment.

The strength of training is repeatability. When a process changes or a new tool launches, training gives every employee the same baseline and a shared vocabulary.

Where Training Works Best

Training is the right call when the growth need is standardized and the same answer applies to everyone.

Strong use cases include:

• Onboarding new hires into roles and systems
• Compliance and regulatory requirements
• Tool or system adoption, such as a new CRM
• Product knowledge for sales and support teams
• Process changes that affect a whole department
• Foundational management skills for new people managers
• Broad skills programs in negotiation, networking, or storytelling

Training works here because it delivers consistency, repeatability, measurable completion, and a common language across teams. When the goal is “everyone needs to know this,” structured training is hard to beat on cost and speed.

Where Training Can Fall Short

Training struggles when the barrier is not knowledge. Motivation, confidence, identity, career direction, workplace relationships, and personal leadership style rarely change because someone finished a module.

Completion does not equal application. An employee can pass a leadership course and still avoid the hard conversation it was meant to prepare them for. One-size-fits-all programs also miss employees who arrive with different goals, contexts, or starting points. A high performer and a struggling new hire sitting in the same workshop often need very different things from it.

What Is Career Coaching?

Career coaching is a personalized development process that helps an employee clarify goals, identify strengths and gaps, work through challenges, and build a practical growth plan. It is goal-oriented and tailored to the individual rather than standardized.

Coaching is not limited to one level. It can support professionals from early career through the executive suite, focusing on career direction, personal effectiveness, leadership, advancement, and specific workplace challenges. A new individual contributor might use coaching to choose a direction. A senior leader might use it to strengthen influence and executive presence. The format stays personal; the content shifts with the person.

The defining feature is context. Coaching helps an employee apply insight to their actual role, their actual goals, and their actual decisions, not to a generic case study.

Where Career Coaching Works Best

Coaching earns its cost when the growth need is individual and there is no single right answer to hand the employee.

Strong use cases include:

• Career pathing and internal mobility decisions
• Preparing a high performer for promotion
• Supporting a leadership transition
• Developing high-potential employees
• Retaining a valued employee who feels stuck
• Helping a disengaged employee re-find direction
• Navigating a complex or political workplace challenge
• Building executive or leadership effectiveness

For organizations supporting employees through personalized career coaching, the value shows up in moments that a course cannot script: the peer-to-manager shift, the decision to stay or leave, the confidence to lead.

What Coaching Adds That Training Often Cannot

Coaching contributes things that a standardized program is not designed to deliver. It builds reflection and self-awareness, which a slide deck cannot force. It sets personalized goals tied to one person’s situation.

It creates accountability between sessions, so learning turns into action. It helps employees apply ideas to real workplace situations as they happen. It supports confidence and decision-making when the path is unclear. And it gives employees a focused space to work through complex transitions where there is no obvious correct move.

Career Coaching vs Training: The Key Differences

The clearest way to compare the two methods is across the criteria HR and L&D leaders actually weigh when designing programs.

• Purpose. Training teaches a defined skill, process, or body of knowledge. Coaching helps employees apply insight, make decisions, and grow in context. One transfers content; the other develops the person using it.
• Scale. Training is easier to deliver broadly across teams, departments, or the whole company. Coaching fits targeted groups, critical roles, and individual development moments. This is the core cost-and-reach trade-off.
• Personalization. Training is standardized by design, which is its strength for consistency. Coaching is tailored to the employee’s goals, strengths, challenges, and role, which is its strength for relevance.
• Measurement. Training measures completion, assessment scores, certification, and skill demonstration. Coaching measures goal progress, behavior change, manager feedback, engagement, retention, internal mobility, and promotion readiness.
• Time horizon. Training is often short-term or event-based, with a defined endpoint. Coaching is often ongoing and developmental, tied to longer-term career outcomes.

Which Works Better for Employee Growth?

Neither is universally better. Training grows capabilities. Coaching grows an employee’s ability to use those capabilities inside the real context of their career. The honest answer is that “better” depends on the growth goal.

If the goal is skill acquisition, training usually wins. If the goal is career clarity, behavior change, confidence, leadership readiness, or retention, coaching usually wins. Most organizations need both because they are pursuing several of these goals at once.

The research backs the importance of getting this right. The 2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report found that 36% of organizations qualified as career development champions. Compared with other respondents, champions were more confident in attracting qualified talent (71% vs. 58%) and retaining qualified talent (67% vs. 50%); these findings show correlation, not causation.

Leadership training was the most common practice, offered by 71% of organizations, which shows how often structured programs and individualized development run side by side.

Training Works Better When the Growth Need Is Standardized

Some growth needs apply to everyone in the same way. These are training problems.

Clear signals include statements like:

• “Everyone needs to learn the new CRM.”
• “All managers need a shared framework for performance reviews.”
• “Employees need compliance training this quarter.”
• “A team needs baseline negotiation, networking, or storytelling skills.”

For professional growth topics like decision-making, negotiation, networking, personal branding, storytelling, and career change, structured career learning gives a whole population the same foundation at a predictable cost. Self-guided courses scale in a way one-on-one work never can.

Coaching Works Better When the Growth Need Is Individualized

Other needs are specific to one person and resist a standard answer. These are coaching problems.

Clear signals include statements like:

• “This employee has potential but lacks clarity on next steps.”
• “A new manager needs help shifting from peer to leader.”
• “A high performer is disengaged and may leave.”
• “An executive needs to strengthen influence and impact.”

Each of these involves judgment, identity, and context. There is no module that resolves them, which is exactly where career coaching for employees does its best work.

The Strongest Programs Often Combine Both

Training and coaching reinforce each other when used together. Training introduces the concepts and the shared language. Coaching helps the employee apply those concepts to their own goals and behaviors.

Coaching also reveals which training would be most valuable next, surfacing the real gap rather than the assumed one. Courses then provide scalable learning between coaching sessions, keeping momentum without consuming a coach’s time. The result is a development path where structure and personalization feed one another.

A Practical Decision Framework for HR and L&D Teams

Use this simple framework to decide between coaching, training, or both. It moves from the goal, to the barrier, to the audience, to the measurement plan.

1. Start with the development goal. Get specific before choosing a method. Are you closing a skills gap, improving performance, preparing employees for advancement, increasing retention and engagement, or supporting career mobility? The goal points to the method more reliably than personal preference does.
2. Match the method to the barrier. If the barrier is knowledge, use training. If the barrier is application, use coaching or manager support. If the barrier is career uncertainty, use career coaching. If the barrier is inconsistent baseline capability, use training first. If the barrier is sustained behavior change, combine coaching and training.
3. Segment the audience. Match the approach to the group. The broad employee population fits training or self-guided courses. New managers benefit from training plus coaching. High-potential employees benefit from coaching plus targeted learning. Executives fit executive coaching. Employees exploring a career change or internal move benefit from career coaching plus career development resources.
4. Choose the right measurement plan. Training metrics include completion, assessment results, skill demonstration, and adoption or usage. Coaching metrics include goal progress, employee confidence, manager-observed behavior change, internal mobility, retention, promotion readiness, and engagement signals. Pick the metrics that match the goal you set in step one, not the metrics that are easiest to collect.

How to Build a Blended Employee Growth Program

A blended program puts structure and personalization to work in sequence. Here is a practical way to assemble one.

Step 1: Define growth outcomes. Name what success looks like. Examples include improving career mobility, building leadership bench strength, reducing regrettable attrition, helping employees navigate transitions, and increasing confidence in communication, negotiation, or networking. Vague goals produce vague programs.

Step 2: Use courses for shared foundations. Self-guided career development courses help employees build common skills and a shared vocabulary at scale. This is the efficient layer: it reaches everyone and sets a baseline before any individualized work begins.

Step 3: Use coaching for individual application. Coaching helps employees translate that learning into specific goals, behaviors, and decisions. This is where a generic skill becomes a personal plan, and where an employee works through the part of the challenge that is unique to them.

Step 4: Involve managers without making them the only coach. People managers should reinforce growth goals, create stretch opportunities, and give feedback. They are not a replacement for dedicated coaching, which offers a confidential, focused space for reflection. The two roles complement each other; managers drive day-to-day development, while coaching handles the deeper or more sensitive work.

Step 5: Review outcomes and iterate. Review participation, employee sentiment, internal mobility, and growth outcomes each quarter. Pair the numbers with qualitative stories, since a single account of a successful internal move often explains more than a completion rate. Adjust the mix based on what the data and the stories show.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Even good intentions produce weak programs when the method does not match the need. Watch for these patterns.

• Treating coaching like remedial support. Coaching is not only a fix for struggling employees. Framing it that way stigmatizes it and wastes its strongest use cases: high-potential talent, new managers, executives, and employees at career inflection points.
• Using training for problems that require behavior change. A workshop alone rarely changes habits. Without reinforcement, feedback, or accountability, the content fades. Application-heavy goals need coaching, manager follow-up, or peer practice attached to the training.
• Offering coaching without clear goals. Coaching needs objectives, success measures, and a link to the employee’s development plan. Open-ended coaching with no target tends to feel good and prove little.
• Measuring the wrong thing. Training completion is not the same as growth, and coaching satisfaction is useful but incomplete. Tie measurement back to the original development goal so the data answers the question you actually care about.

Choosing the Right Growth Strategy

Training builds shared capability. Coaching turns development into a personalized growth path. The skill for HR and L&D leaders is mapping each growth goal to the right method rather than defending one approach against the other.

Start with the goal, identify the barrier, segment the audience, and choose metrics that match. When the need is broad and standardized, lean on structured learning. When the need is individual and tied to a person’s career, lean on coaching. When employees need to learn something and then live it, use both.

For personalized development support, explore PathWise coaching packages. For scalable, structured skill-building, explore PathWise career courses. The most durable approach builds a blended development path that combines coaching, courses, and manager support, and you can map your team’s growth goals to the right method with the PathWise team.

To talk to anyone, start with a low-pressure opener about the shared situation, ask one open-ended question, and listen for a single detail you can follow up on. Share a little about yourself, then let the other person respond. When the conversation slows, either shift to a new topic or exit politely.

That five-part loop works with strangers, coworkers, and people you already know. You do not need charm, quick wit, or a big personality. You need a repeatable method and a few phrases you can reach for when your mind goes blank. Learning how to talk to anyone is a skill, and like any skill, it improves with small, low-stakes practice.

This guide breaks that method into seven practical tips. Each one includes example lines you can borrow word for word, plus fixes for the moments most people dread: the awkward silence, the one-sided exchange, and the graceful exit.

The Simple Conversation Loop: Open, Ask, Listen, Share, Exit

Most good conversations follow the same rhythm. Understanding it takes the guesswork out of what to do next.

The loop has five moves. You open with a comment about something you both notice. You ask an open-ended question. You listen for a detail worth exploring. You share a short response of your own. You exit when the energy fades. 

Behavioral scientists who study conversation quality point to a consistent gap between how enjoyable people expect these exchanges to be and how enjoyable they actually are. A study published in April 2026 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people routinely underestimate how much they will enjoy talking, even about topics they assume are boring. The researchers ran nine experiments with roughly 1,800 participants and saw the same pattern every time.

The takeaway is simple. Your fear of a dull or awkward conversation is usually worse than the conversation itself. That alone should lower the stakes before you say a word.

7 Practical Tips for Talking to Anyone

1. Start with the situation, not a personal question

The easiest opener references something you both can see or feel right now. It removes pressure because it does not demand anything personal. You are commenting on a shared experience, not interviewing a stranger.

Low-pressure openers you can use:

• At a work event: “Pretty good turnout tonight. How do you know the host?”
• In a waiting room: “These chairs are not built for comfort. Have you been waiting long?”
• In line for coffee: “That drink looks good. What did you order?”

Notice that each one ends with a small, easy question. That gives the other person a clear place to respond instead of leaving the comment hanging.

2. Ask open-ended questions

Closed questions get closed answers. “Did you have a good weekend?” earns a quick “yes” and a dead end. Open-ended questions invite a story.

Swap the yes-or-no version for a “what,” “how,” or “tell me about” version. Instead of “Do you like your job?” try “What does a typical day look like for you?” Instead of “Was the trip fun?” try “What was the best part of the trip?”

Open-ended questions also buy you time. While the other person answers, you can relax and listen instead of scrambling for your next line.

3. Listen for one detail to follow up on

You do not need a mental list of clever questions. You need one good detail from whatever the person just said. This is where most conversations either take off or stall.

If someone mentions they just moved cities, you have several threads: what prompted the move, how the new place compares, what surprised them. Pick one and ask about it. This is often called the thread technique, and it keeps a conversation going without any planning on your part.

Paraphrasing what you heard signals that you were paying attention. A quick “So you left the old job partly for the shorter commute?” shows you listened and gives them room to correct or add. If you want to sharpen this specific skill, our guide to paraphrasing in conversation breaks down how to reflect back what you hear without sounding like a parrot.

4. Share briefly, then return the focus

A conversation is a trade, not an interview and not a monologue. If you only ask questions, the other person feels interrogated. If you only talk, they tune out.

The fix is a short offer followed by a return. Answer a question with one or two sentences about yourself, then hand the focus back. “I just started running in the mornings, mostly to clear my head before work. Do you have a routine that helps you reset?” You gave something real, then opened the door again.

This balance matters more than being interesting. People remember how a conversation felt, and a balanced exchange feels good to both sides.

5. Use body language that signals openness

Words are only part of the message. Your posture, eye contact, and expression tell people whether you are actually available to talk.

You do not need to stare or grin. Aim for relaxed and present:

• Face the person rather than angling away toward the door.
• Hold eye contact in comfortable stretches, then look away naturally.
• Keep your arms uncrossed and your phone out of sight.

Putting the phone away does the heaviest lifting. When your attention is split, the other person feels it immediately, and the conversation rarely recovers.

6. Handle awkward silence without panicking

Silence feels longer to the person worrying about it than to anyone else. A pause is not a failure. It is a normal beat in conversation, and treating it as a crisis is what makes it awkward.

When a lull hits, you have a few reliable moves. You can name it lightly, revive an earlier thread, or introduce a fresh topic.

Recovery lines that work:

• “I lost my train of thought for a second. You were saying you grew up nearby?”
• “That reminds me, how did you end up in this line of work?”
• “I always go quiet when I am actually enjoying a conversation. What else is going on with you this week?”

Any of these fills the gap without pretending the pause did not happen.

7. Exit gracefully

Ending a conversation well is as important as starting one. Most people leave chats clumsily because they never planned an exit, then feel stuck. A clean close leaves a good final impression and makes the next conversation easier.

The formula is warmth plus a reason plus a forward note. “It was really nice talking with you. I am going to grab another drink, but I am glad we met.” You can add a small callback: “Good luck with the move next month.” That signals you listened and closes the loop kindly.

Do not overexplain or apologize your way out. A short, genuine close respects both people’s time.

Conversation Starters You Can Use Today

When you freeze, having a few starters ready by context saves you. Match the opener to the setting so it feels natural rather than rehearsed.

• At a work event or conference: “What brought you to this session?” or “What are you hoping to get out of today?”
• In a casual social setting: “How do you know the host?” or “Have you tried anything good from the food table yet?”
• In an online message or DM: “I saw your post about the new role. What has the transition been like?”
• After a meeting: “I liked your point about the timeline. How did you land on that approach?”
• Waiting in line or in a shared space: “This place is packed today. Do you come here often?”

Keep a couple of these in your back pocket. You will rarely need more than one to get moving.

How to Talk to Anyone at Work

Workplace conversations carry a little more weight because they can affect how colleagues see you. The good news is that the same loop applies, with a slightly clearer purpose.

Strong communication is not a soft extra at work. A May 2025 Forbes analysis of workplace trends described communication as one of the most valuable career assets, citing employer surveys that rank it among the top qualities hiring managers look for. Being able to talk to anyone in a hallway, a meeting, or one-on-one directly shapes your professional presence.

Casual workplace chat and goal-driven workplace dialogue are different tools. For everyday rapport, the tips above are enough. When you need a conversation to reach a specific outcome, such as a project decision or a difficult topic, that calls for more structure. 

Our article on how to steer a conversation at work covers the goal-oriented version, and our broader guide to effective communication skills goes deeper on leadership-level dialogue.

How to Talk to Anyone When You Feel Nervous

If talking to people makes you anxious, the answer is not to force a long, confident conversation. The answer is to lower the stakes.

Start with short interactions where nothing is riding on the outcome: the cashier, a neighbor, someone in an elevator. Behavioral science backs this up. A March 2025 public radio segment featuring University of Chicago behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley reported that brief conversations with strangers reliably lift people’s mood, even though most of us expect the opposite and avoid them. These small wins build evidence that you can do this.

A few things make nervous conversations easier:

• Prepare two questions in advance so you are never starting from zero.
• Focus on listening rather than performing. It takes the spotlight off you.
• Give yourself permission to exit after a few minutes. Knowing you can leave makes it easier to start.

If your nerves are tied to networking specifically, our guide on networking as an introvert offers strategies built for people who find crowded rooms draining.

Common Conversation Mistakes to Avoid

Knowing what not to do is half the battle. A few habits quietly sink conversations, and most people do them without realizing it.

Do this:

• Ask a question, then ask a follow-up based on the answer.
• Let the other person finish before you respond.
• Keep your phone away and your attention on the person.

Avoid this:

• Interrupting or finishing their sentences.
• Steering every topic back to yourself.
• Firing off questions like an interrogation with no sharing in return.

The single biggest fix is the follow-up question. It signals genuine interest and does more to build rapport than any clever line.

When to Use a Course or Coaching for Communication Practice

Reading tips helps, but conversation is a physical skill that improves with feedback and reps. If you want faster progress, structured practice beats trial and error.

Guided practice makes sense when the stakes are high, such as leadership roles, career changes, or persistent social anxiety. A course gives you a framework and repetition. Coaching gives you tailored feedback on your specific patterns. Both shorten the gap between knowing what to do and doing it under pressure.

If you want to apply these skills in a professional setting, PathWise offers career coaching for personalized support and a library of career courses that cover communication, networking, and workplace confidence. Choose the format that matches how you learn best, then practice in low-stakes moments until the loop feels automatic.

Put the Conversation Loop Into Practice

Talking to anyone comes down to a repeatable loop, a few ready phrases, and enough reps that the moves feel natural. Open with the situation, ask something open-ended, listen for a detail, share briefly, and exit with warmth. Treat silences as normal beats and follow-up questions as your best tool.

Pick one low-stakes moment this week, a cashier, a neighbor, a coworker in the break room, and run the loop once. Then do it again tomorrow. Fluency comes from small, repeated attempts, not from one perfect conversation.

If you want to move faster than trial and error allows, PathWise can help in the format that fits you:

• For tailored feedback on your specific patterns, work with a coach through PathWise career coaching.
• To build the skill on your own schedule, browse the PathWise career courses covering communication, networking, and workplace confidence.
• If crowded rooms are the real hurdle, start with our guide to networking as an introvert.

Start with one small conversation today, then let structured support carry you the rest of the way.

To speak up at work, prepare your point in advance, connect it to a team goal, choose the right moment, and use clear, concise language. Start with a question or an observation before you offer a recommendation. This keeps the conversation open and makes your input easier to accept.

Speaking up means sharing an idea, a concern, or a question in a way that adds value and gets taken seriously. It is a skill you can practice, not a personality trait you either have or lack. The steps below show you how to do it well, whether the setting is a team meeting, a one-on-one, or a message to a senior leader.

Most people who struggle with speaking up are not short on ideas. They are stuck on the delivery. They worry about looking uninformed, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, or being ignored after they finally do speak. Those fears are common, and they are also fixable. The rest of this guide gives you a repeatable method plus exact wording you can use tomorrow.

Why Speaking Up at Work Matters

Speaking up matters because it shapes how colleagues and managers judge your thinking, not just your output. When you raise a smart question or flag a risk early, people see how you reason. That visibility builds credibility and opens doors to bigger responsibilities.

• The business case is just as clear. Employee voice, the practice of sharing views that influence decisions, is tied to stronger engagement and faster problem solving. Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement fell to 21%, a drop that Gallup estimates costs the world economy hundreds of billions in lost productivity. Workplaces where people feel free to contribute tend to catch mistakes sooner and adapt to change more quickly.
• There is a personal payoff too. A Forbes analysis of workplace communication describes speaking up as a career advantage, but only when it is done with judgment rather than volume. The people who get promoted are rarely the loudest in the room. They are the ones whose input consistently moves the conversation forward.
• Upward feedback, meaning the ideas and concerns that travel from staff to leadership, only works when employees actually use their voice. A healthy feedback culture depends on ordinary people saying what they see. That is why learning to speak up is less about confidence and more about method.

Why People Stay Silent at Work

People stay silent because the perceived risk of speaking feels larger than the reward. Fear of judgment, unclear hierarchy, and poor timing all push employees toward saying nothing, even when they have something worth sharing.

The scale of this is significant. A 2026 survey reported by CNBC found that roughly 6 in 10 employees are hesitant to speak up at work, with many saying they are afraid to state the truth. Psychological safety, the shared belief that you can raise ideas or admit mistakes without being punished, is the missing ingredient in most silent teams. 

The organizational behavior scholar Amy Edmondson built her research career around this idea, showing that teams perform better when members feel safe to speak.

A few specific barriers come up again and again:

• Fear of looking uninformed. Many people wait until they are certain before they say anything, so they never say anything.
• Unclear power dynamics. Disagreeing with a senior person feels dangerous when the rules of engagement are unwritten.
• Bad timing. Jumping in at the wrong moment, or after a decision is already final, makes even good input land poorly.
• A history of being ignored. Once someone speaks up and nothing happens, they learn to stop trying.

Naming the barrier helps you plan around it. If your issue is timing, the fix is preparation. If your issue is fear, the fix is a script you can lean on. The seven steps that follow address both.

7 Steps to Speak Up at Work

These seven steps turn speaking up from a nerve-racking gamble into a repeatable process. Work through them in order the first few times, then adapt as you build a habit.

1. Understand the Company Strategy

Start by knowing what your organization is actually trying to achieve. When you understand the current priorities, your input can connect to something leaders already care about, which makes it far more likely to land.

Read the sources that reveal strategy: the annual report, recent earnings calls, town hall recordings, and internal goal documents. Note the two or three themes leadership keeps repeating, such as cost control, customer retention, or a product launch. When you later raise a point, you can tie it directly to one of those themes.

This step is what separates a comment that gets dismissed from one that gets acted on. An idea framed as “this helps us hit the retention target we discussed” carries more weight than the same idea offered in a vacuum.

2. Form Your Own Point of View

Before a meeting, decide what you actually think and why. A clear point of view gives you something to say when the moment arrives, instead of scrambling to react.

A simple structure keeps your thinking tight. Fill in three blanks: what I am seeing, why it matters, and what I recommend. For example: “I am seeing support tickets climb after the last release. It matters because it could hit our satisfaction score. I recommend we pause the next rollout for a week to fix the top issue.” That is a complete, confident contribution in three sentences.

Writing your view in one sentence before you speak forces clarity. If you cannot say it in a sentence, you are not ready to say it out loud yet.

3. Choose the Right Setting

Match your message to the right venue. Some points belong in a group meeting, while others are better raised in a one-on-one or a written note. Choosing the setting well protects both your idea and your relationships.

Use these venues deliberately:

1. Team meetings for clarifying questions, shared risks, and ideas that benefit the whole group.
2. One-on-ones for sensitive feedback, disagreement with a senior person, or topics that need more context than a meeting allows.
3. Town halls for visible, well-prepared questions that show you are engaged with the bigger picture.
4. Project reviews and written updates for progress notes and early flags on things that could slip.

A disagreement with your boss almost always belongs in a one-on-one, not in front of the full team. A useful clarifying question, on the other hand, often helps everyone in the room, so a meeting is the right place for it.

4. Ask Questions Before Making Claims

Lead with a question when you are not yet ready to make a firm recommendation. A good question invites others to think without putting anyone on the defensive, and it often surfaces information you were missing.

This is also the safest way to challenge an assumption. Instead of declaring that a plan is wrong, you can probe it. Building a habit of asking better questions makes this feel natural over time. Here are three openers that work in almost any meeting:

• “Can you help me understand the goal here?” This buys you time and signals genuine curiosity rather than opposition.
• “What would have to be true for this to work?” This tests an idea without attacking the person who proposed it.
• “Have we looked at how this affects the support team?” This raises a risk by asking, not accusing.

Questions also protect your credibility. If you ask before you assert, you rarely get caught making a claim that turns out to be wrong.

5. Be Thoughtful About Timing

Pick your moment based on urgency and readiness. Some issues need to be raised immediately, while others are better held until a scheduled review or a decision point.

• For urgent issues, such as a safety concern or a mistake that is about to reach a customer, speak up right away even if the timing is awkward. For non-urgent issues, such as a process improvement or a longer-term idea, wait for the natural opening: a planning meeting, a retrospective, or your next one-on-one.
• Speaking early in a meeting helps too. Making a comment or asking a question within the first few minutes breaks the hesitation barrier and makes it easier to contribute again later. The longer you wait to say your first word, the harder that first word becomes.
• Avoid raising a major concern right after a decision has been finalized. Bringing it up before the decision, or during a review built for that purpose, shows foresight instead of resistance.

6. Frame Your Point Around “We”

Frame your input as shared problem solving, not personal complaint. When you talk about the team’s goal instead of your own frustration, people hear a collaborator rather than a critic.

The language shift is small but powerful. Replace “I think this is a mistake” with “I am worried this could affect our deadline, can we look at one alternative?” The first version invites a defensive reaction. 

The second version invites a conversation. Framing your message around outcomes, such as “if we do this, we can expect this result,” ties your point to something concrete and makes it harder to wave away.

Keep the tone factual rather than personal. You are describing a risk to a shared goal, not scoring a point against a colleague.

7. Follow Up and Learn From the Response

Close the loop after you speak. Whether your idea is adopted, adjusted, or set aside, a short follow-up shows you care about the outcome, not just about being heard.

If your point was accepted, offer to help carry it forward. If it was declined, ask what would change the decision, so you learn how choices get made on your team. A quick message after a meeting, such as “thanks for hearing me out on the rollout question, happy to dig into the ticket data if that helps,” keeps you visible and credible.

Consistency is what turns a single good comment into lasting influence. Over time it builds the kind of professional presence that gets you noticed. People start to listen more closely when they learn that your input is regular, well reasoned, and backed by follow-through.

What to Say When You Speak Up

Use ready-made phrasing to lower the pressure in the moment. Having a few scripts memorized means you are never left searching for words when the stakes feel high. Adapt these to your own voice and situation.

• To disagree with an idea: “I see the goal, and I have one concern about the approach. Could we look at the risk to the timeline before we commit?”
• To ask a clarifying question: “Can you help me understand the goal here? I want to make sure my input is useful.”
• To raise a concern: “I may be missing something, but I am worried this could affect our satisfaction score. Can we talk it through?”
• To offer an alternative: “Another approach to consider is starting with a smaller pilot. That way we learn before we scale.”
• To follow up after a meeting: “Thanks for the discussion earlier. I pulled the numbers I mentioned and can share them whenever useful.”

Notice what these have in common. Each one opens with shared intent, stays factual, and ends with a specific next step. That structure keeps the conversation collaborative even when you are pushing back.

What Not to Do When Speaking Up

Avoid the moves that make people stop listening. Speaking up well is as much about what you leave out as what you say.

Steer clear of these habits:

• Blaming a person instead of describing a problem. “You never test these releases” shuts down the room. “The last release had testing gaps” keeps it open.
• Rambling. If your point takes three minutes to reach, people lose it. Say the headline first, then the detail.
• Ambushing someone publicly. Sensitive feedback aired in front of a group creates defensiveness and resentment.
• Making unsupported claims. Asserting something you cannot back up costs you credibility the moment someone checks.
• Apologizing for having a view. Openers like “this is probably stupid, but” tell people to discount you before you start.

The Forbes analysis makes a related point: talking more does not make you more influential. Interrupting, repeating what others said, or contributing just to be seen erodes the very credibility you are trying to build.

When Not to Speak Up Publicly

Know when silence or a private channel is the wiser choice. Speaking up is usually the right instinct, but a few situations call for restraint or a different route.

• Hold back from a public setting when the issue involves confidential information, a personal matter about a specific colleague, or anything that belongs with human resources rather than the team. 
• If the culture around you punishes dissent, one-on-one with a trusted manager is safer than an open challenge. When emotions in the room are already high, adding your voice can escalate conflict rather than resolve it, so waiting is often smarter.
• There is also strategic value in letting others speak first. Listening to the room before you weigh in lets you position your point to build on what has already been said, which makes your eventual contribution stronger. If a decision is being finalized by leadership at the moment, a later private conversation with a key stakeholder usually accomplishes more than pushing back in front of everyone.

None of this means staying silent for good. It means routing your input through the channel most likely to get it heard. When a topic is genuinely unsafe to raise, escalate it to human resources or a senior leader you trust rather than dropping it.

Turn Speaking Up Into a Career Skill With Pathwise

Speaking up gets easier when you prepare, practice, and debrief the conversations that matter, and you do not have to do that alone. Pathwise offers a few ways to build the skill, depending on how you like to learn.

Work with someone directly:

• Career coaching: One-on-one support to prepare for the meetings and conversations you keep avoiding.
• Career services: Hands-on help with interviews, reviews, and the moments where speaking up counts most.

Learn at your own pace:

• Career courses: Structured training that walks through workplace communication step by step.
• All Pathwise offerings: The full range if you want to see everything in one place.

If you are not sure where to start, book a call with our team and we will point you to the option that fits your situation.

Leading through change means helping people understand, accept, and act on a new direction. It pairs the structured side of change management with the human side of change leadership. The goal is simple to say and hard to do: move a team through disruption without losing trust, focus, or momentum.

Every manager will face this. A reorganization, a new system, a merger, a shift in strategy: each one asks people to work differently while the ground moves under them. 

The managers who do this well are not the ones with the best slide decks. They are the ones who communicate clearly, stay steady when others feel unsafe, and give their teams a repeatable way to act when the path forward looks unclear.

What Does Leading Through Change Mean?

Leading through change means guiding a team from an old way of working to a new one while keeping people informed, supported, and engaged. It rests on five core actions:

• Explain why the change is happening
• Define what success looks like
• Communicate early and often
• Remove the barriers in people’s way
• Adjust based on feedback

Managing change handles the plan. Leading change handles the people who have to live it.

Why Leading Through Change Matters More Now

Change is hitting harder because it never stops. Research from Gartner in 2025 found that only 32% of business leaders report healthy change adoption among their employees. In other words, most change lands badly, even when the plan on paper looks fine.

• Trust is the first casualty. That same Gartner research, drawn from a survey of more than 2,850 employees in April 2025, found that 79% of employees have low trust in change. When trust drops, people slow down, hedge, and wait to see whether the change will stick before they commit to it.
• Leaders are strained too. The Development Dimensions International Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that 71% of leaders report increased stress since stepping into their current role, and 40% of those stressed leaders have considered leaving leadership entirely to protect their well-being.
• That creates a double bind. Managers have to carry their teams through change while managing their own capacity to absorb it. Pushing harder is not a strategy. The managers who last are the ones who work with stress instead of ignoring it, and who protect their team’s ability to keep going.

The payoff for doing this well is real. Prosci’s benchmarking research shows that projects with excellent change management meet or exceed their objectives about 88% of the time, compared with only 13% when change management is poor. The difference is not the plan. It is how people are led through it.

Leading Through Change vs. Managing Change

These two terms get used as if they mean the same thing. They do not, and treating them as identical is why many transitions stall.

Change management is the mechanics. It covers the plan, the timeline, the roles, the training schedule, and the rollout steps. It answers the question of what happens and when.

Changing leadership is human work. It covers trust, motivation, resistance, and the behavior shift needed to make the change stick. It answers the question of why people should care and how they will feel supported while they adapt.

A good manager needs both. A perfect project plan means nothing if the team quietly refuses to adopt it. A rousing speech means nothing without a plan behind it. Leading through change is the point where the two meet.

A Simple 5-Step Process for Leading Change

You do not need a heavy methodology to guide a transition. You need a short, repeatable rhythm your team can follow when direction feels unclear. Use this loop for any change, from a new tool rollout to a full reorganization. Keep it visible and repeat it weekly.

1. Name the change. Say what is changing in one plain sentence. If your team cannot repeat it back, it is not clear enough yet.
2. Explain why now. Tie the change to a customer need, a business risk, or a goal. People accept change faster when the reason is concrete.
3. Define what success looks like. Describe “done” in specific, observable terms. Vague goals invite guessing, and guessing breeds anxiety.
4. Set the next seven-day action. Pick one thing to do this week. Short-term clarity keeps a big change from feeling paralyzing.
5. Check and adjust. Ask what worked, what broke, and what needs to shift. Then update the plan out loud so people see the change is being steered, not abandoned.

This is not an extra process. It is a way to move through uncertainty without pretending you have all the answers. It also supports accountability, because everyone knows what they own and what comes next. For a deeper approach to guiding transitions, see how to navigate change and reuse the same language with your team.

10 Skills Leaders Need During Change

The following skills matter in normal times. During change, they decide whether a transition succeeds or quietly dies. Each one is framed here around organizational change specifically, not generic leadership.

1. Focus on What Matters Most

Not every task carries equal weight. Find the work that actually moves the change forward, and put your time there. Deprioritize the rest and tune out the noise.

Managers who try to drive change on too many fronts at once create exhaustion and disengagement. Sequencing matters. Change saturation, the point where a team has more shifts than it can absorb, is real, and it starts when leaders refuse to choose. Pick the work that moves the needle and let the rest wait.

2. Take a Broad View

Get yourself and your team out of the silo. Understand what other groups do and how a shift in your area ripples into theirs. View the work through the eyes of the customer it serves.

The best change leaders connect dots that others miss. They ask how a change in one department affects another, and they surface those links before they turn into problems. That cross-functional awareness is what separates a reactive manager from a proactive one.

3. Act with Urgency Without Burning People Out

In high-change situations, time is the resource you cannot recover. Use it with purpose and do not let weeks drift by without progress.

Urgency is not the same as working around the clock. Change often demands more effort than normal, but burning out yourself or your team helps no one. Urgency means prioritizing hard and protecting energy for the work that counts.

4. Be Accountable

Take ownership. Do what you say you will do and follow through. Do not blame other groups or pass problems up the chain.

Avoid “delegating up,” where you wait for a senior leader to fix every problem. If you see a gap that no one is addressing, work out how your team can fill it. When something goes wrong, find the root cause instead of the nearest scapegoat. Accountability builds trust, and trust is what keeps people engaged when change disrupts their routine. This connects directly to the difference between accountability vs responsibility, which matters more during change than at any other time.

5. Act Decisively

No decision is often worse than the wrong one. You can usually correct a bad call, especially if you fail fast. But if you make no call at all, the team stalls and anxiety grows.

Use one filter: decide what is reversible and what is not. If you can undo a choice within days, decide now. If it locks you in for months, slow down and gather input. Say out loud what you are optimizing for, whether that is safety, cost, speed, customer impact, or trust. If you do not name it, everyone guesses, and that is where conflict starts.

6. Communicate Early and Often

Be transparent. Speak plainly. Explain the why, not just the what and the when. Treat people like adults and do not sugarcoat hard news.

Make communication two-way, not a broadcast. Invite questions and answer them honestly, including the ones you cannot fully answer yet. Employee engagement during change depends on it. Strong effective communication skills are not a nice-to-have here. They decide whether people move forward willingly or dig in.

7. Lead with Emotional Intelligence When People Feel Unsafe

In change, fear spreads faster than facts. Emotional intelligence slows that down. When people feel unsafe, they stop flagging risks, and then you lose the signal you need most.

Start with one rule: name the emotion before the plan. Try “I know this is a lot,” then share the next step. Use short two-way check-ins built around one question: “What is getting in your way today?” Then listen without rushing to fix. Watch your own stress cues, because if your tone sharpens, your team will pull back and go quiet.

8. Practice Agility

Do not stay wedded to the original plan. Build in checkpoints, iterate on what you learn, and be willing to call a timeout when something is not working.

Leading remote and hybrid teams through change is harder because you lose the informal signals. Silence can look like agreement when it is really confusion. Set a clear weekly rhythm: one short meeting for priorities, one check-in for risks, and one written update that stays consistent. Then normalize resets. Saying “that did not work, here is what we learned” builds resilience instead of hiding problems.

9. Get Comfortable with Conflict

Things will not always go smoothly, and people will not always agree. Differences will surface, and that is healthy.

Raise issues when you see them and seek to understand concerns when others raise them. Learn to address disagreement constructively and early, before it festers. Change without honest conflict is change that stalls in silence. Teams that handle disagreement well are the ones that actually implement change instead of just announcing it.

