Okay. Welcome, welcome, welcome, everybody. Say hello in the chat. As you’re coming on, let us know where you are watching from today, and let me make sure I have that in front of me. It’s good to have you all here. Fantastic. Okay. As we are getting you all settled here into Zoom, say hi in the chat. Let us know where you’re joining us from today.

Hey, Sarah, Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey. Hello, San Diego, California. Uh, those of you who are here from overseas, thank you ’cause I know it is later in the day for you. So, hello from Nigeria, Canada, Germany, London, Canada, Des Moines, Massachusetts. Yes. Chile, Chicago, New York City. Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody.

We have a great event for you in store today. We are talking about how to earn up to 200 K more in 2026, specifically five steps to speak like a senior leader. So as we are getting into this today, keep the chat open as you’re coming on, say hello in the chat. Let us know where you are joining from today.

But keep the chat open. You are going to get the most out of this time if you are interacting with us. You’re letting us know what is resonating with you. We’re gonna have questions for you along the way, so make sure you keep that open as we’re going along. Okay, first is, first I am Melody Wilding.

Welcome. I am a two time author. This is my newest book, Managing Up. If you have read the book, let us know in the chat. I always love to hear from you. Maybe you’ve also read my first book that is called Trust Yourself. And uh, I am a therapist by training. That’s how I started my career. I’ve been a human behavior professor for the last decade.

I am a weightlifter. I am a cat mom to two very mischievous and very hungry right now cats named Hudson and Morris. So my fellow New Jersey people may recognize that those are two counties in New Jersey that they are named after. And uh, I am honored and thrilled that you have all taken time outta your busy schedule, especially here at the end of the year to join us.

I wanna hear in the chat, are you an OG or are you new to our, to our world here? And what you do. If you’re an og, put that in the chat if you’ve attended one of our events before. If you’re new type new. All right, we got a, we got a good mix here. Hey, Matt, good to, good to see you all. Kristen. Ratesh. Good to have you, Andrea, Maddie.

All right. I love this. A good mix. A good mix. Good to have you all. Now, today, what you see is this, as I said, I’m an award-winning executive coach. I speak to companies worldwide. I have over half a million students on LinkedIn Learning and over a dozen courses on LinkedIn Learning. I’m actually heading there next week in a couple of days to film my next course with them.

I write for HBR, CNBC, Fast Company Forbes. You may have found me or gotten to my work from one of those articles. This is all what you see today, but you know, like most of you, it did not start out this way. I do not come from money. I, neither of my parents had corporate jobs. They actually both worked for themselves.

They did not graduate college. I am an only child, so I never had brothers, sisters who could go before me, who could show me the ropes about how things worked. And all of this left me feeling like I was dropped into my career without a handbook. I was just dropped into the corporate world. And it felt a little like everybody else had attended this secret class about how to position themselves, how to speak in a certain way, how to articulate what they were trying to offer or what they wanted, how to navigate the different politics and dynamics.

And I felt like I was fumbling through all of this. I wonder if anybody else has had a similar experience, if you had but me in the chat. I don’t think I’m alone in this. And as a result of that, as a result of feeling like I didn’t. Grow up in this corporate world. I actually didn’t know really what a salary was until I was probably in college, because that just was not a concept we had in my family.

’cause we had our own businesses. So as a result, there were so many points in my career where I felt like maybe you feel right now. I felt overlooked. I felt undervalued, very frustrated because it was like I couldn’t break through. I had degrees, I had a lot of expertise. I had a lot that I wanted to say and value that I knew deep down that I could offer.

And I would be sitting there in a meeting trying to contribute my ideas and something wasn’t clicking and other people would say pretty much the same thing. And suddenly everybody was nodding along, right. It felt like everyone had these cheat codes or these keys to the castle, and I was doing things on the fly.

I was trying to act the part. I was second guessing every word I was saying. It seems like yes, a lot of you can relate to that. Yeah, Jennifer was saying, uh, my dad was a professor. My mom was a librarian. I had no clue how the corporate world worked. My saving grace for me personally was my background in psychology, and the day that I realized that the corporate world, the work world, it is just humans operating in a system with the same invisible expectations, the same norms, the same dynamics as any other relationship.

