You are getting a special treat today. This is a replay of my recent training, five Steps to Speak Like a Senior Leader, which was actually our highest attended event ever. The feedback has been absolutely incredible and continues to pour in with so many people saying this has been a missing piece for them that they have been searching for.

So what you’re going to hear is a simple roadmap to sound credible, clear, and get paid 20 to 40% more without working extra hours. This will help you pinpoint exactly what’s going wrong if you aren’t commanding the respect you want, even if you’re doing the work of someone too. Levels up. You’ll hear what it really means when you’re told you need more executive presence, and we go through a whole bunch of small tweaks you can make today to articulate yourself with more polish and precision.

Now, during this replay, you’re also going to hear me talk about my new program, Speak Like a Senior Leader, and I have a big update and good news about that. See since this training was recorded, spots in the program were completely snatched up in record time. We’ve already sold out way before we were planning to close the doors.

I have never seen demand like this for any program I have created, but I do get it. People are done being the brilliant, hardworking workhorse who still gets passed over while they’re less qualified colleagues get ahead. So even if you missed out on joining Speak Like a Senior Leader this time, the good news is that the next cohort is starting in January.

So if you are even considering joining us, even thinking about it, get on the wait list now. All you need to do is head to speak like a senior leader.com or head to the show notes. Because if this round is any indication, then those spots for the January cohort, they’re going to be gone quickly. And as a wait list member, you get first dibs on those spots before we announce them to anyone else.

Plus you get exclusive access to our best pricing and bonuses. So remember that’s speak like a senior leader.com to get on the wait list now. And with that, let’s get into the training.

So welcome to today’s training. Five Steps to Speak Like a Senior Leader. This is your simple roadmap to sound more credible, more clear, to position yourself to get paid 20 to 40% more without killing yourself by working extra hours. And we can’t wait to share everything we have in store for you today.

So, hello Catherine in, Monterey Bay. Maria in Mexico. Hi from India. Amazing. So say hi as you’re coming on, I know we have more people joining us. Make sure you keep the chat open as we’re going along. You’re going to get the most out of this session if you are interacting with us, if you are sharing what is resonating with you, what you’re taking away.

Now, before we dive in, I, I wanna address something right up front, which is that I hear from a lot of people that I don’t have a big team. I’m not in this high level strategy meeting type of role yet. And I wanna be very clear that no matter what level, position, type of industry you are in, whether you are looking to manage up more effectively, you need to lead your peers.

You are running a whole department. These strategies that we are going to share with you today will work for you. We have had clients use these strategies to get promotions to finally get the ear of those hard to reach senior stakeholders to get tapped for opportunities before they were even publicly available.

So you were not too early. You are right on time. Now, first of all, if you are newer to my world, welcome. I am Melody Wilding. Lots of you here are newer, so I want to properly introduce myself. I am honored and thrilled that you are taking time out of your schedule today. I know you have a lot of demands and things pulling at you and I don’t take it lightly that you have decided to spend an hour with us.

So today I am a two time bestselling author of this book here, Managing Up, my newer book. Maybe you have read it. If you have in the chat, let us know. Just say, yes. I would love to hear. And my first book that is called Trust Yourself. Now my background is as a therapist. That’s how I began my career. And I am a human behavior professor at a University here in New York.

Actually just celebrated my decade of doing that work. I love to weightlift. I am a, cat mom to two very sneaky little beans named Hudson and Morris, which are named after counties in New Jersey for any of my fellow New Jersey folks here.

So today this might be what you see. I am an award-winning executive coach. There are many of you here who have worked with us, either one-on-one or in our programs. We’ve worked with thousands of professionals worldwide at pretty much every company, you name it. We’ve probably worked with someone there. I am a corporate keynote speaker. I have over a dozen different LinkedIn courses with over a half a million learners.

I write for HBR, CNBC, Fast Company, Forbes. Maybe you found your way here through one of those articles as well. But if we rewind, there was a time in my own career when I felt like maybe many of you feel right now, I felt overlooked, undervalued, even very frustrated because I felt like I couldn’t break through.

I had the fancy degrees. I had deep expertise. I had so much that I felt like I could offer that I wanted to say, but I kept getting passed over. I would be sitting in a meeting trying to contribute, but my ideas just didn’t land. They didn’t connect. And other people would say the same thing five minutes later and suddenly everyone’s nodding and like, oh, that’s a great idea.

Yeah. So let me know if any of this is sounding familiar in the chat. Just gimme a plus one. I couldn’t help but think, I, I would always say I feel like there was some secret class on communicating in a way with gravitas, with presence, and I was just absent that day. Like there was some memo on acting like an executive that I didn’t get and everybody seemed to have gotten it.

So yes, I could see this is relating to a lot of you in the chat. It just felt like everyone had these cheat codes and I was doing things on the fly. I felt like I was just stumbling along. I was trying to act the part, but I was second guessing every single word. So yes, let us know if that sounds familiar to you.

Sounds like for a lot of you it did. Now, for me, it took getting laid off. It took having my role eliminated because it wasn’t seen as important to the business. It took that to happen, a pretty extreme measure, to realize that influence is not just about what you say, it’s about how people experience you.

The people who are taken seriously, they know how to shape perception on purpose. They are not just winging it. They are not just magically, naturally confident like it’s some God-given gift. They are not just naturally bold and outgoing. They’re using a combination of tactics and psychology to make their message land.

They know how to make their thinking clear, their presence more credible, their message undeniably worth listening to. And once I saw that, once I realized that it’s this combination of tactics and psychology, everything really just started to click into place. And I was able to lean into my training as a therapist.

I had all of this background, my background in psychology and neuroscience, and I realized I could take what had been locked away in ivory towers in these research papers that no one reads. Instead translate that to helping you step into what I call your Professional Power Position. And that’s what you see here.

It’s that sweet spot in the middle there of those two circles where confidence in yourself, managing your own psychology meets influence with others. Being able to influence and navigate other people’s psychology. And now flash forward 15 years, that’s what I have been doing. Teaching sound practical strategies to help you show up at work in a way that earns trust, that commands more attention and that gets you better results.

So here’s exactly what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to help you pinpoint what’s going wrong if you aren’t commanding the credibility and respect you want to, or you think you should be, even if you are doing the work of someone two levels up. And I had someone email me today who’s actually sent me a message on LinkedIn and said, I am like the unspoken workhorse.

I think she said I’m the, I’m like the working donkey of my team. I work so hard, but I, I feel like I’m not, that’s not translating for me. Yeah. Other people relate to being the working donkey. We’re gonna talk about what it really means if you are being given that vague feedback. You need more executive presence.

Who’s ever been told that you need more executive presence? And I’m not going to tell you that you have to dress differently. You have to be louder. That’s not what we’re going to talk about here today. We’re gonna go over some small tweaks you can make today to articulate yourself with more polish, more precision, so that the stakeholders around you say, we need more of you.

We need more of this person. We need you looped in earlier. And most importantly, I’m going to walk you through that five step system that we have used with clients at top Fortune 500 companies to help them get tapped for those bigger opportunities, better projects, better roles, without having to resort to annoying buzzwords like synergy and prepping for 10 hours, which I know you don’t have.