10. Use Influence Instead of Control

Guiding someone to a solution beats ordering them to it. Focus on asking the right questions and helping people see a situation differently. Then equip them to act.

Strong leaders do not hoard control. They distribute it. When employees feel ownership over their part of the change, resistance drops and momentum builds. Map your key stakeholders, work out what buy-in looks like from each one, and give leaders at every level the authority to make the change happen in their own teams.

Scripts Managers Can Use During Change

Advice to “communicate clearly” is easy to give and hard to apply under pressure. These short scripts give you language to adapt for the moments that trip managers up most.

• Announcing a change: “Here is what is changing and when. Here is why it matters for our customers and for us. Here is what stays the same. I will share the next update on Friday.”
• Handling resistance: “You are pushing back, and I want to understand why. What specifically worries you about this? Let’s separate the parts we can influence from the parts we cannot.”
• Admitting uncertainty: “I do not have the full answer yet. Here is what I know, here is what I am still working out, and here is when I expect to know more.”
• Giving a weekly update: “Since last week, this changed. This is still open. Here is the one thing I need from you this week, and here is what I am doing to remove blockers.”

Each script does the same job. It names reality, avoids false certainty, and points to a next step. That combination is what keeps people steady.

How to Reduce Resistance and Change Fatigue

Resistance is usually information, not defiance. When people push back, they are often telling you about a barrier you have not seen: an unclear reason, a fear about their role, or a workload that is already full. Treat it as data. Ask what people are worried about, name the practical obstacles, and involve employees early so the change feels done with them, not to them.

Change fatigue is the deeper risk. It sets in when teams face too many shifts at once with no room to recover. The warning signs are worth watching for:

• Rising cynicism or dark humor about “the next big thing”
• Slower response to requests that used to move quickly
• Quiet withdrawal from meetings and volunteering
• More sick days and visible exhaustion

To reduce the load, managers should stop stacking initiatives on top of each other, finish or formally pause old changes before starting new ones, and protect recovery time between pushes. Reinforcing resilience helps here. The resilience lifecycle framework gives individuals and teams a way to process transitions in stages rather than treating each change as a one-time shock to absorb.

How to Build Change Leadership Capability Across Your Organization

Leading through change cannot rest on one person. Organizations that build this capability at every level outperform those that keep it locked in the C-suite. Senior leaders set direction. HR leaders design the support structures. Managers translate strategy into daily execution. Individual contributors drive adoption in the work itself.

Building that capability starts with coaching, not a once-a-year workshop. Habits form through repetition, so embed learning into the work with short feedback loops, regular one-on-ones, and peer coaching. Assign real change initiatives to emerging leaders and pair them with experienced ones who can coach in the moment. Then track progress with specific measures, not just sentiment.

Values keep this honest under pressure. When speed tempts you to cut corners, clear boundaries protect what matters. If you choose transparency as a guiding value, a short weekly update covering what changed, why, and what happens next keeps the team aligned even when plans shift daily. When you lead change from clear values, people start to see it as an opportunity rather than a threat. To go further, read about embracing change in the workplace and how it strengthens culture over time.

If your organization wants to develop this capability with structured support, PathWise career coaching helps managers build the habits that change demands, and resources for organizations and HR professionals give teams practical development they will actually use.

Turn Change Leadership Into a Skill You Keep Building

Leading through change is not a trait you either have or lack. It is a set of habits: naming the change plainly, explaining the why, staying steady when people feel unsafe, and adjusting as you learn. Managers who practice those habits deliberately get better at them. The teams they lead feel the difference, and so do the results.

If you want structured support to build that capability, here is where to start based on where you are:

• You are a manager guiding a team through change now. Work one-on-one with a coach to pressure-test your approach in real time. Explore PathWise career coaching to build the habits change demands.
• You want to sharpen specific skills at your own pace. Communication, decision-making, and leadership fundamentals all improve with focused practice. Browse the PathWise career courses to work through them on your schedule.
• You lead an HR or people function and need to build change capability across teams. Scattered training does not create lasting habits. See the PathWise resources for organizations and HR professionals for practical development your people will actually use.

Not sure which fits your situation? Reach out through our contact page and we will help you find the right starting point.

You should consider quitting your job when the problems are persistent, harming your health, blocking your growth, clashing with your values, or when staying would cost more than leaving. One rough week is not a reason to resign. A pattern that repeats for months usually is. The clearest way to know when to quit your job is to look for signs that keep showing up no matter how you try to fix them.

Most people sense the answer before they can name it. This guide gives you the language and checkpoints to turn that feeling into a decision you can defend: the five telltale signs, how to test whether the problem is fixable, and how to protect your money and reputation on the way out.

Quick Checklist: Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Job

Use this list as a fast gut check. The more items that describe your last few months, the stronger the case for a change.

• You dread going to work most days, not just on hard days.
• Your job is affecting your sleep, mood, or physical health.
• You have no realistic path to grow, learn, or get promoted.
• Your values or ethics clash with how the company operates.
• The workplace feels toxic, unsafe, or disrespectful.
• Reasonable attempts to fix the situation have gone nowhere.
• You have started planning an exit in your head without meaning to.

If you check one item, watch it for a few weeks. If you checked three or more, it is time to reassess seriously. The five signs below explain what each pattern means and how to tell a bad phase from a bad fit.

1. You Dread Going to Work Almost Every Day

Daily dread is a warning sign that your role no longer fits your needs, even if you cannot yet explain why. If you wake up with a knot in your stomach most mornings, that is data, not weakness.

Occasional Monday reluctance is normal. Everyone has weeks they would rather skip. The concern is the pattern. When “I don’t want to go in” becomes the default thought five days a week, your body is flagging something your calendar cannot.

This chronic reluctance often shows up physically before you admit it mentally. According to the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, job stress can raise the risk of cardiovascular disease, psychological disorders, and other health problems when a job’s demands do not match a worker’s capacity. Fatigue, poor sleep, and constant tension are common early signals.

Ask yourself one question: is this a temporary rough patch or a steady state? A stressful launch, a short-staffed quarter, or a single difficult project can pass. A dread that has lasted six months and survived every small fix points to a deeper mismatch between you and the role.

2. Your Job Is Damaging Your Mental or Physical Health

Your job should not cost you your health. When chronic stress, anxiety, or burnout follow you home night after night, the role has crossed a line worth taking seriously.

Workplace stress is widespread, so this is not a rare or personal failing. In the American Psychological Association’s 2025 Work in America survey, most U.S. workers reported that job insecurity alone has a significant impact on their stress levels, and a large majority said work stress affects their sleep. Sustained stress at this level shows up as tension headaches, disrupted sleep, changes in appetite, frequent illness, and a shorter fuse with people you care about.

Pay attention to the physical signals your body sends. Trouble sleeping, unexplained weight changes, and getting sick more often can all trace back to a job that has become unsustainable. If these symptoms persist, talk with a healthcare professional, who can help you separate a medical issue from a work-driven one and tell you whether stepping away is part of the answer.

Burnout deserves its own test here, because it can look like a bad fit when it is really exhaustion. If your sleep is off, your patience is gone, and small tasks feel enormous, try two weeks of basic recovery first. Protect your sleep, take real breaks, and drop one non-critical task each day. 

If you feel better but still dislike the work itself, that points toward a career change. If you feel better and the job feels manageable again, you may need a lighter load or more support rather than an exit. If the job blocks recovery every single time, that is also an answer. For a fuller recovery plan, PathWise has a dedicated guide on how to deal with burnout.

3. You Have No Real Path to Grow

A dead-end role is one of the most common reasons capable people leave. When there is no learning, no advancement, and no honest feedback, your career stalls even if your paycheck does not.

Growth is not only about promotions. It includes new skills, harder problems, mentorship, and a sense that this year’s version of you is more capable than last year’s. Career experts consistently list stalled development as a top reason to move on, because a role that stops stretching you quietly caps your future earning power and options.

Look for concrete signs of stagnation:

1. You have asked about advancement and received vague or repeated non-answers.
2. Your responsibilities have not changed in over a year, and neither has your title.
3. There is no budget, time, or interest in helping you learn.
4. People above you left the company to grow instead of growing inside it.

If several of these describe your situation, the ceiling may be real rather than temporary. Before you decide, it is worth working through a full decision framework. PathWise walks through one in its guide on how to know when to leave a job, which weighs fit, timing, and next steps together.

4. Your Values or Ethics Are Being Compromised

A value conflict is a clear reason to leave, especially when the company asks you to act against your own standards. When what you are told to do collides with what you believe is right, that friction rarely fades on its own.

Job fulfillment depends heavily on alignment between your values and your employer’s actual behavior, not its stated mission. The gap shows up in decisions: how customers are treated, how mistakes are handled, whether leaders tell the truth, and whether you are asked to cut corners you would not cut on your own.

There is a difference between disagreement and a genuine ethics problem. You will not agree with every business decision, and that is normal. The line worth watching is whether you are being asked to do something unsafe, dishonest, or illegal, or to stay silent about it. When the answer is yes and it keeps happening, the conflict is structural, not a one-time event.

If the environment feels not just misaligned but hostile, disrespectful, or unsafe, treat that as urgent. Bullying, harassment, discrimination, and retaliation are not personality clashes to wait out. PathWise covers how to recognize and respond to these patterns in its guide on how to handle a toxic work environment, which can help you decide whether to document, report, or exit.

5. Your Work-Life Balance Cannot Recover

When your job routinely swallows your personal life and the balance never returns, that is a structural problem, not a busy season. A short crunch is survivable. A permanent state of overwork is not.

The test is recovery. Every demanding job has peaks: a launch, a deadline, a short-handed month. Healthy roles let you catch your breath afterward. Unhealthy ones reset to full intensity the moment one fire is out, so you never actually rest. If you cannot remember the last time work felt sustainable, the imbalance has become the baseline.

Watch for the spillover into the rest of your life. Missed commitments, canceled plans, no energy for people you love, and bringing work stress into every dinner are all signs the job is taking more than it gives. A role that consistently blocks self-care and personal goals is worth reassessing, even if the work itself is interesting.

If you are torn between staying and going, resist the urge to decide in a single frustrated evening. A structured comparison helps you see the full picture instead of the worst day. PathWise offers a proven fit check in its guide on how to decide to stay in or leave a job.

Before You Quit: Check What Is Actually Fixable

A reassessment protects you from making a fast decision in a high-stress week. Before you resign, name the real problem and test whether it can be solved without leaving.

Start by pinpointing the root cause. Is the work unclear, the workload unfair, the manager unsupportive, or the culture cold? Each of these has a different fix. Some can be addressed through an honest conversation, a role adjustment, an internal transfer, or clearer boundaries. Others cannot be fixed no matter what you do, and knowing which is which saves you months.

Then take low-risk steps before you commit. Raise the specific issue with your manager and ask for a concrete change. Explore whether a different team or role inside the company solves it. Set one firm boundary and see whether it holds. If the situation improves, you may have found a cheaper solution than quitting. 

If nothing moves after a genuine effort, you now have evidence rather than just a feeling, and evidence makes the next decision easier to stand behind.

Should You Quit Now or Plan Your Exit?

Timing depends on how urgent the problem is. Quit sooner when your safety, health, or ethics are at real risk. Plan a slower, funded exit when the issue is dissatisfaction, boredom, or limited growth.

An urgent exit makes sense when the workplace is unsafe, abusive, or asking you to break the law, or when your health is deteriorating in ways a clinician has flagged. In those cases, waiting can cost more than leaving without the next role locked in.

A planned exit is usually the safer play for everything else. The current market rewards preparation: reporting from late 2025 noted a growing share of American workers intending to change jobs while employers stayed cautious about hiring. Line up your finances, refresh your resume, and start quiet outreach before you give notice. Leaving with a plan protects your income and keeps you from taking the first offer out of panic.

Money Questions to Settle Before You Resign

Financial timing can change when you should leave, so settle the money questions before you hand in notice. A few checks now prevent a scramble later.

Work through this short list before you resign:

• Savings runway: know how many months your emergency fund covers with no income.
• Final pay and unused PTO: some employers pay out unused time, some do not, and it often depends on state law and company policy, so ask HR.
• Health insurance: confirm when coverage ends and what continuation options cost.
• Retirement accounts: you can usually leave a 401(k), roll it into a new plan, or move it to an individual retirement account, and cashing out early can trigger taxes and penalties.
• Unemployment eligibility: in many states, quitting limits benefits unless you left for good cause, and rules vary by state and reason, so check your state’s site.
• Written offer: if you have a new role, get the offer in writing before you resign from the current one.

Keep copies of anything you agree to. A short paper trail on your final pay, benefits end date, and handoff terms protects you if a detail is disputed later.

How to Quit Professionally Without Burning Bridges

A clean exit protects your references, your network, and your next offer, so quit in a way you will be glad about in a year. How you leave often matters as much as the decision to leave.

Give notice in writing and keep it short. You do not need to list every grievance. Confirm your last day, then ask what happens with handoffs, benefits, and final pay. A resignation is a brief conversation first, followed by a written note, not a text message. Save texts for urgent logistics only.

Plan the transition before you walk out the door when you can. Update your resume, pick target roles, and start reaching out quietly. This reduces financial stress and helps you choose your next move instead of grabbing the nearest exit. For the full step-by-step process, PathWise has a dedicated guide on how to quit your job that covers notice, handoffs, and timing in detail.

Get Help Planning Your Next Step

Recognizing these five telltale signs is only the first move. The harder part is deciding what comes next and building an exit that protects your finances, wellbeing, and reputation at once.

If you are weighing a move, PathWise career coaching can help you compare options, plan your exit, and define the role you actually want. 

When you are ready to make the leap, our job and career change support helps you run the search itself, from targeting roles to landing the offer. You can talk through your situation with our team to map out a clear next step.

Prefer to move at your own pace? Explore the rest of what PathWise offers:

• Career coaching for one-on-one guidance on your decision and your next role.
• Career services for resume, LinkedIn, and job-search support.
• Career courses for self-guided help with decision-making, branding, and growth.

Most careers stall because professionals wait for permission, confidence, or the right timing rather than taking action. In this episode, host J.R. Lowry sits down with former professional athlete and entrepreneur Dre Baldwin to dissect why professional discipline outperforms raw motivation every time. Baldwin reveals how he translated lessons from overseas sports courts into scalable business frameworks centered on mindset, strategy, systems, and execution. They explore actionable ways to build true executive presence before you get the promotion, navigate career reinvention, and develop the human judgment skills AI can’t replace.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/dre-baldwin

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Why Talent Isn’t Enough: The Discipline That Separates Top Performers, with Dre Baldwin

Stop Waiting for Permission

One thing that I’ve observed over the years and still observed now is that a lot of people spend their careers waiting. Waiting for permission, being noticed, for confidence, for the magical intervention that in most cases never comes. My guest believes that mindset is why so many talented people fail to reach their potential or achieve their dreams. Dre Baldwin went from being an overlooked basketball player with no scholarships and no major opportunities to building a professional sports career.

A global personal brand, a business built around performance, discipline and mental toughness. He was clearly taking initiative. You’ll learn his story as we talked. Millions of people have watched his content online, but what makes his message resonate isn’t just Sports. It’s his ability to break it all down and to things that people can clearly understand and his relentless focus on accountability and consistency.

Whenever anyone else is promising hacks or shortcuts or offering simple feel-good motivations, Dre argues that discipline is the real separator and he shows up consistently day after day. His website is called All Day Dre. That pretty much says it. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about self-belief, leadership and career reinvention. We’ll discuss why so many professionals unknowingly have their own potential. By reading or watching, my goal for you is to identify where you can release some of the constraints that you may be placing on yourself. You are going to feel Dre’s palpable energy. I’m convinced of that. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.

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Dre, thank you for being with me.

I’m excited to be here. How are you?

I’m good. Thanks. How are you?

Doing excellent. Thank you.

Glad to hear it. Let’s get going. Give us your backstory. I know you fought your way into the professional basketball ranks. How did you do that? How did discipline help you in addition to being motivated?

I started playing basketball around the age fourteen. It was pretty late if you’re going to play in college, let alone play pro. There we played in high school, walked on the Division 3 level of college, which is not the level to produce as pros. I had to sell myself into professional playing opportunities, which I was able to do successfully. At the same time, I started publishing content on his new website called YouTube in 2005.

That’s where I started to build a name for myself online exclusively through this basketball training. I was just on the court doing drills and showing other players how to practice and get better. About five years into that, at the time, I’m still playing professionally. I’m playing overseas and traveling to different countries every year. I started to sell programs. I started to make training programs for basketball players at this time. Publishing became a thing and that’s when I started to write books. Also, athletes started asking me about the mental side of the game and when I started talking about those things, that’s when the non-sport professional started to find me.

They said, “The way that you break down and explain things, not only mindset but other aspects. This is useful for us. We don’t even play sports.” That’s how I knew what my segway would be out of sports into the next chapter of my life. We all know athletic careers are very short. When I stopped playing sports in 2015, I went full-time into working with professionals and entrepreneurs on not only mindset, but also strategies systems and execution, which is where we are.

Talk a little bit about when you talk about breaking it down in a way that resonates with people who aren’t professional athletes. How do you take somebody who’s juggling work and family and all of the related pressures that come with that? Explain what worked for you and the things that have been different makers in your life to somebody who’s just living that normal day-to-day existence.

The Four Pillars of Performance

The same things that work in any professional realm, the same stuff that works in sports. Sports is a great canvas from which to explain it, and that’s the reason I was able to translate it the way that I did. It’s those four pieces that I just mentioned. The first one is mindset. It’s the way that you think. The way that you think leads to how you speak. How you speak leads to what you do and what you do becomes your habit, your character, your virtue and your destiny. That’s starting off with just the mindset. What is the mentality around your behavior? If you want to change your behavior, you have to change the way you think.

That’s the first thing that starts. I don’t mean in a woo-woo motivational sense. If your mindset is leading you to take certain actions that are not getting you what you want, then we have to change the way you look at the situation so you can change your behavior. The second one is the strategy. Strategy is simply a plan of action. A plan of action does not have to be a 100-page SOP. A plan of action can be three steps like wake up, put your shoes on, and go outside. That can be a strategy as well. Strategy is the plan of action designed to achieve a clearly defined goal.

Systems Create Scalable Results

Interestingly enough, a lot of people operate with no strategies. They have a lot of talent, time, and energy but no strategies. What we usually do is deconstruct strategy from the gold back to the present moment. The third thing is the systems. The system is a set of steps to be followed that can be duplicated and repeatably. It doesn’t require the specific talent of any individual person. I can have a strategy that works for me because some of my talents are part of that strategy. For me to make it into a system has been duplicated by somebody who doesn’t have my talent, my knowledge, my experience and hasn’t been where I’ve been.

They can still execute it and get it done. The best example of this is if you look at Starbucks or McDonald’s. They don’t have to hire PhDs. They can hire people who can just follow instructions. If you can follow instructions, they can make it work. The last one is the execution. This is the biggest thing for professionals. What we usually call leadership just means execution done in a disciplined way over an extended period of time.

It’s executing over and over again. When you’re following the system, it’s usually a lot easier to do than when you’re having to figure it out on the fly even when you’re highly resourced, very talented, smart and you have a lot of energy. You eventually can burn yourself out if you don’t have a simple process to follow that allows you to put it on autopilot.

James Clear in Atomic Habits and others have certainly written about habits, but he probably is best known for the one who talks about the fact that you don’t rise to the level of your goals, but you fall to the level of your systems. Systems, as you say, allows people to put things on autopilot so that they become things that they do. Over time when you build those things, they do start to accumulate, and you start to realize that you can accomplish more and more bit by bit over time.

Yes, I agree. Having those systems in place, once you know what you want to achieve or you achieve it even by let’s say accident. You aren’t trying to do it systematically but you achieve it, then the next thing is, “How do I deconstruct what I just did to make sure that it works?” Again, this could be something as simple as how you like your hand towels folded in the bathroom. Also, be something much bigger like, “How did I close that deal? How did I get that prospect? How do I get them to this position? How can I do that over and over again so I can hire a salesperson and the whole team?”

You’re an entrepreneur. That’s a specialty important when you’re an entrepreneur or take something that you haven’t ever done, certainly in the context of your business. You do it. You start to figure out what will make it successful. You systematize it. You hand it off to somebody and if you’re a successful entrepreneur, you keep doing those things because you’ve got to focus your time on the things that are the biggest difference makers. You can’t do everything. You’ve got to make sure that you’ve got something that you can hand off that they will be able to pick up and be successful with and that takes skill, too.

That’s an important skill if you want to, at some point, let’s say exit your business or sell it to someone else if you want to bring other people into the business to replace you at certain jobs or if you want to pass it on to your kids. It can’t all be based on your individual talents. That’s where the systems and the ability to break things down and put them back together, which is my personal superpower. That ability works wonders when you’re trying to build systems for yourself or for others.

Talk a little bit about how you take some of those same things, the mindset, the strategy, the systems, the executions and you apply it when you’re reinventing yourself. You’ve gone through that yourself. A lot of people, especially as people are having longer careers, go through periods where they have to reinvent themselves. Talk about that journey for you and how you applied some of those same practices. The four things that you’ve talked about when you shift it out of your professional basketball career and into some of the things you’re doing now.

Reinvention Requires Identity Shift

Reinvention happens when your identity is too small for your ambitions. When you see where you want to go in the future, but you look at how you currently see yourself. You see that this person is not going to match that future. That’s when reinvention happens, and it starts on the inside out. I’ll use myself as an example. The first step is, when I’m moving into entrepreneurship. The first thing is I have to get my mind out of the athlete’s mindset. Out of, “I’m going to solve this with physical exertion,” which is what athletes do.

If I have a challenge, I see that by going to the gym, working on my game and getting better. Winning the next game even though I’ve lost the last game. In business, you can’t do that because that’s not the way the game is played. It’s played out in a different way. You have to reshape the way you see yourself and reshape who you see in the mirror so that you start thinking automatically more on a business level than on an athletic physical exertion level. That’s an example of a mindset piece.

As far as the strategy piece, it’s finding people who have already solved this puzzle, who’ve already figured out, “What can I take from what I did as an athlete? How can I use this in a professional world?” I was fortunate enough to have mentors in the game who would say to me, “Dre, you have this framework, Work On Your Game®. You have this idea.” Work On Your Game® is very useful because in a professional world, what people like about athletes and you asked me this question. They like the fact that you have to show up every day as anybody with a job does. You have to be disciplined and do your work even when you don’t feel like it.

There are times when things don’t go the way they’re supposed to. In sports, that’s losing a game. In business, it can be a myriad of things. You still have to keep showing up and its competition. A lot of sales industries and a lot of athletes, because we’re used to competition and we can deal with the back and forth, the ups and downs we’re going through. You have to move yourself to perform at your highest possible level because you’re competing against a lot of people to keep it up at the top 2% of the sports world.

In the professional world, employers love people who are going out there and trying to compete. Maybe not against other people, but often against themselves. Against the benchmarks and against their quotas. How can you take all that stuff? This is what was told to me, “How can you take all that stuff and make it translatable for someone who has never picked up a ball?” Again, as I’ve told you. My superpower is my ability to extract from one place and be able to communicate it to another place so I can talk to someone who’s never played basketball before. Within ten minutes, I can have you pretty well understanding the game and anything else.

If you were to explain to me something that you know at a high level that I never heard of, about an hour of conversation, I can understand it enough that I can take ten minutes and help somebody else get about 68% of the basics of it. That’s what I did with my experience as an athlete. I begin to translate it to the professionals and at the same time you update your formulas while you’re learning. As I’m talking to more entrepreneurs and more professionals, I’m finding out what their challenges are and what they are dealing with.

They had to deal with superiors. They had to deal with middle management. They have to deal with teams that they inherited that they did not choose. It’s the same thing as sports. You deal with different types of leaders, teammates, and opponents. You’re on different teams where you may not like the situation, but you’re signed to a contract. You still have to show up and do your job. All of these pieces are translated out of the sports world into the business world.

There are two follow-ups I want to ask you about from what you just said. One, you mentioned earlier that you played in a lot of different countries. You had to fit into a lot of different teams and a lot of different international cultures. How did you learn to become more adaptable through that process? I’m sure that was a key requirement for your success.

In the Sports world, the good part about it is that basketball is universal. It’s a universal language. I remember I was playing in Herceg Novi, Montenegro and my coach did not speak English. None of the coaches spoke English, and I don’t speak any other languages. I know a little bit of Spanish, but they don’t speak Spanish over there in Herceg Novi. I had two teammates who could speak English and they would be my translators. The good thing about that, I always joke is that if the coach talked to the team for 30 minutes and the teammate gave me the translation. It will be like two minutes long, so I could always pretend that I don’t know what the coach said because I literally didn’t know what he said.

On the courts, the certain movements of basketball and certain things that can be communicated, like pass here, set a screen, or grab the rebound are universal languages. As long as I had the basketball skill, we could communicate on the court to a certain degree. As far as off the court, by the time that I started playing in 2005, a lot of the people under the age of 30, are heavily influenced by what goes on in America. They watched our TV. They are looking at our internet and listening to our music. They’re watching our entertainers, so they speak English pretty well.

That was under 30 then. By now, it’s probably 50. A lot of people speak English pretty clearly. They understand the stuff that we pay attention to. Though, there were always some people in town, whether they were players, teammates, or just people who were fans of the local team. They would come find me and I would make friends with them. They could show me around town. Tell me what to do and what not to do. It was a pretty smooth transition almost everywhere that I went. Also, keeping in mind that you’re an athlete traveling the world to play sports. I’m 6’4”. If you’re a 6’4” Black guy walking around somewhere in Eastern Europe, they know why you’re there for the most part.

That’s probably true. The other thing I wanted to ask you is when you shifted out of basketball and into your business career. What was the hardest part of that transition for you?

One is that you have to get used to doing “real work.” A lot of athletes don’t like when I say that. The reality is, when you’re an athlete, a hard day of work is four hours. That’s a two-hour practice in the morning and two-hour practice at night. If you have a game, that’s 2 or 3 hours. That’s a work day. When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a professional, especially high performing professionals, eight hours is like you’re slacking. There are much longer days. Also, as a professional entrepreneur, there’s always more work to be done.

We have to pull ourselves away from the desk. Pull ourselves away from the office. There’s always more that we haven’t completed that we could be doing. It’s a lot more work, especially when you’re trying to start a business, get it off the ground or establish yourself on a certain market. It’s a market penetration. You have that and also getting people to respect your name and know who you are. When I first stopped playing and came into the business world talking about these concepts, but not exactly what we’re talking about exactly here because it’s been some time.

At first, they are looking at me like, “It’s cool that you play basketball, but what does it have to do with us? How can you help us? Do you have any Bonafide’s in this space working with these people? We know you can be basketball players but what about us?” You have to establish yourself. You got to prove yourself. A lot of athletes may not want to do that work, because it is a lot of work to get yourself established as, “Don’t let me see athletes. Looking at me and seeing this person in this space.” They happened to have been athletes. By this point, I’ve established that but at first, that was not established.

When you were doing that, it sounds like this goes back roughly twenty years at this point when you were first getting into this thing called YouTube and producing content. You were probably a bit ahead of that trend in terms of making that transition. I’m sure you had to learn a lot of hard lessons along the way.

Yes, and a great thing was that what we now know is social media was just coming out right when I got out of college. I graduated in 2004. Facebook comes out about the next year, then you get all the other social apps and then it becomes easy to go direct to the consumer. You didn’t have to go through a middleman to publish a book, to have a radio show, which we call podcasts, and have a TV show as we call YouTube. The middleman was all going.

There were no barriers to entry at the exact time that I was looking to figure out what I am going to do professionally. Athletes started thinking about those things but also, all people now could do them because there was nothing blocking anybody from putting himself out there. It’s a fortuitous bounce, we could say, with the way the world went for me to be able to do it.

I know you write and speak a lot about presence. I will tell you your presence is palpable even though we are on video here together. I can sense it right from the beginning. Talk about how you build presence. Not everybody will have the natural presence that you do. For somebody who feels like they struggle with that or people often get told, “You lack executive presence.” How do you coach them on building their own form of presence?

That’s an excellent question. Also, a lot of professionals work in organizations who come with that exact challenge. They have a leadership or authority position on some level, but the people who they allegedly have authority over don’t listen to them. They’re asking them to do things that people aren’t following through, or people are taking their orders as suggestions. Their higher ups will say to them, “If you want to get this promotion, you need that executive presence because we can’t put you in charge of more people if the people are not listening to you.”

Presence Under Pressure

It’s an excellent question that you’re asking. First, let’s get clear what presence is. Presence is discipline embodied under pressure. It’s the same things done the same way every time consistently following a structure and then the under pressure part doesn’t necessarily mean like you’re sweating bullets and there’s a gun to your head. Under pressure just means things are not normal. Everything is not easy and comfortable. That’s what under pressure means. As soon as the situation goes off kilter, that’s under pressure.

Can you maintain your presence of mind? Maintain your state, maintain that discipline, and that collectiveness, even when things are not going the way that you want them to go. That’s what presence is about. How can someone develop their presence? The first thing is you have to learn to quiet the mind. Quieting the mind means not allowing whatever outside noise is happening to throw you off the game that you’re supposed to be playing at the moment. It’s lessening your reactivity, your output, and the noise going on in your mind and noise that you put up.

In our presence, we talk about four specific things. The first one is groundedness. Groundedness just means being rooted in the reality of what’s happening in the moment. If you listen to the biohackers, there’s a lot of them down here in South Florida. They talk about when you start the day. The best way to start the day is to get some sunlight while the sun is still coming up because the UV rays are not as strong. You want to let your bare feet touch the ground. Touch actual grass or dirt or something like that. These days, some people would call it touching grass, like you need to touch grass. What does it mean? It means you’re connected to what’s happening. Connected to the Earth.

Groundedness means you are focused on the present moment. Where you are is where your mind is. Your mind and your feet are in the same place. What happens with a lot of people these days is that their mind is somewhere way different than where they’re at physically because there’s so many distractions that we have. It’s like a person. They’re at the park playing with their kids, but with one hand, they’re looking at their phone. Mentally you’re in one place but physically, you’re in another. That’s the opposite of groundedness. Groundedness is where you are.

The second one is stillness. Stillness means reducing your mental output. What’s coming out of you through what’s going on in your mind. In other words, if you are angry or frustrated, not allowing that anger or frustration to show through what you’re saying or through your physical presence. The third one is containment. Containment is lowering of the actual tangible output things that you do. Not doing more than you need to do. Not fidgeting. Being able to stand still. Being able to maintain actual solid eye contact. Not reaching for your phone every five minutes when you’re standing at the airport gate waiting for your flight.

It’s physically not moving when you don’t need to be moving. Stillness and containment are about the emotional and the physical, keeping it in. The last one is calibration. Calibration is about you offering a proportionate response to the situation at hand. If you ever see somebody overreacting, that’s an uncalibrated response or somebody under-reacts. When someone’s calibration is off, then they can say all the right things, but the message doesn’t quite land the right way. When you get those four things aligned groundedness, stillness, containment and calibration, that’s when the signal of all those aligned comes out as what people call presence.

How do you factor into the idea of being both decisive in these moments of pressure and also being empathetic?

Leadership Demands Distance

Being decisive is about coming up with all other options. The word decision comes from a Latin word. The root of it is a Latin word means to cut off. That’s what a decision is. You’re cutting off everything else and this is all this way. When it comes to being empathetic, it’s about understanding how other people feel. Maybe not necessarily feeling it yourself, but understanding somebody else’s feelings. What a leader must do and this is something that I’ve told people for years. A leader has to have the ability to disappoint people at a rate at which they can accept a leader.

A leader cannot please everybody. You cannot lead people and need people at the same time. That’s not possible. As a leader, you can’t be the class clown and everybody’s friend. Even if you want to be, you can’t do that as the leader because you lose authority. Leadership requires a certain amount of distance between you and the people that you’re leading. The empathy part is helping people understand, “I know this may be disappointing to you. However, this is the decision and this is the way that we’re moving forward. You can let me know how you feel about it and what you think about it. Most importantly, let me know what you need from me so that you can best help us as a team move forward with the decision that has been made.”

That needs to be communicated in a calibrated way in a way that people understand that I’m not asking you if you’re going to follow it. I’m telling you this is what it is. I’m asking you what you need from me for me to best help you and follow through on what we’re going to do. It’s an important point with people who need that presence. You have to be able to communicate this in a way that you don’t have to say what I just said explicitly, but people should still get the point. That’s what leadership is about.

How do you demonstrate that presence in the absence of pressure? There are going to be moments in business where you are not fighting for your life. You’re not on the playing field metaphorically as you are when you’re an athlete but they’re just in the everyday moments. How do you show presence when the pressure isn’t as present in the room?

It is when you establish, first of all, from the beginning who you are and how you’re showing up. How you walk in the room is how you walk out of the room. You have to establish yourself as that leader even when you don’t have a leadership title because that’s what gets you promoted. You can be competent but you don’t get promoted just because you’re good at the job. You get promoted because the people who are promoting you see you as someone who can lead and inspire others who are going to be doing a job once you move up. Not just because you can outpace everyone else.

It’s the way that you show up on a consistent daily basis. Being present with people when you’re talking to them. Being able to motivate and inspire. Being able to set the tone and setting the bar and the standard. Upholding the standard to where other people look at you when they’re trying to figure out what to do. That’s what makes you a leader. A boss is a person who can tell people what to do and they have to comply.

A leader is a person who gives other people to do something because they want to. They see you and they want to get to where you’re at so they start following you even though there’s nothing that says they have to follow you. That’s how you start to establish it even when everything is calm and normal. Human beings are social creatures. We are oriented to follow the leader. Who is the leader here? Who’s going to take that leadership position? Even when no one has been appointed. You put a group of people who never met each other together, get them stuck in an elevator and somebody’s going to take the lead. Everybody is going to be following the lead of that person. That’s just human nature.

Who is that person who is calm? They seem to have an idea of what to do. They’re willing to take on the risk of possibly being wrong. |Everybody else who would rather follow them than make the decision themselves get behind that person when you carry yourself in that way. Again, it’s not something that you announced. It’s all in your energy. People have to remember that 85% of communication or maybe more is nonverbal. It’s not what you say. It’s how you carry yourself. It’s what’s being said, even when you’re not talking. People get a pretty good read and understanding of who you are and what you’re about before you even open your mouth. That’s where you establish leadership.

I would imagine you work with early tenured people as well. What do they misunderstand? For example, when an individual contributor becomes a manager or when that frontline manager becomes a manager of managers about what’s required to be successful at the next level.

The first thing is they have to understand that a certain amount of distance is required. Leadership and authority requires a certain amount of our distance between you and your subjects. Meaning you can’t be the one joking in the lunchroom the way that you were before. You can’t do it because it undermines your authority. People see you as a peer and they see you as a friend, then when it’s time for you to use that authority, they’re going to be offended by the fact that their friend is trying to tell them what to do or what not to do.

It’s accepting the fact that leadership comes with it in a package deal. A little bit of distance, and a little bit more isolation. A lot of people, when they ascend to management, don’t want to deal with that isolation. They’d rather be part of the group. This is just a human thing. Many humans would rather be part of a bigger group than part of a smaller group because they feel more connected, but that’s the reason why leadership is a burden. Not only just a reward. That’s one thing.

The second thing is that, what got you here is not the same thing that’s going to get you there. What was working for you to move up? It was you doing the job and also showing the leadership tools but when you move up to a new position, you have to adjust to that position. Adjusting to that position means figuring out, “What works here?” What worked there versus what’s going to work here. Usually, if you got promoted, you got moved up or promoted, the people who promoted you know what it takes and they’re going to tell you.

What I find is, a lot of times, people either are confused by what they’re told. They don’t know what to do with it or they hear it and reject it because it seems a little bit cold and a bit distant. “I don’t want to be that type of person,” as they say and then they go out and try to do it their way. It ends up not working and now they’re stuck. It’s heating the advice from the people who already are in the position that you’re in and asking yourself, “How can I develop more of that?” A lot of it is not technical. It’s not to say, “Push this button and send this memo.” It’s all in a way that you’re carrying yourself.

Again, that 85% of communication is nonverbal. That’s where leadership lives. It doesn’t live in speeches. It doesn’t live in memos. It lives and that communication. When people can feel that energy, they can peg you as a leader, even though they don’t know who you are. The example I get from people is that if you were watching an Amazon board meeting. We were just watching it on camera and I turned the sound off. You can’t hear anything anybody says. You don’t know anything about Amazon.

I would ask you after about ten minutes, “Who’s Jeff Bezos?” “He’s the guy who runs the company.” “Point him out.” Everybody can point him up and why is that? You’ll see everyone in the room orienting towards the boss, the leader or whoever it is. People physically orient towards them in a way that you can tell even if you can’t hear what’s being said. It’s the same thing with human beings in any environment.