That was when I felt like the, the world opened up to me. I saw things more quickly. More clearly, rather that the same psychological principles that governed behavior. When I saw people in the hospital, in the clinic, it was the exact same dynamics driving people in every workplace interaction.

And this underscores the fact that influence is not just about what you say, it is about how people experience you and the people who are taken seriously in the workplace, they know how to shape perception on purpose. They are not winging it. They are also not just naturally confident or gifted. They’re not just naturally bold or outgoing. They are using a combination of tactics and these psychological principles, so.

They’re using this to make their thinking clear, their presence more credible, their message undeniably worth listening to. It’s this combination of the tactics and the psychology that is key. So that’s exactly what we’re gonna talk about today and I know some folks are asking, uh, if there will be a replay, their absolutely will.

We’ll be sending that out tomorrow. So no worries if you have to jump off. Here’s what we’re going to cover today. We are going to help you pinpoint exactly what’s going wrong if you are not commanding the credibility and respect that you deserve at this point in your, your career, your background should entail even if you are already doing the work of someone one, two levels up.

We’re going to discuss and decode what it really means when you are told you need more executive presence. Who has gotten that feedback? We’re, we’re in performance review season, which is actually also you need more executive presence season. So some of you may be hearing this right now in, in conversations you’re having and it has nothing to do with being louder, with grabbing the mic in a conversation with wearing nicer clothes.

Has nothing to do with that. And most importantly, we’re going to go through small tweaks you can make today to articulate yourself with more polish, more precision so that people are saying, Hey, we need your input on this. We need you looped in earlier. So you are going to get my five step system that our clients at top Fortune 500 companies, they are using right now, they’re using right now to get tapped for bigger opportunities to position themselves to get paid up to 40% more.

Yes, in this economy. I’m not talking about last year or months ago. I’m talking about Q4 2025. As we are recording this live right now, you can see here these are screenshots from two clients. We have heard from recently. One telling us they’re getting us a, getting a 43% salary increase.

Another just received a long awaited promotion at the end of October. We’ve had people make big internal moves to global roles. The list goes on and on. And here is the very, very exciting news. During this training, we are officially opening the doors to my program, Speak Like a Senior Leader. This is my wildly popular bestselling coaching and training program.

It shows you exactly how to become a crisp, clear, confident, executive level communicator long before you have the title. I know we have some of our current, current students as well as people who are graduating out of the program. And so if you are here, say hi in the chat, we would love to hear how the program has been for you.

People always value hearing from folks that have actually gone through the program. But if you’re joining us also thank you for being here. if you think you want a spot in this program, you definitely wanna stay till the end. We are definitely going to sell out. 

We’re already over halfway full and we’re just opening the doors today and that’s because we’ve so many people continuing in the program. and so the last time we opened the doors to the public, they filled up in about 48 hours. And we have a special bonus for all of you if you join by the end of day Monday, December 8th. Okay, so now is the best time to join ’cause you will get access to that bonus. We’ll have plenty of time today to get your questions answered.

Now if you are like most of our clients, you are here because you wanna do a few things. You wanna be able to walk into a meeting with your executives without your heart beating out of your chest or sweating through your clothes because you know how to handle their pushback. You know that’s not gonna throw you off course, and you’ll be ruminating about it for three days. You wanna be able to send one email that gets an immediate response instead of having to follow up with people and say, Hey, just checking in on this. Any update you want to get answers, approvals fast because people respect you when they hear from you and you want, you don’t wanna get buried in their later folder and have to be that person who feels like they’re begging or proving themselves to get any time from those important decision makers.

You wanna present. Complex ideas. Many of you do very, uh, technical or just very involved work. And you have complex ideas that you need to be able to distill down to different stakeholders. Often people that have no idea about the nuts and bolts of your actual work, and you wanna do that quickly so that it doesn’t take you 10 hours of prep.

And in a way that’s engaging because we’re fighting against a lot of distractions now. You wanna be able to disagree with your boss or other leaders in a way that makes them say, okay, I see your point. Instead of you getting labeled as difficult. And to articulate your results, your decisions with more clarity so that people actually understand the thought process that went into them, the value behind them.