And at the end of this training, we are going to officially open the doors to the public for my new program. It’s called Speak Like a Senior Leader. But here’s the thing. It is a new program, but we are down to the final spots. That is because we opened this to the wait list a couple weeks ago and we had such an overwhelming response that we only have a few spots left.

And I’m not BSing you, I’m not making this up. This is very true. So if you think you want a spot in this program, you definitely want to stay to the end because we will sell out and then we’ll be closed for this round. The program will not be running again until 2026. And so if you want the rate we are offering now, we are also going to be sharing with you a special bonus worth over $600 if you join by this Friday.

Now is the best time to join. So stick around. We’ll have plenty of time for questions, and to walk you through that. All right. I want a quick sense of who is here with us.

So I know most of you are mid-career professionals, but even within that, there’s a spectrum. So tell me in the chat if you are number one, number two, or number three.

Okay. Number one, number two, or number three. Are you currently an individual contributor? You’re trying to make the move into a leadership role or people management role for the first time, and you feel like I need to get out of the weeds. I need to totally change how I communicate my impact and value.

Less like a subject matter expert, more like a strategist. Or number two, are you aiming for a promotion, you’re trying to break into the executive ranks from middle management, and maybe you’re having a hard time making that case that you can excel at the next level. Or last, are you a leader who is looking to level up?

So you’re already in some of those rooms. You’ve got the title of a more senior person, maybe director, vp, head of your function, but you wanna be taken more seriously? You wanna be seen as more of a trusted peer to the C-suite. Okay. Looks like we have a really big mix of people, which is great. I love it.

 We have a really solid mix here, and the good news we have, we’ve helped people at all of these stages. So, uh, I know a couple of you were saying, actually none of these apply to me. I’m an entrepreneur, and even if you’re not in a traditional corporate environment, we work with a lot of people who, who are in nonprofits, academia, for example, healthcare settings.

So even if you’re not in like a traditional knowledge worker type role, everything we cover is still going to be very useful to you. Now, if you are like most of the people we work with, there’s a few things we probably know about you and what you wanna do. You want to be able to walk into those high pressure meetings without breaking a sweat or your heart feeling like it wants to jump out of your chest because you know you can handle their questions and their pushback.

You wanna actually send emails that people answer instead of having to chase people follow up because you feel like it’s just been pushed aside in their later folder. You wanna be able to com present complex ideas in a way that makes people lean in instead of just checking out. You need to be able to disagree with others, probably your boss or other people that have power and authority above you.

You wanna do it without being labeled difficult or not a team player. And you need to articulate your results, your decisions, so clearly that people come to you, they tap you on the shoulder and say, Hey, you would be a great fit for this. So do these sound, are we getting it right? Give us a plus one in the chat if so.

Yeah, Alfredo was saying, managing conflict, much needed skill. Absolutely. Now, here’s the thing I’ve been hearing from people as I’ve been having conversations with them about speak, like a senior leader. That many of you are confident in the value you bring to the table. You know you have a track record, you have results, you have receipts.

As I said, you’re that reliable workhorse. You have been busting your butt for years. You might already be leading a pretty sizable team, or managing maybe a several hundred thousand dollars, if not a multimillion dollar budget. You’re driving real impact, yet some things not landing. Like I said with my story earlier, you’re in the meetings, you speak up and it’s like the words don’t stick.

You may make a sound recommendation, but it gets met with silence or worse. A lot of questions trying to poke holes in it. So maybe you even have the title, but you’re not being treated like someone at that level. You’re not getting the influence, the opportunities that you’ve clearly earned. And I wanna be very clear.

I’m not saying this. This is not because you are not qualified. It’s not because you are not working hard enough. You are probably working too hard, but it’s because of this, you are trapped in the gravitas gap. You are not hitting a ceiling because of your talent. You are stuck because there’s a disconnect between your expertise and how you come across.

That’s the gravitas gap. It’s that very confusing space between your actual capability and how much authority people assign to you. And in the eyes of decision makers. That perception makes a big difference. Again, you may belong in these rooms, you may qualify for these opportunities, but the way you are presenting yourself, articulating yourself may not consistently reflect that or convince people of that.

So tell me how many of these you relate to. So these are some signs, telltale signs. You may be stuck in the gravitas gap. You may find you’re getting looped in late after decisions are already made. You find yourself spending hours wordsmithing talking points, and then still walking away like that didn’t land.

You’re told you’re not quite ready yet. We need to see you have more presence. You need to know the business better. And no one’s telling you what that means. You may be being asked to execute when you really feel like you should be leading, driving the discussion or the strategy or the vision. You are praised for being supportive and helpful, but not for the sexier stuff.

Being bold, visionary. You’re doing everything right on paper. Does anybody feel like that? You’re doing everything right on paper, but you are still not the go-to. Yes. Okay. Seems, yeah, seems like a lot of you resonate with that Grania said pretty much all of them. Yes. Okay. It doesn’t matter though.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your insights are, how prepared you are for a promotion, how much credit you actually deserve. It doesn’t matter if you spend 10 hours perfecting your talking points, whether your staff loves you, if you can’t do these other things, if you can’t pitch your ideas in a way that gets them funded.

If you don’t sound strategic, you sound more like the doer, the implementer. If you are not, you could be getting a lot of great things done, but you’re not actually socializing and converting those wins into actual clout and credibility. It, you can have the best talking points, but if it’s still rambly and there’s no clear point, you need to deliver them with crispness and conciseness conviction in the moment. And your staff may love you. That’s great. That is extremely important. But you also need to be able to influence the stakeholders up across and even outside of your organization at times.

You’ve probably tried a lot already. I would actually love to hear what sorts of things have you tried? Some of you, I sent out a survey maybe two weeks ago, and some of you, um, gave me some really, it was actually kind of funny, the ideas I saw in there that, things that you’ve tried, but you have probably read the books. You’ve listened to the podcast. Maybe you’ve even listened to my podcast. Don’t stop by the way. You have journaled about your fears. You have visualized your success. You’ve taken deep breaths in the bathroom before that deep meeting. You’ve signed up for maybe one of those, you know, half day executive presence seminars where you go to that. Crummy hotel room and the light’s flickering, the coffee is burnt, the danishes are stale, right?

Everyone’s practicing a confident handshake in their power poses and you walk out thinking, alright, that I got what I need, right? You walk out with your stack of handouts, a pen, a few good tips. There’s one big problem with all of this, and it’s the exact reason why you can’t just can’t seem to break through that invisible ceiling of the gravitas gap.

It’s because you’re still throwing spaghetti at the wall. You’re just trying to see what sticks. You get these tidbits. Sometimes these little like gimmicks or hacks, but they’re just putting a bandaid on a bigger issue. ’cause again, you can have that perfect handshake or like fist bump now. You can nail your eye contact, you can deliver your opening line with a lot of confidence, but then you may completely blow it 30 seconds later when someone asks you this unexpected follow up question and you stammer all over yourself, you say, uh, yeah, that’s a great question. Um, I don’t know if I’m the right person to answer it, but um, maybe I could. And you just go on and on and on. Or you finally get that rare 10 minute window with that skip level manager you’ve been trying to get FaceTime with for months. And you proceed to just rattle off your to-do list and their eyes glaze over and they’re looking at their phone within a few seconds.