You’ve taken a lot of initiative in the course of your career. There’s clearly an entrepreneurial bent to the way that you think. A lot of people seem to be waiting for permission. How do you coach them to become more the masters of their own destiny?

The number one thing is, even if you are not an entrepreneur in name. You must be an entrepreneur in spirit because even if you don’t own the company, you own your career. Where do you want to go? You own yourself because one day, you’re not going to be working here. Whether it’s the day you retire, or you change companies or you change Industries. Where do you want your career to go? What do you want your career to be about? You have to take ownership of that because the company that you’re at, as long as you’re doing a good job, they’ll keep you. Is this where you want to go?

If you want to go somewhere else, then you need to ask yourself where is it that I want to be, and what is required there? The first step again is not the technical skills. It’s the interpersonal abilities, presence and the, how do I see myself when I’m looking in the mirror? You carry yourself in a certain way that makes people know without you saying it and without them asking it. They’re like, “This person looks like, they feel like the type of person that we want in this position that we need fulfilled.” It’s not necessarily, “Do you have the skill?” Skill these days is a dime a dozen.

I’m not saying that skills don’t matter. Develop your skills, work on your game and get better at the technical tools. Skill can be easily replaced by a lot of people. Most of the people reading, there are 100 people in your industry who can replace you and do the same job that you’re doing with the similar training that you have. That’s not what makes you valuable. What makes you valuable is how you are as a person. Not who you are.

In the venture capital world, what a lot of them would say is that when we’re looking at an entrepreneur and deciding who to invest in. We’re not asking for someone who has all the answers or necessarily the best product because you never know what’s going to work. You invest in some and you think they’re going to be amazing. They’re trash and you invest in some and you think there’s going to be small then they blow up. We’re looking for someone who is magic about to happen, someone who was frightening in a bottle. That’s a feeling. That’s not a technical thing that you can write down and count.

Do you feel like lightning in a bottle?

Yes.

What’s the mix? Tell us about the mix of business things that you’re doing.

The main thing these days is our execution reliability. Execution reliability is all about how you show up consistently and execute the way that you’re supposed to execute. Upholding the standard, following the disciplines and getting done what needs to be getting done. Especially in organizations where the biggest challenge is not strategies or skills or mindset even. Its execution drifts.

Slowly, over time, human beings when not corrected or checked or held to accountability standards slowly drift off the path of what they’re supposed to be doing. Not because they’re trying to, but because without parameters and rules, you get chaos and disorder. Execution reliability is all about making sure that companies at scale even as they expand, everyone stays on the process. That’s our main focus.

Thinking back to when you started this journey, what something about leadership that you felt back then that you’ve changed your mind on since?

The number one thing with leadership is about how people are responding to you, not necessarily about what you know. I’m a high processing person. I could explain for hours any subject and I like doing that, but that’s not what makes people follow you. That makes people think that you’re smart but doesn’t make them follow you. What makes people follow you is the energy and that’s much less about what you say. It’s much more about how you carry yourself. What makes you a leader has nothing to do with talking. You talk, give speeches and say things, but that’s window dressing. Real leadership is just about who people decide to follow when they have a choice.

For our audience, that’s trying to figure out what to do who has a career, uncertainty and maybe they’re facing layoffs. We’ve got a lot of that going on. AI is looming in the background as this threatening thing that a lot of people are feeling. What advice would you give somebody about managing their career over the next 3 years, 5 years or even 10 years?

I Cannot Replace Human Judgment

AI is going to replace a lot of duplicatable tasks. It’s already doing that and it’s going to continue to do that. It will be a long time before artificial intelligence can replace human judgment. AI cannot do human judgment the way humans do judgment. Your ability to discern, lead, and make tough decisions when you have incomplete information and when you have unclear information. They’re a lot of different choices you could make and they all look equally good and bad. What you do in that moment and how you can get other people to remain confident and steady by following your energy. There’s no artificial intelligence system that can do that, because the human touch cannot be replicated by a computer chip.

At least not yet. Any last thoughts you want to share with our audience before we break?

The biggest thing is that execution is what makes the professional organization a professional organization and also the professional as a person. Continually doing what the standard says to do even under pressure.

There’s lots of good lessons here. You are clearly a coach and teacher. It comes across as strongly as your presence, Dre. I know you enjoy that. It shows just even in the brief conversation we’ve had. I appreciate that you reached out to me to get this set up and it was good to talk to you. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for the time and for sharing your platform.

—

What a fabulous discussion with Dre and so much practical wisdom that he shared. The first thing to understand is that you have to take ownership for your career. Dre describes people being constrained by a lack of ownership. Not necessarily a lack of talent. Those who are consistently advanced are the ones who stop waiting for these external validations, and start treating their careers like they’re the CEO of their own business.

As Dre said, you don’t necessarily own the company, but you have to own your career. The second thing is that discipline creates opportunities that motivation alone never will. Sustainable success comes from the things that Dre talked about such as mindset, strategy, systems, and execution, doing that stuff day in day out, even and especially when you don’t feel like it and when conditions aren’t perfect. That’s when everybody else gives up and that’s when you start to stand out.

The third thing is that leadership starts with self-leadership and building presence. That presence piece that they talked about comes in moments of pressure where you’ve got to demonstrate that groundedness, the stillness, and being connected to what’s right in front of you and not distracted by the many things around you. That’s something a lot of people struggle with. It’s frustrating for rising people in their careers because they often get told, “You lack executive presence,” and then they ask what that means. They don’t get a good answer.

Dre gave some practical advice there that you can apply whether you’re an Individual contributor, a new manager, a leader, or even in the C-suite. Lots of good advice from the discussion. It was great talking to Dre. Again, thank you to him for joining me. I invite you to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube or any other platform that you happen to use. If you found this discussion enlightening, which I hope you did, please join my membership community which is called PathWise and subscribe to our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Dre Baldwin
• Dre Baldwin on LinkedIn
• Dre Baldwin on Instagram
• Dre Baldwin on YouTube
• Work On Your Game®
• Work on Your Game: Use the Pro Athlete Mindset to Dominate Your Game in Business, Sports, and Life
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter

About Dre Baldwin

Dre Baldwin built Work On Your Game® to turn disciplined execution into dominance. A 4x TEDx speaker and 43-time author, Dre played pro basketball for 9 years. Today, he helps experts and entrepreneurs install mindset, systems, and strategy to scale from six to seven figures with presence and power.

What if becoming a better leader has less to do with learning new management techniques and more to do with becoming more yourself?

In this episode, former RBC executive and HomeEquity Bank CEO Katherine Dudtschak shares a deeply personal journey that transformed not only her life, but also her philosophy of leadership. After publicly affirming her gender while leading thousands of employees, Katherine discovered that vulnerability, compassion, and authenticity weren’t leadership liabilities. In fact, they became her greatest strengths.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why success and fulfillment aren’t always the same thing
• How fear-based leadership limits both people and performance
• Why vulnerability builds trust faster than authority
• How curiosity and compassion can outperform command-and-control management
• Why doing the inner work is one of the most important responsibilities of a leader
• Practical ways to lead with greater authenticity without sacrificing results

Whether you’re leading a team, navigating your own career, or simply questioning whether the life you’ve built truly reflects who you are, this conversation will challenge the way you think about leadership and yourself.

If you’re interested in the impact of capitalism on leadership and innovation, make sure you tune in.

Subscribe to Career Sessions on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts for weekly episodes like this.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/katherine-dudtschak/

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Leadership Lesson I Learned By Becoming My True Self, With Katherine Dudtschak

The Success Gap

This conversation is about something that a lot of people spend their entire lives or much of their lives awaiting, the gap between success and truth. My guess is Katherine Dudtschak, a former Senior Executive at RBC, former CEO of HomeEquity Bank, one of Canada’s most accomplished business leaders and now the author of Sincerely, Katherine. At age 50, while leading thousands of employees and one of the country’s most visible corporate roles, Katherine publicly affirmed her gender identity.

In doing so, she triggered a question that goes beyond gender or identity politics. How many people are living lives built around expectations that they never consciously chose? We live in a world that is very focused on achievement, productivity and image. What does that cost us if it’s not true to who we are? Why does reinvention, particularly midlife, feel so threatening? We’re going to be talking about leadership and conformity and the tension that exists often between success and internal alignment. I’m J.R. Lawry. This is Career Sessions.

—

Katherine, thank you for being with me.

It’s wonderful to be here with you and all of your guests.

I appreciate your joining. You’ve got a new book out. It’s been a few weeks. Thanks for putting it up there for those who are watching on video, it’s Sincerely, Katherine. You describe what many people would consider to be a successful life before you realize that something was missing. Something very important was missing for you and you made it a very visible, personal transition while in a big leadership executive role. How did that change the way that you view authenticity and people? Particularly those who are in an executive leadership role.

Defining Masculine And Feminine

It changed a lot. I’ll give you some backstory. I was known as a fairly empathic leader before June 17th, 2019. The reason I share that is, it was around the year 2000 that I definitively cried at work the first time. I think of human behavior as either masculine behavior or feminine behavior. There are feminine and masculine attributes in every human being. There’s a unique mixture in each of us. We would describe/showing sensitivity or emotion at work as a feminine behavior. Not female, but feminine.

If you look at my essence in childhood before my parents, community, and school tried to shape me into behaving a certain way, or performing a certain way. I would have been a fiercely curious human being. I would have been a sense-making systems thinking human being, which are more mechanical or masculine characteristics. I would have equally been highly emotive, highly sensitive and expressive. I started to embrace my more sensitive side in around the year 2000. I got to be known as a fairly empathic leader.

When I affirmed my gender in 2019, I had come through a 24-month period of deep heavy mental health challenges. I was suicidal the year before I came out. I thought it would have been better for my life to be over. I built the perfect career. I had four beautiful children and got married. It was the perfect life in materialistic terms, yet I was complete. I went through a dark period, then a friend pulled me aside who could see my symptoms. She’s a psychologist or psychiatric nurse and she said, “Do you want me to send you research on the intergenerational trauma caused by suicide?”

The Dark Period

She literally walked me off the cliff. I ultimately made a pledge to myself to come out in my job leading 25,000 people at Canada’s largest company. I was in one of the most senior executive jobs in the country. I didn’t come out of that job because it was going to be popular. I came out in that job in order to keep my job and be able to finish putting my children through school. Right up until my coming out, I expected to be homeless. I expected the worst. Partly, because I had childhood trauma associated with fears of abandonment and fears of rejection.

Everyone was saying, “You’re going to be met with such love and such embrace,” yet I feared the worst. What happened in that moment of my coming out or of the video going out to the world is I started to receive hundreds and eventually thousands of emails from people about bravery and courage. Neither of those are sexy words. Bravery or courage is about moving forward with something to be true yet fearing the worst. You’re in the presence of fear but you’re moving forward because you feel you need to survive.

I expected the worst, yet I got all these emails about bravery and courage and people started volunteering their own life stories to me. Aspects of identity that they had hidden from the world. Aspects of hurt and hardship that they had never told anybody about. Yet they are writing to me and they are from all walks of life. A gentleman from the East Indian Community talking about ostracizing his best friend in India who had told him he was gay. Who later took his life because he was put into an arranged marriage. He carried that guilt forever.

There was a woman talking about emotional and physical abuse from a former spouse. The stories were countless. The fact that I was fairly empathic before and trusted, then I showed high vulnerability in my coming out. It resulted in me being met with a level of trust that humbled me to the core and because of the kindness, the empathy and the embrace that I received and because of the trust I received from others telling me their stories. This gets to the root of your question. I was forever changed as a human being.

Redefining Leadership

When you get to see into the soul of others, and they trust you with such vulnerability and to be embraced the way that I was. It’s pretty damn hard to go and be a command and control manager after that. It’s pretty hard to be a dictator after that. I was immediately changed. I could no longer be directive in the way that I might have been in the past. I learned how to suspend my own anxiety and my own fear of meeting targets and expectations as a manager. I learned how to suspend that and shift my manager’s approach or leadership approach to kindness and curiosity.

Kindness and curiosity that would lead to empathy for what people are sharing with me. I became a much flatter leader. My executive team would tell me they knew what the root cause of a problem was of what we were trying to solve. It didn’t feel right intuitively to me, so I would go to the front line employees and say, “Tell me what’s going on here.” The front line employee goes, “It’s this, this and this.” I go, “What should we do about it?” They’d go, “We should do this, this and this.”

I go back to my executive team and I go, “We’re not listening. We’re not showing empathy and listening effectively to the people that know the best.” Everything got turned upside down for me because I saw a side of the human condition that I didn’t see at scale before. There’s so much hurt or conditioning that occurs that causes people to not share. I became so much more compassionate, empathic and curious that my leadership style changed forever to being much more human-centered and much more heart-centered. The funny thing is, our business performance was record-breaking through the entire period of that.

It’s a significant personal change for you and in what you revealed that day, but also in what happened afterwards. Having now reflected on that, do you feel like the corporate world is evolving or are they still stuck in the mode where leaders need to be these personas and can’t be their authentic selves?

Yes and yes. Both are true. There are pockets of light everywhere of humble, selfless, heart-centered leaders that lead with kindness and curiosity, show empathy and compassion. Take input from all levels. All corners of the organization. That’s what inclusivity is. It isn’t fancy. It takes psychological safety and belonging, but it’s about getting everybody’s input to come up with more holistic solutions. There are leaders like that everywhere. Many of them are flying beneath the radar. Not because they’re shunned necessarily, but because the organization and senior management is under so much pressure to perform.

Nobody takes enough time out to see and understand what makes this more human-centered, heart-centered inclusive and compassionate leader effective. There are bright lights everywhere. There are also and I saw it, at the most senior levels, there are very human-centered, planet centered senior executives and CEOs. The challenge we’re dealing with, and it’s a Western world, if not global societal issue. For a long period of time, we have built a world that is extractive and performative. We’ve been on a path for several thousand years that have created this consumerism, capitalistic, extractive and performative world that we live in.

The Performative Treadmill

It’s not good or bad. It just is. That extractive world has quarterly performance targets, quarterly reporting, risk management, board governance, a set of linear, logical, mechanical practices that keep CEOs and senior executives on this performative treadmill in order to keep the governance, the risk management and the production of the organization moving. It takes a lot for a senior executive to be able to pause that and embrace more regenerative and more coherent ways of leading and running a business.

Even the attempts of ESG have been pushed backwards. It’s hard. There’s great people everywhere, and great intentions everywhere. Yet they often get masked by the performance pressures within an organization from the top down, to perform and to deliver. It takes a very conscious leader or a very aware leader who is conscious of their own behavior and their own tendencies to create enough space to pause the anxiety associated with that performative way and create enough space in their day and in the way that they lead to be more human-centered and heart-centered.

It’s why I speak at Sincerely about the pathway to a regenerative world and a coherent world. It starts within the leader himself in order to create calm and peace within ourselves so that we can shift from anxiety or fear-based ways of being to kinder, more curious and inclusive ways of being. Both are true. Is it shifting? Yes. Is that at the pace it needs to? In order to save humanity and our relationship with nature and the planet, I don’t think it’s moving fast enough.

A lot and what you just said, both the notion that the way that we approach leadership has flaws but also the broader environmental consequences of it. Talk a little bit more about what that journey was like for you as you evolved your own leadership style and discovered that you could lead people in a very different way than perhaps you would have been leading up until that point.

I’ll give you 3 or 4 data points. The first time I cried at work was around the year 2000. A gentleman that was reporting to me, who I idolized, who I was junior to at one point. Now, I am a senior too. We were doing their leadership review, and it called out that they were risk adverse and they were pensive as a manager. I said to him, “You’re called out as risk adverse. Where does that come from?” He trusted me and he started to cry. He said, “Every time my parents made a risky decision, they failed. As a child I promised myself I would not take risks that would result in failure.”

He’s bawling his eyes out and I started to cry because I felt his pain. I also felt that he trusted me with a side of himself that he had not shared before at work. That moment for me was the beginning of learning to slow down and get to know the whole human being that you work with. That it’s okay to cry at work. It’s okay to be sensitive and to be vulnerable. That went on. I led the restructuring of a bank across nineteen countries in the Caribbean. I was the CEO. The restructuring by the board was seen as wildly successful.

The company went from losing money to back to sustainable profitability in less than 24 months. The board was blown away, yet I was heartbroken because in these small countries of the Caribbean, we reduced 40% of the workforce during that period as part of the restructuring. Employees didn’t trust management anymore. They were going to the media. I said to somebody, “We need to tell them the truth that we’re losing money. We need to tell them the plan to restructure the company.” The person says, “We’ll tell them when we’re done,” and I go, “They’re adults. They deserve to know.”

Every six weeks, I’d have a call with 6,000 employees. Eventually 5,000 and eventually 4,000 and I would cry with them because I got questions and I didn’t have answers. I said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry this is hard and I’m sorry this is heavy. I promise you I will do everything in my power to save this company and as many jobs as humanly possible.” As soon as I was honest and vulnerable, I would cry alongside the employees, not out of weakness but just out of feeling. They stopped going to the media and employee engagement on the team over that 24 month period went up over 20% at the same time we restructured.

Again, I learned that it was okay to be human. It was okay to be vulnerable. Everybody deserves to be brought on the journey, then I came out. I went through my own personal transformation. Now, it’s not a corporate transformation. I was met with the level of love, kindness and trust that I shared with you earlier and it changed me. I had to lead in an inclusive way with compassion and less command and control. I focused more on inputs or activities and behaviors. Less on financial outcomes as a leader. Again, we went on to achieve record performance and this was the turning point.

I’m now living in a woman’s world. Not a man’s world. I’m worried about being judged for being too feminine and too sensitive. I was carrying that, yet I became an enigma. I was in my mid-50s and at that point, I made a decision to leave. Amazing company that I spent 37 and a half years at. Yet I had grown so much as a human being, neurodiverse, lived in a man’s world, lived in a woman’s world, and grew up as a poor farmer to war surviving immigrant parents.

I had made sense of all of this stuff but I got to a point where I said, “I need to leave. I needed to leave,” because so much had changed for me that I needed another chance to meet new people where they’re at and have them meet me where I’m at and move forward from there. In that case, I chose to leave a company I had spent many years at in order to not start over but start clean. Start from a clean place. I wanted to prove to myself, myself as a woman, and also as a heart-centered leader, that it wasn’t a fluke.

I became a CEO of another bank and within 60 days or 90 days, we were achieving record performance just by showing compassion and sensitivity to employees and giving them permission to come together and work side by side with their peers to come up with creative solutions. The company’s mission was all about approving the quality of life of aging people, people 55 years of age and older. We started to achieve record performance. Again, this more compassionate heart centered leadership worked and I just needed another chance.

I wanted another opportunity to prove it. As you know, I’ve since moved on from that and now, I’ve set up my own company called Sincerely. There’s 3 or 4 events in my career that groomed me, that opened my heart and opened my mind to a more compassionate inclusive way of leading where I learned to suspend fear and anxiety, but it didn’t happen overnight. It’s about going on a journey of inner discovery and self-discovery as a manager that brought me through that fifteen-year period to the point that I’m at.

Listening to everything you’re saying and thinking about what you said earlier in the conversation, Katherine, about the fact that we’re in a culture where there’s all this constant quarterly pressure to deliver. In the scheme of things, if I think about the way that most leaders need to perform as a piece of advice. A bigger piece of it is the lack of willingness to do the inner work. We end up with these cultures.

I’d love to get your view of having observed things from multiple lenses, living as a man, living as a woman, being able to see how a change in leadership style played out in your case at least. It feels to me like we’re living in this regime of command and control, top down and managing through fear and all those things that you’ve mentioned and threatened in through what you brought up so far. A lot of that persists because people just aren’t as willing to look within themselves and find a better, deeper, richer way to lead.

It starts with looking within. It’s also important to be kind enough to ourselves and realize that this extractive and performative world is all around us. It’s been built over several thousand years and it’s been intensified in the last 50 years in a way that’s become almost unimaginable and would appear to be unsustainable. In the world we’re living in, the level of social fracture and the level of economic divide between countries or people and the level of planet degradation and the level of over-information and disinformation. Those four forces combined, social economic, planet, and volume of disinformation and information is unmanageable for any human being, I believe.

I don’t think we were built to deal with that much anxiety and pressure from the outside world. It doesn’t just exist at work. I have four children. If there’s one thing that my former spouse and I did well, it’s that we did not jam our children into an excruciating schedule of extracurricular activities. We would go visit family in the country on most weekends or go to a family cottage where we would hang out in the wilderness and the outdoors as a family.

Since I have four kids within four years, they became best friends with each other, but we did not have this performance intensity day and night. We had some relief in our life. This idea of an extractive and performative world is all around us, consumerism is a byproduct of it. The way companies run is a byproduct of it. This going inward is more than being a manager or a leader. It’s a human journey. It’s a human journey to say, “I am not at peace with the level of pressure and anxiety that exists in my life because of family, spouse or my job. I want to go on a journey to calm my nervous system and find some peace within me.”

Taking the time and space to go Inward and be reflective is more than management. It is about life. It is about going back, finding your way back to your true essence as a person, and finding a level of inner common, inner peace within you. At Sincerely, I describe the world we live in as extractive and performative. I describe the world we have the potential to move towards, which is regenerative and coherent. What I mean by coherent is a world where the human being lives from their essence, their essential self through their physical and inherited self, genetics outward through our lived experience.

Back to performative. Most human beings are taught from a very young age to suppress parts of our identity to fit in. It’s like, “Don’t be too expressive, Katie. Don’t be too sensitive, Katie. Learn to talk with a deep voice. Don’t be creative. Perform.” Most of us have aspects of identity we suppress throughout our life. That creates a level of anxiety within our nervous system because it’s not natural. What we have is a society that values education or a job resume. It might value whether you’re male or female, but it doesn’t value what are the unique human traits of J.R.

Moving to a world that is regenerative and where you as a human being are more aligned and coherent, involves going inward to revisit that inner child and learn to love and like the parts of yourself that your parents might have told you were not appropriate or your teachers might have told you weren’t appropriate. To heal that, and to ultimately create habits in your life that calm your nervous system like meditation.

I meditate now twice a day. I lead a very quiet life. I used to go from 6:00 in the morning till 11:00 at night every day. As an executive, that doesn’t happen anymore. Making conscious choices to go inward and learn to love yourself and to create peace and calm within yourself is a human journey that leads to coherence that allows you to become a better leader and also a more whole and complete human being.

Now that you’re doing what you’re doing with Sincerely and have shifted out of the corporate world. You’re out speaking and writing on this. What are you hearing from people about how to practically incorporate some of the things that you’re talking about into the way that we run our world day?

A few things and I’ll be tight. One is it’s never too early to go on an inner journey to start. Whether it’s learning to meditate or hiring professional help. I’m a strategic advisor to leaders and businesses. I’m a storyteller. I’m not a therapist. Surround yourself with the right professional help or healers or mediums, surround yourself with two or three people that you admire, see the best in you, and you can confide in those who are friends. Not going to take you into pity city and create some habits around wellness. Whether it’s yoga, Pilates or meditation.

Creating some of those habits in your life that help you calm your nervous system and tune into yourself is step one and you can never start too early. The second point is it takes time. Since the complexity of my journey was at least a decade long. I said back in 2020, “If you put a performance expectation on your inner journey, you’re going to just exacerbate what already exists in your life. Don’t do that.” Start now and build the community, build the professional support, and build the practices. Be kind to yourself.

Be kind to yourself that it’s a journey. It’s part of your lifetime. It’s not something that you deal with overnight. The third thing that I would say. At Sincerely, I am launching my own show. I’m the host of a global podcast called the Sincerely Show and everyone that I’m interviewing is living a life of service or contribution. They’re all doing interesting things for their local community, for humanity and for our planet.

Every one of them has been through an awakening of sorts. Every one of them has been through deep darkness. It’s mind-blowing that as humans, so many of us have to go through deep mental health challenges and what I call collapses of our ego, our fabricated identity in order to awaken into something that is more whole and more complete in order to feel spared and to dedicate your life to contribution, to service to humanity and to our planet.

The Life Of Service

The reason I share that as a common arc of the people that I’m meeting and interviewing is it’s a metaphor. It is Joseph Campbell’s Heroes Journey, but it is a metaphor for the human journey. An inner journey can be hard. It can involve collapses. Sometimes, it involves divorce or other forms of upset. It doesn’t need to be about affirming your gender. It can be heavy. The sooner we build mental health practices and wellness practices and the sooner we learn to love and live in a line with that inner child, the less harsh that upset is going to be because they can be hard. They can be heavy. That would be my advice for people. Those would be my lessons I would share with people.

Overall, you are saying that if you have conviction, that this is about who you are and what you believe in. Going through whatever upheaval that it causes will be easier. I use that word with a lot of trepidation that it will at least be easier for you to feel that you are doing what was necessary and right for you. If you don’t necessarily build that conviction, I’m sure it’s much harder.

In every human being, again, it depends how spiritual you are. Love is real. I know it in the core of my being. Human beings’ innate ability from our essence or our soul outward is love. It’s innate. Fear is the opposite. It’s a conditioned human trait. We needed fear, survival instincts to put food on the table and to defend against the saber-toothed tiger. Yet the extractive and performative world has fed off of anxiety and fear of being good enough to perform to appoint that it’s dominated our life. It’s almost become fabricated and embedded within the human psyche to a point that we’ve lost the ability to create commoner life and space in our life to be coherent to realign.

I’m saying this from the standpoint of your word conviction. Anybody reading that is on a journey to be a better manager or better leader is because something in you knows that you’re not operating from a place of balance or from a place of wholeness. Somewhere in you, you want to be loved just as much as your employees want to be loved or cared for or nurtured. That’s the right place for conviction to come from. Conviction from ego will be met with some form of a human breakdown or collapse.

Conviction from this place of a deeper calling that you want a world that is more inclusive. You want a world that is kinder. You want a world where we live harmoniously with self, each other and nature. You believe deep within you, to your point about conviction. It’s worth going on that journey, because if not us, then it’s going to be up to our children or the next generation. If that’s where the conviction comes from, which is what you meant, then I say yes. That is the right conviction because it’s from a place of service. It’s from a place of wanting to leave the sandbox better than it was when we took it over.

You’ve left us with a lot to think about. I sincerely appreciate your candor, your authenticity and what you are now turning to do in service with Sincerely. Thank you.

Thank you for the invite. Thank you for what you’re doing because it matters. We’re human beings and there’s an opportunity to be the most full and authentic version of human beings possible. That’s what you’re pursuing and I applaud you for it.

Thank you.

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What would I like you to take away from the discussion with Katherine? Probably, most importantly, is its success and alignment aren’t necessarily the same thing. One of the most powerful ideas from everything that Katherine said and there was so much there is that success often coexists with internal misalignment. She reached a point in her life prompted by depression and suicidal thoughts were she realized that she needed to reveal who she was to the world.

She did it in a very brave fashion through thousands of employees across the company that she was working for at the time. She heard back from people things that they’d never revealed to anybody else. People were willing to share with her in a very vulnerable way because she was vulnerable with them. It begs the question of, how many people are out there living lives that weren’t the lives that they’d intended? Living identities that aren’t who they are, or who they want to be. That, to me, is one very powerful idea from the episode.

The second thing is this idea of how leadership can be very different than the way we often perceive it. Katherine, by virtue of now living a woman’s life, had to adopt what she felt like was a more feminine way of leading. In doing so, she realized that command and control fear-based approach, not that she necessarily would have had that in the past. That approach was even more different from what she wanted to be than perhaps it had been in the past. She started to lead more through compassion and that’s been a revelation for her as you heard her describe.

Again, it raises a question of, can we bring more of this into our leadership approach in a way that will be better for our employees and a way that will help them connect to themselves and to us as leaders and to the organizations that we represent without sacrificing performance? As she said, these things are not necessarily at odds with each other. Finally, just as this idea about the extractive performative world that we live in, and the notion that we should slow down live more as we were meant to be, live a more regenerative life, both for our own mental health, but also for the broader collective health of the human population and the planet that we live on.

This ultimately is playing a big role in what Katherine is now doing with Sincerely. As she says, living a life of service at that point and trying to deliver this message again and again. There is a different way of thinking about the way that we act, the way that we lead, the way that we interact with each other and the way that we live on our planet. I hope you all took away some other lessons from the conversation. I invite you as always to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. If you found this discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, PathWise and subscribe to our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Katherine Dudtschak on LinkedIn
• Katherine Dudtschak on Instagram
• Sincerely, Katherine
• RBC
• HomeEquity Bank
• Sincerely
• Heroes Journey
• Sincerely Show on Apple Podcast
• The Sincerely Show on Youtube
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter

About Katherine Dudtschak

Katherine Dudtschak is a former banking CEO turned conscious leadership advisor and creator of the Sincerely framework. After more than 30 years in senior executive leadership, including serving as President and CEO of HomeEquity Bank and Executive Vice President for Personal and Commercial Banking at RBC, she now helps leaders move from survival‑based identity to authentic, essence‑led leadership.

Katherine is widely respected for bridging elite corporate performance with deep human integration. She publicly came out as a woman in front of 80,000 people while still in executive leadership, marking the beginning of a new chapter focused on psychological safety, identity integration, and sustainable leadership from within.

Her work supports executives, founders, and high‑performing leaders who have mastered the external game of success but seek wholeness, clarity, and purpose.

Everyone talks about AI as the future of work. But what if the bigger story is something we’re overlooking?

In this episode, JR speaks with leadership strategist and author Dan Pontefract about why experience—not youth—may become one of the most valuable assets in tomorrow’s workplace. As workforces age and labor shortages grow, Dan argues that organizations must rethink how they hire, develop, and retain talent—or risk losing decades of knowledge and expertise.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why demographic change may have a bigger impact on work than AI

What “age debt” is—and why organizations aren’t prepared for it

How ageism affects professionals at every stage of their careers

Why traditional generational labels may be doing more harm than good

Dan’s “Rivers, Rocks, and Rubies” framework for understanding career growth

How organizations can turn experience into a competitive advantage instead of treating it as a cost

What professionals can do to build careers that remain relevant and rewarding for decades

Whether you’re just starting your career, leading a team, or thinking about what’s next in your 50s, 60s, and beyond, this conversation will challenge many of the assumptions we’ve long held about work, careers, and retirement. You’ll come away with a new perspective on why experience may be one of the greatest advantages you can build—and why the organizations that recognize its value will be the ones best positioned to succeed in the years ahead.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/dan-pontefract/.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Why Experience Is Becoming Your Biggest Career Advantage, With Dan Pontefract

The world of work has a demographic problem, but most organizations and their leaders are pretending it doesn’t exist. We are living longer and working longer. Yet, somehow, we are still building and running organizations that behave like careers, ending at 65 with a cliff where you just stop working fully one day. We’re practicing subtle and, frankly, not so subtle ageism for anybody in their 50s. In the meantime, we’re seeing experience walk out the door. There aren’t enough younger workers to fully fill the gaps. The people in the middle are being stretched thinner and thinner.

We talked endlessly about the future of work, particularly related to topics like AI, flexibility and culture but we’re missing one of the biggest shifts that’s happening out there. It’s hiding in plain sight. The workforce is getting older. It is also getting more complex. What if the future of work isn’t young or disruptive but grey? Our guest Dan Pontefract is making a point that we’re facing something he calls the age debt. A slow-building crisis that organizations aren’t prepared for but he also sees an opportunity.

What if experience isn’t a liability to manage but an advantage to unlock? In his new book, The Future of Work Is Grey, he challenges everything we think we know about generations, career journeys and what it takes to build organizations that work for everyone and for the long run. I’m JR. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.

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Dan, thank you for joining me on the show.

Thanks, JR. Thrilled to be here.

I appreciate that. Congrats on your new book, The Future of Work Is Grey. Let’s get into it. You talk about something you described is the age debt. What’s the simplest way to explain that to the uninitiated?

It’s like a head in the sand of four key things, demographic change, ageism and inability to see and how to capture wisdom. The fact that we’re living longer, but no one is prepared for it.

You hit at this point that we’re living in the world of the past where people retired at 65. It was a hard cut off. You went from working full-time one day to trying to figure out what to do with your life the next day. That’s not how we’ll want it so much anymore but most organizations and their leaders are still operating in that world. Why is that?

It’s a cracking of the code I was trying to do within the book and I still don’t have an answer, quite frankly. I’ll say two things. First of all, there is an antiquated way of thinking that has just leached itself onto the point like, what is the definition of retirement? It happens in Japan at 60. It happens in Germany at 62 and North America at 65. That’s how we’ve always done it. The organizational and societal norms are that, and that’s a problem I would say.

The second thing is individual. We continue to think, “There’s this golden watch date. I’m 65 or whatever the date is, and then I’m going to be free.” I’m sure you see these stories. Lots of individuals a year or two years in are like, A) I’m bored out of my mind. B) I am lacking a sense of purpose for whatever is I want to do next because I’ve done enough golf and gardening to fill an entire Mars planet up with. C) They slowly look at the 401(k) or other savings. They’re like, “That’s going down faster than I thought or I didn’t save enough. What am I going to do now?”

I’m at that point in my life. I was working in corporate jobs up until 2025. I now run my own business. The question is, is that all I do or do I fill other things around it? I wasn’t ready to quit working and yet I was thrust into that model. I’m sure you found out by doing the research for your book and maybe personal experience, it gets a lot harder to find work when you get older. There is a lot of ageism out there. It just doesn’t feel like the world is geared for taking advantage of people who are like me. Not that this is about me, but people who want to keep working maybe less than full-time and maybe in a more flexible way but not just flip the switch completely off.

Your spot on JR. Whether you’ve been involuntarily removed from your role and/or organization at the same time. You’re like, “I didn’t expect that.” We, as individuals, and also, again, back to organizations are creating these constructs that are from the ‘60s or ‘70s. It’s still there now. That is, the only way to grow your career is to go up the career ladder. Even if you don’t go up the career ladder, you might get stuck halfway there, then you’re stuck. That day comes when you can no longer work for us and we’re going to get rid of you or you will retire yourself from the role you’ve had.

It’s just like, is that the only way? I blame tons of folks. I blame senior leaders in the C-suite who have collected enough of that money as retirement savings to not care. They’re like, “Whatever. This is never going to affect me. I don’t worry about the other 95% of the organization.” I blame HR, PNC or people in culture. Again, they have not paid attention and/or shove this under the rug and the carpet so to say about what is good culture these days.

Are they planning appropriately for the talent conundrum that they will face from the absolute demographic math that is going to math very soon in North America? There’s lots of blame to go around, but then thirdly the individual. When I’m doing my therapy and counseling sessions for those that reach out and say, “I’ve just been whacked by, name your tech company or name your organization. What should I do? I put 58 resumes and applications out. I’m not getting any callbacks.”

One of the other things we got to be thinking about as individuals is transferability and those skills that you have that you might have to lift and shift over to another industry, another role, or another type of job that you never thought of, but you’re smart. You’ve got scars, and you’ve got wrinkles from all these good experiences. You can transfer those to another type of opportunity that you might not be thinking about. There is blame to go around a lot of different ways.

What’s the biggest consequence of this that you’re seeing in organizations because of the fact that they’re not adapting?

Everyone’s love-hate relationship with Boeing is a pretty good real-life example. You’ve seen over the last 10-12 years, multiple incidents that are public. Let alone the ones that you don’t know about. One thing you can think about from a Boeing perspective, they’ve been public in Congress hearings about what has gone wrong. One of the issues is the fact that they both had voluntary and involuntary departures from a lot of these mechanic roles, operational roles, production roles, etc.

Not only did they lose wisdom that was chopped at the block. Again, either they chose to leave or they didn’t. They’ve had to backfill and figure out where’s the wisdom and how we train new people into these roles. Things are getting missed and things are lost. Things weren’t recorded, so we didn’t have any transfer of that wisdom let alone the capture. There’s one company of a kazillion where we could go into and say, “There might be real-life consequences or real business economic consequences if we are not thinking about talent in different ways. What could Boeing do?”

I’ll give an example with BMW, who’s doing it much better. The same thing. They make cars but they don’t make plans. It’s the same but different. BMW in Germany took a look at their aging workforce and said, “We got a lot of folks over the age of 50. Not a lot of young folks coming up.” In fact, Germany has one of the lowest birth rates in all of Europe. They’re like, “We don’t have a lot of immigration happening. What are we going to do?”

They start a program called the Senior Expert Program. The Senior Expert Program is a way for them to build up the skills of the middle aged leaders and individual contributors so that they know they’re going to move up into these new leadership roles. The people who are in the existing roles, who might be older or what I call Rubies. They’re offered the opportunity to stay full-time or on contract or part-time or whatever they wish to still be at BMW well into their later life. That’s a conscious decision of a C-suite saying, “How can we take care of our organizational talent and repurpose it in different ways?”