Now tell me if this sounds familiar. You are confident in the value you have to offer, that you have to bring to the table. You’ve got the track record, you’ve got results, you have receipts. You probably see yourself and others see you as the reliable workhorse. You have been busting your butt for years, but there is this disconnect where, as I mentioned with my story before, you’re not getting through.

People are, dismissing what you say or maybe they’re greeting you with even more, peppering you with even more questions. You share a solid recommendation, but it doesn’t get approved. You’ve got the title, but you’re not treated like someone at that level. Is anybody experiencing that? Yeah. Tom, Suzanne. Amanda, Kristen. Yeah.

It’s because of this. We call this the gravitas gap. You are not hitting a ceiling because of your talent. You are stuck because of how you are coming across. The gravitas gap. It’s this very confusing space between your actual capability and then how much authority people assign to you.

And in the eyes of decision makers. That perception, that is what makes all of the difference. And it’s not necessarily that you don’t belong in these rooms you do belong. But the way you are presenting yourself and articulating yourself may not reflect that, at least not consistently. So here’s some telltale signs.

You are in the gravitas gap. You can tell us how many of these, let’s see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

You relate to, you get looped in late after a decision has already been made. You’re not necessarily the one consulted on the strategy. You’re the one who is tasked with executing it. You spend hours over preparing ’cause you wanna say just the right thing, yet you still walk away from that conversation or that meeting feeling like you didn’t quite nail it.

You’re told you’re not quite ready or we need to see more from you for that next level role, but no one can actually pinpoint what that means precisely. As I said, you’re asked to execute when you really should be the one leading the discussion. Because you have so many years, you have such a depth of expertise in something you are praised for, not necessarily your leadership qualities, but being supportive, being the team member who goes above and beyond, but not being the person who is bold, visionary, who is strategic.

Yeah, and this is the most frustrating part. You’re doing everything right on paper. You’re like, I’m trying to be the good student. I’m trying to get the A pluses here, but you’re still not getting those career defining opportunities. Yeah. Amanda, Jessica, were saying 100%. Uh, Tom said, thank you for educating us, us peasants.

Well, Tom, not, not quite, but I appreciate what you’re saying in the humor. And here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I wish the work world was meritocracy, but unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how brilliant your insights are if you can’t pitch them in a way that people give you what you want.

More money, more resources, more headcount, whatever it is, doesn’t matter how prepared you think you are for promotion, if you don’t actually sound like you’re already operating at that level. And if you just sound like a doer and an executor, it doesn’t matter how much credit you deserve. If you aren’t actually building career capital from those wins, you can perfect your talking points all you want.

But if you get in the room in that moment and you fumble, you’re not able to deliver it with crispness, you’re outta luck, right? And your staff, your team can love you, but you may not have that same sway or influence with stakeholders, the people across the chain, across and up, frankly, the chain of command who hold the keys to whatever is next for you.

You’ve probably tried a lot of things too. If you’re like most people in our world, you’re very thoughtful, you’re into professional and personal development to some degree. Put in the chat what you have tried. I’m always interested. These are the things we hear.

Right. I’ve, I’ve done the power posing. I’ve done the deep breaths. I journal about my fears. I’ve listened. I’ve read so many more books than I can count. I listened to all the podcasts. I’ve done seminars. I put my emails in the Chat GpT, and I ask it to sound better. Right? Am I right? Anything else? Yeah. Someone said, who was that? Tom said, I script things beforehand. The deep breaths. I’ve watched what Jade said. I watch myself on video. Yep. All of the things right? All of the tactics.

The problem with all of this is that it starts to become this very scattered shot approach where we’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping that one of these things will stick, and we get these little tidbits, gimmicks.

It’s like putting a bandaid on a broken bone. It’s not gonna solve it. You can master the perfect handshake, you can nail your eye contact, you can have a really powerful opening line. But again, like I was saying, if 30 seconds later you’re asked a question you weren’t ready for, you can have the most perfect opening line, then you start stumbling and say, um, that’s a great question. I’m, I’m, I’m not really sure. I’ll have to get back to you on that. Right? You’ve blown the whole situation.