So you don’t need tricks. You need a complete operating system. Not this like random selection of things that may come in handy at one fleeting moment, but a more comprehensive way to rethink how you are communicating how you are perceived across various channels.

’cause almost everything we do today is communication. Meetings, presentations, emails, one-on-ones, slack messages, like you name it. One that helps you craft the impression that you leave. So people walk away saying, she’s really sharp, she’s smart, she’s, she’s going somewhere that one and that you feel good about and confident in.

So we wanna make sure you are shaping your perception on purpose, whether it’s in the room, it’s in your emails, it’s in day-to-day conversations, that’s where your reputation is built. So we need an integrative or an integrated rather approach that elevates how you think, how you speak, how you position yourself across those different touchpoint.

And when you do that, your entire identity and level of influence changes. We hear from people all the time that they’re not having those 2:00 AM wake up, the Sunday scaries, they’re not replaying the conversations in their head, wondering if they did or said the wrong thing. They’re not having so much anxiety about whether they’re going to be found out as not belonging.

You’ll stop wasting so much mental energy resenting your colleagues because you are finally being recognized and getting credit where credit is due. You can earn more because decision makers actually get the value you’re creating. They wanna see you happy. They wanna keep you there, and that means you’ll have leverage to negotiate for more flexibility.

We have had people get work from home Fridays, the ability to leave early for their kids’ soccer games without people giving them side eye. You can work fewer hours because you are getting better results. You don’t feel like you have to stay to prove your dedication, and there’s just so much satisfaction and the sense of impact that comes from feeling like people actually care about what you have to say.

That they seek out your opinion instead of feeling like you are fighting tooth and nail to have a seat at that table.

This is really important. I believe very strongly in this. That is you will have options in this economy at this moment in time. Options give you power. You start attracting champions.

Those more influential decision makers, people who are more willing to put a good word in for you to open a door to maybe, adjust a precedent to say things like, let me see what I can do. Let me see if I can make that happen. Because they trust you, because you sound like someone who belongs in the room. Someone they can bet on.

You can better position yourself to be more insulated from layoffs. Not because you’re replaceable, nobody is. Everybody’s replaceable, but because you are a person, leadership can’t afford to lose.

You get intel that matters. Senior leaders start treating you more like a peer, which means you hear about the reorg months before it’s announced. You know which departments are getting fund funding, which ones are getting cut. You have time to position yourself or to jump ship, to make a change before everyone, before you’re just blindsided by that change. So this is career insurance at the highest levels. This is the type of thing we are helping our clients do every day. Create options for themselves. ’cause when you have options, you are no longer in that place of scarcity.

Alright, so with that, let’s get into our five steps to speak like a senior leader. Now, what I wanna do is walk you through my proven five step speak system to help you do exactly what we’ve been talking about today, to close that gravitas gap, to help set you on the path to sound more clear, confident, credible, without busting your butt any more than you already are.

So this is the exact system we have used with hundreds of mid to senior level clients who have gone from being that sort of overlook underpaid superhero to becoming more of the go-to person in their organization.

We’re going to walk you through each of the five parts of this system. And more importantly, I’m going to show you the biggest missteps or mistakes you might be making in each of these areas.

Now these, there are some subtle patterns that may be accidentally undermining your authority without you even realizing it. And once you see these blind spots, you can’t unsee them. And that’s important because you can start shifting them immediately when you are aware of the problem. So you’ll have terminology, you’ll be able to label this and name this and catch it and pivot more easily. So by the end of this, you’ll have that roadmap to communicating with more polish that you know you can have.

Alright, our first step in the speak system is to Shift Your Style. You would be the odd one out here if you, if the only person you have to deal with every day is just your boss and maybe a few of your team members, you would be the rare exception.

My guess is that you are juggling conversations with your direct reports, your peers, other managers, skip level executives, cross-functional partners, external vendors, clients, customers, you name it. Probably a combination of all of the above, sometimes in the same meeting, and that means a lot of different personalities, priorities, perspectives, pain points, insecurities, on and on.

You may have a CFO who only cares about the impact to the bottom line. You have an operations manager who wants the step by step by step implementation. The CEO, who just wants the 30 second elevator pitch. And where things go wrong here is that many of us try to cover every angle in the same breath. We think it makes us sound more prepared and thorough, but instead it just sounds watered down.

We may take something that is super technical or high level and we miss the mark because that’s not actually what’s needed in the room. Or we default to our own comfort zone. We’re taking in, we’re talking rather in too much detail. We’re maybe softening our language. We’re staying more vague because we’re playing it safe.

We’re not sure what’s gonna land. And so the, the consequence of all of this, and tell me if this is sounding familiar, if this is something you realize you do in the chat. What ends up happening is that we are talking past people not getting through to them. That’s where that disconnect can happen.

It’s almost like we’re, we’re talking to a glass wall. Who’s guilty of this? Put in the chat, we would love to hear, just say me if you struggle with this. So how do you fix this? What do you do? Well, you have to learn to operate at the right altitude because the real issue here is when your message isn’t landing, it’s not always about what you’re saying, it’s how you’re framing it.

It’s more about the level you are saying it at. So there is this misconception that strong communicators, they are very consistent, but the truth is, the best senior level communicators, they are aren’t consistent. They are adaptive. They know how to adjust the level of their message based on who is in the room, what the emotional need is at the time.

And so think of it a bit like flying a plane. Great communicators know when they need to be a high. They need to give that 30,000 foot view the strategy, the why it matters. And they know when to dip down lower, when to get into the weeds, the operational details, the steps, the metrics. And you may need to do this all in one meeting as you’re addressing different people, right?

But if you are always just flying at one level, you may be either too high or too low and you’re going to lose people. And so that’s what I mean here. When I talk about communicating at the right altitude, you’re not necessarily changing the content of your message here. You’re changing how you frame it and tell it based on your audiences vantage point, their priorities, their pain points, their level of involvement, the vocabulary that they use.

So let’s take an example. If you are talking to a teammate, you might say, well, we’re, we are rebuilding the dashboard with a new data visualization library to fix some of the display issues. That’s what you might say to your team member. To your department head, you may say, we’re improving the dashboard experience so our different teams can access and interpret key metrics faster.

Now to your C level, your COO, you might say, this update is going to reduce reporting delays and improve decision making speed, which supports our goal of better forecasting this quarter. So all three of those are about the same thing. They’re all true, but do you see how the framing is different depending on who we are talking to?

So if we stay too high, our message sounds too vague. It just sounds like empty buzzwords. If we stay too low, too technical, too granular, people can’t see the impact and sometimes they think we’re too in the weeds and the value of the message get gets lost. So this ability to operate at different levels of abstraction, to zoom in, to provide that operational context and details when it’s needed, or to zoom out to articulate the bigger business impact when it matters.

That is a big, big part of what separates people who are senior leaders from those who are just very competent professionals and managers. You don’t have to have necessarily different information, but you do have to have the awareness, the agility, to the skill to translate the same information across different contexts.

And Dee was saying, oh my God, this is exactly what I need. Now I realize why I’ve been two in the weeds. Yes. Now this may sound like a small shift. To really drive home how huge this can be. I wanna tell you a story about a past client. I’m gonna call her Molly for the purposes of this. And, uh, she is a chief people officer at a fast-growing startup with about a hundred employees.