I’m sure there are lots of examples of companies that are starting to wake up to the fact that in most of the developed world, more people are aging out of the workforce than are coming into the workforce. It got this whole immigration debate that’s going on in many places. Without immigration, the math is the math. More people are leaving than coming in. It’s going to create, at some point, a labor shortage. Maybe that’s what people want. At the same time, we’ve got all this AI stuff going on and people are saying, “We don’t need as many workers as we used to have.” Maybe the math will end up working out for them but it’s a big gamble.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, to me, it’s too early to tell and it’s a bit of a red herring because tech was over-hired during COVID and post-COVID. Now, they’re just trimming the books and that’s getting all the mainstream media headlines. If you look at the actual data that says, “Is AI doing anything to replace young middle aged or older workers?” It’s nowhere near that. It’s, in fact, complementary rather than replacement. That being said, there are actual examples whereby organizations are not hiring young people.

My book is for all ages. When young people aren’t being offered those out of school internships or first time roles. They’re off doing jobs where they’re overqualified for indeed. Those organizations that aren’t doing the hiring and they’re preventing that friction learning from happening. That young people need to get in order to become more senior experienced people down the road. That, I would suggest leaders need to take a good hard look at from that perspective.

Now, flip it to the other end, to your earlier point. When we make rash decisions about workforce dynamics or talent composition, and then we’re just looking at EBITDA and saying, “JR and Dan, you two are making $200,000 a year. That’s $400,000. We’re going to get rid of you two and we’re going to replace it with a $70,000 individual. Two for one, we’re going to save $330,000.” Now, could you possibly maybe work with JR and Dan in a way that is, first of all, humane but looking at that talent composition as, “Maybe you could get two for one. Those two maybe want to work 50% each for like 3 or 4 or 5 years.”

The $200,000 each is $100,000 or even less. You’re just looking at the economics of your cost and P&L essentially differently so that you don’t lose immediately in 100% all that wisdom and the tacit knowledge that’s basically walking out the door. Both ends of the spectrum, you can see organizations not planning for that demographic inevitability. With immigration cuts, in both Canada and the US from North America perspective, it is inevitable that the over 50 crowd is increasing at a rate faster than the under 30 crowd. For those organizations not thinking about the longer term, you are going to be in for a world of hurt.

How much of the study do you think is exacerbated by the fact that you’ve got this incredible financial pressure that most companies feel to drive better returns, have consistently improving quarterly results and squeeze as much out as they can? Whether for the shareholders or senior management or both. Pushing that experience out the door because it is viewed as expensive and maybe not as productive as they would like it to be.

We were chatting and I was mentioning how this is rightly or wrongly, my 6th book across the library of Dan Pontefract books. Many years ago, my second book was published. It was called The Purpose Effect. In that book, I basically speak to three types of purpose such as personal purpose, role purpose and organizational purpose. Do you have a sense of purpose in your role at work? Now, why do I bring that up? It’s because it’s been ten years since that book. In the organizational purposes thesis that I suggested, organizations who continue to align with Milton Friedman’s shareholder primacy theory, which is essentially at all costs serve the market or the profit seekers for the quarter, which is AKA known as short-termism.

You will rue the day downstream if you’re thinking so short sighted in this with short-termism not thinking about the better health of your org over time. We’ve seen examples of this in the last decade where organizations who are myopic and just thinking in the short term have either fallen off the cliff from a fleet street or Fortune 500 perspective or they’ve had to do remedial efforts of trying to save where their economic value and output is. They might not be as innovative.

Examples could be things like research, motion and blackberry. There’s one perfect example whereby they weren’t thinking it through and then what happened? Everything was for the short term and the company almost went belly up. Now, my point is, you take that short term as I’m thinking and layer on the demographic inevitability that your workforce is shifting from a bell-shaped demography to a light bulb shape demography.

There’s less people in the bottom and way more up at the top. What are you going to do? Are you going to work for the short term or are you going to think about the health and longevity of that organization for which you work and say, “Maybe we should be doing things differently? Maybe we should do it for the long-term.” The two ten years apart are related but in different ways.

You mentioned Rubies a minute ago, Dan. I know you’ve got a different framework for thinking about the generations than the traditional ones of Millennials, Gen Z and Gen X. Talk a little bit about rivers and rocks and rubies.

What has happened forever basically, since maybe 1964, is that we have coined individuals in the organization and outside of it by these 14 to 18 year segments. To your point, Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y/Millennials, Gen Z and now Gen Alphas. How is that helpful, first of all, inside an organization who’s trying to be innovative, serve customers, and create a great employee experience? What it basically does is it takes societies tropes and means and places them inside the organization. It just compounds ageism

Whether that is ageism or directed at young people, or middle-aged sandwich workers, as I call them, who have to take care of ailing or dementia-based parents and the young kids at their raising. Maybe older workers who are just dealing with the fact that they’re getting older but still at work. Generations enforce ageism. If we were to just take a look at this and say, “You and I are both props of the same vintage.” Everyone will go through three career eras. As opposed to generations, all of us, regardless of your age and when you were born, go through three eras. I called them rivers, rocks, and rubies.

I’m paying homage to basically some early work with a psychologist, LaMotte. Basically, we have two types of intelligence. We have what’s called fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid is when you start and then that fluidity eventually morphs into crystallized intelligence. I was like, “Not quite.” That’s not what I see in my role as a people in culture executive for 30 years. I’ve seen three eras or three types of intelligence. Essentially, fluid intelligence or what I call the rivers, that’s when you’re just getting going.

Again, you could be 16 to 30 or 16 or 34. It doesn’t matter. The number doesn’t matter. You’re in your young era, but then you start to figure out things. In that same river, you start dropping what I call rocks. You solidify a little bit. Your river is still flowing around you. You’re still fluid, but you have now ideas on how and what works right in the right way because you get context. You develop that and more wisdom. As the river continues to undulate around your rocks, those rocks get polished and they crystallize over time to become rubies.

You, I, all of us, start as a river, become a rock and then eventually become this ruby. Again, you don’t have to use the vernacular but if you were to just say, “All our organizations and all our team members, regardless of whether they’re born in 1946 or 2026, it doesn’t matter. There’s these three eras and it happens. How might we look at intergenerational teams made up of rivers, rocks and rubies? How might we look at rivers as ways in which we help them become rocks? How may we look at the rubies and say, “The rubies are shining. We should keep a bunch of those shiny objects around so that we can help rocks and rivers become better employees.” That’s the type of frame I’d love to see.

What’s interesting about the whole generational labeling and stereotyping is, it’s fun but it’s also rife with accuracy. You are highlighting a lot of times. Somebody our age, we would have been rivers back in the day, trying to figure out what we wanted to do. Meandering through and ultimately figuring out a path that felt right for us, betting down and becoming one of those rocks. We look at those kids, they’re kids because they’re even younger than my kids are at the point, in their early twenties and think, “They’re different from the way that we were.”

They’re clearly different in the sense that they’re digital natives and we weren’t. There are definitely some things that will affect their adult lives relative to what has affected our adult lives. We blend so much of this stuff. The context of what’s going on in the world while you are coming of age. What is relevant to you in your twenties relative to what’s relevant to you in your 30s or 40s or 50s or 60s. The fact that they are somewhat different from what you and I were like when we were in our early twenties.

The problem is, when you start unpacking all of that, these differences aren’t nearly as big as we make them out to be. They become an excuse, a label, and a stereotype. They get in the way of people figuring out what’s the best way to work with everybody as individuals. To me, that’s the part about the generational labels that’s just flawed.

My dad was born in England during just the end of World War II. He grew up in an era whereby he put to work at sixteen. He was in an apprenticeship program. He was an Engineer, but they never had TV. They couldn’t afford a TV. Their entertainment was out and about in the community in England where he lived, but the radio. His stories at work were about radios. When he enters his rock era with other rivers who now are in technicolor, can have TV and its color. Now, these conversations are happening like, “Interesting. I never thought about TV that way.”

My point is, wherever you are, we all have tool change. Whether it’s from the radio, to the TV, to the internet, to AI. These tools change. Why is it that we can’t evolve our thinking to say, “Even though I might be a ruby, can I learn AI?” Of course. This is not the point. Can a river learn about the Beatles and the Stones now? Sure. I think they can.

You can go pick up some catalog of music and say, “That’s pretty cool music from the ‘60s and ‘70s. That’s the thing. We myopically consider and classify people based on an era where they were born. In my case, between `years of 1964 and 1980 being Gen X. Does that mean that I am not able to enjoy Wet Leg, Will Fallas or Wolf Parade or Harry Styles these days because of their river bands? No. The same thing can apply at work and that’s what I’m trying to get.

You talk about the title of the book, The Future of Work Is Grey, and there’s an implicit focus on the aging population and what’s happening with them. There’s a lot of ageism of mid-level people, middle managers, and others who are in their 30s and 40s. It feels like they’re under attack. We’re trying to thin out management layers and get rid of management numbers in a more general sense. The people who are left end up with 10 or 12 or 15 people reporting to them, who they can give no time to. What do you see happening with that population?

They’re the highest, on a percentage basis, increase in stress and anxiety as a cohort inside of our organizations. In the rock era, some of them are dealing with aging parents and young kids or kids, giving the birth rate to collapse. Nonetheless, having to do it to your point expands in layer increase. Not only is there the hollowing out of middle management. It’s like putting more on them. You’d have 8 to 12 direct reports in this span and layers thing. They’re being over six layers between the CEO and that frontline team member.

These days, the minimum it seems is that team size starts at 16 and then goes up to 50. To your credit, how are you supposed to have great coaching conversations, performance management, just normal development and being a leader and a manager at same time with a team of 50? These are consequential decisions that are being made. That is adding stress and anxiety on this middle cohort. What happens? Not only do you have that stress and anxiety going up. Performance issues will ensue, and then they start looking for other roles.

It’s like, “Can I possibly work for our company or organization that is pro midlife knowing that I am this sandwich generation leader and all these things going on?” What happens is you start having a talent exodus. That is another thing that could be thought through when you look at these three river, rock and ruby eras and say, “If we hollow out our rocks, who’s going to become our rubies one day?” It’s some short-sighted thinking there.

Have you worked with an organization and gotten them thinking in this rivers, rocks, and rubies construct? If so, what changes you see them making to make it better?

No organization specifically yet, because I’ve been immersed in the development of the body of work. In the research and the interviewing and then the working with organizations on pieces to the puzzle I was trying to put together, there are lots of good lights of hope around the world. An example are companies like L’Oreal and British Columbia Lottery Corps, in my home province in Canada here in BC. They have instituted phase retirement programs. Instead of you ducking out off a cliff at the age of 65, they ask you if you like to phase that out over 3, 4 or 5 years and maybe go from 100% to 80% to 60% to 50% time.

We’d love that. We’d love to support you. We get to use you still for that period of time over those 3, 4, and 5 years. How fantastic is that? We’d love to keep you around, learn from you and help you onboard your replacement or whatever the case may be. Those types of programs are pretty good. Unilever has another program, which is neat. It’s called Uwork. What they do is they allow you, whether you’re a river, rock or ruby.

They’re thinking about the longer-term play for their talent composition. Your work allows you to basically have a side hustle. As long as you’re not in competition with Unilever, you can start your own gig. You can work for another gig up to a percentage basis or a number of hours per week and as long as you’re doing your job. As long as you fit that in somehow, they promote it. You will have these new learnings and new opportunities then potentially also bring back into Unilever. There’s lots of good examples. It’s just that there’s no big, massive one, “We’ve become pro age and we’re going to do everything as I’m recommending.”

One of your other terms is experience dividend. What does that mean? What does it look like in a real company?

First of all, the book I wrote is like an album, side A and side B. Side A is the problem. Those are the problem tracks. That’s the age debt. If you flip the album over or get to side B on the book, the experience dividend, essentially. You can turn debt into a dividend if you erase your thinking, at least evolve it. The three good examples that are nucleus points, I call them as follows. One is the longevity lens. The second is the wisdom wheel. The third is the career canvas.

When I’m asking the leader to consider, whether you’re a small, medium-sized business, or you’re a unit leader or maybe you’re a big company or public sector. It doesn’t matter. The longevity lands are basically you say, “How are we going to be more age inclusive in our culture?” It’s our job descriptions. The fact that people are living longer and having open conversations about that. The fact that those rocks and some ruby women, 52% of them suffer from perimenopause, premenopausal and menopause. What are we doing about that and so on?

It’s just like these longevity items that we never talked about. If we were to become more age inclusive and pro age, maybe we should. That’s number one. Number two, on the wisdom wheel. Going back in time a little bit and saying, “Might we allow apprenticeships? How can someone shadow someone?” We learned from them. How do we make sure we don’t terminate rubies by not capturing their wisdom, and then sharing that?

There’s a great example of AI. Why not have a whole bunch of cameras or contraptions? Whereby, we are capturing the knowledge of people. Using AI not only to capture, but then to put that into nuggets of learning so people could learn from customer relationships that people have but never talked about. How you run the line and that production line and again, share that. Wisdom, mentoring, coaching, rotations, etc.

The career canvas is my point of taking a very large match in setting the career ladder on fire. This is where small, medium-sized businesses do this because they’re told to by edict, I suppose, from past lore. Large organizations still do this. The only way is up. A terrible song, but that’s not the way our career should go either. They should be multifaceted, multidirectional. What’s wrong with a 48 year old taking a two-year down spin and saying, “I don’t want to be the Director for a while. I’m going to be an individual contributor. Is that cool?” Why not?

Is there a stigma? We call it demotion? Why do we call it demotion? That’s terrible. You’re just taking a break but you’re still a full-time employee. You just don’t want to run a team anymore. That organization shouldn’t lose you if you want to do something different for a while. That’s what I’m getting at. The canvas is, you and the team or the organization, rethinking about every career goes up. In fact, it could be multidirectional and like a good painter, you have all these paint colors and brushes. How might we basically paint a better picture using the canvas of opportunity?

So much of this just strikes me as you’re talking about this, Dan. HR people and cultural organizations are so pressed for time. They’re besieged. They’re getting pressured to halo themselves out and use AI across everything. They don’t have time to think about this. An enlightened manager, if somebody 48 years old came to them and said, “I want to downshift for a couple of years because I’ve got something going on and my personal life and I’d like to go back to doing what I was doing.”

An enlightened manager, an enlightened HR person, an enlightened organization, you put all those things together, and that might happen. The odds of each of those things being in place, is certainly well less than 100%. Multiply them all together and you get something probably approaching zero. That’s why this doesn’t happen so much. It’s because it requires work and it’s so antithetical to the way that people tend to think about the career ladder and the idea that if you step down, it’s permanent. You can’t come back to what you were doing.

I do love the word antithetical. This type of thinking is anathema to the longer term rethinking that any organization of any size needs to be doing. Again, if I were to chat with you in ten years time and we say, “In 2026, Dan, you said demographic disruption is an inevitability. The math math’s on this one. Ten years later, in 2036, how did those organizations do?” The good ones will be making the plans and preparations now to do exactly what you said to carve out time in calendars to say, “What will this organization be like in 5 years or 10 years?” If you’re not a leader who suggests to everyone, “We got to invest a little time on this,” then that conversation you and I will have ten years from now. We’ll be talking about a lot of broken organizations and people.

There’s so much disruption going on now. I haven’t felt this way since the internet era was blossoming many years ago in terms of what’s going on with AI. I feel like the broader geopolitical sense and how people are thinking about those forces and their careers. It feels like the next ten years are going to be interesting. It’s hard to know how any of its going to play out.

I don’t disagree. The only way I would disagree with it is that we’re running out of people. If we’re running the people, that tells me there’s a supply and demand scenario that is unfolding that we might want to pay attention to.

Apart from the fact that we’ve got the supply demand inequity that you’re talking about. You also make an argument that thinking about this more creatively helps with innovation. Not just filling seats but also with doing better work, driving work, innovation and growth. How so?

If I told you that in Japan, adult diapers outsell baby diapers. It might be a bit of a shock for those that haven’t heard that before and it’s true. South Korea is the same thing, by the way. The diaper manufacturers, when they started looking at the demographics, they’re like, “Maybe we should start thinking about what that consumer pool looks like. If it’s shifting demographically, maybe we should shift with the times.” There’s a hidden point in this book.

The book is called, The Future of Work Is Grey. Grey is meant to be a double entendre, which is that we are aging as society but also, there’s fog. Grey can mean fog. What I’m trying to do with the fog is to lift it and then when you lift that fog, what should there be is, hope for an opportunity. Which is why the cover is Gold. I think the future of work is a golden opportunity. Whether you’re looking at that from what consumer opportunities, what business opportunities, and what B2B opportunities are there as society ages. You’re like, “We can put our heads together here and maybe think about different ways in which to help.”

This isn’t just like, “We need more elder care homes and health care options.” We do, but that’s not the end of our innovation that we should be thinking about. If you get intergenerational, rivers, rocks and rubies, thinking creatively about what we might do economically from a production, innovation, output perspective. Maybe you come up with your own adult diaper strategy, and maybe there’s something else metaphorically there that helps you for the long term.

It’s hard to do a follow-up question when we’ve been talking about adult diapers and baby diapers, but I’m going to do my best. For an organization that’s thinking about this, somebody picks up your book, reads it and is thought-provoking to them. What do you want them to start doing, stop doing and continue doing?

It’s not in the right order in the book because I wrote it in a way that just said, “You can pick up any track whenever you want,” because I don’t even call them chapters. I do think that if I were to pin the tail on the proverbial age donkey, ageism is the one that is the immediate remedy opportunity and what’s happening. You see on one end, older rubies, even rocks scrubbing their tenure from LinkedIn. They’re embarrassed or finding that they’re not getting through to the recruiters or talent teams or even hiring managers. They might have worked for six years between 1995 and 2001. That’s dated on their LinkedIn.

There’s this, how old is your inferiority complex that has enveloped the Western world? As if we’re not supposed to say our age. As if I am looking into this camera, it isn’t 55. I’m supposed to be 38. That is ageism but that’s self-ageism. Meaning I am embarrassed by the inevitability that I am aging. We all age. That needs to be self-corrected but then, you’ve got the age against the machine, as I call it, issue. That’s the organization.

Whether that’s talent teams, hiring teams, or HR teams who use ATS and are consciously looking for age and to scrub those people out from the potentiality of being hired or getting to the interview stage. That’s wrong. That’s ageism. Ageism is how you craft your job descriptions. Ageism is how you craft who gets considered for promotion or the projects inside your organization.

Ageism is how you communicate in the town halls by recognizing only the rivers or vice versa, never recognizing the rivers. All of this has an opportunity. If we just looked in the mirror and said, “We all end up six feet under. Age is inevitable. What is it that we’re doing to be more inclusive rather than age negative and ageist?” I think that’s the opportunity.

If people start working well into their 60s or their 70s and maybe even into their 80s. What do you think’s going to change most about the way that the workplace works?

There’s going to be all some practical changes. Westpac is a bank in Australia who took a look at their workforce. They got 33,000 people or so. They recognize that just 22% of the workforce was over the age of 55. They’re like, “That’s like 7,000-ish people. Maybe we could do some ergonomic accommodations for whether they’re bank tellers or things that’s happening within their actual branches and so forth.” They made a conscious decision to be pro age, age inclusive and then look at things ergonomically.

When I was visiting a couple car manufacturer plants in Japan, they too have done the same thing on the lines. Both with the use of AI and VR headsets and the way in which the lines are crafted to be more pro age for potential physical labor work as these examples I’m giving you. It can be done in a way that’s a little bit more healthy. You got that, the physical, ergonomic, easy, low hanging fruit stuff.

Does anyone out there think that they’re training people to understand their unconscious and conscious bias of age? Do we have age training or ageism of training? Are we a pro age company by talking a good game and putting up posters of people of three different eras but not teaching people how and what they’re doing from a biased perspective and enlightening them? That, to me, is a conversation at a leadership level. Your line leader or you as a team lead could be having it and good on you if you are. It is a conscious culture change opportunity that the C-suite and the senior leaders need to be having.

You wrote this book because you saw a gap in the way that people were thinking about this. Having now gone down the rabbit hole of looking at this very deeply, where are you in terms of optimism, pessimism about where organizations are and what the future holds for us?

I’ve been an executive at Telus and SAP for about eighteen years, running culture, leadership development, all the CLO capacities and I never thought about age. Not once. If I consider myself semi-smart with a bunch of degrees, running culture change in the development of leaders and teams for two organizations over nearly two decades and I never once thought about it. I’m trying to perhaps remedy a little bit of my own past mistakes and to enlighten others that certainly I would argue aren’t thinking about it either.

Now that the book is out in the world, the conversation will blossom because people will be able to pick it up and start talking about it more. I appreciate you taking time, especially given that this is launch week talk with me. Thank you, Dan.

It’s been great to chat with you, JR. Thanks to the opportunity. I appreciate the new friendship.

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What I would like you to take away from the discussion with Dan, first is this idea that age is real. In most of the developed world, we have fewer people coming into the workforce than we do leaving the workforce. It’s going to compound just given what’s going on with population trends. The idea of age debt reflects this demographic change as something that organizations and leaders are ignoring. The cost is starting to show up in talent gaps, disengagement and lost knowledge. That’s what is providing the spark for Dan writing this book in the first place.

Second, we talked about generational labels and how we often use them as a crutch and not a strategy. This idea of rivers, rocks and rubies rather than Gen X, Y, and Z. The way we talk about this isn’t just semantic. We need to rethink how we design teams, careers, and leadership to reflect the fact that we have a multi-generational workforce and that we’ve got to create something which sustains itself over time and gets the best out of all those populations. Also, recognizes the life constraints that they’re operating in and what they need from their professional lives at that point in their lives.

Third is, this idea of the experience dividend. Flipping on its head the idea that experience is costly, older and unproductive workers. Start to think about how we get as much out of these people as possible and take advantage of them. Potentially, an alternate labor model from the traditional idea of a full-time person who steadily rises up the corporate ladder. This idea of getting more out of these people will be especially critical as we are relying more and more on experience. Especially when we’re hollowing out junior roles with AI.

Finally, it’s this idea that we’ve got to think differently about age in the workforce. The companies that are going to be successful, probably aren’t going to be the ones that are the youngest or the ones that are the most disruptive. They’re going to be the ones over the long term that integrate talent across ages, skills and perspectives.

That’s going to require redesigning careers, rethinking leadership and letting go of some outdated assumptions about how long and how linearly people work. I invite you to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube and others. If you found this discussion enlightening and I hope you did, please sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and subscribe to our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Dan Pontefract
• Dan Pontefract on LinkedIn
• Dan Pontefract on Instagram
• Dan Pontefract on X
• The Future of Work Is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce
• The Purpose Effect: Building Meaning in Yourself, Your Role and Your Organization
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter

About Dan Pontefract

Dan Pontefract is a renowned leadership and culture strategist, author, and keynote speaker with over two decades of experience in senior executive roles at companies such as SAP, TELUS, and Business Objects. Since then, he has worked with organizations globally, including Salesforce, Amgen, State of Tennessee, Nestlé, Canada Post, Autodesk, BMO, Government of Canada, Manulife, Nutrien, UBC, McGill University, Virgin Media O2, City of Toronto, among others. Dan has firsthand experience in turning leaders and corporate cultures into a competitive advantage. Dan has written five books: WORK-LIFE BLOOM, LEAD. CARE. WIN., OPEN TO THINK, THE PURPOSE EFFECT, and FLAT ARMY garnering multiple awards including the Thinkers50 Top New Management Book and the Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal. Dan has also written for Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Leader to Leader, The Globe and Mail, Inc., among other outlets. Dan is a renowned keynote speaker who has presented at four TED events and delivered over 600 keynotes. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria and has received over 25 personal awards. Dan’s career is interwoven with corporate and academic experience, coupled with an MBA, B.Ed, and multiple distinctions. Notably, Dan is listed on the Thinkers50 Radar, HR Weekly’s 100 Most Influential People in HR, PeopleHum’s Top 200 Thought Leaders to Follow, and Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers.

Why does work feel so overwhelming, even when you’re getting everything done?

In this episode, leadership expert and bestselling author Liane Davey explains why the problem isn’t your workload—it’s your thought load: the hidden combination of cognitive demands, emotional burden, and depleted energy that makes work feel harder than it should.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why working harder won’t solve the problem of overwhelm
• The difference between workload and thought load
• How constant context switching and emotional stress drain your performance
• Why attention is your most valuable resource—not time
• A practical framework for prioritizing what matters most
• Simple strategies to reduce overwhelm, regain focus, and protect your energy

You’ll walk away with practical tools you can use immediately to feel less overwhelmed, improve your focus, and do your best work without burning yourself out.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/liane-davey

Buy Liane Davey’s new book, “Thoughtload”, subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and join the PathWise membership community today at pathwise.io.

—

Listen to the podcast here

Why You’re Overwhelmed At Work ( How To Fix It), With Liane Davey

A lot of us are feeling overwhelmed in our professional lives and a lot of times, we blame our workload for that. Too many meetings, too much email, and all the administrative work. The priorities that are constantly changing with unrealistic deadlines. What if workload isn’t the problem? What if the real issue is in how much work you have but everything that comes with it? The constant context switching is like multitasking. The emotional labor of managing up and down and sideways. The mental tabs that are probably still open as you’re trying to fall asleep at night.

If you’re a manager, the pressure of knowing that you’re accountable for your team success, but also knowing that you’re barely keeping your own head above water. Our guest Liane Davey argues that we’ve been diagnosing this all wrong. That it’s not about workload, but about something she calls thought load. The hidden combination of cognitive demands, emotional burden, and depleted energy. That’s the real killer performance.

If she is right, then working harder isn’t the solution. Working differently is. Liane is a New York Times bestselling author, leadership, advisor and someone who has spent decades inside teams trying to figure out why smart capable people so often feel stuck and burned out and ineffective. In her new book, Thoughtload, she offers a different lens in a very practical playbook for escaping the madness. We’re going to be challenging some deeply held assumptions about productivity and leadership and what it takes to do great work. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.

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Liane, thanks for joining me.

I’m so glad to be here, J.R. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

It’s nice to speak with a fellow page to offer. Your book is coming out in a few weeks. It’s called Thoughtload. Let’s get right into it. You make a key argument in the book that what’s over all of us isn’t our workload, but it is our thoughts. Explain the difference for us.

Workload is the effort that you put into producing outputs that are the key piece of your job. I sent the report. I got the signed contract or whatever. Thought load is much bigger than that. It’s everything other than the actual works. I call it an invisible tax on our performance. It comes from rising cognitive demands. Everything we have to pay attention to, so the work and everything else. Increasing emotional burdens because we’re living in an emotionally dysregulated society.

There’s a lot of emotional residues sitting on us and how we’re trying to do all of that with declining energy reserves. Workload is what you have to accomplish for your job. Thought load is what you have to cope with as not only an employee, but a human and all you carry with you. The problem is, the higher your thought load the harder it is to get through your workload.

It makes intuitive sense once you explain it that way. As I was reading the book, I was thinking about my most recent full-time experience. The workload was always high, but it became impossible, when you’re getting assaulted from all sides. Assaulted from vendors and employees. Not in a physical sense, to be clear. Assaulted from above, board, boss, all of those things.

When all of that is hitting here, it’s a lot harder to maintain that emotional regulation and the multiplier effect if you want to think about it in the way of thought load being a multiplier on workload. It goes from being like 1X to being like 10X. It makes it almost impossible to keep up with things because you’re never at your best and you’re constantly having to play defense on one of those things and the work is still there.

Exactly. You finally carve out an hour to make some meaningful progress, but the thought load is so high that you get distracted as you’re going or the emotional stuff is making you feel like, “Am I even up to doing this?” All of that means that hour doesn’t get you as much forward momentum as you hoped it would. You spend the next hour feeling crappy about the fact that you just wasted the last hour. It is a multiplier effect in a negative direction.

What was the moment where you had the a-ha about the idea of thought load?

There were two key spots. Before COVID, people kept asking me as a keynote speaker to talk about change management and I had this reaction. As a psychologist, our reaction to change has been the same for Millennia. Anyone who’s trying to tell you differently doesn’t understand how the brain works. I thought it was a little dull until I started looking at, not how the human reaction to change is any different but how change has changed in organizations.

Gartner released a study that was probably the first moment that showed that, in 2016, the average employee faced two enterprise level transformations each year. Only six years later, it had gone from 2 to 10. That’s the moment when I had my first realization that change has changed. We need to manage differently in this perpetual change than we did in our simpler era. That’s when I started thinking about how we have to manage our attention, our anxiety, and our energy.

The core of the thought load equation came then, but it was in front of a live audience, giving a keynote. Somebody asked a question at the end and said, “Isn’t our workload way too high to do this?” Live from the stage, I just came out with, “It’s not our workload that’s killing us. It’s our thought load.” As soon as I created the word live in front of an audience, the room went silent. All I could do was go, “Could somebody write that down?”

You probably wanted to run off the stage and go make a bunch of notes on it.

Those two pieces. First, I had to have this realization that change has changed and we need to manage ourselves in one another differently in perpetual change. Secondly, realizing that we’ve been putting way too much attention on workload and what we have to think about is our thought load. Those were the two pennies I had to drop before I was often running.

I have done a lot of transformations in my day. You do realize as you do more of them that it’s not just managing people through change like, “I have to do something differently than I did it yesterday.” It’s more of the human part of getting through that. Even for the project team themselves. They’ll be completely committed to the end state but when these things go on for months and months or even multiple years. The adage of, it’s a marathon. Not a sprint. It’s a little bit trite but, at the same time, it’s true.

I was giving a talk at a conference over in London on this very topic of, how do you manage the human element of these big transformation programs? That’s arguably the hardest part. It’s not technology. It’s not the process of change. It’s just bringing people in the project team and around the project team for the duration of that journey and keeping them engaged especially to your point. It’s like, “This follows the last change or it’s going on in parallel with three other changes.” It’s constantly changing. It’s hitting us all the time. It’s hard for people to keep up with that. That’s a big factor that’s hitting at this idea of thought load as well.

That changes the team, it’s their primary role. Think of all the people who are on the receiving end of the transformation and the thought load equation is terrible. A) You’re asking me to do this off the corner of my desk with a tenth of my attention. B) You’re probably not creating a forum for me to process the emotions that are coming up for me about whether this change is going to make me redundant or change my control or whatever else. You’re expecting me to just do this change after the last change and burning me out. It’s one thing for the team that’s central and focused on the transformation. If you think about everybody on the receiving end, it’s even worse. We’re amplifying this thought load effect in our organizations at our peril.

I agree. We talked a little bit about the three things you talk about in the book, the cognitive demands, the emotional bird and the energy depletion. Why is it so important to think about all of them in combination and not individually?

There’s a lot of people out there talking about each of them separately, but nobody’s talking about all three together. The reason is, and this is partly my husband and my business partner who’s a neuroscientist who helps me understand. That each of the three components, both amplify and exacerbate the others. I’ll give you a couple of science-based examples. As your energy reserves run out, particularly your frontal lobe, which is your executive functioning. Which runs out fairly quickly, because it burns a lot of glucose and releases a lot of glutamate.

Your frontal lobe goes offline fairly quickly. When it does, one of the first things to go is your ability to calibrate what should I pay attention to and what should I not. All of a sudden, the cognitive demands go up as you’re paying attention to everything. The next thing to go is your ability to differentiate between something that’s a social threat and something that was a sarcastic remark or whatever. As your energy goes down, your emotional burden and your cognitive demands go up.

Another interesting one is one of the most common emotional burdens for us as anxiety. Particularly anxiety about our workload and how much we have to get done. What we find is that, as your anxiety rises, you try to multitask. You increase your cognitive demands. As you multitask, your energy depletes faster and your productivity and your quality suffers. You’re doing that in the wrong direction. The reason you need to understand and try to tackle all three is that, if you only solve two of them, particularly if you try to ignore the emotional things. Our brains are very wired for fear to just take out everything else.

You could be building the nicest time management plan whatever else. If something hijacks you, because you’ve decided it’s a risk to your belonging in the group or whatever else. It doesn’t matter how great your time management plan was. That’s why we need to think about them because physiologically, each one of them amplifies and exacerbates the other so we have to deal with them together.

It’s especially hard for managers or leaders because they’re not only having to worry about themselves. They also have to worry about this for their teams. How do you help managers figure out even where to start with this?

The answer for managers is start with yourself because managers with a very high thought load, leave a very big week behind them. If you are struggling to know what to pay attention to and trying to juggle many balls. Your team is going to be looking to you for prioritization and they’re not going to find it. They’re just going to be looking at somebody who’s like, “It’s all important.” If you are emotionally triggered in some way, impatient, frustrated, or feeling demoralized, the emotional contagion from a manager to their team is incredibly potent.

You’re going to leave them just feeling deflated as well. Start with yourself as the answer and in starting with yourself, I encourage folks to start with focusing their attention. It’s hard to deal with the emotional stuff or to get your energy back if you haven’t zoomed in on what matters first. Start with your attention, then learn some of the emotional literacy that we don’t have so that you can process your emotions more quickly, then you can work on the energy.

Certainly, you can dabble in them all but the first thing is your attention. Once you’ve created some order in the chaos in your own head, then you’ve got a hope of going out and supporting your team. If you are leaving a big week behind you, both terms of priorities and emotional residue. There’s little hope you’re going to help your team.

A lot of people think that time is the most precious resource. I’ve certainly said that to my team again and again, but you make the point that it’s your attention. Time is limited. Attention is even more limited, which is what makes it more precious. You’ve got some great tips to help people think about how to focus themselves on what matters. Share some of those for us just to give our audience some practical takeaways.

I love it when we talk about time as if somebody magically has more than 24 hours a day. No time is fixed. We all have the same amount of time. What do you think about both your attention and your energy at that time? That’s what I was alluding to earlier. If you have one hour and you have that one hour with a low thought load, with real clarity on the most important thing you need to accomplish. With everything ready to go when you start the hour, with the things that are weighing on you parked for a time when you address them.

In that hour, with both strong attention and good energy, you will move through so much. You’ll get so much accomplished. I had this. I thought I had a meeting at 9:00 AM but it turned out it was 10:00. I sit down at my desk. I get my microphone ready. I’m all good to go. I open my calendar and see that I have an hour. Interestingly, I wasn’t ready to have an hour then. I didn’t know what’s the most important thing. I’m in the middle of a book launch. There are a million things I should be doing.

I didn’t know. I didn’t have focus. It was in the morning. I hadn’t gotten moving yet. I made very little use of that hour that could have been really meaningful. It’s figuring out, how do I have a clear quest? What is it that I have to accomplish? How do I have mise en place? How do I have everything ready so that when I start to work, I don’t have to open my email to find something? If you open your email to find something, I promise you something else is going to distract you or if you have to go on the web and search for something or whatever else. How do I do that?

How do I go in with clarity and remove the distractions? It’s not having the hour. We can usually make the hour. It’s what we make of the hour so that we get something meaningfully done. If that happens at the end of the hour, then also, you get this emotional lift. It’s like, “That feels amazing. I shipped that code. I sent that contract. I did the thing.” The next hour is going to have benefits. I always talk about it. If we have to do something hard, start on a downhill. If you’ve just had that hour, the next task is going to feel like you’re starting to go downhill. I got momentum here. Let’s go. Follow that energy. Time is not the issue. When you have the time, the same 24 hours as I have, how do you use it?

I was a CEO of an asset management company. At one point, that is thousands of people working for me. It’s a big role and I say that not to brag about it, but just put it in stark contrast to the life I’m living. My days there were very busy but they were also very programmed. You knew how certain pockets of your time were going to be used a day in advance, a week in advance and sometimes even longer in advance.

What I’m finding out that I’m doing my own thing is I got to figure out what every day looks like. I have found it much harder to be focused and much harder to get good use out of my time because there’s a million different things that I could be doing. I’ve literally had to block like, “I’m going to spend 30 minutes on this task. I’m going to spend an hour on this task.” That’s the only way that I am finding that I am able to get through things and to do them while and to feel like I’m productive.

Otherwise, I get to the end of the day and feel like I got pulled in fifteen different directions and I didn’t get anything done. That’s something I never felt to the same degree even running a big organization in a corporate job. That’s been a real learning for me over the past roughly a year that I’ve been doing this and I’m still learning, to be honest with you, about how to focus my attention and get as much out of those hours as I can.

I love that you’re being authentic about that because I feel every bit of it. This is year eleven for me in my owning business and I got to a pretty good point on being productive. All of a sudden, I ran into this massive very painful realization that while I was being incredibly productive, it was not effective. I realize that while I was patting myself on the back for creating a lot of output, that output wasn’t moving the needle on the things that I cared about. That was excruciating. For many years, I had written a blog every single week and I was so proud of myself. I would look down on the people who started a blog or a podcast and only did it for like seven weeks or whatever. You’re like, “Those people.”

