You don’t want just any kind of influence, but strategic influence because you like to be on purpose, and you have milestones to achieve that involve others.  

What if the path to more strategic influence isn’t another leadership book, yet another how-to guide, or more efforting to prove yourself, pedaling hard when you’re already running on fumes? 

You’ve been cut off in a meeting yet again. Frustration rises and, before you know it, you’re spiraling because other people didn’t behave the way they should.

If that sounds familiar, please know this isn’t a sign you need to work harder. You just need to regain an objective perspective.

That nagging voice of self-doubt can drive you to overwork, overthink, and overlook your own value. Discover what's happening in your brain when doubt takes over, and three simple neuroscience-informed techniques to calm your nervous system and regain perspective.

Conversational hypnosis isn't about mind control. It's about working with your brain's natural processes to unlock new perspectives, build confidence, and make choices that feel authentically yours. Discover how neuroscience-informed coaching helps you become more of who you already are.

Sometimes the most painful career setbacks open the door to something better. From heartbreak and self-doubt to unexpected new beginnings, here's how the smallest thread of hope can lead you towards a future you never imagined.

My brain had all kinds of fear-based objections as I prepared for a nine-day training with the one and only John Overdurf. But I’m a coach, and I know a thing or two about dealing with the fear brain… so I did the work.

"I used to get paid more somewhere else." That was the sentence. Almost an afterthought, dropped near the end of an offer negotiation that had gone beautifully. And it was enough to make my client spiral in doubt. Here’s the coaching I gave her.

If you're technically excellent, hold yourself to a high standard, and feel a low hum of guilt about wanting more (because a bigger career might disappoint the people you're currently keeping happy) this one's for you.

When people hear “negotiation,” they often picture something adversarial: pounding the table, making threats, trying to “win” at all costs. That’s not how I negotiate, and it’s certainly not how I teach my clients to negotiate.

The women I work with are skilled, thoughtful, and allergic to office politics. They don’t want to turn into jerks to get what they want. They want their income and impact to grow without drama.

That’s where relational negotiation comes in.

Winning in an unequal system simply requires a different, more nuanced kind of effort. If you are a woman or a minority preparing for a pay negotiation, here are three strategic pivots to make.

Are you white-knuckling the status quo — one in which you're underestimated, undervalued, or stifled — while quietly wondering if this is just how it is?

If you're a high-achiever who's genuinely excellent at her job and exhausted by how much that still isn't enough, let me help you do the work to get past that.

The path back to Executive Presence is through shifting brain states.

• From frantic to settled. 

• From narrow focus to open focus. 

• From high frequency beta waves associated with stress to synchronous alpha waves associated with alert creativity. 

With this shift, you regain the capacity to see the big picture and connect the dots, even when a conversation gets heated among executives or a direct report complains about pay.

Maya hired me as her executive coach to help her navigate this kind of corporate nonsense without losing her edge. In our coaching, we addressed a hard truth: while subjective feedback is often a product of unconscious bias, simply dismissing it as "BS" doesn't help you win.

Here’s the nuanced truth: To maximize her leverage, Maya needed a strategy to bridge the gap between how she organizes reality and how the "harmony-seekers" around her do.

Yes, progress feels fragile right now. But fragile doesn’t mean doomed. Fragility can be strengthened with intention — and even transformed into what Nassim Taleb calls antifragility.

Leaders who are willing to choose courage, who can combine accountability with compassion, will be remembered as the ones who helped their organizations become more resilient, more human, and more sustainable in uncertain times.

You don’t need to play a zero-sum game in your career journey. 

You don’t need to hustle for external validation or tie your self-worth to a job title.

But you can choose to grow — to negotiate for better pay, to rise into leadership — not because you’re trying to prove your worth…

You grow your career one conversation at a time — not by being some superhuman “Business Barbie” who never messes up and wears a tight plastic grin that doesn’t scare the bros.

You’re allowed to feel both proud and petrified. Brave and unsure.

You don’t have to resolve that tension. You get to be real inside it. That’s one of the most honest, human things you can do.

Feeling like a "fraud" is super normal, even for me. The more I coach subject matter experts and executive women, the more I see that imposter syndrome is never an indicator of actual competency but a hypnotic spell induced by a society steeped in bias against women and minorities. We can break the spell of this terribly boring hypnosis by co-opting its language. So there, I'm a "fraud." 

She reached out for coaching because, in her words, she didn't want to make the mistake of being "too blunt, too forward, too much" in her negotiation-- a critique she's heard more often than she'd care to count over her decades-long career. So here are four things we worked on in coaching.

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