At the time, she was someone who really prided herself on being highly empathetic, caring to a fault about her team, always going the extra mile for her company. But the problem here was the relationship with her boss, who was the CEO, I’ll call him Alex. And that had just been becoming more and more and more strained.

Every conversation was increasingly feeling like an uphill battle. She, Molly would hop on a call, she would have, uh, reports on employee engagement, turnover rates, different recruitment strategies. They wanted to try, she thought she was doing her job well and thoroughly, but Alex would get really frustrated with her.

Halfway through the presentation, he would say can you just tell me the point here? And this disconnect, it really painfully came to a head when, during a one-on-one, Alex said to her, what you see here, and this is a verbatim quote, I am not sure if you’re in over your head, incompetent or both. Just imagine it feels like a punch in the gut every time I say it.

The key that changed everything for Molly was realizing that she has what I call a caretaker style, and she was working for someone with the exact opposite style, what I would call a commander style. Her natural default was to highlight the risks, to give lots of details, to talk about the personalities and everybody’s feelings about a situation.

Her CEO was exactly the opposite. He wanted the bottom line. He wanted to understand the results, he wanted, things framed in terms of speed, competitive advantage. So Molly did not have to change what she was doing. She was getting good results. She was working with a direct team that she loved, but she had to change how she communicated about it.

So it actually landed with Alex. So instead of coming to him and saying, I’m really concerned about the morale implications of the pace that we’re hiring, and we need to be more thoughtful about how we’re integrating people. Instead, she would say, our current onboarding process is creating a several week productivity delay for our new hires.

And I think I can cut that about a week with these changes. And so when she began making these tweaks, it was not overnight. It was not overnight, but Alex’s attitude, it started to shift because suddenly he could see the business impact she was having. He stopped seeing her as someone who was too focused on feelings and in the weeds, and started seeing her as someone who understood how people strategy actually drove business results and the things he cared about.

And so, as you can see here, this is a screenshot from her. She ended the year with a huge bonus, 1.5 times her annual salary for her, which was over six figures. And later when she talked, when I talked to her and I got, we got to catch up about this, she said, it’s all because Alex now sees me as more of a partner to him, more of a trusted advisor.

So pretty powerful stuff. All right. Type in the chat for me. How many hours a week would you estimate you spend in meetings? Virtual, in-person conference calls, doesn’t matter. Just gimme an estimate here in the chat. How much time do you spend in meetings? 30 plus. Melissa said 20, 30. Yeah. A lot, right? For many of us, it’s the majority of our time, and in a way, this can be a good thing because meetings are where visibility is built.

Your presence is evaluated at scale, which is why the next part of our speak framework is to Present With Poise. Here’s what many of us do though. We spend hours perfecting our slides, right? Putting together our business case, refining our talking points, and then when it’s time to present, we open. We start with the background of the problem because that’s how we got started thinking about the problem.

We walk through all the analysis because that’s how we built confidence in the idea that we’re offering. And then we present three, four, maybe five different recommendations because you considered all of them and you wanna show, you are collaborative, you’re flexible, you’re open-minded, you’re giving people options, right?

Is any of this sounding familiar? Maybe you even think that shows you’re strategic because you’ve thought through so many different angles and considerations. You include every detail, every piece of data on your slide. You wanna make sure they get the big picture, but you also wanna make sure they know you did your homework and you put a lot of time into this, right?

So all that thoroughness probably served you incredibly well as you built your expertise. Now it’s working against you. Because when people can’t follow your train of thought, or I should say, when you do this, people can’t follow your train of thought. And when you do this, you are asking your audience to do a lot of mental work because you are asking them to figure out what matters most.

You’re making them like follow the meandering journey of your mind instead of delivering them right to the destination. So when you jump between different levels of detail, people aren’t really sure where you are, they get lost your points. I see this all the time. Your points flow together, like they’re one, just big interconnected stream of consciousness or run on sentence.

And guess what? Your audience tunes out when you do that. Is any of this sounding familiar? Yes. Mira was saying, this is me. Oh my gosh. So who, who else is realizing like, oh shoot, I do this. I do talk through my thought process. Who is realizing this? Megan said a hundred percent me all the time. Yes. Here’s what to focus on instead.

Instead of communicating in those long flowing explanations, we’re gonna communicate in headlines. We’re going to signpost where we are going. So to drive this home, here’s an example. It’s the difference between saying, well, we’re seeing some challenges with the timeline and there are some budget considerations.

Plus the team has raised some concerned about the scope. Or. Saying, saying it this way. We have three issues to resolve, timeline, budget, and scope. Here’s how we plan to address everyone, right? Totally different. Senior leaders understand that clarity is a form of respect. They know that when people can easily follow your logic, or rather when people can’t easily follow your logic, they start questioning, is there any logic here at all?

They begin to wonder if you really understand what you’re talking about or you’re just thinking out loud in the moment and hoping something coherent emerges. Again, doesn’t matter how brilliant your analysis is, are if your conclusions are spot on. If people have to work too hard to understand what you’re saying or follow it, they will unconsciously categorize you as someone who is still figuring things out. Versus someone who has things figured out.

So you have to come to the table with a point of view. Now, one of the most, the biggest blockers that people shared when I sent out the survey a few weeks ago, the thing that was holding them back from speaking like a senior leader was they would, they were telling me things like, well, I’m afraid I won’t, I won’t say the right thing. I won’t have the right data. I won’t have the right answer ready in the moment. And that’s totally understandable, right? If you feel that way, you are not alone. But you need to understand there is no such thing as the right thing to say. And waffling is so much worse than providing your point of view and letting that be a starting point, because at least that can be a jumping off point.

Those operating at a senior level understand that saving the people around them, cognitive energy, having a clear recommendation, is better than having the perfect argument. And this is crucial because the leaders around you, they don’t want more to analyze. They want fewer decisions to make. So let’s drive this home.

Again, this is not just a formality. Having a clear point of view fundamentally changes whether or not you are seen as leadership material and if you are a fit for your role. So something that we bring to the table as coaches here is that we have coached thousands of clients on both sides of the table.

We help people every single day speak more like this, but we also have direct access to those who are in those high level roles, which gives us an advantage to understand what they’re looking for. What are they evaluating you on? And so just last week I was talking with someone who’s an executive at a tech company.

They have a product that has over 3 million users, and she was telling me how this year, just this year alone, the last six months, they have let five people go and four of them were let go because they were smart, they were talented people, but they could not be decisive in their communication. So here’s what was happening.

These managers would come to leadership meetings with proposals, but instead of making a recommendation, they’d present all of the options. They would say, well, we could do A, which has these benefits, or we could do B, which solves this problem, or C, which is the safe choice. And even when the leadership team would ask, okay, so what should we do here?

The managers would still say, well, this option has this upside, but then again, this other one has this upside, and that approach might be better because of X, Y, Z. So from these, from those employees’ perspectives, again, they thought they were being collaborative and thorough, but what’s senior leadership saw is that they weren’t delivering what was asked.