I was so proud of myself for just churning it out but at some point, I said in 2026, is what people are looking for advice about achieving amazing things together. Are they looking in the same places? Do they need the same content? The answer was no. I was so proud of how productive I was and not asking the hard questions about but is that productivity in service of the ways I want to change the world? That’s the other thing.

If we can make the transition from focusing on activity to output, that’s good. That’s an improvement. Responding to a lot of emails never changes the world. It’s good if we get out of that and even harder shift because our world is incredibly focused on productivity and just not nearly focused enough on, is that productivity serving anything? AI is the greatest example of that. AI makes it easy to create a lot of schlock.

It’s not going to change anything. The good news for an entrepreneur is that, at some point, you go, “If I am clear on my quest in the world, on the outcomes I’m trying to create, maybe there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t need to do. Maybe I could have a better life while running this business.” It’s very interesting but I had to make the epic fail before I figured that one out the hard way.

All having to let go of a lot of things in terms of the way that we’ve done them in the past and AI is striving for that. It’s probably the single biggest factor at the moment, but it’s not the only one. That’s hard. If you’re a content creator, that world has changed tremendously in the last five years. You talk about activities, outputs and outcomes. You have to continue to focus on outcomes. Ultimately, if you’re an entrepreneur, your job is to bring revenue in for yourself and your company if there are others around you. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get or how many impressions you get or how many followers you have. None of that stuff. It’s all helpful.

Even there are places where getting views are not the views that are helpful. It can be vanity.

There are vanity metrics. People talk about that a lot in the creator space, but they’re vanity metrics in the corporate world as well. It’s easy to get drawn into them like, “I cleared my inbox out or I went to five meetings or I put out three articles on the corporate internet site,” or whatever the case may be. If you keep yourself focused on the things that matter then it will help Focus your attention. You have another framework that I thought that was helpful, this idea of the three priority lists.

When you have a high thought load, having a to-do list is a nightmare. First of all, because every time you look at it, it’s demoralizing. Secondly, because when your thought load is high, you tend to pick what to do off that list using a terrible criterion. Maybe that criterion is, which of those tosses are associated with the scariest person or like, “What’s the one I just wrote down? What’s the thing that just came into my inbox? I’ll just do that one.”

When we have a high thought load, having just one long to-do list isn’t helpful. If we can understand that most of us operate on three to-do lists at least for work, the first one is, what are the things I need to do to advance my quest? The thing that I’m here to accomplish. What’s the number one? Number two, and number three things I could do that will significantly progress the things that matter most? We all need that list. If you work in an organization, there’s a second list because we don’t live in Pollyanna world.

The second list is other people’s very important quests that they think I need to be a part of. Maybe you’re an expert in the automotive industry and your firm’s automotive account team wants you to come and be part of the team. That may be important and there’s a wide variety for us in cross-functional organizations and matrix organizations where you need number 1, number 2, and number 3 to-do list for ways you support other people.

We all have the third list, which is the side quests. I got to do the compliance training. I got to send my invoices. I got to book my trip. If all of those things are on the same list, it’s easy to just look and pick off things for all the wrong reasons. If you start with, “I need to be making sure that the things from my number one list get slotted into the calendar first.” The things from that side quest list get put in the lower value part of my week, they get put in between tasks or when I’m on hold with the help desk or whatever else. Three party lists, not one, makes a world of difference.

You can’t compare one versus the other. The thing that’s important that your boss has asked you to get done may not be the most important thing toward your outcomes. You still have to do it or the thing that your kid wants you to get done with them that night when you get home for work or whatever. Managing things and thinking about both, the different lists and also how you use your time and marry your time up with that I thought was helpful.

It’s also a great thing to be able to take your list to your manager. If your manager asks you to do something, just share, “It’s Wednesday. I haven’t made any headway yet on the things on my most important list. Where does that thing you’re asking me to do fit in? How do you want me to prioritize that?” When you’re managing it that way and you look accountable and take ownership of your time. That’s a constructive conversation to have with your manager.

Let’s talk a little bit now about the emotional aspect, the second of the three. You describe it as an invisible load. You also talked about the fact that people in the middle of the organization are arguably dealing with even more conflict because they’ve got to below, across, up, and at home. What advice do you give people to help them think about their own emotional load? Also, this issue that you talked about in terms of emotional contagion where a manager can infect their team for lack of a better way of saying it.

Maybe be infected by their team and all managers have that day. What we’re missing is emotional literacy in our society. The starting place in the book is to talk about some of the neuroscience of how this works. Which is that, an emotion is a pre-conscious physiological experience we have in our body. There are a lot of data on emotions. There’s lots to learn from emotions. They’re there to keep us safe and help us be effective in our environment. They are very different from our feelings, which are the cognitive stories and narratives that we come up with to rationalize what we’re experiencing in our body.

Most of us don’t know that. Therefore, most of us believe our feelings as if they’re true. We give them too much credit. We take too much stock in them and while emotions can get us lots of data, feelings get us lots of drama. That’s the first thing we need to understand. First of all, there’s no such thing as turning off your emotions at work because they are pre-conscious but the key thing is to interrupt that fiction weaving process of telling yourself this grand story why they made you upset and all these things that make us feel not in control of our own emotional experience of the world.

First of all, understanding that and learning a process to intercept the emotional experience. Learn from it. Interrogate it before it turns into some great fiction. That’s the first piece. Once we understand that’s what’s going on, to be more attuned to it going on in the people around us, so that if they’re having an emotional experience, we don’t unintentionally or unknowingly pick it up. That’s what happens in emotional contagion. You can feel the whole room go down. One person is feeling deflated and all of a sudden, you feel the whole room go down.

The book takes you through a process for, how do I notice the emotion? How do I extract the data from that emotion? What is that about? Where is it coming from? What is it exactly? What story am I telling myself that is reinforcing how I’m feeling about this and then to get to some action to make things better. Teaching people how to process their emotions more efficiently and then what to do if you’re seeing that from somebody else and how to prevent that from spreading to you.

Learning that emotional literacy of the difference between emotions and feelings and then learning how to process our emotions more quickly so that they don’t take us down or leave an emotional residue for the day or the week. That’s just sitting in our thought load. You bought real estate in our thought load. I’m just squatting here and I’m not leaving.

I love the story in the book where you were describing the snow storm and being mad at your husband for taking one of your shoveling turns because you thought that it meant he thought you were weak. He was just trying to be nice. You describe this as an example of the fiction that we tell ourselves about why something’s happening when it’s not true. One of the things I took away from that part of the book because the idea of pulling the thread. You talk about knowing your treasure. It would be great if you could help our audience understand this idea of how you get to the why that you’re feeling that thing and sometimes how it’s a multi-step approach.

As I was writing the book, I was trying to make the book what I described as buoyant. How do I make this something that for somebody who has a heavy thought load that it’s enjoyable to read. It feels like something that lifts you up or helps you get your head above water.

Enter self-deprecation.

There’s a lot to share with you about all my failures. We started with the night on its epic quest. When we got to the emotional section, I shared a story I’ve used for a long time, which is when the dragon is breathing fire, it’s because they’re protecting treasure. If you, on your noble quest, bump into a fire breathing dragon, do not do what we tend to do, which is build a wall of facts between us and the dragon. You’ll recall the email of April 2nd that said this and this or in policy 17.3 point range. That does not help when a dragon is protecting their treasure. All it does is build this wall. The dragon is still back there.

The idea is that the fire from the dragon is the emotion. They’re angry, yelling, crying or whatever it is. If that’s what you see, that’s not the important point. That’s just a good clue that, “Somehow I’m encroaching on their treasure. They feel a threat. They’re triggered and that’s what I’m seeing.” The key thing is, I talk about it as they’re on the other side of the moat trying to protect themselves and their treasure. You need to get them to open the drawbridge. What can you ask? What can you try and understand? What’s at stake for you here? How do you imagine this playing out? What mistake do you think we’re making?

These kinds of questions that get the dragons open the drawbridge and draw you the map to what the treasure is in this situation. What is it that they value? What’s precious to them that feels under threat with this conversation or this plan? Once we understand the fire breathing dragon metaphor, at some point, you stop and you go like, “Sometimes, I’m the dragon.” When we have that emotional reaction, something feels at risk and that’s how we protect ourselves. You can ask yourself the open drawbridge questions. What story am I telling myself that’s causing me to react this way? How am I seeing this playing out?

You can then ask other questions, like what else might be possible? What else could be going on here? As you come up with answers, share those answers with the room, “The reason that I just raised my voice there is, I’m imagining having to go back to my team and tell them that I wasn’t successful in advocating for our project. I’m feeling like that reflects poorly on me as a leader. They’re going to be upset with me.” Being candid in the room about what’s going on for you. Not in a way that’s like, “I’m so angry.” You’re not like losing your cool, but you’re doing the investigative work to figure out what’s the treasure going on, open the drawbridge and share with everybody else what’s going on.

It just creates a much more constructive conversation. I tell the story in the book of a real team, where they were trying to figure out which projects to cut because they needed to do a big budget cut. The leader was not engaging in the conversation very honestly or with integrity. He was trying to defend his thing and it was because this is what he was imagining. Having to go back to his team and tell them that three months of work was going to be wasted. When he finally was able to say, “This is what’s going on. This is why I’m not having this conversation.”

Honestly, everybody else came right to his rescue. It was like, “How do we help you? How do we support you in getting the right message back to your team?” It was amazing, because until then, everybody thought he was just being a dragon. Once they understood, “That’s meaningful treasure. We get it.” All of a sudden, they were on his side trying to problem-solve about how they did it. It makes a massive difference.

You got to know your own treasure. The more you can understand the things that are likely to trigger you in any situation, the better prepared you are. Also, when it happens, to know, “I got to do the work myself to figure out what’s this about and to get that into the conversation.” It’s amazing how different it is. Once I tell people about when the dragons breathe fire, it’s because they’re protecting treasure. They’ll tell me ages later, “That’s so helpful. I think about it so differently now.”

That’s a powerful metaphor and it works well. Let’s talk about the last one. I think about energy management, Tony Schwartz. That’s how I was introduced to this. His firm came and did a training program when I was working at Fidelity many years ago. Help us understand where that fits into this equation of thought load and how you can manage your energy in a practical sense.

The top of the thought load equation is the cognitive demands in the emotional burdens, that’s the load. I’m sure you can think of a day where you were carrying a heavy load no sweat. You’re like, “I got this>.” You’re well rested and in a good place.

That was 1988.

It was a great year, but then you can probably think of another day where even something that wasn’t very heavy loaded at all just felt too much because you were depleted. That’s how energy factors into the equation. There’s three things I talked about. We take our night and we get them past the fire breathing dragons, and now they have to figure out how to fill their chalice. How do I fill my cup? How do I make sure I have the energy to keep going?

There’s three things. One, how do I find waterfalls to fill my cup from? How do I get flow into my week? Work that matters or work I’m interested in. Chunks of time where I am able to work unimpeded, undistracted. Finding waterfalls, but also finding wells. I have an assessment tool that I share with folks on the website that allows them to figure out what is your unique brand of overwhelm. We have people who are overwhelmed and become whirlwinds just like acting to feel busy. We have other people who become sticklers who just go back to the rules because that makes them feel like things are a little more predictable.

There’s four different styles. Knowing which one you are helps you understand what’s the well you can dig deep and find energy from. Whether that be planning and order or physical activity. Maybe you’re a rogue and you can deal with your overwhelm and build your energy by connecting with others more socially. It’s understanding that. When you can’t find a waterfall, you at least can tap a well of energy that you have. The third and final piece is, if your cup has cracks in it, no matter how much you’re doing to try and restore your energy. It’s not going to help.

Figure out what’s in your week. Are there a bunch of meetings in your week that are cracks in your cup? Are there relationships that are toxic? Are there conflict depths you have that because you’re trying to work around that conflict that you’re burning a lot of extra energy? Thinking about, what are my waterfalls, what are my wells and how do I make sure to fix the drains so that my energy becomes a renewable resource instead of what it feels like now. It feels like we’re burning fossil fuels in this finite energy like I got no more left. Humans are the ultimate renewable energy machines if we treat our machines well.

There’s a ton of things in the book, Liane. You did a great job of being practical and being buoyant. There’s a lot that people can take away individually for organizations and the leaders of those organizations. What message would you want to leave them with in terms of how they can better create the conditions for success to ease this following burden that’s endemic around organizations?

I would say stop managing workload and start managing thought load. Managing workload is not enough anymore. If you don’t know what’s in your team’s thought load, that could be tasks coming from parts of the matrix in the side door and the back door that you didn’t know about. Also, what are the stresses they’re experiencing or what are the things that are burning them out. Manage for thought load. Not workload. If we take one example. AI is that great example.

Whereas chatbots and agentic AI may be wonderful for their workload, the research is showing it’s hard on thought load. If you’re going to integrate AI into people’s workflow, great. We need to understand how it affects their cognitive demands, where it creates emotional triggers and makes people less productive instead of more. A lot of AI sends you off in multiple directions. How is it burning our energy? Is it doing it wisely? As leaders manage for thought load, not just workload. You will find you get so much more creative work, more innovative, more collaboration, and just so much less stress. It’s a positive thing when we can make that switch.

It’s easier said than done.

It is.

A lot of organizations and leaders are so output focused. They’re so financially driven. Taking that step back, even since the end of the COVID pandemic feels like we’ve taken a big step back and having this wellness, emotional health conversation that we are having in spades in 2020 because people view it as a distraction. They want to ignore it because it doesn’t help them hit quarterly goals. That’s unfortunate because we’re trying a lot of people.

I do think the way you said it is true. We’re focused on outputs and burning people out may get us lots of output. I’m quite convinced it does not get us the outcomes that we want. Those short-term measures that we’re using may look healthy but the long-term measures aren’t. I don’t even need a leader to believe that someone’s thought load is intrinsically meaningful.

If you want Innovation, sustained performance, or a great customer experience, all of those things, I promise you that managing thought load is essential to getting the outcomes you want. It’s when we’re stuck in this productivity trap of thinking the more we churn out, the more effective we are as a corporation. That’s why we’re stuck.

That’s a big part of why we’re stuck, too. Thank you. Thanks for doing this. As I mentioned at the outset, your book Thoughtload is going to be out by the time this episode airs. People will be able to buy it right then and there and benefit from it. Thanks for writing about it.

I needed to read it and I needed to live it. I’m constantly managing my own thought load, too.

Thank you again.

—

A terrific discussion with Liane. What I want you to take away from what we talked about, first and most importantly, is this idea that what is consuming you, what is overwhelming you is not just your workload. It is your thought load, which plays a multiplicative effect on top of your workload. This idea of cognitive switching is like multitasking, the emotional burden that we’re all carrying either because of things going on at home or at work and depleted energy. Which is definitely a crisis in the United States if not elsewhere. All of these things contribute in a multiplicative way to the work that you’re doing. It’s not just the tasks on your plate.

The second thing, as we’re talking about cognitive load. Attention is your most valuable resource. We talk a lot about time and time is definitely very valuable, but you’ve got to make sure that you are using your time well. You can use your time poorly. If you’ve got attention, it means you are using your time better. By definition, you will be more productive and more effective. We then talked about emotional load. That is a big part of the job. We are all carrying a lot. We’re always carrying a lot, whether it’s driven from things going on at home or at work.

If you’re a manager, you’re carrying that from your team and potentially contributing to their thought load because you are bringing your emotional burden and creating this sense of contagion to them in addition to them doing it to you. Finally, is this idea of energy being a huge performance lever. It’s how you manage both the things that bring you in energy and the things that deplete your energy. You have to constantly keep enough gas in the tank. If you’re not doing enough things that bring you energy and you’re doing a lot of things that deplete it. You’re just going to burn yourself out. You’re not going to be able to have attention. You’re not going to be able to handle the emotional aspects of your job.

All these things are related. Again, a terrific discussion with Liane. Her book. Thought load is available. If your interest has been piqued by this conversation, please go buy the book. Thanks for tuning in. I invite you to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and YouTube and any of the other platforms that are available. If you found this discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and subscribe to our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

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About Liane Davey

Liane Davey is an Organizational Psychologist, CEO advisor, and sought-after keynote speaker with more than 25 years of experience researching and advising teams on how to perform at their best. Known as the “teamwork doctor,” she works with teams from the frontlines to the boardroom, across industries and around the world, from Boston to Bangkok. Through her work with hundreds of teams, including 26 Global Fortune 500 companies (and counting), she has developed a practical, research-backed approach to solving the challenges that prevent teams from working effectively together.

Liane is a New York Times bestselling author of You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done, The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Back on Track, and her forthcoming title, Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work (Page Two, May 2026). Her work focuses on increasing productivity, strengthening engagement, developing leaders, and helping teams navigate conflict in healthier, more effective ways.

Anxiety is often treated as something to overcome. But what if it’s also one of the forces driving your success?

In this episode, JR speaks with Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever and host of Harvard Business Review’s popular podcast of the same name, about the complex relationship between anxiety, achievement, leadership, and performance.

Morra argues that anxiety isn’t necessarily a weakness to be fixed. For many high performers, it fuels preparation, creativity, empathy, and ambition. The challenge isn’t eliminating anxiety—it’s learning how to understand it, manage it, and work with it rather than against it.

Their conversation covers:

• What separates anxious achievers from people who are simply stressed
• How anxiety can become both a leadership asset and a liability
• Why so many high performers are driven by fear, control, and hypervigilance
• The connection between childhood experiences and achievement-oriented behavior
• How mindfulness and self-awareness help people manage anxiety more effectively
• Why boundaries are especially difficult—and important—for anxious achievers
• What psychologically healthy teams and workplaces look like
• How managers can better support different working styles and needs
• Why today’s workplace often works against mental well-being
• How leaders can build resilience in an increasingly uncertain world

If you’ve ever felt driven by a constant inner voice pushing you to prepare more, do more, and achieve more, this conversation offers a thoughtful framework for understanding anxiety—not as a flaw, but as something that can be harnessed with greater awareness, intention, and self-compassion.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/morra-aarons-mele

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Anxious Achiever: Turning Anxiety Into A Leadership Advantage, With Morra Aarons-Mele

Unlocking The Potential Of The Anxious Achiever

Traditionally, we’ve all come to subscribe to a pretty simple story about success. That the best leaders are cool, calm, confident and collected. They can walk into any room with certainty, make the necessary decisions and sleep just fine at night. What if that story is just flat out wrong? It probably is. What if some of the most driven, high-performing successful people that you know, the ones running companies, leading teams, building careers, being famous are also badly with anxiety? Sometimes to crippling degrees.

Not only that. What if anxiety is part of their success engine because here’s what’s interesting. Anxiety doesn’t always look like panic. Sometimes, it looks like over preparation, hyper responsibility, relentless thinking, a voice that says, “This could go horribly wrong, so I better be ready.” Those aren’t necessarily bad things, particularly in a workplace. For a long time, we’ve treated these voices in our head as a flaw, something to manage or suppress or hide, especially when we’re at work.

Our guest argues something much more radical that anxiety, when understood and channeled, can become a leadership advantage. Morra Aarons-Mele is the Author of The Anxious Achiever and the host of a very popular Harvard Business Review show, The Anxious Achiever. She spent years exploring, including within herself what it looks like to succeed while anxious and how more leaders can stop fighting their minds and start working with them. This isn’t going to be a conversation about eliminating anxiety. It’s going to be about redefining it. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.

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Morra, thanks for joining me.

It’s great to be here.

Good to meet you. I was mentioning before we started that I enjoyed your book and I’m looking forward to talking about it. You write about anxiety and you challenge the idea that anxiety is something that should be fixed. What blood do you use to reframe it as something that people can use to their advantage or maybe even turn into something resembling a superpower?

I was just doing a session for a big global law firm and in a poll question, I said, “How many of you have felt anxious in the last 24 hours?” Eighty-four percent of them said they had felt anxious in the last 24 hours.

I would have thought it would be 100% in a law firm.

I know. I’m like, “Who’s that 16%?” There’s the fact that anxiety is part of the human condition and anxiety is a helpful and useful emotion and a necessary emotion. We’re going to feel it whether we like it or not. We might as well understand it and use it. There’s the fact that in my work, inter-veiling high achievers who manage mental health challenges, who are neurodivergent, who have faced traumas and other challenges that impact our brain and our psyche.

I couldn’t believe how many of them said to me, “Anxiety is my superpower.” They would say, “I’m not saying it’s comfortable and that I loved it and it makes me an unnecessarily happy person. It’s an essential key to who I am. It powers me. It drives me. It causes me to seek new things.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that even though as I always say it’s a double-edged sword.

What distinguishes people who you call anxious achievers from the everyday run-of-the-mill person who’s stressed out about something?

Anxious achievers are a special type of people. I would say that anxiety is like their oxygen. They have been powered by anxiety often since they were kids. It’s a way of being. It’s a little bit of a habit. Anxious achiever tends to be someone who is maybe an overthinker, who’s always four steps ahead, who’s never stopping and who just bust through milestones and keeps going in that relentless way. The ambition, the achievement can be powered by a lot of different drives, but the anxiety is used as a motivating fuel to keep going.

These people who think a bit as a superpower, what are some of the specific ways that they use it to their advantage?

There’s a lot of specific ways and some will surprise you and some won’t. An example is that anxious achievers always say that they are warriors. They are looking ahead for threats. Many of them are what psychologists would call Hyper-vigilant. They are scanning the environment for threats and preparing. When you think about it in many workplaces and in many professions, it’s something that is highly rewarded. I would imagine in your past careers. The ability to be four steps ahead and anticipate multiple scenarios, and how we might get out of them, is a key facet of an anxious achiever.

It’s extremely exhausting because your nervous system is always aroused in a threatening state. Again, double-edged sword. That person who’s always looking ahead who’s always thinking and very motivated by goals and tasks because goals and tasks feel very important to an anxious achiever just like a lot of my identity riding on it. Myself worth and my perfectionism riding on achieving tasks. We’re often very motivated by money, fear and scarcity. We will work very hard to provide money and make sure there’s financial security.

At the bottom of all of this behavior is the need for control that a lot of anxious achievers feel. We feel that if only we keep control over things and keep trying hard and harder, things will be okay. Some of the more surprising aspects are that I find that anxious achievers can be very empathetic. They are deeply attuned to other people.

Anxious Achiever: At the bottom of all of this behavior is the need for control that a lot of anxious achievers feel.

They are extremely creative because they’re seekers. I interviewed a script writer and she said, “I can go to Target and I’m attuned to everyone else’s behavior. I’ll have four ideas for different story lines and scripts just by noticing things and tuning in to the shoppers at Target.” We have a lot of radar going on. We could also have good social skills as well, because again, we’re very focused on the other person.

For leaders who see their anxiety as a liability, how do you help them shift their mindset?

From Self-Critic To Best Friend: Reprogramming Your Anxiety

I try to help them at a few different levels. I should say that I’m not a psychologist. I am not a therapist. I recommend that they are in therapy. The mindset shift is that a lot of anxious achievers and a lot of us in general are used to being our own worst enemies. There’s an incredible quote that I love from a sports psychologist that I know. He says, “At the highest level of performance, people are often their own worst enemies.” That’s true.

A lot of us use our inner critic. We almost bully ourselves. A lot of anxious achievers do this, too. We bully ourself into performance. The key is to stop being your own worst enemy and turn into your own best friend. Stop trying to change who you are. If your anxiety is getting in the way of your life, it needs to be treated. Many anxious achievers are on medication. They’ve been in therapy. They meditate and practice all the modalities that help and they still have that nature.

I joke that we vibrate at an 11. My point is, that’s a beautiful and essential part of who you are and like all things. All of our strengths, we have a shadow side. The key is learning to have a relationship with your anxiety. I use a lot of mindfulness techniques for that. It’s that it’s not in control of you, but you can’t control it. It’s a relationship and a dialogue that you will get more agency over, but the first thing is accepting it.

In the book you talk about how a lot of this goes back to childhood issues, childhood trauma, or childhood memories. How can somebody unpack that and use it to help in a practical way?

There’s a great saying, wherever you go, there you are. By the time you get to a certain age, hopefully, you’ve done enough reflection that you realize, “I didn’t come from a radish,” as my father used to say. The thing that’s so interesting about work is that workplaces are systems just like families are systems. When we grow up in families, we all play a role. There’s a big thing on the internet, the eldest daughter syndrome. I’ll use that one because I’m definitely the eldest daughter of a single mom.

There is the sense that as the eldest daughter of a single mom, you grow up hyper-competent. Many of my anxieties are the eldest child, especially single parents or parents who struggled. You fix things. You solve things. You are probably mature before your time. You learned that you are competent and that you have a role in making things better. Guess what happens when you show up to work? You’re that person, which could be extremely rewarding and extremely draining. Also, ultimately not great for your leadership.

At the end of the day, leadership is not about fixing things for other people. It’s about bringing people together so that they can create solutions and you can guide them. It’s interesting wherever you go, there you are. I met so many anxious people who come from alcoholic families, who come from families with significant trauma, who grew up themselves with a learning difference or ADHD. In which, they felt that they were constantly compensating or overcoming something with drive and with achievement, with getting the gold stars. Those patterns stay with us until we do the work to ask, “Are you serving me? Do I want to be like this anymore? Can I dial it back?”

Anxious Achiever: At the end of the day, leadership is not about fixing things for other people. It’s about bringing people together so that they can create solutions and you can guide them.

You talked earlier about needing to manage this relationship with anxiety and accepting the fact that you may never be able to fully control it, but needing to get more control over it. How do you work with people to develop the right self-awareness without falling into a pattern of obsessing about it so much that, that becomes a source of their anxiety?

What I do is helpful to anybody. I have a very basic technique that I start with people. It’s so simple, but it starts with helping them notice. I teach them what I call my two-step, which is basically to pause and then to ask. It’s a three-part process. It’s based on mindfulness and something called ACT therapy. The key is, whether we’re anxious achievers or we’re just going through a hard time. We carry stress and anxiety with us in our bodies. We have certain behaviors. It’s almost like your tell in poker. I don’t know what yours is. If you’re feeling stressed and anxious. What’s your warning signal?

Sleep is harder. I have a harder time falling asleep when I’m feeling that way. The second thing is I go into almost pulling the proverbial hoodie over my head and being blinded on head down and keep plowing through.

I would say that that’s a common reaction. For me, I get a twitch in my eye. It took me many years to understand that. I’ve had people say that they start tingling in their arms. You have to learn to tune in. A simple way to start to do it is literally during your work day, maybe once in the morning, once at lunch, once in the afternoon, once at the end of the day, or once before a meeting that you have frequently. Take a sec and close your eyes. Feel your body where you’re holding tension, where you feel stuck, or where you feel pain.

There’s often in our lives a meeting that makes us feel a certain way. I’ve worked with so many senior executives who said, “Every week before I have to have my one-on-one with my boss, I have a migraine or I feel like I’m going to throw up or I don’t sleep well.” These are all signals. The tuning in is the first step like when you start putting your head down. A lot of people will say, “When I start micromanaging people or when I need to know what everyone’s doing all the time.” These are signals.

The key is not to blame yourself. The key is to be like, “Ha. Okay.” When you notice that you’re feeling these feelings or you’re doing this behavior, pause for a minute. I like to teach people very simple grounding techniques so that they can calm their body, come into the present moment and then ask themselves. What do I need? What’s going on here?

That could be as simple as, “Maybe I’m hungry. Maybe I’m thirsty. Maybe I need to go outside and get some air. Maybe I need to put down the laptop for a little bit,” or it could be, “Why is this meeting making me feel like this is the end of the world? What’s going on?” It’s that deeper inquiry. That’s the process that starts building mindfulness that gives you that ability before you act out your anxiety, pause, interrogate a little bit and then choose a path forward.

Navigating Negative Self-Talk And Setting Professional Boundaries

There’s a related point around just the fiction sometimes. The negative self-talk that runs in our head that sometimes is truthful and sometimes is fictional. A lot of times, something may trigger us and trigger a feeling of anxiety, but we have to almost pull a thread to figure out like what’s driving that? It’s like, “Why am I upset about this situation? Why am I upset that somebody loaded the dishwasher wrong? Why am I upset that somebody’s a minute late to a meeting?” What’s the underlying reason when you’re working with your clients or giving talks on this? How do you suggest to people that they deal with the negative self-talk and the thought traps that they can fall into?

That is the work of therapy and inquiry because that stuff can run very deep. That stuff can be interlaced with trauma and hard things. My role as a coach is very much around the behavior and the grounding and the mindfulness. Those very deep questions are worth investing in yourself. I call it self-understanding.

The process of self-understanding is the greatest leadership gift we can give ourselves, which is understanding how we got where we are. The stories we tell ourselves are patterns. It’s understanding our personality. Am I an introvert? Am I an extrovert? Am I conscientious? Am I a little bit neurotic? It’s understanding our neurotype, which is something my next book is about. It’s putting that puzzle of us together so that we can create optimal situations. To me, that’s the biggest gift you can give yourself for other people as well.

You talked earlier about the fact that people who come into work and want to solve all the problems because that’s what they did are kids. That is often rewarded, but it’s also often exhausting, which brings us to the topic of boundaries. Which you talked about being a big issue for a lot of anxious achievers. How do you help people figure out how to set their boundaries?

Setting boundaries is hard. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but I used to talk about boundaries and talks. I found that I would start getting their eyes rolling at me. It’s like, “I don’t have the ability to set my boundaries. Stop promising. Stop teasing me because you don’t work here. You don’t know what it’s like.” I get it. We live in a world where boundaries are very challenging. It’s important to know your boundaries. It’s important to also understand.

I was talking with Frances Frei and Anne Morriss and they said to me, “Nobody is going to protect your boundaries for you. No one cares about your boundaries if you don’t set your own.” That’s why I try to teach people to understand their limits. What are my limits? Limits are like the hard and fast lines that help us protect our boundaries. Maybe a limit for me is, I can’t do six Zooms a day because that fries my brain. Maybe a limit for me is around the amount of travel I do. Maybe it’s a time-based limit. The key is, how do I protect my limit without losing power and status?

That’s where the magic is. Even just understanding your personal boundaries and how they affect you gives you a little more agency over feeling less violated by them. For example, I have a funny boundary. Which is that if people start to tell me what to do in order to get around too much, I get very angry. I’ve done a lot of therapy and I know that this boundary is about my stepfather. I have an irrational response to it. Sometimes even inappropriate. That’s a boundary that I understand. Also, it’s a boundary that is hard to set limits around. I’m okay with that because now I know. I’m like, “Morra, this is your thing. This is not about the client. It’s about your past. Let this go.” Sometimes even understanding it is powerful.

Certainly, cognizant of the fact that you can’t always get people to honor your boundaries at work. If you don’t articulate them, then they’re never going to be honored. You have to at least try if it’s important to you. When you are hitting something that is like a hard limit in the way that you were describing it. You have to make sure that people understand that because that’s when things can go bad and off track. You don’t want that to happen for your sake or for your relationship with them.

That’s right. The other thing is, you can do it from a position of strength. My new book is for what I call a typical achiever. There’s a lot of people who would identify as neurodivergent. This is a big deal because, for example, if you cannot work under fluorescent lights. If they over touch your nervous system, that is a hard limit for you that is going to impact your performance. That has a very easy solution. Turn off the lights. Things like that, that are essential to performance and survival, you have to own in a position of strength. It’s like, “I need this to be the best I can be and I can be good.”

Those are hard situations if you work in an office that’s full of fluorescent lights. Essentially, it means they need to create a dedicated space for you. In some situations, the company is not going to be willing to do that then you get into a legal wrangle of whether they’re obligated to do that. I don’t know how those situations play out because there has to be some reasonable middle ground. When you are living with those circumstances, it does matter to you. It’s hard. I don’t think there’s an easy solution in those cases.

The solution can feel very stark for people. Under the ADA, you are entitled to reasonable accommodation if you say it is a disability. If your sight is a disability, they’ve got to fix it. On the other hand, many people won’t do that because they feel that they’ll be punished if they say that they have a disability. At the end of the day, maybe you can just turn off the fluorescent light above your cubicle. We, as teammates, as workers have to get much more comfortable with the fact that we all work differently and we need different things to thrive and that’s okay.

Building Mentally Healthy Teams And Organizational Culture

Let’s talk a little bit about the team in the organizational part of this. What’s a mentally healthy team or organization look like to you?

Mentally healthy team is a team that does have the ability to understand the conditions that they need to thrive and is able to ask for it without shame or fear of punishment. That’s important. There’s something called psychosocial safety factors at work. It’s important to understand that this isn’t someone being difficult. I’ll give you an example.

My daughter was having a lot of math anxiety. I met with her teacher and her teacher said, “I noticed that when she is seated among a lot of other kids and she sees other kids get up with their finished tests and go hand them into the teacher. She gets anxious and she freezes. What I decided to do is two things. 1) Nobody gets up when they’re test is done. They turn their paper over and read or sit quietly. 2) I seated your daughter in a corner so her line of sight is removed from other people finishing their work.”I thought that’s amazing. What a simple thing to do that helps everybody? We can all relate to that feeling of we’re still trying to finish the test and everyone’s getting up. It’s a terrible feeling.

Getting up early and walking out of the room is a bit of power play.

It’s a total flex, and it doesn’t mean you got a better grade on the test, by the way. That is also about psychological safety, the ability to be who I am, to ask for what I want, to push people and to question without fear of being punished. To me, that’s also based on an understanding that we are a group of individuals with different skills, different strengths, different quirks, and different needs who need to come together and work as a team. We have the ability to do that and figure it out like a grown up.

A lot of this is hard in a practical sense, and I’ve watched this play out. I’ve had situations where there’s been a lot of ask put into the group that on their own are very reasonable. That isn’t reflective of what people need to be at their best at work. When you pile them all together, it almost becomes too weighty for that team to even manage. Those are difficult situations to work through particularly when you’re the manager because you want to honor what everybody needs individually. When you look at it all collectively, you’re like, “There’s no way we’re going to be able to succeed.”

It’s hard. That’s why there has to be compromise on both sides. They call it work for a reason. We all have to be reasonable, but that’s why I encourage people to figure out their non-negotiables. What’s nice to have and what’s a must have. I have this framework that I call Mentally Healthy Leadership. That isn’t team-based, but it creates healthy teams. The first pillar is self-understanding, which is showing up understanding my past, my personality, my nature, or my neurotype like what makes me, me, what makes me thrive and what makes me struggle.

The second piece is emotional flexibility, and this is what you’re getting at. Emotional flexibility is the ability to name an emotion, to identify it, and to manage it appropriately in the moment. Sometimes, that is saying, “I’m going to take one for the team. It’s okay. This triggers me. This makes me upset. It’s hard for me, but I’m here for the team.” That’s an important skill. The hard thing is that most of us, if we’re not taught that, we act out our emotions. That makes situations like you’re describing way harder. All of a sudden, they become fraught. Emotional flexibility is so key.

Anxious Achiever: Emotional flexibility is the ability to name an emotion, identify it, and manage it appropriately in the moment.

The third pillar is stress literacy. It’s understanding what stress is, what your body feels like when it’s under stress, and how to identify good stress versus harmful stress. It’s understanding the nervous system. Again, if teams understood that, we would remove so much complexity. The fourth is mindfulness. It’s being able to come into the present moment, to focus on what’s at hand, to be present and pay attention. In my perfect world, we’d all have those skills and all of the things we’re talking about would be easier.

Those are some of the things that are at the team level, at the broader organizational level. What are some of the things that you would like to see or some of the things that you advise your corporate clients to do to help better position anxious achievers to be at their best, but also create a mentally healthy construct in the organization?,

It’s hard because the incentives are so misaligned with mental health in every way in most workplaces. Would you agree with that?

We took some steps forward in COVID time and then we took some such right back.

I would agree. What’s sad for me to say is that as much as I want companies to create the infrastructure, have access to therapy, pay people well, and have benefits. All of those things companies need to do. The incentive structure that companies create is almost antithetical to well-being for many people. Not less the threat of AI.

Every time I read about a company who’s threatening layoffs because of AI or having people teach AI how to do their jobs. It is extremely hard to have any well-being in an environment like that. That is literally placing you under threat. I find myself coaching individuals to survive. Versus, how do we create systems and organizations that allow people to thrive? Companies want to do that, but the market forces against them are so hard. I don’t have a good answer for that. Maybe you do.

I’ve certainly had more conversations with people who are feeling the same sense of unease about the direction of travel in the corporate world. Part of it AI related and part of it more general. In the sense that, below the top level of the company, life gets hard quickly. You’re constantly under threat of losing your job. We want to hollow out the middle management layers.

