When she first came to me, she was the co-CEO of a $55 million advanced healthcare company.
She was smart. Strong. Deeply trusted inside the business.
But her energy was fractured.
She was fielding every question. Available to everyone. Finishing her teams’ projects.
A bottleneck, not by incompetence, but by habit and with good intentions.
She thought her value was in availability.
She knew the business better than anyone. She helped build it.
But the role she was now growing into required something different:
Not more hours.
Not more 9pm calls.
Not more Saturday emails.
More gravity.
So we started there.
With her self-concept.
She wasn’t the second seat anymore.
She was THE decision-maker. The closer. The culture-setter. The damn visionary.
That shift sounds obvious on paper. It’s anything but.
Because stepping into true leadership at that level doesn’t happen just because your title changes.
It happens when your nervous system catches up to who you are BEING.
We worked on:
- Refining her leadership so she could fully own her voice and communicate like a CEO
- Leading the team toward the vision, not just managing the day-to-day
- Reducing access so her team could step up
- Listening more, reacting less so she could be empathetic, but not emotional
- Evolving the culture she inherited from fear-based to vision-led
She didn’t hustle harder.
She created boundaries.
She became sharply focused.
Which is what happens when real leadership does.
And then something wild happened.
A private fundraising opportunity opened.
The problem was that she’d never pitched before.
In fact, she had zero experience and was about to pitch in front of 620 offices on a Zoom call with $0 on the table.
Within a short period of time, $5.5 million was wired!
Here’s what she didn’t do:
She didn’t get there by becoming someone else.
She got there by becoming undeniably her.
By letting people feel the conviction, presence, and certainty that can’t be faked (and we did it with non-traditional high performance coaching techniques.)
That’s what people buy into.
Not slides.
Not scripts.
HER.
Her leadership.
Her energy.
Her power.
And that’s what she leads from, daily.
With alignment, authority, and the kind of presence that moves the room without saying much at all.
That’s the ultimate shift.
And it’s available to every woman who’s ready to make it.
PS. We got to celebrate when she showed me that she rewarded herself with a new custom matte Graphite Gray exterior AMG GT 43 Mercedes with Red Pepper Nappa Leather interior. Not just to celebrate the title, but to honor the woman she had become, inside and out. She likes the best of things.
Mom of 2 who hates minivans, loves luxurious travel experiences, and believes life is too short for mediocre champagne.