And when they pushed for a decision, these employees would get defensive. They would feel singled out, they would feel like they were being put on the spot unfairly. But all senior leadership actually was thinking was, if you can’t make a decision with a week to prepare and all that data in front of you, how are you going to handle the pressures that come with the next level up?

So they were not fired for being wrong. They were let go ’cause they were indecisive.

Okay, moving on to the E in our speak system, Express Your Impact. The single bus biggest misstep here is that you are communicating activities instead of outcomes. You are probably doing very important work, but the way you talk about it makes it just sound like you’re busy.

You might say we’re implementing this new CRM system. The team is getting trained on it right now. Or the design team has been iterating on the inter user face given our user feedback. Again, all true, all important work. But what tends to happen is that other people on the other hand just hear a very detailed to-do list. You are communicating what you are doing, but not why it matters.

You are too focused on the activities, not the outcomes that those activities produce. That’s a problem because when you talk about your work in terms of process instead of impact, people slot you into that execution role. So you may give detailed updates, tell me if you’re guilty of this. That sound like a grocery list.

Like we did this and we did this and this, and you’re completely missing the business significance of what you accomplished. You can, you talk about launching the customer portal, but you never mentioned it reduced support tickets by 40%. You describe the vendor negotiation, but you totally skip over the fact that it saved the company a hundred K.

Right? So your manager or the people above you may sit through these up updates and think, okay. So what, why does this matter? What does this mean for our goals? And the trickle down effect might be one you have experienced. This is what happens when you’re seen as the doer. You, your manager looks at your track record.

They see you are someone who consistently delivers, who can be counted on to execute flawlessly, who keeps all the trains running on time, but they don’t see you as someone who can be strategic step back, who can drive where a project is headed in the first place. So when promotion time comes around, they also panic at the thought of losing their most reliable executor, and they think, well, we can’t promote Wendy, who’s going to handle all of the implement implementation work.

So you accidentally have made yourself indispensable in your current role, which makes you completely unpromotable to the next one.

Okay, so your superiors, the decision makers, they don’t just wanna know what is happening. They wanna know what it means, what you are proposing to do about it, what does it enable creates. If you are not

consistently doing that, you’re leaving a vacuum for other people to fill in the gaps, and often they fill in the gaps with doubt.

So this is really frustrating when you are someone who’s making important decisions behind the scenes. You’re setting priorities, you’re adjusting scope, you’re managing trade-offs, but that’s not reflected in the way you talk about it. It just sounds like project management. So every time you connect your work to business outcomes, every time you frame a problem in terms of competitive advantage, growth opportunities, increase in revenue, whatever it is, every time you demonstrate that, you see beyond your immediate scope.

You’re essentially auditioning for the next level up. You are planting the seed so you can be top of mind when an opportunity comes up. And even better, this is pretty cool, a halo effect starts to take hold. You do something that a lot of people miss, which is you build visibility beyond your boss because guess what?

It’s likely that the opportunity you want, the promotion, the stretch project, expanding your scope or your team, that’s decided by multiple people, not just your manager. So people begin seeking you out, not just for your functional expertise, your subject matter expertise, but because of your overall acumen.

They want perspective on things outside of your domain because they see you can think beyond your immediate opportunities. So a perfect example like this is one of my past clients who I’ll call, I will call Claudia. That’s a tongue twister, who is a technical lead at Google Now, at the time, Claudia felt like she had a decent but kind of a distant relationship with her manager, and she was a go-getter. She worked on the advertising data side. She was always creating new tools, new dashboards that could be used across the business, and in marketing to improve how they were training or retaining and attracting new accounts.

But here’s where she, she was sabotaging herself without realizing it. She would talk about her work in terms of activities instead of outcomes. So in team meetings, she would say things like, well, I created this tool that pulls data from different sources. Or, I spent a week optimizing that report pipeline.

Again, all impressive from a technical standpoint, but none of it communicated the business value that she was delivering. So it was no wonder then why she felt like all of her colleagues were like zooming ahead of her and she was just treading water. So what we did with her was hone in on highlighting two things, scope and scale.

So changed it to saying something like, this dashboard identified about 2.3 million in at-risk accounts that we can now proactively save. Or this new tool reduced manual reporting by about 15 hours a week, which means that the business development team can go out and do more prospecting. So when she made that shift, she was identified for a high potential leadership program within the company that gave her lots of exposure to higher level leadership and mentorship, and that allowed her, those relationships, allowed her to switch functions when she was ready for a change without having to leave and start over somewhere else.

Okay. So we’ve talked about shifting your style, presenting with poise, expressing your impact. The A in the speak system is often the most overlooked, which is Articulating Yourself in Writing. That’s a big missed opportunity because just think about it. You spend your entire day writing Slacks, Teams, texts, emails, it goes on and on, and then you have decks, status summaries, meeting notes.

We get so obsessed with speaking up in meetings that we neglect the fact that every other message we send is in writing, and that shapes perception. So the people you are trying to influence though, they get hundreds of messages every day. So you are competing against that noise. So even if your email does get open, your text does get looked at, it’s a even higher bar for it to get responded to, let alone actually acted upon.

Now, the big misstep here is when your communication is too meandering or worse when you use non-committal committee language. And what I mean by this is the, we should really look into this, or the team needs to consider.

That kind of language makes you seem hands-off. You’re positioning yourself as someone who identifies a problem, but who is not solving them, who’s not taking ownership. You raise questions, but you’re not providing answers. So again, you think you’re being inclusive, but it’s just vague. So when you write, we should really look into this.

Who exactly should be looking into it? Is it you? Is it me? Is it the entire department? By when? What does look into it even mean? Are we researching this? Are we having a 30 minute conversation? What does it mean? So committee language creates what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. It’s like, like everyone is responsible, so no one is responsible, right?

I’m sure all of you get that. Alfredo said, everyone is no one. So your email may get read and people are like, yeah, someone should definitely handle that. And then nothing happens because no one knew if it was meant for them. So this is often why your emails don’t get responses. It’s not that people disagree with us, they don’t care about the issue.

We haven’t given them anything concrete to respond to. So what do you do instead? You need to optimize for the skimmer and the time starved decision maker. Put yourself in their shoes for just a second. They are juggling back to back meetings. They are scanning emails between calls. They’re reading your message on their phone, we’ll, walking to the next one.

They don’t have time to decode what you’re asking for and piece together your logic. They need to understand your point in a couple of seconds and know what you need them to do. So your subject line needs to be direct and action oriented. You want the email to be scannable, because a dense paragraph is gonna get skipped.

Every message needs to have a clear call to action, not this sort of, let me know what your thoughts, or we should really do something about that, or happy to discuss further, that’s not a clear call to action. What are you actually asking for? Approval, input decision by a certain date? A call, budget.

You need to specify. Let me know your thoughts is not a call to action. Okay. Wanna tell you about is Isaac quickly, who’s the head of a platform at an organization, and he had recently been promoted to this. This was a brand new role that was just created and let me know if you’ve ever been in that situation.

So not only was he up against the headwind of trying to establish himself, but he had stakeholders worldwide from Asia to San Francisco. So almost everything he did was some form of written, asynchronous communication. And maybe you can relate to this, Isaac came from an academic background, so his default was lengthy, sort of an indirect tone. It’s felt very sterile and kind of clunky. And so when he needed a decision on budget, he would start the email with, as we continue to evaluate our infrastructure needs across various reasons, there are some interesting patterns emerging about our performance that suggests we might benefit from considering from some strategic investments.