I was talking to somebody yesterday about age in the workplace. There’s a lot of things that work against healthy workplaces. They may be financially healthy, but they’re not emotionally healthy or societally healthy. That is one of the big tensions in the corporate world. We’re indexing hard on one dimension and it feels like it’s been in the other dimensions. If you’re an individual in those situations, even if you are an emotionally healthy individual, it’s hard. If you are an emotionally challenged person, anxious or in whatever other form, it’s really hard.

The best work you could do is to get comfortable being uncomfortable. That’s such a cliché. but focusing on your locus of control, trying not to catastrophize and investing in that. I will say that there’s a lot of companies doing a lot of things. Much magic can happen at the team level. If I were a company and I’m obviously not, I would think about helping managers because managers are very overloaded. They don’t have enough resources, but smart companies understand that the magic happens at the team level. How do I empower managers to create great teams? That’s the answer.

You’re on a level of a small company, you are going to have some level of middle management. I know we’ve got this dream and there are a few small examples of it where one or two people can run these gigantic companies. They’re doing it all with third parties and automation. That’s a bit of the tech nirvana. You’ve got other companies where the senior person may have 20 or 30 people reporting to them and it’s a very flat structure, but there is a limit to that.

Once you hit that limit, then you need layers in between. Once you’ve got those layers in between, you’ve got an obligation to make sure that they have the conditions that they need to succeed. I feel like what happens a lot of times is, as soon as we’ve got that layer, we start complaining about them. At the end of the day, it’s not helpful because what’s the alternative? You can upgrade your talent in that layer. You can train them and try to develop them. Pointing fingers and blaming them for all of the ills of the organization seems to be what a lot of executive level people have a tendency to do. That doesn’t solve any problems for anybody.

There’s not much compassion for basic human empathy, and that’s unfortunate. There’s an amazing concept called Spaciousness that I love very much. It’s Dr. Megan Reitz. One of her big points is that when humans have no space at work, it’s hard to do our best work. It’s hard to be kind to each other. It’s hard to be thoughtful, make good decisions, and take care of ourselves. The mere idea of injecting some space into your day is profound. Often, if we just cut back a little and gave people back a little more space. What would happen?

The Future of Leadership: Thriving With Anxiety

Bringing this back to an individual level. What thoughts would you want to leave somebody with who cares all of this and identifies as a person who has a level of anxiousness? Whether they call it anxiety or not. It feels like they are an achiever. What advice would you want to leave them with in terms of how to manage a suspect they can and make the most of it?

I would say the key is not to try to cure yourself and not to try to change yourself. To simply sit with it and ask, is this serving me? Is this how I want to live? Is there a piece of me that feels like I might want to do something different? If that’s the answer, there are ways, but you don’t have to give up that essential hard, thinking, overthinking, achieving-driven piece of yourself. You don’t, but you could do it with a little bit more ease. It doesn’t have to be as expensive.

Thank you. Thank you for writing your book. I’m sure that it’s something that resonates with a lot of people. I know you talked about this topic on your own show as your theme. There’s clearly a massive audience of people who are resonating with it, who can relate to the work that you’re doing in the things that you bring to bear in your book, your show and your speaking engagement. Thank you for all of that. I appreciate it.

Thank you, J.R.

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An interesting conversation Morra and something that a lot of you can probably relate to, because a lot of us struggle with anxiety. At least at some level and feel like it’s something that is an advantage, but is also something that probably gets in our way at times as well. One thing to take away is that anxiety isn’t the enemy. Misunderstanding is. If you try to eliminate anxiety, you’re going to lose the parts of you that you care deeply about. The things that allow you to think ahead, push for excellence and bring detail and focus to things.

The goal isn’t to get rid of those things. It’s about how to learn, how to make it work for you instead of against you. The second thing is just this idea of self-awareness. Self-awareness is opposed to self-control. If we’re so controlling in the way that we behave, whether at work or outside of work. It’s exhausting trying to power through anxiety. It is exhausting. The real shift needs to be in understanding your patterns, your triggers, and your thought loops. Sometimes the fiction that your mind is telling you so that you can respond intentionally and intelligently as opposed to reacting automatically with that amygdala part of your brain.

Third is that your coping strategies might be a constraint like overworking, perfectionism, people pleasing, or micromanagement. These things might feel like strengths. Although micromanagement probably wouldn’t, they’re often anxiety in disguise. At some point, what can help you can also start holding you back.

Finally, coming back to this idea of teams and organizations. The most effective teams, leaders and organizations model honesty, authenticity and imperfection. Not perfection. You can’t build strong teams by pretending to be fearless and pretending that nobody’s got things going on in their lives or nobody has worries. You build them by creating environments in which people can be human. They feel logically safe.

They can manage their emotions and they can still perform at a high level. The goal isn’t to become less anxious. The goal is to become a better leader with anxiety if you have anxiety. I invite you to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and YouTube. If you found this discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and subscribe to our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Morra Aarons-Mele
• Morra Aarons-Mele on LinkedIn
• Morra Aarons-Mele on Instagram
• The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears Into Your Leadership Superpower
• The Anxious Achiever
• Frances Frei on LinkedIn
• Anne Morriss on LinkedIn
• Americans with Disabilities Act
• Spaciousness – Megan Reitz
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter

About Morra Aarons-Mele

Morra Aarons-Mele helps leaders build strength by tuning into their inner lives.

An anxious achiever herself, Morra knows that taking your mental and emotional health seriously is a leadership strength. Her ongoing work has been recognized by Mental Health America with their Media Award (2023). Morra is a LinkedIn “Top 10 Voice” in mental health and was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 2023 Distinguished Achievement in Leadership Award.

Morra’s consulting clients include Fortune 500 companies, startups, and U.S government agencies. She teaches Executive Education at the Harvard Kennedy School. In her decades-long career as a political, public health, and issue advocacy strategist and advisor to four U.S. Presidential campaigns she has helped the world’s largest organizations change minds and behaviors. Her speaking audiences range from executives to frontline workers, and startups to associations. Learn more about Morra’s keynotes and workshops here. Her media coverage is extensive.

Alongside speaking, coaching, and consulting, Morra hosts a Top 10 Management podcast, “The Anxious Achiever,” for LinkedIn Presents. Guests range from CEOs to leading psychologists and leadership colleagues. This popular podcast is a Webby Awards Honoree and a “Best Commute” Signal Award winner.

Most teams don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because they’re not having the conversations that matter.

In this episode of Career Sessions, Career Lessons, I sit down with workplace culture expert, consultant, and author Gustavo Razzetti to discuss his new book, Forward Talk. Gustavo argues that the biggest threat to team performance isn’t conflict—it’s silence. When concerns go unspoken, tensions remain unresolved, and difficult issues are avoided, organizations accumulate what he calls “conversational debt.”

This conversation explores why people often stop speaking up, why agreement isn’t the same as alignment, and what leaders and team members can do to create healthier, more productive conversations.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why teams often struggle because of avoided conversations rather than a lack of talent
• What “conversational debt” is and how it compounds over time
• Why employees frequently stop speaking up—not because they’re afraid, but because they believe nothing will change
• The difference between agreement and true alignment
• How groupthink, blame, and avoidance keep teams stuck
• Why psychological safety alone isn’t enough
• Practical ways leaders and team members can foster more honest, productive conversations
• How high-performing teams create cultures that encourage participation and shared ownership

Tune in every week for more episodes like this. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or follow Career Sessions wherever you’re listening.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/gustavo-razzetti

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

How To Overcome The Conversational Debt That Holds Teams Back, With Gustavo Razzetti

Defining The Concept Of Conversational Debt

Most teams do not fail because they lack talent. They fail because they do not have the necessary conversations. Think about all the meetings that you have been in, and I have certainly been in some where everyone nods and agrees and leaves, only for nothing to actually change, or worse, where the real conversation is happening afterwards in the hallway or in a messaging platform or behind closed doors somewhere.

Our guest, Gustavo Razzetti, argues that this phenomenon is much more than bad communication. He calls it conversational debt. The hidden cost of avoiding tensions, unspoken concerns, and the decisions that never really get made. The interesting part is that we assume that people stay silent because they are afraid to speak up. I am sure there is some truth in that. Gustavo’s research also suggests that something far worse is going on. People are silent because they do not believe speaking up will matter.

That sense of pointlessness erodes trust, it kills momentum, and it keeps even the smartest teams stuck. In his new book, Forward Talk: The Bold New Method For Getting Teams Unstuck, Gustavo lays out a practical approach for turning conversations from something we avoid into something that actually drives progress. We are going to explore why teams get stuck, why psychological safety may not be the full answer, and what it really takes to create conversations that move both people and organizations forward.

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Gustavo, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

We are going to dive right in. You have a new book out, which talks about teams. I know you argue that teams often do not fail because they have a lack of talent, but because they are not having the right conversations, which is a pretty bold claim. We would love to hear you talk a little bit more about the conversations that we’re missing in our teams.

I’m talking about strategic conversations. Not the coaching, the how-to communicate clearly and so on and so forth. My focus is on teamwork. There are conversations, not one-on-one, but collective conversations. What is missing is basically the difficult conversations, the topics that we do not want to address, and the different perspectives. Sometimes, we look like we are aligned. We look like we are all on the same page. Simply because we do not want to rock the boat. We do not want to upset our manager. We do not want to look like, “You’re not a team player for speaking truth to power or challenging the status quo.” Those conversations that are missing at some point are going to explode.

You make the point that these conversations compound over time in a nonlinear fashion, and there is a bit of exponential growth to them if you let them linger for longer.

There is a phenomenon that most people work a lot with teams in workshops and consulting, and they always have the illusion that things are going to happen magically. When I have a one-on-one conversation, everyone knows what is happening, but then when they get together in the room, no one wants to address those issues. I call this compounding effect conversational debt. It is like, “We are making some money. Maybe I overspend, maybe go out for dinner too frequently. We see nothing is going to happen until the credit card statement comes, and we see that the debt starts to pile up.” The same happens with teams. We think, “It is not a big deal,” but when you have not a big deal, one after the other, then it becomes a big deal.

That phrase conversational debt really resonated with me. It captures the essence of it perfectly. As I think about my own experience working in the corporate world for several decades, when you have those situations where people just do not talk about the things that are really necessary. The elephants in the room, or whatever you want to call them. It just gets worse and worse. The point where the team is for all practical purposes, even if they are getting along, it is a dysfunctional team.

The best way to address conflict is when it starts, and the next best moment is now. The more we keep waiting, the more it is going to get out of hand. We have that fantasy that a conflict disappears, and it does not. I work with leaders who do not want to have those hard feedback conversations with team members because they do not want to go through that tense conversation. They do not want to go through that moment in which people get upset, or maybe they are not going to like them as leaders, whatever.

I always tell them the person who is having some kind of performance issue knows. They know that you are not happy. They know that you are looking at them, frustrated. They are waiting for that conversation to happen. It is like a couple that is going through a rough patch, and both know that they need to sit and say, “How are we going to relaunch our marriage, our partnership?” Someone has to go first.

One thing that I thought was more of a bold claim, I guess I know I used that phrase a minute ago. You make the point that people often do not speak up, not because they are afraid to speak up, but because they do not see the point. That is dark in a way that people have just, in essence, given up on their teams.

Overcoming Pointlessness Versus Just Fear

It is dark, but it is also clear, and it gives us a different kind of path. The point is when leaders say, the team is not speaking, I always say, were they speaking in the past? Try to get when you started. At the first meeting you had with them, did they share their concerns? Did it tell you what was wrong with the former leader? Probably they did. People at some point stopped sharing their perspectives, and this is because nothing has changed. This is very interesting because people usually think that people do not speak up because of fear or because of their culture.

I have seen a lot of cultures that are really nice where people are happy, leaders promote and nurture a safe environment, so people feel safe. No one wants to basically rock the boat. They do not want to create any friction, so people do not speak about, “Your leaders are going to listen.” They are going to hear your concerns, but then there is no action, no change. It is like those employee engagement surveys that we complete every twelve months, twice a year, whatever the cadence is. After sharing, nothing changes. I would continue to raise my hand and share my opinion if nothing mattered.

For people who are sitting in a team, that gets to be a very frustrating existence. I can think of times when I have been there. You feel like you’re talking to a wall, or you make a controversial point, or you bring up something that will create a sense of conflict and tension in the room. Everybody else just looks down, and your peers leave you hanging out there.

It becomes not a team discussion anymore, but it is you and the boss going to engage on this topic, or is the boss just going to move on and change topics? When that happens enough, they just change topics. You just realize, what’s the point of bringing these things up? You are not going to pay any attention to them anyway. That is where I feel like you have hit a person on a team who has just given up for all practical purposes.

It is a paradox because it is like you are shooting yourself in the foot, because if you do not raise the issues, once again, those issues are going to harm you and the team as well. There is an interesting point about what you were saying. We talk about the walls. Of course, the manager plays a big role, and probably many of your audience are managers, but there are also people who are not in a position of power, but still contribute to this kind of defeat mindset. I always say agreement happens in the room.

Alignment is what happens after, because we can all agree when we are together, but then, when we implement, are we really aligned with the implementation? During those water cooler conversations with my team members, we start saying, “I do not care about this.” We are feeding that darkness using the term that you used before. It is not just the boss who is the problem. Sometimes our own colleagues pulled us down.

Teams are teams. You use a sports analogy. You can blame the coach on the sideline for everything that goes wrong in the game, but there are five in basketball, eleven of you, and a soccer football team out there on the field, the pitch. If you are not working well together, you cannot really blame the coach for that. Again, thinking about my own experience, I have sat through meetings where teammates are really not carrying their weight of making the team effective. Even a well-intentioned boss is going to struggle unless they get that dynamic right. This idea of individual agency comes with this. You have got to take some ownership. Even if you are a team member, you cannot just put all the blame on the boss and say this team is not working and it is all their fault.

We contribute both to the harm and to the solution, or part of the solution and part of the problem. Part of the problem, part of the solution. Agency is a keyword they just brought up because I think that people do not realize their contribution. Silence is contagious. When I am going to raise my hand, and then I see no one speaking, then I say, “Maybe it is not the right move to make.” When I facilitate workshops, and I ask a question, people start looking at each other and say, “Something is going on here.” On the other hand, when someone takes that action, they act with courage, they break the silence, and they ask a question. They are blunt in front of others. They are also modeling that positive behavior.

When that happens, it feeds the opposite cycle. You can have a negative cycle that compounds debt. You can have a positive cycle that compounds interest, conversational interest. If you want to use the opposite of your conversation with that phrase.

Totally. If you do not mind me asking, in your experience, because you mentioned earlier that you have seen those teams where people are shutting each other down by looking at each other like, “This is not the right moment. We do not want to get there.” What are the signals that you observe working with teams when the opposite happens?

It happens in one of a couple of ways. Either somebody in the right tone says, “Mary, I know you were expressing some concerns the other day. Share those.” There is a little bit of putting the person on the spot when you do that, but done in the right way, it gives them the confidence that you are going to support them because you have already said, “I want to hear what you have to say. I know you have an opinion on this, one teammate to another, not in the position of leader.”

The other way is when somebody does bring that up, and somebody else then comes on top and says, “I have been thinking about that as well,” or “That is an excellent point,” or asks the question and just allows the conversation to get some oxygen in it. When it is just one person making that point, and you get crickets, nobody says anything, and people are not making eye contact. That is where I think it feels really awkward and where that debt does accrue. I have seen it work both ways, but it is definitely harder to get that dynamic going, which obviously is the point of your book.

Sometimes we think that it is harder, but it is not as hard. There is this thing called the vulnerability loop to a point in which the second person is as important or even more important than the one who starts the conversation. I am going to say, “Maybe not naming Mary,” but saying, “I heard that some team members had some concerns about the deadline, the timeline. This project feels a little bit like we are rushing it. It is too complicated.” Someone says, “Yes, I heard the same when someone builds on that conversation.” The rest say, “Now we can jump too.” That second person plays a huge role in building that loop.

For sure. Your book is called Forward Talk: The Bold New Method For Getting Teams Unstuck. Help us understand what you mean by forward talk and how it creates this kind of team construct that you are arguing for here.

Of course, we want, and leaders want, and you, as a team member, want to move forward. The most important thing is that teams get stuck in conversations because most of those conversations are focused on the past. We have, for example, one pattern that is to blame. When all our conversations are about that bad hire, the bad decision the team or the leader made, or a project that went wrong, or maybe we never completed it, or we had to redo it, whatever the case may be, that blame drags people into the past, and we cannot get over it.

Implementing Forward Talk To Neutralize Groupthink

Rather than focusing on how we can improve from that mistake, what have we learned? We get stuck on who screwed up. Avoidance is also the same because, building on our conversation, “Nothing happened in the past. I stopped caring. I am going to keep myself silent, or I am not going to really speak up my mind. I am going to just adapt.” The other pattern is groupthink. It is the most deceiving of all because it looks like we are moving forward, but we are just moving on.

We just want to go along with the team, we want to agree, we rush decisions without having the proper conversation. We are dancing around the issues simply to be a team player or just to “Let’s move on.” That is why decisions never stick. Forward talk is about conversations that not only focus on moving into the future, making progress, but also do that by addressing the real issue, not ignoring it, not tackling it superficially.

You talked about groupthink perhaps being the one that is most deceiving because you think you have got agreement, but you really do not have agreement. Which one do you think happens most often?

It all depends on the type of culture. In cultures that are more nice, groupthink is the one that you see the most often. In cultures that are driven by fear, blame is the easiest pattern because when there’s fear, someone’s going to get punished. We would rather not be the culprit. We find someone else or even another department.

You also feel that psychological safety isn’t necessarily the answer.

I have been working with psychological safety before it became a thing, following Amy Edmondson’s work for over eight years or more. I have been training people, facilitating stuff, but going through the research of my book, and also working with teams, I realized that it is not a complete solution because psychological safety focuses on the context. We need to create a safe space for people to speak up. Two things are happening. First, as we mentioned before, some companies are safe, but that still does not mean that they want to hear the truth.

They want to hear the perfect truth, the illusion of alignment. Second, the concept of psychological safety has become a little bit weaponized, both from leaders and team members. I have a lot of team members saying, “This team is not safe, so I am not going to speak up.” They use it as an excuse because, in the end, they are part of the problem. They are not doing anything to change it. They are using the excuse that it is not safe enough. They are not accountable.

That is a really fair point. A lot of things end up getting taken too far and used in a way that ultimately is not constructive. Certainly, the concept of having a team environment where people can speak freely, share opinions, be vulnerable, and bring up conflict if that needs to be brought up. Say the unpopular thing. All of that is important at the same time. I have seen situations where people have said, I do not really feel psychologically safe. Therefore, they are just casting blame on the system as a defensive mechanism. Exactly what you said.

They are removing their agency, right? The point is not with the framework. It is how the framework has been turning into something that basically is not helping some teams, but also, there is an additional layer in my research identified, like three groups. Some people are susceptible to psychological safety. If the environment is safer, they tend to speak more. If it’s unsafe, they speak less. There are team members who, regardless of whether it’s safer, do not participate. There are people who, even in unsafe environments, speak up because of their personalities.

For somebody in our audience who is listening or watching and is having their own team experiences like this. We talked a little bit about being that second voice and the powerful effect that that can have. What are some of the other ways that a team member sitting in one of these meetings can help turn the conversation in the right direction?

Two things come to mind. The first is becoming more aware of the patterns. I always like to say forward talk is like a direction. No team is perfect. We are always going to have a little bit of blame. We are going to have a little bit of avoidance. The point is not having those patterns. The point is when those patterns become the team’s norms, and we default to those. We are going to have better and worse days. When we start seeing how the conversations happen through those three lenses, are we avoiding the topic?

Are we focusing more on blaming people or other people, or maybe even the customers, instead of trying to solve the problem, focusing on the system? Are we trying to find a solution that maybe, for example, a group thinks. It is about finding the safest idea instead of the idea the team really needs, because we want an idea that everyone is going to support, instead of the idea that is going to be a little bit uncomfortable, but it is the one that we need. This is the first thing.

When you start noticing the patterns, you can start sharing that with the team members and say, “Guys, I think we are getting too much into this.” Not judging, not finger-pointing, but at least it creates awareness. The second and quick intervention is what I call reframing conversations. Many times we have, we tried that, and it is not going to work, or it did not work in the past. How can we make it work, considering that the conditions have changed? For example, you reframe it into an opportunity.

We cannot make this decision because the leader is not in the meeting. What decision can we make with the power that we have? We do not have a budget. What can we prioritize? We make money or fund this project. Many conversations get teams stuck because they feel absolute, and they focus on a problem. Reframing the conversations, turning that obstacle into an opportunity, trying to see the other side, and not getting stuck. You turn into a question to explore.

You have done a lot of work with teams for the ones that you have seen that are really high performing. What else do you see them doing that really stands out both in and outside the room?

First, it is important that leaders realize that their role is to facilitate, not dominate, conversations. That comes to letting go of what happens in the room, being more intentional about tapping into the collective wisdom, and also admitting that they are not right or they are not the only source of truth. I was writing an article about this in Mark Zuckerberg’s AI version, so people can access the CEO 24/7. That is built on the idea that the CEO is always right and is the source of answers. High-performing team leaders are not in that position. They are in the position of curating the information through their teams rather than being the ones who provide the solution.

You’re hitting on a couple of things that really resonate with me. One is the idea that we are in this era where the idea of star CEOs really seems to be particularly prominent. When you have a star CEO, to me, that is a weak team because it has a singular dependency on one person. Even if that person is legitimately a star, I mean, sometimes it is, they are so controlling that nobody else really gets any air to speak or to express their own opinion or to take their own actions. The idea of the star CEO just works against everything that a team really should be about, which is a collection of people trying to achieve more than they would have been able to do if they were working independently.

Even if they see us as stars, they should not play the star part. They should let their team thrive.

I was coincidentally listening to Stanley McChrystal’s book, Team of Teams. At the very end of the book, he talks about the leader as a gardener. It was a good analogy. I have not heard before, just this idea that you’re tending to something. You are nurturing it. You are not growing the vegetables or the fruit or whatever you’re growing. You are not making the flowers.

You are tending to them. You are creating the conditions for your garden to grow. If you think about it in that construct, you’re going to play a very different role than if you’re the controlling, top-down, micromanaging leader. That difference really stood out to me as a very relatable metaphor for thinking about the role that a leader needs to play if they really want to bring out the best in everybody on their team.

That is the culture. It is an environment where you want other people to flourish. You just need to nurture it, not take over it.

Let’s talk a little bit more about the broader organizational context and just some of the things that I will say exist outside of the team itself and the broader culture of the organization that is creating these conditions where people just feel like it is not worth speaking up, pointless, or otherwise.

There are two takes on that. The other day, I was facilitating a workshop, and there were like 600 senior managers, and I asked them, what is your stronger sense of belonging? One extreme had your team, the people that you work the most frequently with and are closest to, or the larger organization, and everything in between. The vast majority of people say that their strongest sense of belonging and their connection was with their teams. The larger culture plays a big role and influences a lot of patterns when it comes to conversations. In the end, you can have a very toxic organization and still have great subcultures that are healthy or semi-healthy. Conversely, you can have a very healthy organization and have pockets that are really toxic or harmful or silent.

I am curious to get your view in terms of the orientation of the individual to the team versus to the organization. Is one necessarily better?

Probably, but I want to think more about what the natural tendency is, because I think that leaders need to work with the energy we’re talking about in the garden. If a tree wants to move in one direction, it can push. They are going to look for where the sun is. You should not fight against that. That is nature. Nature is that we have a stronger sense of belonging to the people that we are closer. You get connected to the place that you live, the sports team that you follow, your neighbors, then your family, and your friends. The closer that community, the stronger that sense of belonging. That is human nature.

When we want to create an identity, especially for companies that have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of employees, it is very hard to make sure that everyone has the same pattern, the same agreements, and they all look alike. Actually, by trying to do that, we basically erode people’s uniqueness. It is easier to create that connection and have stronger subcultures at a team level than trying to force one identity that is going to bring us around to us. We need to bring the connecting tissue between those subcultures and the larger org.

Think about teams that are so team-centric. Almost to the point where they are ignoring the broader context. Positively or negatively, I think that can be pretty unhealthy because it does not scale particularly well. It could be that the team becomes very set on doing something that is misaligned with what the broader organizational culture or purpose is about. At the same time, I think it is unrealistic to expect people to gravitate more naturally to a big organization because they are not dealing with the 10 or 100,000 people that are in their company every day.

They are dealing with the ten people that are on their team and how to balance that centricity. If you want to call it that in terms of my centricity to my team and my centricity to the broader organizational purpose, I think it is one of the hardest parts to get right in terms of having team focus, because you do not want them to act in isolation. You also do not want them to completely ignore the ten people around them.

You capture it brilliantly. You do not want to impose your organizational identity. You do not want to isolate teams into their subculture. It is a balance. In my book, I talk about the three key elements of culture. Those are basically the three key elements of commercials that are conversations about alignment, belonging, and collaboration, or I call them the ABCs of culture. When it comes to alignment, what’s our purpose, value, what are we in business for? What’s the impact? Everyone should be on the same page.

I do not care which business you are in or which unit. When it comes to how we do the work, the collaboration, that is more up to the team to decide what is going to work for them. We talk about being innovative. Innovation does not mean the same for your legal team, your procurement team, your finance team, or your product team. It is different. The belonging, that emotional side, is a combination of both how leaders lead at a company-wide level and also how teams operate on their own.

You have worked with teams all over the world. When you go in and work with a team that is maybe not where they should be or where they want to be, what do you see as the tension to separate the ones that then head in the right direction versus the ones that just stay stuck?

Utilizing The Team Heartbeat Exercise For Alignment

What changes is that they move conversations from their head to the room. A lot of people are building narratives around their team members. They’re really totally off, and sometimes getting that narrative outside helps a lot. I am going to share a very basic exercise. One thing I call the team heartbeat. I ask. From the moment you join this team until today, capture all the highs and lows, then identify what are the key events that happen on each of those. That creates a pulse or heartbeat of the team.

When people share with each other, you start to realize that maybe a project that was limited in terms of budget and timing or whatever for you was exciting. You start to see how people react to different events. When you can bring all those perspectives together in terms of how we perceive the same events, the same experiences, but through our different personalities and roles, you start to create a very interesting context for people to realize that, “Maybe we are seeing the same movie, but everyone is getting hooked in different parts, and we love certain parts.” Sometimes we hate all the movies.

In that exercise, I would imagine what is particularly valuable is seeing what people agree on highs? What do people agree on lows? They are all bringing up the same situation, but they are seeing it differently. You probably also got some things where I thought this was a particular high that nobody else happened to notice, or a low that nobody else happened to notice. That is insight as well. It helps you see different people’s perspectives because you go into the room, you have your meetings, but then you all go off and do your own thing, and you’re living different experiences day to day. You’re only having that shared time every now and then. I am sure you see a lot of that in your work when you go through that exercise.

You said something that is really interesting. Imagine that, for example, the leader says, “This moment was fantastic.” They realized that no one else cared. It could be either that you’re clueless or that your communication skills are not there. Maybe the moment was great, but you make it about yourself. You want to be the hero in the narrative, not the people. People did not like it. There is a lot to learn from those things.

You made a point earlier about narratives. We are forming these narratives. We are interacting with our peers. We are saying some things, we are not saying some other things. We are walking away from every meeting with a point of view about where people are coming from. We have these opinions about teammate A, teammate B, teammate C that could be accurate or perhaps completely inaccurate.

Unless you start to vocalize some of those things and test them and figure out whether you have got a shared view of reality, you run the risk that you do not. That is where this idea of conversational debt comes back to what you talked about earlier, can really pile up because it just means that the team is not really having a shared sense of consciousness, if you will, about how all of this really ought to be interpreted.

If you do not know what the problem is, all solutions are going to fail. Conversation is the first step towards understanding what is going on. That is why we fail. When there’s silence and leaders in particular, but also team members, avoid the real issue, people are going to fill the void with narratives. In most cases, they are not going to be good. People start filling that void with lots of crazy stories. When we start a conversation that we fear, people say, “It was not that bad.” That is the realization that most people have. There is a lot of research that shows that the people who went through hard conversations most of the time do not regret it and actually feel that “That went much, much better than I thought it would.”

That is true a lot of the time, as you are saying that you have this belief that if you bring something up, it is going to be this huge issue. I will say 7 or 8 times out of 10, it ends up being less of an issue than you thought it would be 2 or 3 times. Maybe it becomes a bigger issue than you thought. If that is the case, then you really need to have the conversation.

It is like overspending, and I do not want to check your credit card statements. It is going to be here. Probably when you open, say, “I thought it was even worse.”

That is where the debt’s really going to pile up. Not conversational debt, real debt.

Yes, sir.

For our audience, what would you want people to walk away with? One mindset shift or one tool in their toolkit to help their teams be more effective?

Cultivating Individual Agency And Positive Cycles

First, the notion of regret. There is a lot of research from Daniel Pink that says that we do not regret what we tried, what we did. We usually regret what we did not do. You are not going to regret a conversation even if it goes wrong. You are going to regret the idea of I should have, I wanted to, but I never did. The second thing is that you’re part of the problem.

We talked a lot today about conversational agency in plain English. Own your part. Do not complain if you are not sharing your truth. If you are not asking the right questions, you are also part of that silent culture. You are also part of the problem. We need to stop waiting for someone else to do that. We need to go first. We need to model the courage we want to see in others.

If everybody starts doing just a little bit of that, you start to get the different kind of compounding effect that creates some of the positive energy that you need to then help the team become even more effective, more willing to confront hard topics together, more willing to speak openly. That’s what we are really all aiming for. That is what’s going to drive high-performing teams.

I know people are saying, “You are saying this.” It sounds easy. I am not saying start with the hardest conversation. It is like exercising. You have to build muscle. We built the muscle of avoidance. Now we need to start training and start building the muscle of participation, the muscle of conversations.

Your book is out. I look forward to seeing how the book launch goes and how it does. I wish you the best with everything. Thanks for being on the show with me.

Thank you for hosting me, and thank you for the conversation.

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Takeaways from the conversation just now with Gustavos. First, the biggest risk in teams is conflict. It is actually silence. Teams do not underperform because people disagree. They do so because people stop speaking up. Often it is not fear. It is the belief, even a deep-rooted cynicism, which I said was kind of dark, that saying something will not actually change anything, which is not where you want your team to be.

The second thing is that unspoken issues do not disappear. They compound. This is what Gustavo called conversational debt, and it builds over time, just like interest would on a loan that you owe. Each conversation adds to misalignment, adds to frustration, and eventually these things turn into major failures that will feel sudden, but they really were not, and they were completely predictable. Third, alignment is often an illusion.

Just because everybody nods does not mean everybody really agrees, and getting real alignment is both a shared understanding and a genuine commitment. Even when people initially agree, as Gustavus said, agreement happens in the room, and alignment happens afterwards. There is a big difference between the two. Finally, better conversations require courage, not just frameworks. The exercise he suggested, I think, is a great one in terms of looking at highs and lows and how everybody views that.

At the end of the day, for teams to really work together, there has to be the courage to speak up. That means everybody has to have that sense of owning their part, being willing to express unpopular opinions, to engage and challenge honestly, even when it is uncomfortable. Culture does not really change until behavior does, and that requires everybody owning their part. I invite you to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. If you found this discussion enlightening, and I hope you did, please sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise, and my newsletter, PathWisdom. Thank you.

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About Gustavo Razzetti

Gustavo Razzetti is the bestselling author of Remote, Not Distant, Stretch for Change, and his forthcoming book, Forward Talk. Gustavo is a culture strategist, workshop facilitator, and keynote speaker with over 25 years of experience—first as a marketing and advertising executive, now as CEO of Fearless Culture, a culture design consultancy. He’s facilitated more than 1,500 workshops with leadership teams at Mars, Microsoft, Merck, the Inter-American Development Bank, and hundreds of organizations across the world.

Razzetti is the creator of the Culture Design Canvas, now used by over 500,000 practitioners worldwide, and the Forward Talk framework. He helps teams surface issues early, challenge groupthink, and turn avoided conversations into decisions that stick. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, and Fortune. He’s a regular contributor to Psychology Today. His most recent book, Forward Talk: The Bold New Method For Getting Teams Unstuck, was released on May 5, 2026.

Most people spend a huge portion of their lives at work. So why do so many of us dread it?

In this episode, JR speaks with Debbie Lovich, Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group and author of Make Work Work, about why employee engagement has remained stubbornly low for decades despite billions spent on leadership training, culture initiatives, and workplace transformation programs.

Debbie argues that making work better doesn’t require another grand strategy or organizational overhaul. Instead, it comes down to a handful of daily leadership behaviors that create more human, enjoyable, and productive workplaces.

Their conversation covers:

• Why most leadership training fails to change behavior
• The connection between employee joy, performance, and retention
• The five daily practices that help leaders create better workplaces
• Why employee experience should be treated like customer experience
• How co-creation can replace traditional change management
• The role of middle managers in shaping workplace culture
• What leaders get wrong about AI and the future of work
• How anyone—not just senior executives—can improve the culture around them

If you’re a leader, manager, or employee who wants work to be more meaningful, productive, and enjoyable, this conversation offers practical ideas you can put into action immediately.

Subscribe to Career Sessions on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts for weekly episodes like this.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/debbie-lovich/

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Why Work Feels Broken (And How to Fix It), With Debbie Lovich

The Stagnation Of Global Workforce Engagement

If we’re honest with ourselves, a lot of us would say that the answer to that question is no. Workforce engagement with a proxy for satisfaction has hovered around 30% in the United States for many years. It’s even lower in other parts of the developed world. If you think about it. It’s a huge failure that we can’t do better than that. What’s fascinating is that we’ve never had more books or frameworks or leadership training and even shows like this one about how to make work better. Hundreds of millions of people just go through the motions every day at work and that’s terrible.

My guest, my friend in HBS classmate Debbie Lovich has spent over three decades working inside some of the world’s biggest organizations. She has been at Boston Consulting Group, advising leaders who genuinely want to create workplaces that are better but they haven’t figured out how to translate that intention into everyday behavior in a way that truly makes a difference.

The problem isn’t that these leaders aren’t trying or that they don’t care. It’s that they’re focused on the wrong things. The way they’re going about it is making things even worse. In her new book, Make Work Work, Debbie introduces five daily practices that when done consistently can transform how people experience work.

It isn’t about launching a big transformation or rolling out yet another HR program. It’s about what leaders can do every single day. In this episode, we’re going to talk about why work feels so broken to so many people, what it takes to create joy at work and how any leader or honestly, any of us can take part in changing our workplaces for the better. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.

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Debbie, welcome back to the show. This is your second time with me. You must be especially brave.

Maybe especially lucky.

We will leave that up to the interpretation of our audience. Let’s get going. You have a new book out. You spent 30 plus years working at the Boston Consulting Group and advising organizations. What finally pushed you to write a book now?

Defining The Concept Of Radical Employee Centricity

If I look at the ark of my career, I spent the first part thinking that smart people did strategy and operations and the softies did people stuff. Halfway through my career, I realized that, “If I look at all the projects I did for clients and the work I did for clients. They definitely had a great impact, but they didn’t have as much impact as I aspired for them to have.” I started to look at what got in the way. What got in the way? People, leadership, culture, ways of working and behavior.

I started to say, “I have to address this stuff.” I went into work on the people’s stuff. My first client was BCG, and I found out that changing behavior is anything but soft. It is hard, especially senior leader behavior. When you have dozens, hundreds, thousands of leaders, to get them all work differently and to drive value creation. That was the coolest thing I could be doing. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past decade and a half.

In the last decade, I started focusing on what I call radical employee centricity. Which is if you treat your employees as important as you treat your customers and shareholders, there’s tremendous value on lock for the company. It’s not just you employees nice because it’s the right thing to do. Employees who enjoy their work can create so much value. I discovered this thing. I’ve written about it. Now, I want to get those two ideas, the leadership piece and the employee value. They sort of skate together because what is the easiest way to unlock employee value, to make work enjoyable, or the title, my book to make work work?

What’s the easiest way to do that? It’s leaders and what leaders do every day. That’s what the book is for. It’s to get this message out there. Every leader has in him or herself, the ability to make work enjoyable for his or her people and her team or her organization. In doing that, they could unlock so much value for their organizations besides just making the people’s lives better every day.

What’s interesting about this, all these business books have been read. We’re doing training for leaders and employees. Yet, as you point out in the book, work still sucks for a lot of people. What are we getting wrong?

Why Traditional Corporate Training Often Fails

First of all, training doesn’t work. I tell people, and you will appreciate this. You don’t get in shape by watching an exercise video from the couch. Nor do you get in shape by going to a spa for a week because you’ll go back to sitting at your desk all day or your sedentary life. You also won’t get in shape by saying, “I’m going to go to Pilates every morning at 5:00 AM,” because you’re going to hit snooze and you’re not going to go. The way you get in shape is by walking to work, doing walking meetings, building fitness that’s doable into your natural rhythms and routines.