And you’re like, what? What? What are you even saying? So as a result, he felt like things were just consistently swirling. Everything was just going in circles and decisions would take weeks to happen. And so what he did, what we worked on a lot, was using more natural conversational language instead of the jargon.

Instead of, as we continue to evaluate our needs, blah, blah, blah. He’d say, our Singapore servers are 40% slower than our San Francisco servers, which is hurting our productivity for our Asia Pacific clients. Like, oh, now I understand. He stopped burying his asks in tons of context. The budget email became, I need approval for 150 K to update this data center.

Without that, we’re going to have slower performance and that puts this, these accounts at work. Can we get your approval by Friday so we can start implementation next week? So the results we’re, in his case were almost immediate. He started getting responses significantly faster. He wasn’t spending so much time chasing people down.

People were thanking him for using one email to replace what would’ve been three meetings. And so, as you can see here, what Isaac told me, he was getting bigger and better relationships, more influence with some of his key out allies.

Alright, the last part of our five part speak system is to Keep Your Composure because we have to face it.

The complexities you face increase dramatically as you are moving up. You’re no longer just managing your own work. You have questions from multiple directions. You have to deal with incomplete information. Under pressure, there’s competing priorities. The stakes are higher. The people around you have less patience.

So this is where most people crack and they revert to their own pa old patterns, rather. They start over explaining when what they should be doing is reassuring. They start treating, treating every curve ball like it’s this pop quiz, and they need to defend themself around it. Senior leaders understand that keeping their composure is not about having all the answers.

You’re seeing a theme here, but they need to stay calm enough to figure out what’s actually being asked and respond to that. So when your CEO drops by your desk and asks, so how’s that project going? They may not necessarily be looking for this comprehensive status report. They’re scanning for risk.

They wanna know, should this be on my radar? Should I be worried about this? Is this gonna blow up at me? And here’s the, for my people pleasers out there, this one blew my mind when I realized it, which is the mistake you’ve been making is answering questions at face value. You being the responsible professional you are, you start rattling off everything like, well, we’re at 73% completion on this, and meanwhile, your CEO is standing there thinking, I literally just want to know if I need to talk to the board about this.

So we’re treating every interaction like we’re still in seventh grade, and the teacher’s like what happened in that chapter? And we have to cover every single plot point. So the best senior level communicators, they understand that most questions from their peers, from authority figures are really a request for one of three things.

Reassurance, is this under control guidance.

What should I think about this?

Or action, what do you need me to do here?

So you have permission to skip right to what they need to know to say, you know, we are on track to hit our goals and I will assure you that I will flag you if anything changes or the budgets solid.

There are no surprises coming. We go live Monday. So your team can start planning around that. Or better yet, probe deeper. Sometimes those above and across from you, they themselves haven’t fully articulated what they’re worried about. They’re just reacting in real time. So your job is to surface the real issue to address their actual concern, not the surface level concern.

And so asking questions like, tell me more about that. What’s driving that question? Are you worried about resourcing or is it chain in change in scope? Is there something about our past launches that’s informing this? What does a conservative timeline look like to you? So this is going to reveal a lot of important information that can change how you respond.

So I wanna tell you about, Julie, who worked at a large university in academic affairs, and she was constantly caught in between two skip level leaders. Her natural instinct, maybe like yours, was to immediately jump into problem solving mode when emotions were really high because she wanted to smooth things over.

 She wanted to offer solutions and try to do everything herself, which number one was, was not addressing the root cause ’cause things kept happening. And number two was only making those leaders more frustrated because Julie was solving problems that they felt didn’t actually exist. And in their mind, she was wasting time and energy.

So when she started probing first and solving second, that was huge. Instead of a meeting immediately presenting solutions, she would ask questions like, what’s really at stake here? What does success look like from your perspective? What’s driving the urgency around this? And her boss noticed this.

Instead of coming to him with more problems to solve, she was coming with insights about what was really happening, and she was addressing those root causes. She was discharging some of the emotional tension in the room, taking both of those leaders out of their defensive posture. They were less combative, they were a bit more open-minded.

And you can see here that praise trickled down to feedback her boss gave her. Now you might be thinking, but Melody, earlier you said to make recommendations and to move forward with next steps. And now you’re saying slow down and ask questions. So that seems contradictory. And in a way you would be right, because the key here is developing situational awareness.

That is the ultimate hallmark of professional maturity. The highest level leaders, they have mastered this skill, like I said earlier, of being agile, reading the room, having the flexibility to stay true to their beliefs, their values. They know when to lead with a clear recommendation, when to lead into questions.

So those are our five steps to speak like a senior leader. I would love to hear which of these do you wanna work on? ASAP. You can just type the letter. S-P-E-A-K. Just type the letter in the chat. Love to hear.

Now, some of you may be thinking right now this all makes sense, but I have no idea where to start. This all feels very overwhelming. Or I can see what I want to do differently, but I don’t know how to do that. Maybe some of you are thinking, I’m worried I’ll do this for a little while, and then I’ll just default back to my old way of doing things. Or what if people think I’m being too, try hard, I’m being too fake and inauthentic.

Here’s the thing. With the right operating system, with the playbook for those moments, all you have to do is shift in those five key areas we talked about. You do not need to reinvent yourself overnight. You don’t need to become someone you’re not. You need specific frameworks, scripts, strategies that make these changes feel more natural and to become more second nature.

And so what if you had seasoned experts in your corner who have not only coached people through these exact transformations, but have also been the close confidants to the people you are trying to influence? So I wanna ask you, do you see what is possible for you with just some of these small shifts we discussed today?

I know a lot of you were saying, oh my God, this is making so many things click. Because if not now, when? You have to be honest with yourself about that. How much longer are you willing to tolerate seeing less qualified people get promoted? How many more times are you going to leave a meeting thinking, Ugh, I should have said something, I wish I said that differently. How much more mental energy do you wanna keep wasting, replaying your ideas, wondering why it’s not working? And the scary truth is that the workplace is not getting any nicer or easier. It is only getting more competitive. We, of course, have ai, it’s eliminating a lot of routine tasks, which means the value you bring has to be higher level.

It has to be more strategic and leadership oriented. And with economic uncertainty. I know someone was saying, I would love to, position myself as more rece, recession proof. So companies are looking for people they wanna invest in, they wanna promote, they wanna keep around. So what if six months from now you were that person that leadership is turning to for input?

What if you were that person earning 20, 50, a hundred K more because your value became undeniable. So the gap between where you are now and where you want to be is not going to close itself, and the longer you wait, the harder it becomes to get out of it. So the question isn’t whether you are capable of speaking like a senior leader because you absolutely are. The question is whether you are ready to stop, hoping things will change and you are ready to make a change.

So if that is you, then my new program speak like a senior leader is exactly where you need to be. Wendy, my co-coach here is going to drop the link in the chat. This is a 13 week coaching program designed to give you the tools and coaching support to communicate in a way that makes decision makers trust you with bigger and better projects, budgets, and to work towards that nicer title and salary bump to match.