What organizations spend billions on is the spa, the watching an exercise video from the couch or Pilates classes that nobody goes to. It doesn’t take and so the secret to building muscle, to building leadership case stability is not doing off-site, training and webinars. The secret is to make small changes in your day-to-day work that build habits and build muscle. People could understand that work could be better. They understand that leaders could be better, but the answer they’re putting against it, the solution just doesn’t take.

There’s certainly a heavy emphasis on behavioral science that underpins your five practices. The idea that you’ve got to make it simple, habitual, and do it consistently or you’re not going to continue to do it over time. That’s where a lot of these things fall down. A lot of leadership books are at 50,000 feet. They’ll talk about these big thematic things. They don’t bring it down enough to what you can do. A lot of other books do a decent job of that. Your book certainly is very focused on saying, “These are five practices. They seem simple. They’re not as simple as they seem if you want to put them into practice and you’ve got to make them into habits.”

It’s also interesting because there are a lot of books out there that give you a checklist and do these things. One of the things about the five behaviors in the book, the five practices that help them take is that they’re rewarding to do. They’re multiplicative in their impact. This is like doing something that just gives energy and in return, gives you back energy. Hopefully, people get addicted to doing these things because they’re so rewarding to do. You see the multiplicative impact right away.

Let’s get into them. I’ll rattle them off and then I’ll let you explain each of them in turn, celebrate someone, go see and help, be interested, co-create, and do it first. Let’s go through them.

Celebrating People And Embracing Servant Leadership

Let’s start with celebrate someone. I start that chapter with the story about this very senior leader I worked with whose team was not productive, bad morale, and bad culture. I interviewed all of his senior directors one-on-one and they were like, “He hates us. We’re never good enough for him.” This was in a pharmaceutical company, a biotech company. They’re all clinical geniuses. I go back and I tell him, “Your team thinks you hate them.” He’s like, “What? I have the best team on the planet.” I’m just, “When have you told them that?” He goes, “They don’t need to hear it. They know it.” I’m like, “No. They need to hear it.”

This is to celebrate people, every time you have a positive thought about someone, tell the person. Be like,” J.R, you are so awesome because I don’t know how you created this show in your spare time while you work full time. You are this runner, hiker and walker. Where do you find the time for it? It’s amazing.” That’s a specific compliment. I happen to believe that, and it’s true. It’s genuine. Don’t make stuff up or say, “You’re great.” The move. If you think anything positive at any time about anyone you work with, let them know.

By the way, it doesn’t have to just be your team underneath you. It could be your peers. It could be your boss. Bosses are lonely, but you got to get the balance. We know from behavioral science that people need to hear something like five positive things to every negative thing to feel good about themselves. Yet, we’re not saying the positive things. Go see and help is built on servant leadership. If you remember that from agile methodologies.

It’s the notion of going to where the work is and helping people out. What I tell executives is, “You’re meeting at these gleaming corporate headquarters or fancy hotels and you get together all day for your executive meetings. You’ve gotten so disconnected from what’s happening at the rock face of the work. Instead, why don’t you do your meeting in a manufacturing plant or in a retail store or in a distribution center? Before the meeting, go out on the floor and talk to people. Ask them, “How can I make your job easier? What can I take off your plate? What gives you straps?”

When you get to your executive meeting, talk about it at the meeting. I talk about Hubert Joly, who I’m so privileged to have worked with. Hubert was the CEO who turned around Best Buy when Amazon got into consumer electronics and they started going online. If you remember, there was Circuit City, RadioShack, and Best Buy. Circuit City and Radio Shack were out of business. Hubert took this very employee-centric mindset.

Before he took the CEO position, he worked in the stores. He just spent time with the front line and learned what we can do as an organization to help them be more effective in their jobs. He’s written in his wonderful book, The Heart of Business. Everything I needed to know about turning around Best Buy was coming from the front lines. That’s the go see and help. Get on the floor and help folks.

As I was reading that piece, I was thinking back to when I was at Fidelity. This goes back many years. We would do meetings. I can’t remember how frequently we would have them. Maybe every 6 or 8 weeks or maybe every quarter. We would go to a different site to do the meeting, to your point. Most of our organization were call center reps. Thousands of people answering, in that instance, calls from people who are participating in a benefit plan that Fidelity administered like a 401(k) plan or a pension. Every time we met, we would have our meeting but then we’d spend time with the management team there.

We do events with the employee population. They loved the fact that all of us came to them. Even if we didn’t spend a ton of time with them, we were certainly being visible to them. I made a huge difference in those circumstances and it certainly reinforced for me the value of getting out there and being visible to your employees. Make sure that you’re breaking through the layers of management chains and hearing about what their experience is like.

That’s exactly right. You’ve got it. I worked with a client years ago who was big pharmaceutical company. Pharmaceutical companies have huge sales forces. They always have an open territory. The executives would go out for a week a quarter and go sell. That was magical because they were helping out the district manager who was short-staffed. They also were in tune with what it was like at the rock face of the customer interaction. The reaction you get, like what you said, when you were out in the call centers, people loved it. That’s the energy. Remember I said, these are positive things. It makes you want to do it again because people are so happy to see you. It makes them feel like rockstar. It is reinforcing energy.

For sure. Let’s go to the third one, be interested.

Developing Genuine Interest In Employees As Individuals

This is just asking people about themselves. Being interested in the people on your team as a human. Not as a worker. What do you do outside of work? How do you end up here? Where’s your family from? What do you do for fun? What do you want to do long term? What are your career goals? People want bosses and leaders who care about them. You then remember the details. In my contact information for people, in the notes section, I write down the details. The next time I talk to them, I could be like, “How’s your son’s college applications going?” They’re like, “Debbie, remember that?”

It’s being interested in their lives. I get a little bit of push back when I talk about this. Some people are not comfortable talking about themselves. They may be very introverted. That’s fine. Make it safe. Talk about yourself first and don’t go deep to say, “Here’s what I’m doing on the weekend. What are you doing?” If you offer about yourself, that’s also generous. It makes it psychologically safe for them to offer about themselves. It shows your interest in people. It helps people feel valued, not just as someone who does great work but as a whole person, part of your team.

For a lot of leaders, it’s uncomfortable. You get some who are great at walking the floor. They remember people’s names. They remember the details. They can make it seamless. They light everybody up and bring energy. Others are so awkward about it. That it just feels like a horror show for all parties involved. Having a repertoire of questions that you can go to or having a method of engaging people in a way that doesn’t feel awkward for them or awkward for you and your style. It takes time to develop. A lot of leaders are interested in their people and their certainly time constraints.

They can’t engage is deeply in every conversation that they would probably ideally like to be able to. It making the most of those little moments, whether it’s passing somebody in the hallway or bumping into them, going in or out of the bathroom even or in the cafeteria or in the elevator. There’s lots of opportunities for those 30 second conversations that will bring a little bit of extra lift to somebody’s day if you take advantage of them. There’s also the people who just don’t. You stand in the elevator next to CEO and they don’t say a word to you. That’s the thing you’re going to remember. That they didn’t say a word to you. They didn’t even say hi.

The elevator is so funny. The BCG office in Boston, we have floors eight to the top. There are people who get out before but as soon as we hit eight, I’m like, “This is the BCG express. I’m Debbie. Who are you guys?” People appreciate it. It warms it up. These are colleagues, but you’re right, it is awkward. By the way, it’s awkward for the CEO, too. Maybe they don’t know how to do it but they know everyone knows that. You almost have to.

 You almost have to. At the same time, I see a lot of senior leaders who are like, “Pretend there’s nobody in here with me so I can be alone with my thoughts for just a second.” The phone has become the ultimate cure for social awkwardness and unfortunately, it’s making it worse.

Again, as soon as you do all these practices, the positive instant feedback you get just gets you hooked on it. I like talking to random people in the elevator who are all colleagues of mine. I know we have something in common. I like that. I like getting to know people, which is great. The problem starts when people are like, “Debbie, you introduced yourself to me yesterday or last week.” I’m like, “I’m sorry, my brain. Please remind me of your name again.” You got to be okay with that.

You do. I’m terrible at remembering names and I work at it and work at it. Age is not helping that. I will just say to people like, “I’m terrible at remembering names. You may have to tell me your name again, but I will remember you.” It helps take some of the pressure up. It’s admitting a little bit of weakness and vulnerability in a way that people can relate to and it in my case, it’s not just made up.

Prioritizing Co-Creation To Boost Adoption And Engagement

That’s right. It makes you so human as a leader. Even saying, we’re interested. That’s the third. The fourth is co-create. Co-creation is a little harder. Co-creation is more anything that you were working on as a leader that’s going to impact some group of employees, have someone at least someone at best a couple of those employees on the team with you working on it. What happens is as we make these top-down changes, these off to the side projects, these Gen AI use cases. We’re like, “Let’s roll them out.”

They never get adopted the way they should be because they don’t work as well as they should be because you haven’t gotten adequate input from the people who are getting it. The world gets this with consumer products. There’s so much customer level, interaction, piloting, alpha beta, gamma, feedback loops co-creation with customers. It’s so ironic when it comes to work. We don’t do that. Every change we do at work, re-org, new technology deployment, new workstream, and new approach impacts people.

We got to do the same customer stuff with our employees and that could take lots of different forms. It could take a couple and put them on the team. Create an employee advisory panel and have the team off to the side that’s doing this read out to them every week like they’re the client or do a focus group with them. I’m working with a client. We’re doing a huge transformation program and we literally communicated to the entire organization we want your ideas. There’s a website they can go to put their ideas in.

Every idea is categorized and routed to the right leader. The person gets a response like, “Here’s what we’re doing with it and why. Can we talk more? Here’s why it doesn’t work, but thank you. Keep them coming.” Is it energizing? There’s a whole goal of these behaviors. By the way, it’s to unlock employees, and joy which unlocks value creation for the company. This stuff makes it feel like we’re all in this together.

This co-creation is a little harder to do because you’ve got to pull the people on your team or you have to create the advisory panels or you have to create the infrastructure to make people feel a part of everything you’re doing, then it’s not top down. When you do this, remember Jim Whitehurst, from our section? He wrote a book called The Open Organization after he went from Delta Airlines to Red Hat. He saw Red Hat. That company was all co-creation. He’s like, “What is my job as CEO if everyone’s self-motivated and doing their own work?”

What he realized, and he wrote in his book is something like change management is for when you’ve done a bad job at the work. If you do the work in the wrong way and you need to convince people it’s in their best interest to adopt it. That’s changed management. If you do real co-creation, like, “Change what? This is just how we do things.” That’s the fourth.

In the scheme of things, frankly, that one is more than a little bit harder. It’s a lot harder for most people. First of all, leaders feel like they have to have all the answers and they don’t necessarily want to feel like they have to go out, solicit and put on them. They want to move quickly. They think engaging employees in the process slows them down.

They don’t think employees will have a valuable perspective. All those reasons that people put in their heads about why they can’t, shouldn’t or don’t want to do this stuff. It’s a lot harder and it’s countercultural in a lot of organizations. I talk about Red Hat build on a usage of an open source platform Linux, in their case. That’s how that whole company was built and grown.

It’s in their ethos. We’ve seen more of that open source mentality in the era of the internet. This crowdsourcing and all of the things out there from Wikipedia that are about people working together to make something better than it could ever be with people working individually on their own. It’s still grudgingly finding its way into most of corporate America. That is about a leader’s egos and their processes and their willingness to make time for this early rather than doing, and fear. That’s why this one is the hardest of the five.

I agree. Here’s how I’ve been working around it. It doesn’t have to be all the way to a Red Hat total crowdsource company. Literally, an email box where people can send ideas and you staff someone to respond to them. That’s super easy to do. As a leader to any team, you just need to start saying, “Make sure you have the employees impacted. Have a voice on that team. Here are a couple ways you could do it.” Making Red Hat is definitely very hard, but there are baby steps that get you a lot of the way there, but you’re right in what you said. It’s a mindset thing.

What’s helped me on the mindset thing, is the customer discovery wave. You do this with your customers. Why not do it with your employees? By the way, our customers choose every day how much energy to bring to work. Can you turn your customer stuff, which you already have, on your employees? We got customer journeys, design thinking, segmentation, personalization, AB testing, crowdsourcing and customer feedback. You can’t buy a product without customer feedback. How many times do we ask employees for feedback? Once a year or twice a year. Long surveys that nothing happens as a result. I just need to pull them over to say, employees are customers, too. Your spot on that mindset is the issue.

Let’s go the last one.

The Power Of Leading By Example (Do First)

Do first. I start this chapter with the story of this new Starbucks CEO who takes the job at Starbucks, but says, “I’m going to still live in Southern California and private jet up to Seattle whenever I need to be there. By the way, I need everyone to be back in the office.” Disconnect. This is not the only reason Starbucks is totally failing, but it can’t help.

On top of that, “Here’s my ginormous pay package,” while the average person is Starbuck’s is barely earning a living wage.

That’s it. You can’t ask anybody to do anything that you don’t do first. You want everyone to adopt Gen AI and rethink how they spend their day and their work streams. You better do it first and talk about it. Talk about how hard it is, how rewarding it is and how scary it is. Once you start doing it and you see how people react, it will become addictive.

This one is ultimately about role modeling. Role modeling or showing people is a lot more powerful than just telling them to do something because you’re showing them that you’re willing to do it, too.

By the way, if you can’t do it, you’ll think twice before asking everyone else to do it.

For a leader who’s reading and saying, “This sounds great. Where do I start?” Where should they start?

You just start by starting. I literally would start with the celebrate them. That’s the easiest one. You have a positive thought about anyone. Say it. Coach the leader of the big transportation company. People even use abusive words about him. I had him start doing that, celebrate them and people were literally sending me notes like, “Whatever you did to Sam,” and it was nothing. The cultural ripples, the performance and the energy. That was amazing.

It’s about feedback, positive or negative. You said the ratio was 5 to 1. I’ve heard some people say it needs to be up closer to 10 to 1. The point is, you need to be delivering those specific bits of positive reinforcement all the time. Don’t leave a meeting. Don’t be in an enemy meeting without mentioning things. Don’t be in a one-on-one without mentioning these things. Don’t be in the elevator without mentioning these things.

Have the ability where you’re constantly giving some little piece of specific positive reinforcement. In the scheme of things, I won’t say it’s always easy but it’s the one that gives you back to the point you talked about earlier, that dopamine hit for yourself. I gave a person positive feedback. That felt good to them and it feels good to me. It makes you want to keep doing more of it. If you can get that cycle going, then it becomes easier to do some of the other things like being interested in working way up to probably the hardest one, which I still think is co-create.

Remember, the meta goal here is to have an organization where everyone is excited to be there every day. Which doesn’t mean every minute of work is joyful. It’s not, but on average. When people say, “Do you enjoy your work?” Your answer is yes. Did you enjoy your work this week? Your answer is yes. Did you enjoy work? Mostly yes. Sometimes we could have bad days. My research shows when employees enjoy their work, they are half as likely to quit.

They are anywhere from 2 to 4 times as motivated to bring their best to work every day. In a recent piece I put out an BHR, they sell 25% more per hour than people who don’t enjoy work. There is value on the table just like the customer revolution decades ago. I believe we’re on the precipice of the employee Revolution. The value on the tables there. The unlock can be tiny little things that become multiplicative. Start by starting.

We need something, because employee engagement haven’t moved in the last generation 25-30 years. Everything we’ve been trying is not working. It goes back to what you said earlier in the conversation that all these big programs, the training, the books, and the retreats, none of that’s working in the way that we want it to. We’ve got to try something else. The idea of small practices matters. Let’s we talked a little bit earlier about leaders, but for a mid-level manager or mid-level person, what can they do to help bring this into the culture of their organization?

Mid-level managers are so important in my mind because they are the providers of this emotional context in which their teams live. They’re the coaches to the frontline manager to help them drive it. A mid-level manager has to role model this. They need to coat their frontline leaders in doing this. They also have to give feedback up high. If a mid-level manager is doing this, in one part of organization and they start seeing performance, this beautiful work that works, performance morale or performance motivation, virtuous circle going. Their group will perform better than others.

That will send the message up high. This is applicable to a front-line supervisor, a mid-level manager, and executive. Ironically, it’s also applicable to individual contributors and employees. You could give a compliment that’s genuine. You could ask the peer how they spend their weekend. You could say, “I heard something’s going on incorporate. Let’s find a way if we can get our voice heard.” You could change the dynamic. I’ve had junior people on my teams change the dynamic all the time. You’re not a victim.

If you’re going to work every day and you’re not happy. You’re quite quitting, your job hugging or whatever you’re doing. You have enough of a relationship with work. It may be tactically necessary because you need a paycheck. At the same time, you don’t want to live in that situation. Work or careers are too long to have anthe us the mentality and constantly be looking over your shoulder and worrying about it. Everybody needs to change that dynamic. We’ve made work so utterly unenjoyable for so many people that it’s like a hollow form of capitalism in a way.

Imagine this. You’re one of these employees who are working for the paycheck. The place is terrible. You feel like, “I can’t do anything about it,” and then imagine something small good happens. There are new snacks in the cafeteria. If you take a minute to write a note to whatever leaders in charge of that and you say, “Thank you. That made a huge difference. If you’re open to other ideas, I got plenty.” You can do something. By the way, that’s not a complaining way to do it. You have to find a little thing to say thank you about and say, “If you want more, we could give you more.”

I know you do a lot of writing and thinking about the future of work more broadly. Apart from applying practices like the ones you described in your book. What else do you want to see in the workplace in the future?

Applying Human-Centric Practices To Future Technology Deployment

I’m still pushing for more enjoyable work. It is critical when it comes to Gen AI, agentic AI and this whole technology explosion. In my heart of hearts, most organizations are going about this wrong. They’re pushing technology for productivity. Productivity alone as opposed to saying, “Here’s your work. Here’s what this technology can do. How could it make your work more enjoyable? How can it take away the stuff that sucks your soul?”

By the way, customers and employees are all different. One person’s joy is another person’s toil. I worry where we’re going with technology. This whole thing about making work work, if we approach AI in the same way, co-create with employees, focus on helping them in their work, celebrating people who find ways to do it. The productivity will solve for itself.

We’re at this crossroads of how you decide to deploy it. Everything in the book and everything that I’m trying to push around moving from transaction track to work that works gets magnified with this. It could go much worse or much better with AI. That would be my last message. This is not separate from your technology agenda. It has to be the core of your technology agenda.

Something is disruptive as AI can be disruptive in a good way or disruptive in a bad way. The jury is still out on how we’re going to see this play out. That’s what everybody’s focused on and worried about.

The jury is still out on how we’re going to see this play out, but we all have agency. Especially as leaders to drive how this is going to play out. We can make sure it plays out in a much more human-centric, employee-centric and people-centric manner. I want every leader to be the cause to tip the scales to make a come out the way it should come out.

Agency is an important point. From the leader all the way down to the front line, you have to have agency in your professional life. Otherwise, it will happen to you. Odds are, it will happen to you in ways that you don’t always like. If you want to tilt the odds in your favor, you’ve got to take ownership.

You’ve got it.

The book comes out in November 2026. It’s available for pre-order.

It’s called Make Work Work: The 5 Daily Practices of the Employee-Centric Leader. It’s out at Amazon, Barnes and Noble or wherever you buy your book. Thank you for helping me amplify it, my friend.

You are more than welcome, Deb.

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What should we take away from our discussion with Debbie? First of all, work doesn’t improve through big programs. It improves through small daily behaviors. That’s the premise of her book and the five practices that she covers. The way that you as a leader show up or you as an individual show up, matters more than any strategy, deck or culture initiative. It’s the small behaviors that compound over time or compound across people in a way to become meaningful.

Second, we didn’t talk about this so much but, certainly, a key highlight that Debbie mentioned right at the end. That the idea of an employee is a better goal than employee engagement. We use employee engagements as the measure that’s been out there for 25 or 30 years that Gallop came up with. There’s a big difference between being engaged, which means checked in and truly enjoying your work. When people truly enjoy their work, it drives better performance, better retention and better innovation.

The third is that five practices are simple, but they’re not automatic. Celebrate someone, go see and help, be interested, co-create, and lead by example. The power in doing them consistently even if you don’t always do them perfectly. Pick a place to start. Don’t try and make it like a New Year’s resolution where you throw yourself into something and you stop doing it by the second Friday of January. This has to be something that you work on bit by bit over time.

Fourth, is it culture isn’t just about what leaders say. It’s about what people experience. This is where this idea of employees as customers that Debbie talked about. The transaction trap, the us the mentality, all of that comes into play. You want a workplace for people want to contribute. Who wants to work in a workplace where it feels like us them all the time?

Finally, importantly, is that everybody plays a role and everybody has agency. If you are C-level leader, a middle manager or even an individual contributor, you can bring these practices into action in your team, in your organization and all of that adds up in making your organization a place where people enjoy coming to work. I invite you as always to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or YouTube. If you found this discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Debbie Lovich on LinkedIn
• Boston Consulting Group
• Make Work Work: The 5 Daily Practices of the Employee-Centric Leader
• Hubert Joly
• The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism
• The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter

About Debbie Lovich

Deborah Lovich is a Fellow at BCG Henderson Institute, Boston Consulting Group’s think tank, leading the thinking on the Future of Work, with a focus on “making work work” for all stakeholders by adding radical employee centricity to organizations priorities including reshaping work with GenAI.

Debbie has spent the last half of her 30+ year consulting career working across industries and countries on the human side of transformation. She does the hard work of changing cultures and leader behaviors from the C-suite to the front line to enable sustained value creation. After COVID-19, Debbie led BCG’s thinking on the future of work. As GenAI is reshaping work, organizations and industries, Debbie is showing her clients how being employee-centric will enable them to get the most value from these new technologies. Debbie has also applied her expertise internally at BCG, where she led the development and rollout of the firm’s global predictability, teaming, and open communication (PTO) program, an initiative implemented to improve BCG’s culture and employee work–life balance. She has been a frequent contributor to Forbes, as well as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review and a TED speaker.

Most people see careers as ladders to climb. Mohamed Isa sees them as mountains to explore. In this episode, Mohamed shares his remarkable journey from working as a cleaner in a bank to becoming the youngest CFO of a publicly listed company in Bahrain. Along the way, he learned that success isn’t about following a predetermined path—it’s about taking calculated risks, continually reinventing yourself, and creating opportunities where others see limitations.

JR and Mohamed explore:

• How a cleaning job became the foundation for an extraordinary career
• Why taking career risks can accelerate growth
• The difference between having a large network and having the right network
• How to think about reinvention through seven-year cycles
• Why careers don’t need to follow a linear path
• What “peak leadership” means and how to build a lasting legacy
• How mountain climbing became a powerful metaphor for life and work

This conversation is a reminder that where you start doesn’t determine where you’ll finish. Whether you’re feeling stuck, considering a career change, or simply looking for inspiration, Mohamed’s story offers a powerful perspective on what’s possible when you combine ambition with action.

Tune in every week for more episodes like this. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or follow Career Sessions wherever you’re listening.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/https://pathwise.io/podcasts/mohamed-isa

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

From Cleaner To CFO (and Beyond): Lessons On Reinvention And Risk, With Mohamed Isa

Our guest has a story that will make you rethink what is actually possible in a career. Mohamed Isa did not begin his career in a position of privilege. He began as a cleaner in a bank, working quietly and in the background, observing a world that he was not yet part of. Instead of accepting that that was his lane, he treated it as a vantage point, as a way to get himself into university and beyond. What followed was not luck. It was a series of deliberate climbs.

From those early days, Mohamed went on to build a career at Unilever, earn his CPA, and eventually become the youngest CFO of a publicly listed company in Bahrain in his late twenties. On paper, it looks like a pretty straight ascent, but as you will hear, the reality was a lot more complex, filled with reinvention and resets and things like that. Mohamed is not somebody who just climbed the ladder.

He actually questions whether the ladder is even the right metaphor. He talks about reinvention in cycles, about treating life more like a series of experiments, and about operating in what he calls your peak leadership mode. Most interestingly, he often compares the whole journey to climbing a mountain, not just reaching the summit, but knowing when it is time to choose a different one. We are going to talk about that journey from cleaner to CFO, from structure to experimentation, from success to reinvention.

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Mohamed, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, JR.

The Early Experience As A Bank Cleaner

It is good to have you. Let us dive right in. I know from our past discussions that you started your career working as a cleaner at a bank. What do you remember most vividly about those days? At that point, did you have any sense of where life might take you?

I remember the cleaning job very vividly. I remember going to a point where the bus would come and pick us up from the diplomatic tower and the diplomatic area in Bahrain. We would go to clean two floors in the bank. It was an investment bank. I cannot remember the name, but it was an investment bank. We would normally go from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM. Most of the staff would be out, but some of the hardworking staff would be there, and they were all dressed nicely, wearing ties and looking very elegant. We were just in different types of overalls. We did not have a uniform.

That was funny for me. A company should have a uniform. I remember going there and vacuuming the carpets, cleaning the windows and making them very shiny, just like my head, if you can see. Collecting the mugs from the tables and washing them. The funny thing is, I did not wash the toilets. That was good. It was not part of my job description, but being serious, even if I had to wash the toilets, I would have washed the toilets because, after all, this is the job I had to do to get money to go to university. That was the main objective.

Get some money into my pockets so that I can buy some new clothing, shoes and other things. In high school, you could just wear anything and go to school. In university, you want to give the right impression. In fact, I had a strategy. I do not know how I came up with that strategy. I was very elegant in my dress. I had all these not-so-expensive shirts, and I bought a few ties, so when I went to university, all the professors thought I was working for a bank. My treatment was different from that of the other classmates I had, and that was the start of my career.

Cleaning, I did not see it as something shameful. I thought I had to do what I had to do, as simple as that. The staff, one of them in particular, was very polite and he was very recognising. One night, I had the courage to ask him, “What do you think I should join? Should I get a bachelor’s degree in management or in accounting?” He gave me the most beautiful answer. He said, “Regardless of your degree, make the most out of it.” That was advice I will never forget.

Did you know at that point that you wanted to have a career like the one that you have had, or did it still feel distant to you?

To my surprise, I had decided to become an accountant at the age of thirteen. Let me tell you the story. I have a preferred uncle, and he used to be a volleyball player. He used to get all these fancy shirts, T-shirts and shoes. I was the tallest one in the family, and I would get all these T-shirts. Not only that, I would sneak into his room and sometimes just steal some candies and chewing gum. One time, I saw a career guide published by the Rotary clubs in Bahrain, and it had the title, the job description and what qualifications you needed.

At the bottom of the page, there was the salary. Because in our family, cash was so tight, I was just looking at the salaries and flipping through the pages. At that time, the accountants made the most money. I looked up the title of the page, accountant, and I thought, “This is me.” When it was time to select my stream in high school, I did not go into science. I went to commerce. Eventually, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in accounting. The career choice was made early on, literally based on the money.

Becoming The Youngest CFO At Twenty-Six

Fair enough. I think that is probably how a lot of kids decide what they want to do, or at least come up with an initial idea of what they want to do. You ended up becoming the youngest CFO of a publicly listed company in Bahrain. Walk us through how you got from that kid cleaning offices in an investment bank and then going to university to becoming the youngest public company CFO.

It happened in a very nice way, and the sequence was very simple. I worked at Unilever for a few years. I came back to Bahrain, and I joined Gulf International Bank and I joined for a very brief period, only two months. Someone from Bahrain, whom I met in Jeddah when I was based in Jeddah, working with Unilever, gave me the hint about the CFO job. He said, “Give me your CV. I will pass it to the team, and hopefully it will work out.”

I was very reluctant because when I was growing up, we had this advice. You should stay in a job for a certain period. You should not be jumping from one job to another. I was from that school. When he hung up, I thought I would never send him the CV. He called in the afternoon. He said, “Where is your CV?” I sent the CV, and at that time, I used to have a Yahoo account. I still remember the email exactly word for word. “Dear Ali, although I am not very excited about this, please find my CV. Regards, Mohamed.”

I received a call immediately from Ali, and he said, “Just tell me, should I pass it or not?” I said pass it, and that is how I went into the interviews. We had three rounds of interviews. I met the chairman, the CEO, the outgoing CFO, the investment director, and the property development director. I had so many signs from God not to join that company. Just give you one example, or maybe two. The day I had my second interview, I was waiting next to the building. I received a message from the investment director saying that the wife of the CEO is having labour.

We were rescheduling the meeting, and I thought, “That is a sign.” I went back to the bank, and that day, Bahrain experienced what we know as Black Monday, where there was an electricity outage. I thought, “This is another sign from God not to join this company.” I thought, “I am just making this up in my mind.” The first sign was that I was going through another interview, but this time the company wanted to take me and show me the assets they owned.

One of them was a man-made island called Tala. We were there in a four-wheel Jeep, and we got stuck in the mud. I thought, “Now this is a sign.” The CEO was so good. He said, “How about this day in the office?” I felt I could work with this gentleman. If he had this incident and he is making fun, I can work with that. Despite all these signs, I said, “Let me go and try this out.” I ended up staying there for more than eleven years.

What is interesting to me about that story is how persistent they were in keeping you pulled in because a lot of companies, a lot of people, like the guy that you sent your CV to, he could have just said, well, you do not seem very interested in this. I am not going to use my own personal capital to help you unless you are really committed. He pushed you into it anyway.

I am very thankful to him to this day.

How did you get from Unilever to becoming the CFO of a publicly listed company?

In Unilever, I had a strategy because I knew if I stayed very long in Unilever, I would not be coming back to Bahrain. I wanted to come back to Bahrain. My strategy was that when I passed the CPA exams, I would come to Bahrain. I had made two calls, one to a friend of mine who was working in the Gulf International Bank, and another to someone who was working with what we now know as our capital. I had two job interviews on the same day. One clicked immediately, the recruiting manager, the VP, she was not there to test my knowledge or anything.

She was fascinated by the work I did with Unilever. She was saying, “Tell me more about this and that.” I just got the offer on the second day. I just told you how I went from GIB to the investment bank. It was a very risky decision. All my career decisions were risky. Leaving Bahrain was risky. Leaving Unilever, a very well-established company, to join a bank in Bahrain was a risky move. Going from the bank to a newly started company, that was risky, but I think I have always been able to have this mindset. So what?

Let me try. Let us find out what happens. All the time, I had these friends whom I trusted. I called someone from Oman. His name is Nazar. We used to work together at Unilever. I told him about this jump because I was a credit analyst at Gulf International Bank. Jumping from a credit analyst to CFO, that is a big jump. He had asked me a smart question. He said, “Do you think you have a 30% chance of succeeding? I told him, “I think more than that.” He said, “Just do it.” That is what I did. That is how I became the youngest CFO of a publicly traded company in the Gulf. I was 26 at that time.

The Importance Of Cultivating A Strategic Network

As you went from your pre-university job to university and to Unilever into that CFO job, were there times that you felt like you were in over your head and did not really belong in the track that you were in?

I did not feel that. The reason is that I always did my homework. I always had calls with people outside the company to ask for tips, for advice. For example, when I was a CFO for the first time, I had to deal with external auditors, and I had never dealt with external auditors in my life. Yes, I dealt with internal auditors. I called my previous manager, whose name is Majeed, and I said, “Man, these guys are coming within three weeks. What should I do?”

He just kept telling me to do this and this. This is what I used to do, cultivating contacts and then using these contacts to help me succeed in my career. I attribute whatever I have reached today to my contacts, and I can name these individuals who have shaped my career. One time, I did a trail and I ended up having only eight people take me to where I am today. People think you need to have a very big network. I do not think so. You need to have the right network.

I think you are highlighting the importance of having a few people in your network who will really go to bat for you, to use an American expression, who will open doors for you, create opportunities, and back you when you need it. It is sponsorship, right? That goes beyond a network, goes beyond mentorship, having that level of sponsorship. The fact that you can pinpoint back to eight people who created opportunities for you is a really good thing and probably something not a lot of people would be able to do in terms of having that level of sponsorship.

I totally agree with you. Sometimes I think I am lucky, but sometimes I tell myself, this is not luck. You have been working. I remember when I was a CFO, we had the annual report of the company, and I enjoyed writing the CEO message and the chairman’s message myself. I did not give it to an agency or a marketing department. I used to write them myself. To issue the 2004 annual report, the CEO told me, “I like this, but I need something at the end.” I said, “What do you need?” He said, “I need an inspirational quote.” I said, “Let me find something for you.” I shortlisted ten inspirational quotes for him. He chose this one. It said, “Luck is a preparation meeting opportunity,” as simple as that.

It is a good way of describing it. It is about creating your own luck. You were doing that.

I am sure you have heard this phrase or expression, “If they do not invite you to the table, build your own table.”

You got your CPA along the way as well. What led to the decision to get that, and why did you decide to get it?

When we grew up, the general plan for us, the accounting students, was to work for a Big Four company and then clear the CPA exams, stay with them for five years and then jump into banking. That was the general plan. For me, Unilever was advocating other qualifications, CMA, Certified Management Accountant, and CIMA, which is the UK version of the UK. I was not inclined to go to the UK because the journey is very long.

In the CPA, you get four exams, and in the UK version, you get fourteen. Why should you go for fourteen? The decision was very clear. I was a very research-oriented student. I used to visit the public library we had in the university, and we used to get The Economist and Business Week. I would go to these magazines, and I would see the advertisements, how many times the CPA would come and how many times the ACCA would come. Ultimately, the CPA was more in demand at that time. That was the decision. Pursuing whatever I saw in that little career guide, I was just going full speed.

Was getting your CPA about building your own capabilities? Was it about conveying credibility in the space by having the certification, or was it about giving you confidence that you had that knowledge of accounting?

We had a very strong bachelor’s degree program at the University of Bahrain. The CPA was not something difficult for me. Yes, it had the taxation, which we did not study, but I know many people who do not have professional qualifications who are performing at the highest level. I can imagine the previous manager I had, Majeed, whom I consulted for the auditors. He does not have a professional qualification, but he is that kind of guy who knows what he is doing. Sometimes, the only reason you get the qualification is for the other side to have confidence in you, for the other side to see the credibility. I know many people who do not have professional qualifications, and they are doing very well. Does it help? It tells a lot.

I think sometimes, certainly, there are fields where having a professional certification is a requirement. As for practising medicine as an example, there are other fields like coaching, which would be a good example where having the certification may or may not be important to you. If you are able to build a client base without it, then it does not really matter. If you feel like you need the training or need the credibility to build your client base, then it becomes important. A CPA is probably somewhere in between. It is certainly in some places, like if you wanted to work for a Big Four, they are certainly going to push you to get your CPA. To be a CFO of a firm, it may or may not matter.

Depending on the sector, even in Bahrain, the central bank, they will have its own qualification requirements. You cannot be ahead of a department if you do not have this or that. For whoever is watching this or tuning in to this, you need to know the profession you are entering. You need to know what the requirements are. You need to know, you need to study, you need to ask. That is what I am trying to say.

The Seven-Year Cycle Of Career Reinvention

Let us talk a little bit more about some of the things you have done since then. I know you are a big believer in reinvention. You talk about the seven-year cycle. Where did that come from?

That seven-year cycle came from the story of Prophet Joseph. When he was installed as the treasurer of Egypt, he had this idea that the harvest would last for seven years, and after the harvest, there would be a drought. He managed the situation over there. Seven years are enough for someone to reinvent themselves, and you cannot reinvent yourself overnight. Seven years is a good time. If you are changing careers, you will need to establish yourself in seven years. If you are going out on your own as an entrepreneur, it will not happen overnight.

You need to be very patient. Seven years is a very good time to reinvent. I like reinvention because you can be the same person 20, 30 years from now, but what is the point? One of the most beautiful expressions that I have heard in my life was by someone called Ralph Zangara. He was in a documentary film. He said this, and it fully resonated with me back in 1998. He said, “We are a gift from God. What we become is a gift to God.”

Talk a little bit about how you have reinvented yourself over the years.

You have the cleaner, you have the student, you have the Unilever regional finance manager, then you have the credit analyst, and then you have the CFO. After the CFO, I am now a speaker, an author, and a traveller. That is what I do. In between, I do coaching, consulting, and sit on boards. Sometimes I sit on the boards of companies. Sometimes I sit on boards of professional associations. Now I am sitting on the Bahrain Customer Experience Association and the Bahrain Management Association. As I said, we need to cultivate a diverse set of experiences.

I do not want to be that person when you meet me in the future, and you tell me how many years of experience you have, and I say 25, for example. In reality, it is just one multiplied by 25 years. I cannot tolerate that. That is why reinvention is very important to me. I do not know what will happen next, because now I am pursuing mountains and pursuing speaking. Yesterday I was tuning in to your latest episode. You said something very important. You said, “If you are under 55, you still have many jobs to come.” I thought, “Yes, why not? Fifty-five is young.”

We are living longer. We are going to be working longer. It changes the dynamic. You do not have to work for the same company or in the same profession anymore. Some people want to do the same thing. I was just staying at an inn in England, and the innkeeper had been doing that job for 37 years. That is a long time. That is what he wanted to do. There are others, and I probably would count myself among them, who like to do different things every so often. It comes back to whether it is a seven-year cycle or whatever. For me, that just keeps me energised. It does not have to be this ladder. It does not have to be this if you want it to be.

I have a book over here that is called The 100-Year Life. They predict it will be normal for us to live until a hundred. What would you do if you lived to a hundred? We need to think about that.

For some people, that means they will have a longer retirement. They can afford it. For other people, it means they are going to need to work longer. That is something that we are all contemplating right now. Fifty-five is really not that old.

It boils down to what personality you have. Are you an adventurous person or are you a play-it-safe person? Let me just sit down here, I am getting a good salary, everyone respects me in this job, so why bother? There is nothing wrong or right. It is just the personality.

Talk about some of the topics that you write and speak about. I know you have written quite a bit.

I wrote about public speaking, customer experience, and leadership, but my first book was about investor relations. It was the first book about that subject in the Middle East. As a CFO, I practised investor relations, and I studied it or researched it in my MBA, and I converted my MBA into a book. We were pioneering. I am very proud to say that I am not being boastful over here, but other companies were just copying what we were doing. I was practising. I was writing about it, and I was a practitioner at the same time. I like to write about practical things. I do not like to give theories. You need to give people what they need to succeed, as simple as that.

How many books have you written at this point?

The published ones are 21. We are printing one next week, and I am printing another one, which documents my ten-year journey outside the corporate world. In May, it is called No Title No Limit. Initially, I thought, let me write a ten-article series about what I did since I left, and I will share them on my blog and on LinkedIn. As I evolved, when I reached article eight, I thought, no, I should be expanding all of this. I doubled the count of words, and I increased it from 10 to 14 chapters, plus the intro and the closing of the book. In essence, this is a book I want to hand to my children, my nephews, my nieces as a way to inspire them because now they see what I have. They do not know what I went through. I write to help people.

It is good that you are demonstrating for the next generation in your family what is possible, what you can achieve.

Last night I was attending an online course. It was the US time, so it was very late for me, but I kept just pushing myself to not sleep. They said something very interesting. They said business is a belief. If you have the belief, then business will work. The same principle applies to our careers, to our lives. If you believe the thing, and if you work for it, you will achieve it. That is what I want to show them. Everything is possible.

Mountain Climbing As A Motivator For Life

You use mountain climbing analogies in the speaking that you are doing. What does the climb represent to you in terms of your life and your career?

The climb represents energy. The climb represents passion. The climb represents challenging yourself. One way of getting to work out and be more physical is to have a mountain in my head that I want to climb. That is the motivation. I know I have to generate more funds to go, so I have to work harder to get more speaking engagements, and that is the mountain. For me, it is the biggest driver of my life as we speak, the mountains. I am pursuing the Seven Summits challenge, where I have to climb the highest mountains on each of the continents.

In the US, it would be Mount Denali in Alaska. Being fit, having the money, and enjoying the journey, writing about it, I am telling you, this all started with a two-week expedition to Everest Base Camp back in 2022. Those two weeks, it changed my life, and I fully mean it. I am writing an adventurous novel. It is called The Summit of Unity, where six climbers from the Gulf States go on a climb to Everest. I never read a novel in my life, so this is what the mountain did. The other thing I have is the Peak Leadership model. The research is now around 290 pages.

I can have a one-day workshop or twelve days of training on the methodology I developed. This is reinvention. When you have a passion for something, good things will happen. The other day, I was visiting my mom, and I was talking to Claude AI, and I said, “Go and search what are the books are available about Everest in Arabic, not in English.” It turned out there was only one, and I know the author of that book. Immediately, I thought, “This is my opportunity. Let me write not only about Everest, but also about this is the twist I have that most others do not have. I have the executive experience, I have the mountaineering experience, and I have the writing experience.”

My next target for this year is to write my first Arabic book. Not in my imagination, I thought I would write an Arabic book, because I always write in English. Because of the mountain, now I am writing an Arabic book, and it will be something totally different. I will be distilling the history of Mount Everest for the last hundred years in one book. With each chapter, you will have a leadership lesson at the end. It will be something totally different, not available in the market. This is what I want people to find. What they are passionate about. Find the thing that will make you work day and night without being tired.

Defining Peak Leadership And Leaving A Legacy

Is that what peak leadership is for you, or is it something different?

Peak leadership for me is leaving a legacy. This is the top of my peak leadership model, leaving a legacy, just like the book I am writing now for my children, my nieces, and my nephews. What legacy do you want? Do you want to be the trailblazer? Do you want to be that person who came on this earth and left it without anyone noticing? That is peak leadership. Start with self-leadership, because if you cannot lead yourself, you cannot lead others. That model has six different levels of leadership capabilities and ultimately leaves a legacy.

Leaving a legacy is something that I think a lot about at this point in my career, because there are, in all likelihood, more years behind me than there are ahead of me from a professional standpoint, at least. You start to think you have limited shots left. What are you going to do with that time? How do you make sure it has as much impact as possible? It is why I started to do Pathwise and this podcast, and all of us want to leave some form of legacy. Some of us are more committed to it than others. Some of us take more action than others.

It is great that you are doing this beautifully, J.R. I am not sure how many people you are inspiring because, as you know, all people will come and comment on your show or like it, but I am telling you, your impact is more than what you imagine.

All of us can have some impact, right? The size of the ripple effect that we create. Some people create a large ripple effect and leave a true impact on the world, positively or negatively. Other people leave a smaller ripple effect, but all those ripple effects add up. That is what advances humanity.

That is the compounding effect.

For somebody who is tuning into this and feeling stuck in their career, what would you tell them that they should be thinking about in terms of driving towards some form of reinvention?

Call someone, meet someone, sit with them, share with them. What are your worries? What are your feelings? What is happening in your life? Tell them where you want to go. Two days ago, I was talking to someone. He wants to take over his father’s business, and he wants to pick my mind on this. I said, “I need two things from you. I need you to think like a dentist. Show me the picture with the broken teeth, with cavities, and then show me the Hollywood smile.” If you know these two points, then you can work out the details.

If you do not have any idea of where you are going or what you want to do, it would be very difficult, or even for well-intended people to help you. You can have access to people who can help you, but you need to have that clarity about where you want to go. From there, you start calling people, having coffee with them. I had so many coffee conversations, and some of these coffee conversations led to business opportunities. If you are stuck, get unstuck, do something. Do not wait.

Sitting around waiting for something to happen to you is usually not a recipe for success. Last question, if you were going to go back and talk to that version of yourself who was cleaning that bank as a teenager, what would you tell them?

I would tell him you are in for so many surprises, good ones and bad ones. At the end, just enjoy the journey.

Good advice. Mohamed, thank you for doing this. I appreciate what you are doing and what you are aspiring to do in terms of the legacy that you leave and the impact that you have in your speaking and your writing.

Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. I wish all the audiences, the viewers, all the best in their career transitions and their career growth, and take charge.

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What are the practical takeaways from my discussion just now with Mohamed? First, where you start your career definitely does not define your ceiling. This is probably the most important point, but how you respond to the opportunities that are put in front of you is really important. Think about Mohamed’s own story that he talked about in terms of his transition into Unilever and from Unilever into the company that he ultimately became the CFO of. It was not just about ambition, but it was also about awareness, discipline, and purposeful action, about listening to opportunities that were presented to him. He did not just wait. He studied, he prepared, and he stepped into things as they came to him.

Second is that careers are not singular. They are not just a steady climb up a ladder. To his point, they are cycles of reinvention, whether seven years or otherwise. One of his central theses is that our careers need not be linear. Every few years, you ought to be IRS-assessing and relearning and sometimes starting over, as I have done and he has done over the course of his career. People who thrive long-term are the ones who lean into that and are willing to evolve and not just keep doing the same thing again and again and again.

Third is that ownership is the difference between drifting and building. Rather than letting his career happen to him, Mohamed made intentional choices, whether pursuing a CPA, shifting into leadership, or jumping into something that he was perhaps more than 30% confident in, but certainly not 100% confident in. All of that mindset of ownership, as he said, compounds over time. Finally, peak performance is about the legacy that you leave.

It is about continuing to grow, to learn, and try, test, and adapt. His mountain climbing analogy reinforces that success is not always about one perfect path to that summit. Sometimes it is about choosing different climbs, about learning, about adapting. Sometimes it is about learning when to turn back because that summit might not be right for you, or the conditions might not be right for you. As always, I invite you to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. If you found this discussion enlightening, please sign up for my membership community, which is called Pathwise, and our newsletter, PathWisdom. Thanks. See you next time.

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About Mohamed Isa

An internationally recognized keynote speaker who inspires, engages, and transforms, Mohamed Isa energizes audiences worldwide with heart-moving stories and performance-driving strategies. Known for his dynamic style and relatable storytelling, he delivers experiences that stay with audiences long after the applause fades.

As an award-winning keynote speaker, Amazon bestselling author, and former CFO, Mohamed bridges the worlds of business and inspiration with effortless credibility. Fluent in Arabic and English, he connects with audiences across cultures, empowering leaders and teams to think higher, act faster, and achieve more. With expertise in leadership, employee engagement, and customer service, Mohamed delivers content-rich keynotes that combine practical business insight with authentic storytelling. His sessions are not just motivational; they create measurable change and help organizations strengthen culture, performance, and purpose.

What sets Mohamed apart is how he lives the lessons he teaches. From standing at Everest Base Camp to summiting Mount Kilimanjaro and trekking Mount Kosciuszko, his expeditions mirror the challenges leaders face every day. His attempt on Mount Elbrus reminded him that leadership is not only about reaching the top but also about knowing when to pause, adapt, and protect the team.

Before becoming a full-time speaker and trainer, Mohamed built a distinguished corporate career. As Chief Financial Officer of a dual-listed investment bank, he managed a balance sheet exceeding USD 500 million. He led transactions worth more than USD 350 million in exits, equity, and debt financing. He has served on multiple boards, mentored startups, and advised Fortune 500 companies, bringing a wealth of practical experience to every stage he steps on.

Consistently praised for his energy, clarity, and authenticity, Mohamed Isa does more than deliver talks; he delivers results. He creates experiences that inspire people to climb their own Everest.

Most people think overwhelm is a productivity problem. Corrie LoGiudice argues it’s something much deeper.

In this episode, JR speaks with Corrie LoGiudice, author of The Five Overwhelm Culprits, about why so many high performers feel exhausted, disconnected and stuck — even when their lives look successful on paper. Corrie explains why burnout is often misdiagnosed as a time-management issue, and why the real causes of overwhelm usually stem from deeper problems like misalignment, lack of clarity, weak support systems and chronic self-neglect.

Their conversation covers:

• Why overwhelm is more than “having too much to do”
• The five root causes behind burnout and chronic stress
• How work and personal life pressures compound each other
• Why high performers often confuse exhaustion with success
• The difference between burnout and misalignment
• How intuition helps people recognize when something is wrong
• Why women experience overwhelm differently than men
• The role resilience plays in navigating major life changes
• How to recognize overwhelm before reaching a breaking point
• Why meaningful change either happens by choice — or happens to you

Subscribe to Career Sessions wherever you get your podcasts for weekly episodes like this.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/corrie-logiudice

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

How To Escape Overwhelm And Redefine Success, With Corrie LoGiudice

Overwhelm Is Driven By Five Deeper Root Causes

This conversation is about something almost everybody feels at some point but very few people are willing to name or say out loud, I’m overwhelmed. The kind where to the outside observer your life looks successful but internally, alarm bells are going off. You may be checking all the boxes of career, family, friends, hobbies and interests but you feel like you’re barely holding it all together. My guest Corrie LoGiudice has spent years unpacking that exact experience in her new book, The 5 Overwhelm Culprits.

She argues that overwhelm is more than about being overly busy. It’s driven by five deeper root causes, the lack of clarity, confidence, community, conditioning and consistency. What makes her perspective different is that it doesn’t separate work life and personal life. As she puts it, most people, especially women, aren’t managing one set of demands. They are managing potentially two full lives at once. Corrie’s work is grounded in real experience operating at a high level while also going through some difficult and deeply personal chapters.

She’s turned that into a practical framework that’s now helping thousands of people rethink how they approach success, burnout and change. In this episode, we’re going to dig into those five overwhelm culprits, why so many high performers feel stuck even when things look great and how to start making meaningful changes without blowing up your entire life. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions. Corrie, I am glad to have you here with me.

I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

You have a new book out. You open your book with a line, “I am so exhausted. I’m pissed off.” What was the moment where you’re overwhelm turn from something that you were managing into something that you had to confront?

It happened for me on the Belt Parkway in New York. I was going through the commute and I’m sitting on the Belt Parkway right outside of JFK Airport. It’s 7:00 AM. My GPS is basically frozen in time. I would get stuck in this section of road so often, I would check into it on Facebook like I was checking into a place. It’s like, “I’m on the Belt Parkway but the GPS is frozen in time.” I’m thinking to myself how I missed my son’s entire morning routine. I’m thinking about the long day ahead and about how maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get to see him for an hour that night when I get home at 7:00 at night.

I was commuting four hours a day, so two hours there and two hours back. I remember looking around at everybody and all the cars around me. This is New York rush hour. It’s hundreds of cars. It’s thousands of people who are all stuck in the exact same position as me. I remember thinking to myself like, “This can’t be it. We’re all choosing to do this? This doesn’t make any sense to me. Why am I signing up for this?” It ultimately became a topic of conversation I brought to my therapist later where we were talking about my commute.

I had this feeling. I called it weird. something felt off. Ultimately, I learned later. It’s because I was misaligned. I wasn’t busy for the sake of being busy. I was taking action in so many different capacities in so many different ways that it didn’t make sense to me. It’s like, “Why am I doing this?” It became a topic of conversation I brought to my therapist and then later, led to me in the career that I’m doing now. That was the big turning point for me.

I have one kid who she and her husband, both commuted every day from New Jersey and in New York. I think New York’s got its own special form of rat race. The commutes are harder. There’s nothing easy about managing that day-to-day existence. It brings up something that you talk about in the book, which is that everybody talks about personal life and work life.

Often, they talked about the fact that they’re distinct from each other but you have to confront all of this stuff collectively. The idea of bringing also your professional and your personal sense of being overwhelmed together. Why do you think this gap exists? Why are we getting this point wrong in the way that we’re looking at this problem?

For so many years, it was separate. What ultimately has happened and has been in the last couple of decades. Our workplace has changed so quickly that work and life used to be separate. You had one parent that was working outside the home. One was taking care of kids or one was responsible for the home. It’s very distinct. You had work and you had personal. Now, it’s more common to be dual income than it is to be a single income and dual responsibilities across the board. What’s happened is expectations have compounded. Not reduced. At the same time, traditional advice still treats them separately.

It’s inconvenient for employers to acknowledge that your personal circumstances are having an impact on you and some are more in light than others, obviously. It doesn’t contribute to the company’s bottom line to worry about how long your commute is or how much stuff you’ve got going on. Whether you’re the parent in charge of your kids PTA or soccer team or whatever that case may be. it’s this systemic form of denial willful ignoring of it all.

I couldn’t agree with you more on that.

For you, as you were working this through with your therapist and starting to figure out what this meant. What did you feel like you were missing up until that moment of realization? What do you think other people are missing when they are having one of those moments where they are drowning? It ought to be more visible to them and to the people around them.

Apart with the drowning that’s exceptionally frustrating. Ultimately, it’s a misdiagnosis. What everyone’s telling us, it’s like, “You’ve got a time management problem. It’s a productivity problem. If you color code this and get this calendar and whatever else, then things should be able to work.” That’s not the problem. The problem is mental load across roles. When you look at women in particular in leadership roles when you think just about their responsibilities at work.

Usually, they’re responsible for themselves and their direct reports, then carrying into that. Again, the personal side, you can’t take out of it. There are also responsible a lot of times for scheduling things for their spouse, children and all the other things in addition to that. It’s an overall mental load problem. There’s also expectations in society now. When you look at, you know the Pinterest era, things having to be perfect and being at every single event. Not saying no to things because you’re expected to be there.

Women are in this position where you feel that we’re drowning because we have all these expectations that keep coming on us that we didn’t necessarily raise our hands and say, “That sounds fun. Let’s do this.” Also, the solutions in the way people are trying to sell it for them is through a calendar. That’s ultimately not going to work. You have to find the root of why they are feeling this way to be able to address it.

Five simple hacks won’t solve anything and having a color-coded calendar. It’s probably one of those things. This small step in the right direction but nowhere near sufficient. How much of this do you think is personal? How much is structural given what you’ve just said?

I believe it’s both. One plays into the other. The challenge is we treat overwhelmed like it’s a personal problem and all the solutions are personal. Especially in this day and age, a lot of the issues are structural. Best example I can think of off the top of my head and again, I’m going to bring it back to the caregivers. The standard workplace works 9:00 to 5:00 but school drop off is at 8:00 and we pick them up at 3:00. That’s a structural problem. It is both. You can’t solve the structural problem by giving them a personal solution. Depending on what the situation is.

The Five Overwhelm Culprits: Clarity, Confidence, Community, Conditioning, And Consistency

Let’s get to your book. You’ve got five overwhelm culprits that you talk about in your book. Do you want to run through them? The clarity, confidence, community, conditioning and consistency. That’s the list but you can put the color around all that for us.

The thing that’s great about the overwhelm culprits in particular because we were talking about structural versus individual. These work for individuals, as well as teams and organizations. It works across the board and you’ll see how I describe them. The first one is lack of clarity. It’s not so much knowing what it is you want but having alignment and understanding why you want it. For individuals like me and the car all those years. The reason I was going through the four-hour day commute was because I wasn’t aligned with my why. I was working for my family’s business. I was heading it up after fifteen years.

I love the work that I did, but the thing that changed, my real why was my son. By saying yes to that career, I was saying no to my son. My clarity was the big one for me on that. The second one is lack of confidence. It’s not so much knowing what you want and why you want it. You have to believe that you could do or have it. For a lot of folks that got stuck in cycles of imposter syndrome and things like that, that is the reason for this. Even in terms of teams. Looking overall at a team. If a team doesn’t believe a goal is possible, you have to do something to bridge that belief gap before you’re going to see them perform.

The third one is lack of community. The famous motivational speaker Jim Brown once said, “We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with.” If the people we are spending the most time with don’t know how to do what it is we want to do or don’t believe it’s possible or don’t support you in doing whatever it is you’re going to do because it’s not going to benefit them in some way, shape or form. You’re going to stay stuck and you’re going to stay overwhelmed. You’re being exact same place that you’re in now. That’s a big one.

The fourth one is lack of conditioning. When I say conditioning, it’s your physical and mental health and wellness. By the point you reach burnout, it’s too late. What we’re looking to do is to identify where in your health and your wellness are you drinking enough water. Are you getting physical activity? Are you taking care of your mental health? What time and space do you have to be able to meditate, journal or talk to a therapist?

Especially high-performing women. This is the first one that gets snot to the side because we’re so busy focusing on everybody else’s needs that we put our own last. The problem with lack of conditioning in particular in leadership is if you’re not paying attention to your physical, health and wellness, you become the bottleneck in every single system that you’re in. It’s because you’re not running at your top capacity. It’s important.

Lastly, it’s lack of consistency. In order to achieve what it is you want from where you are now, you have to be able to take action over and above what you’re currently doing to get it. Consistency is one of the easiest ways to do this. It helps with things like the mental load like we are talking about before. A lot of this comes down to systems, habits, routines, and organizations. How are your systems supporting you to be able to take action on your worst days? Not necessarily your best days.

All of these of course are interrelated as well. For somebody who’s overwhelmed, can they pick up and try and focus on one first or do they have to confront them in a holistic fashion?

Usually, you can determine which one is your culprit based on where you’re stuck. If you’re not sure on what your next step is, it might be clarity. If you don’t believe that you could do something, it’s probably confidence. That’s a good place to start. I do have an overwhelmed corporate quiz, which is great. That’s definitely very helpful. Even just in describing the five culprits, a lot of times, when people are listening to it, they’ll hear one and they’re like, “That resonates for me.” That’s usually the best one to start with.

I do recommend starting with one which is clarity. It’s the foundation will culprit. It ties into a lot of different ones. The system is designed in a way that you do pick it up where you need it. I’ve done keynotes where I’ve had people in the audience come up to be saying that they saw me at an event six months ago. They had a completely different set of takeaways hearing the exact same content because their culprit was different or their seasonal life was different.

That’s interesting. Having worked on this with people and deliver these keynotes and done your coaching work. Do you find that any one of them is misunderstood by people that requires the most going deeper?

I would say lack of conditioning because it’s the first one that pretty much anybody puts on the side. If you’re a high performer, you’re always putting everybody else in front of you. You got to view it almost like an athlete. If you’re not fine tuning that physical and mental element, you’re not performing at your talk capacity. This is very much the case for women in a lot of the interviews featured in the book. They say variations of the same thing where they feel like they’re not fully 100% in one place.

Escape Overwhelm: High performers spend so much time taking care of everyone else that they forget the truth: if you’re not fine-tuning your mind and body, you’re limiting your own potential.

They’re like, “I’m not fully at home when I’m at home. Mentally, I’m checked out and think about stuff at work. I’m not fully at work because I’m mentally checked out and thinking of things there.” That’s a direct reflection of you need to work on lack of conditioning. You need to create that time and that space for your brain to find down to be able to process so you can be fully present.

Personal Experience Of Surviving Trauma Shaped The Framework

Framework is practical and certainly clear. I know you also draw in some pretty deeply personal experiences. How did those shape the five categories for you more generally?

It was through life experience. The way it ended up happening, it was from having to survive while I was leading. I was leading as a corporate SVP. In the timeframe I was looking at, I left this abusive marriage. Later on, I had experienced this suicide loss. I had a therapist who was like, “You should figure out how you were able to do this and apply it here.” It was very much like a workshop process going through it. In looking at different situations but in a way similar in terms of them through line, in terms of trauma, there were different situations but they were the same patterns that showed up over and over again.

Each time I was starting off, I didn’t have any clarity on what I wanted next or for the next phase of my life. In each situation, it was showing up that I wasn’t necessarily confident in certain areas or I didn’t have the right support people. It became very clear that those were the five to go after. I ended up using it in like a trial and navigating my suicide loss.

Through that experimentation, within months of having lost by then partner, I found the man that I ended up marrying. I started my business and I did a whole bunch of other things that most people would have taken years to be able to unpack and figure out. It’s because I had the right support systems in place. I knew exactly what I needed to allow myself the space to be able to heal and process. Also, to still continue to perform.

It sounds like a fast timeframe to have worked through everything you just described.

It was very fast. That’s the reason, too. I had gone through this same thing when I had gone through my divorce. My therapist at the time was like, “I have other patients that can’t do what you’re doing. If you could figure out how to teach people how to do it, you can impact a lot of lives.” At that point, I was still in my family’s business. I was expected to take it over. The seed had been planted that I started thinking about, what would it look like if I did do this work? After my suicide loss, that’s when I decided, “Let me go all for it,” because I didn’t want to sit in the car for hours every day.

Let’s come back to that car and sitting in the car for four hours every day. A lot of people are chasing what you call the illusion of success. The idea of having things that look perfect on paper in terms of profession, family, kids, partner, hobbies and friends. All of that stuff that creates this sense of success but they know inside something is wrong. You described feeling off early in our conversation. How do you tell the difference between, “I just signed myself up for too much and I got to start saying no more to know something more deeply is wrong here?”

The biggest way to look at it is depletion versus misdirection. When you’re burnt out, you have no desire to do anything. You want to get away from it all. You want to run. You want to escape. You don’t have any excitement in regards to the future. Where when you’re a misalignment, the energy is there but there’s friction. For me, sitting in the car, that energy was there. I love the work that I did. I love working for my family’s business. I build a career. I enjoy the work that I did, but there was friction. There was friction in that commute and sitting there. It didn’t sit right. It’s through that misdirection of energy that you could tell me difference.

For somebody who is feeling that sense of things, it’s often hard to break away from the status quo. You get into the cycle. You’re on the hamster wheel. Why is staying stuck so often more appealing than confronting change, even when we’re deeply unhappy?

It’s much easier to stay unhappy that it is to face our fears. A lot of times, you’re dealing with fear of the unknown or fear of disrupting different relationships. You don’t want upset people. For me, I didn’t want to upset my dad. “You’ve been preparing me for many years for this. I don’t think this is for me.” Predictability also feels safer. When you go into the unknown you make a big change. You don’t know what’s going to ultimately end up happening. People choose what feels safe for them and a lot of times, not necessarily what makes them happy. That requires a lot of internal clarity and self-awareness to figure out.

The Process Of Breaking Inertia And Trusting Intuition

How do you when you’re working with your clients coach them through that process of breaking the inertia?

One of the biggest things that I do with my clients when first starting with them is getting them to trust their intuition. The way that we do that too is when we’re exploring a topic. Let’s take values. It’s one of the first things that will go through. We determine personal values. I asked them to pick four out of a list of say 105. You would think I asked them to commit to a 3-year life plan. They put so much time and attention into it.

It’s a matter of when you look at the words on paper. Which one gives you a gut feeling? You can either feel it in your stomach. Some people feel it more in their chest, but there’s a feeling before your brain starts going, “This is so-and-so’s valuable or this is a line with my partner’s. I should choose this.” Usually, your tuition is whatever the first thought crosses your head before your brain starts spiraling. The more that you can learn to trust that very first answer, the more an alignment you’ll be with your intuition overall.

Is that how you get people to separate out what they want from what they feel like other people expect from them?

Yes. A lot of times, too, we’ll also explore why is this your value and having them explain it. If it ties into, somebody else shares it. Why is that important? If this person wasn’t part of the equation, would this still be your value? Help them gain clarity from there. Asking why is an excellent question in terms of coaching to get you four levels deeper to the root of what you’re looking to uncover.

Do you think this is a harder process for women than it is for men?

I do it for a couple of different reasons. In general, women aren’t necessarily nurtured to trust their intuition. We’re nurtured to be exceptionally safe. Even little girls versus little boys. We praise the little boy. They jump from the top of the stairs. You’re like, “He’s daring.” The little girl does it and we’re like, “What are you doing? You’re going to break your leg.” Women, in general, were encouraged to be helpful. We’re encouraged to be kind and take care of people. None of that has anything to do with your intuition.

Where little boys, is this a good idea? Basically, trying to train them to be leaders through making decisions, trying and failing. Little boys get more flexibility with versus girls. I do think that intuition is much harder for women to grow and nurture. Women do tap into it and I don’t necessarily want to say it’s because of empathy, but because of other ways that women process emotion and feelings. As well as situations and problems that they’re intuition becomes very powerful compared to the way that men may process the same situation.

Even for people who are coming into adulthood now. There’s probably still gender norms that are being imposed on kids growing up that affect how they behave as adults and confront some of these things when they run into them as adults. Come back to the idea of success in the hamster wheel. What are some of the other lies that we often tell ourselves about success?

The biggest one that I see is this belief that success is tied to sacrifice. You can’t have one without the other. This is something that was modeled for me. I’m a 4th-generation entrepreneur. I learned everything I learned from my father and my uncle who learned from my grandfather. Watching how they ran our family businesses was work hard and play hard. It was 70-80 hours a week in the office. It was a long commute. That’s why I thought it was normal. It was a lot of missed school concerts and things like that on my side that my dad might be on a business trip.

That’s what I thought the definition of success was because my family is successful. What I’ve learned since then because I wasn’t going to sit in a car for four hours a day. You can still have your own version of a line of success. There’s a big difference between being successful for the sake of success as well as being aligned with what it is that you’re working towards. When you design it intentionally, it’s possible. I run my business now 20-hours a week. Everything is designed around my kids. It is entirely possible to have that level of success. I would say I’ve been more successful in my career since I’ve left and started my own thing than I was before. That’s the biggest lie that I’d be telling my kids, for sure.

Change Either Happens By Choice Or You Are Forced Into It

You talk about the fact that change can happen in two ways. Either you choose it or you’re forced into it. How do those two paths choosing it versus being forced into it tend to lead to different types of outcomes?

It’s the same outcome but different experiences. You have two ways. The first one is you can make a conscious choice like, “I’m going to change. I’m going to quit my job. I’m going to apply for this other job that I’m not sure if I’m qualified for, but it would be great if I got it.” You could be forced into it through what I call a pivotal life moment. Pivotal life moments are things like I described before such as divorce or suicide loss. It could be you losing your job or any number of things. That’s your life after the event is different than it was before. That’s a force change.

There’s so many people who will not change their job until they’re laid off. That’s a force change. You’re ultimately leading to the same thing. You could either choose to get a job and change your job or you could be laid off and then have to go and find a job. The experience is very different because through the choice, there’s a certain level of empowerment. There’s a certain level of confidence that you build by taking the chance, going through and doing things that have it go according to plan.

When you go through the pivotal life moment or forced way, the experience isn’t as bright and shiny. You’re having to learn as you go. You’re scared you didn’t want to do this. There’s a lot more fear involved with it. You can lead change. You could decide like, “I’m going to make this change proactively,” or you can end up recovering from it. Either way, you can get the same outcome but they’re two very different experiences.

Resilience comes into play here as well. Giving some of the stories you shared about yourself and you share in the book. How does that factor into this whole notion of confronting your overwhelms?

Resilience to me is evidence that you’ve built the capacity to be able to handle hard things. For each and everything that I personally went through and there was a lot in a five-year timespan. Every single time that I successfully navigated it, it built my confidence. I vividly remember this to the day that I lost my partner to suicide. I was the one to find him. I remember standing on the lawn of his apartment and thinking to myself, “You’ve been through hard things like this before. You’ll get through this.”

There was a certain level of confidence that I was going to be able to navigate it. It had I not gone through the other situations before that were not the same situation but had similar undertones and lessons. I never would have had that level of confidence going into it. It’s that moment where you know deep down I can do this again. That’s true resilience.

To your point, every challenge that you face makes you a bit stronger. It gives you a sense of pattern recognition of, “I know what this feels like. I’ve been here before. I’ll get through it.” Having those challenges in life, painful as they are in the moment, they do help you get through lesser situations in the future more readily than you would have otherwise.

I’d also probably add to that. We were talking before about deciding to make a change or waiting for a pivotal life moment. When you’ve gone through situations like that in the past and you’ve successfully survived in and built that confidence. It makes making those proactive decisions so much easier because they seem like nothing in comparison to what you went through. It’s helpful too in terms of what risks you take to be able to better yourself moving forward.

How do you recognize the signals when you’re feeling a sense of overwhelm sooner so that it doesn’t hit a breaking point?

Most of the time we know that we’re overwhelmed. There’s that moment that you’re like, “It’s just too much.” The way I like to describe it is like a computer having too many tabs on. You open up too many tabs on the computer and it starts to run slow and then eventually it freezes up. We all have that moment when it comes to your own personal overwhelm.

You have to do a shutdown to get it to work again.

I tell everybody to do a brain dump because it’s the same thing. You take what’s in our head and put it on paper instead so it doesn’t have to live there. That would be the first sign. You feel yourself because overwhelm erodes your performance, your productivity, and your presence. It happens with time very slowly. It’s hard to know when you’re in the moment, but you do know that breaking point when you just can’t process.

From what you’ve said, intuition plays a role here, too. You’ve got to trust you into your interaction more than some people are comfortable doing.

Intuition is so important for all the things that we’re talking about.

For somebody who feels like they’re in a breaking point moment, what’s the first piece of advice you give them in terms of where to start?

To shift from a future focus vision, which a lot of us high performers were always thinking about like next quarter or next year or a five-year plan. It’s to shift from that future focus vision to shifting to today. This is something too that I could speak to. My capacity currently is very low because I experienced family lost and this was the very first thing I did. It was from, “We’re going day by day.” Instead of monthly or weekly. Even my team knows. Everybody knows we’re shifting day by day because your overall capacity is lower. You need time and space to be able to process what’s going on.

This is helpful and it removes pressure from you. It gives you that space. You naturally know when the time is to start shifting back to that future focus because you’re going to start to get excited. Once you finally have the time to cross and move through whatever it is you’re moving through that’s overwhelming. You’re going to naturally start to shift forward again. That’s when you just go back to business as usual. To start and take all that pressure off yourself and shift to what would make today a successful day and leave it at that.

I’m sorry for your loss. When you’re confronted with something like that, it’s probably a bit easier to downshift. When there isn’t something that slams you in the face like an illness or a death or some other catastrophic thing that happens in your life. It’s harder to call the moment and say, “We’re downshifting.”

You can’t expect yourself to be able to perform at 100% if you’re experiencing something like that. It’s also a good mindset shift to know that you’re 50% now, if that’s 100% of what you can give. It’s still 100%.

True. For your kids who might be reading this book but at some point, in their future. What do you hope has changed about the way that we think about success and are overwhelmed by the time that they hit adulthood?

I dedicated the book to my kids and the dedication is for my children. You never learn to confuse exhaustion with success. I would love for them to stop equating exhaustion with success the same way that I did. To move away from tracking and basing their performance on output and more shifting to alignment. Whether or not these actions were taken are aligned and having an impact. That they don’t feel that they are two people, employee versus a human or one whole human.

Overall, overwhelm is recognized a bit earlier than it is now. I feel we’re in a scenario where everybody is talking about the burnout crisis. Unfortunately, once you get to burn out, it’s too late. We have the ability to be able to solve this by looking at how we handle overwhelm. My hope for my kid’s generation is, success doesn’t end up costing them their lives and their health.

We all want our kids to be happy first and foremost. It’s hard to be happy when you’re exhausted. I know your book comes out on May 12th, 2026, The 5 Overwhelmed Culprits. I wish you the best with the launch. It’s an exciting time when you’ve got a book about to be birth into the world. Thanks for joining me and for sharing your story with some of its deeply personal moments. Also, your framework and help people apply it to help them break out of the cycle that they might find themselves in.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been great.

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What should we take away from the discussion with Corrie? First of all, being overwhelmed isn’t a time problem. It starts with clarity. What stood out for me is this idea that it’s more than about just having too much going on. It’s often a sign that something deeper is off. It could be clarity, consistency, conditioning or any of those five things. If you don’t know what matters most or why you’re doing it or you’re not taking care of yourself or you’re not able to do things as consistently as you want to be able to do them. It creates this slippery slope.

It’s a non-linear slippery slope. Burnout is non-linear. The longer you let it go, the worse it gets. The longer you let misalignment go, the worse it gets. It’s harder in an almost exponential way to recover from that if you let it go on too long. The second thing was our conversation about success and this idea that success and exhaustion should be the same thing. You can have a life that looks great on paper and still feel completely drained by it. A gap between the external perception of success in our internal alignment and happiness is where a lot of overwhelm lies.

If there is that misalignment, that can be a real signal to you that something in your life needs to change. The last thing is this point around the fact that change either happens by choice or it happens to you. You may ultimately get to the same outcomes as Corrie was saying, but the process to get there will be different and will feel different if you choose it. Such as choosing to leave a job versus if it happens to you, such as getting laid off or waiting until you get laid off.

Again, coming back to what I said a second ago. The earlier that you learn to listen to your intuition, your energy and your body signals, which can show up in a variety of ways. The more likely you are to make changes on your terms, versus having them first on you. I invite you to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or YouTube. If you found this discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Corrie LoGiudice
• Corrie LoGiudice on LinkedIn
• Corrie LoGiudice on Instagram
• Corrie LoGiudice on YouTube
• The 5 Overwhelm Culprits: Strategies to Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter

About Corrie LoGiudice

Corrie LoGiudice is a keynote speaker, high-performance coach, and entrepreneur who helps high-achieving women turn their overwhelm into a catalyst for confident leader- ship. After navigating a series of life-altering events—including divorce, loss, and walking away from a senior executive role—she rebuilt her life one intentional choice at a time. Her signature Overwhelm Culprit framework was born out of that season and has since helped thousands of women clarify their next step, speak up powerfully, and lead fulfilling lives.

She’s been featured on TEDx and in outlets like Forbes, Thrive Global, Business Insider, Girlboss, and more. Through her company, Corrie Lo & Co, she delivers keynotes, workshops, and coaching to powerhouse women and the companies that want to retain and grow them. Her client roster includes organizations like Michelin, Vonage, Impossible Foods, SHRM, Na- tional Grid, and dozens of women’s leadership associations across the country.