So you deserve to have that level of respect, recognition, rewards that match the talent and value you bring to the table. Like this client here who said she was getting a 20% raise. So just think about what that could mean for your earning power over the course of the rest of your career.

Everything in this program will help make your thinking clear, your presence more credible, and make sure that people are asking, who is that? We need more of them. So Speak Like a Senior Leader. It is a hybrid coaching and training program and there are four aspects for four aspects to it that truly make it stand out. And as I’m going along here, please pop your questions here in the chat. We would love to answer them.

So first you get 13 weeks of weekly group coaching with me and my team. The program officially kicks off Dec September 10th, and we end the week of December 3rd. Each week we meet on Wednesdays at 3:00 PM Eastern for 90 minutes.

You have an opportunity to submit questions in advance. We give you direct guidance and feedback. So whether you are wondering what’s the best way to position this request so it doesn’t get shot down, how do I respond when I’m put on the spot for something I wasn’t prepared for? No matter what it is, you can get immediate specific feedback.

This is your weekly touchpoint to also make sure you’re applying what you’re learning from the lessons and the material from the curriculum. And if you can’t make it live, no worries. If you wanna revisit a script or a strategy, all good, you can download every call recording to keep. We also make searchable transcripts available so you can quickly reference different key phrases, examples, language you may want to reuse. And we also add all of our calls to a private podcast so you can easily listen in your car while you’re doing other things.

And so a really cool part of this program is that you get two coaches for the price of one, you get both me and my highly seasoned co-coach, Wendy. And Mira, you can start earlier.

We’ll talk about that in a minute. Wendy is a professional certified coach with, a certification through the International Coaching Federation. She’s been working besides me for over two years now. Many of you are familiar with her. If you’ve joined some of our other, uh, webinars and also some of our programs, she helps me develop new tools, serve all of our clients, and now she also oversees all of our one-on-one engagements.

So, suffice to say she has a ton of experience. She has over 600 coaching hours logged. She has been directly trained by me and, uh, she’s also a student of my work. That’s how she first came into my world. And she has 30 years of corporate experience, uh, largely in the tech field. So our clients always love saying they love having access to Wendy’s brain, her perspective, so you get access to her as well.

You also get the access to the entire Speak curriculum. These are bite-size on-demand lessons that take you through each of those five components in really in depth. We go above and beyond to make sure every lesson gives you clear, actionable, tactical strategies because you have enough theory and the lessons here will be dripped out as the program goes along.

You can follow along or we give you a recommended study plan that you can go through or you can just go through them at your own PLA own pace. And remember, we have our weekly live coaching calls. We also have our community, which I’ll mention in a moment, and that’s meant to be anchor touchpoints where you can bring your questions, you can workshop things further, you can get the support you need to keep moving forward.

And Wendy, if you wouldn’t mind just dropping that link in again. So in terms of the S shift, your style, this is where we’re talking about the fact that what lands with one person may totally mist with another. So you’ll decode how different personalities tick, how they process information, make decisions, respond to pressure.

You’ll be able to stop second guessing and hitting walls will give you exact words, angles to emphasize to avoid with certain people. So you can frame your messages to get faster. Buy-in, you can read a room, adjust your approach. You can move people to action more easily.

Like I said, you probably spend the majority of your work hours on calls in meetings, and we’re going to help you perfect that art of executive level delivery, including how to structure your ideas and our process for being able to adjust on the fly when you need to cut your 30 minute presentation down to 10. How to use silence and pacing for emphasis. We’ll talk about simple shifts and scripts to interject, to get your, get a word in edgewise to take back control when your agenda gets hijacked or people talk over you. How to sharpen your ability to think on your feet. I know that’s a big one for a lot of you, so that you can answer questions when you feel put on the spot without looking incompetent.

Doing great work is not enough. We have to be able to communicate our value in a way other people recognize. So we’ll talk about how to communicate your results, how to make some of those run of the mill updates much more powerful so people get the ripple effects of your work. We’ll talk about how do you, when things aren’t going well, ’cause you don’t always have wins to report, then what?

How do you talk about that in a strong way that inspires trust? How do you create those advocates, those internal champions? We go over, how do you, retool your one-on-ones so you become more of a partner to your boss? How do you run a skip level conversation with someone above your boss? How do you make the most of those casual run-ins with executives without frittering away that time.

On the a, articulating yourself in writing. We’ll talk about some of those subject line, uh, formatting tips that make sure your emails actually get open. Read, replied to how to upgrade your tone and timing. How, and this is important, this is one I don’t see talked about anywhere, but is huge, which is turning your thinking into influence, building assets, how to make your contributions travel further and keep working longer for you through recaps summaries, one pagers a lot more.

And then last we have keeping your composure. How do you disagree without being seen as com combative, raising challenges, risks, pushing back when you need to. How do you hold people more accountable to get the follow through you need? And how do you keep control of a situation, even when someone else is getting defensive? How do you disarm them?

Okay. We have so many different touch points for you to get support in this program. And another one of those is our private community space hosted on a platform called Circle. So this is your private members area. You can post questions, you can get access to daily coaching from Wendy and I. And this is your dedicated place to stay connected to one another, to ask questions, to get realtime coaching.

Because most importantly, you are not doing this alone. You are in a cohort of other mid to senior level professionals who get it, who are working towards the same goals, who can offer their perspectives, their experiences, their wisdom. So there’s this sense of comradery having people in your corner to celebrate and lift you up.

It really makes all the difference in your, progress. Okay. For those of you who are like, I wanna get started sooner than September 10th, we have a few things for you. As soon as you sign up, you unlock access to our entire Coaching Tools Library. So that means you can start getting results right now.

This is my vault of 80 plus different templates, scripts, resources built over the last 15 years. So we have things in there like an assertiveness cheat sheet that has specific phrases to make your point more clearly, more concisely, we have a list of strategic questions to ask in your next, next, all hands to look sharp prepared, more future focused.

We have a performance review, one pager template I’ll talk more about in the minute. Tons of different guides, templates, scripts in there for you. That’s just five, that’s just a handful of them. There’s over 75% more or 75 more, and we’re always adding new ones. And so this is what I wanted to talk about.

If you join between now and Friday, July 18th at 11:59 PM Eastern Time, you will also lock in access to a bonus that we are offering a live two-part intensive that is called the Performance Review Playbook. Okay? This is a live intensive first session is happening August 6th. The second session is happening August 20th at 3:00 PM Eastern, and both of them will be recorded.

If you can’t make it live, no worries. It’s gonna be posted for the inside of the classroom for you. So whether your review is coming up in a few weeks, a few months, we’re going to cover how do you articulate your impact. How do you position yourself for more advancement. And this bonus alone could pay huge dividends for the rest of your career.

Because if you think about it, you have at least one, if not two performance reviews every single year. So over the course of a 20 year career, that’s 20 to 40 critical moments. Where you could hear we’re promoting you, you could get handed a bigger, salary increase. You could find out you’re being named to a higher visibility project.

So we wanna make sure that you can prep with less time, that you can frame your wins as value add for the organization, that you can position your areas for development, your weaknesses as stepping stones to bigger opportunities.

If you added up everything inside Speak Like a Senior leader, the value would be over $11,000. But right now for this, this is our inaugural round and like I said, we’re pretty much sold out. I have not looked at how many people have joined while we’re, while we’re on this call here. But for this round we are offering it for only $2,000.

We have a three month and a six month payment plan available if you need to spread it out. You get immediate access to the coaching tools library when you enroll. You also, if you join by this Friday, get access to that performance review playbook session. Now this is the only cohort we are running this year.

When we run it in 2026. Again, the price will be going up in 2026 and I fully expect that this program will match the investment of my other, signature program called Resilient, which is currently $2,900. So I fully expect that will happen. So if you’re like, this is of interest to me, then now’s your time to jump in.

And so we want you to be able to say things like this. We want you to be able to say you are proud of how you have grown in terms of your public speaking skills, that your top brass is giving you kudos, and they are recognizing you. So what questions do you have, Wendy? Did any questions come in that we can answer here?

Lemme go over to my doc that you shared with me. What questions can we answer for you? 

Yeah, the questions are at the top of that. Great. Let me see 

here. 

Second page.

Uh, let’s see. Yeah, 

Mira asked, how can I start sooner? I really need to this to fight a difficult situation now. 

Yes. And so, Mira looks like you have joined, which is great. Um, and like, like we said, we have, you will get immediate access to the coaching tools library as soon as you join and we’ll have that performance review, review playbook session, and so you’ll get, you’ll be able to make progress on that right away.

Okay. John was asking, how many spots are you allowing? So John, when I hopped on today, we were 80% full. We had about, 15, 20 spots available. And again, I haven’t. I haven’t looked at my inbox now while we are on this call, so, I’m not totally sure how many more spots we have. Jose was asking could I get an invoice that states leadership development so I can have my company pay 100%.

So Jose, just email us at hello@melodywilding.com. Wendy, if you wouldn’t mind popping that in and Jose brings up a great point. Let me actually just pop over to that slide. Can I expense this through my company? Yes, 100%. Many companies cover programs like this, under professional development budgets, continuing education funds.

 We have in that, document that Wendy put here in the chat, if you scroll down to the q and a section, there will be a question about this and there are links in there for a letter to that you can copy and paste to send to your employer as well as the PDF that you can share with them giving the details of the program.

And once you enroll, if you need a receipt to request reimbursement, just email us, Wendy, put it in here low@melodywilding.com. We’re happy to help you with whatever documentation you need. So we’re happy to help with that. Okay. Uh, Wendy, would you mind reading some of the other questions that came in while I’m fussing with the slides here?

Actually, here we go. Rashmi was asking. Some questions. How many cohorts per session? What does hybrid mean? Some sessions live and some are, some are recorded. So, we only have one cohort running at a time. And what does hybrid mean? Hybrid means that there are asynchronous lessons for you to watch.

And like I said, you can go through those at your own pace. You can use our suggested, um, study plan that we will give you. and we have these live coaching elements, including the live weekly coaching calls, the community where you can get more support. 

All right. Let me answer, I’m gonna go through some of those questions in a moment. All right. So when does the program start? We officially start September 10th. Again, leading up to that, you’ll get immediate access to the coaching tools library. You will, also if you join by this Friday, 11:59 PM Eastern, you’ll also have access to that two part intensive in August, the Performance Review Playbook.

What happens after I enroll? When you go, so it’s just speak like a senior leader.com. On there you’ll find, the link to enroll. There’s different payment options. Select your preferred payment option, and the registration is very painless. It takes less than two minutes. You’ll receive a confirmation email from me along with instructions to set up your access to the Coaching Tools Library.

And then of course, in a couple of weeks as we get closer to that bonus session, we’ll send out details about that. And as September approaches, we’ll get you onboarded into our private community and be sending much more information.

Okay. When are the weekly calls? Our weekly calls are Wednesdays at 3:00 PM Eastern. They are 90 minutes. They are recorded. We have a lot of people joining that are like, you know what? I can’t make the co the coaching calls alive at all. And that’s no problem for me. ’cause I know I’m gonna get a ton of value listening to the recording because guess what? The questions you have are likely a lot of the questions other people have.

 And even if you can’t make it live, there are so many other ways to get support. Like inside of the community. Wendy and I are going to be in there every single day answering questions. So you have access to daily coaching that way as well.

 Who’s the right fit? So it’s probably pretty obvious if you’re the right fit. If you enjoyed this presentation and everything resonated with you, you’re the right fit. but if you are someone who is trusted to execute, you’re not seen as a leader. You want more of that crout clout, not sour grout clout and credibility.

Your communication isn’t landing in the way you want it to. You work in a very fast moving environment. That’s, that’s, something we’re seeing is you may have a lot of new stakeholders, new projects, shifting priorities that’s pretty normal for you, and you realize you need to make an impact and you need to do that quickly.

What’s the time commitment? So because of who this program is for, we know you are a busy professional and de in a demanding role, you probably have a big life outside of work as well. So the lessons are short. Usually they are under 10 minutes and the, there was that one weekly live call, 90 minute live calls. Everything is recorded. If you can’t make it, it is uploaded to our private podcast within 24 hours, or inside of the community, so you can easily catch up.

All right. What other questions do we have that I can answer? I saw one about Resilient and different offerings. So let me answer that one. Resilient is my other signature program. Maybe you’ve joined some of our trainings about that as well. Think of it this way, if we go back to that graph from the very beginning where I showed that professional power position graph, 

Okay. Here we are. Resilient is really about managing your own psychology. It is about that side of the equation. It’s all about getting out of your own way at work. So managing your doubts, your emotions, your insecurities, your fears, your energy. So they work for you instead of against you. And specifically in that program, we’re focused on sensitive strivers that are, those are people who are highly driven, high achieving.

Um. Highly driven, highly achieving, and highly sensitive. Sorry, I have been saying a lot of words today. So in other words, Resilient really lays the internal foundation that makes confident communication possible. ’cause we like to say, I could give you the best scripts and tips in the world for communicating with more polish and presentation, but if you’re emotionally hijacked and you are become so emotionally dysregulated in the moment that you need to address that first.

So on the other hand, speak like a senior leader tackles the influencing other people’s psychology piece. So this is for you if you want more advanced, practical, tactical, teaching and coaching. Very focused on the communication skills. So if your, it is a better fit for you, if your main goal is to speak with more clarity, authority, impact.

Um, so really ask yourself this. Do I know what I want to say and how I want to show up, but I’m struggling with the confidence to follow through on that? Start with Resilient or do I feel emotionally solid? I have confidence in what I have to offer, but I wanna sharpen how I come across. Then speak like a senior leader.

 I’ve also gotten some questions of, is this just material from your book? Um, no. The speak system is a new framework that goes far beyond anything I’ve covered and trust yourself managing up both in terms of breadth and depth. So my book offers foundational concepts for everything from building confidence, navigating your upward relationships, but Speak Like a Senior Leader is specifically designed for advanced communication challenges that you as a mid to senior level professional faces.

And so, of course, this program provides hands-on coaching, real-time feedback. The, we can get into more complexity that in a book you just simply can’t address. So the depth, the specificity of both the tools, the application, the coaching, makes it a completely different and ultimately much more effective experience than just reading about the concepts.