So instead of this scattered shot approach, you need a system, not just a random collection of tips and tricks that may work for one fleeting moment, not AI that you become dependent on. Right? We hear about this a lot now, like AI brain rot, because we’re learn, we’re getting conditioned almost to not be able to think for ourselves.

And guess what? AI can’t be there with you in the moment when you are put on the spot. So you need an approach that shapes how you are perceived across all of the touchpoints you have, meetings, presentations, one-on-ones. And one that you can feel confident and good about. So I wanna get into just that.

This is our proven Five Step Speak System and this is gonna help you do exactly that, exactly what we’ve been talking about so far. It’s going to set you on the path to become more credible, more clear, and to closing that gravitas gap. Once you are able to execute this speak system, it really becomes more of an identity shift.

And if you are here in, or if you have been and Speak Like a Senior Leader and you are here and you are open to sharing, I’ve heard this from so many people in the program that this was, yes, I learned how to elevate my communication, but I totally changed how I see myself. And, what it means is no more replaying conversations, wondering if you said the wrong thing. Those 2:00 AM panicked wake up because you’re concerned your deck is a disaster, and you’re like, oh my gosh, maybe I should just redo the whole thing. Right? You will have structures to fall back on and follow. You will stop wasting mental energy, resenting your colleagues because you are finally getting the credit you are due, instead of it going to them.

You’ll earn more. Because decision makers get, they actually grasp the value that you are creating. They want to keep you happy. You’ll have greater leverage ’cause you have more of that social capital. You’ll have greater leverage to negotiate for the things you want. Headcount, flexibility. You won’t be working so many hours ’cause you won’t have to prove yourself.

And you’ll have the satisfaction. I, I, I don’t think this gets talked about enough. The satisfaction, the sense of impact that comes from someone looking to you for your opinion. Someone treating you more like a trusted advisor rather than just the subordinate and not having to fight for your seat at the table, not feeling like you have to work twice as hard as everyone else for half of the credit.

And perhaps most importantly, you’ll have influence. Influence. This gives you the best career insurance that there is, which is options. Influence gives you options because when you have that, you have strong relationships. You start attracting champions and allies who are willing to open doors for you, who are willing to make exceptions, to bend rules, to say things like, well, let me see what I can do to make this work.

Right? You start to insulate yourself from layoffs, not because you work so hard. Because you are the person leadership can’t afford to lose. They’re like, well, we have to keep them. We can’t afford to lose them. Right? Executives start training you, as I said, more like a peer and a partner. You’re no longer just the subordinate.

You’re no longer hearing about things. Only as they are announced you are pulled into the big initiatives before anybody else. So just like you can see some of our Speak Like a Senior Leader clients here, getting opportunities to prevent present to their senior VPs, being appointed leads of projects, getting their programs endorsed, people bringing opportunities to them and saying, Hey, you should really apply for this chief of staff role. Getting buy-in for multimillion dollar projects. This is huge.

So now let’s dive into each part of this speak system. And what I wanna do is show you the biggest missteps you may be making in each. Because there are some subtle, patterns and actions that you may be accidentally doing and undermining yourself as a result, even when you don’t mean to, or you think you’re, you think you’re being thoughtful or doing the right thing. Right.

The first step in the speak system is to shift your style every day. I am sure pretty much all of you here you are juggling so many different personalities, priorities, perspectives. You have your peers, your manager, your skip level executives, cross-functional partners, vendors, clients, like the list goes on and on of the different personalities you have to manage.

You may have your CFO who only cares about how something impacts revenue, and they really want the numbers. You may have an operations manager who really wants the nitty gritty step-by-step details. Or a C-suite executive who has patience for like a 30 second blurb at most before they cut you off. My guess you can tell me if this is true in the chat.

My guess is you try to keep all of these people happy. So you try to cover every single angle in the same breath thinking that will make you sound prepared, but instead you end up rambling and watering down your point ’cause you’re trying to please everyone. You either are super technical and in the weeds or very high level and in both approaches you’re, you’re trying to sound smart, you’re trying to make yourself valuable, but it’s missing the mark or you just default to what’s comfortable for you.

Right. Under pressure, you may, talk in too much detail. You may soften your language, you may stay vague ’cause you don’t wanna make promises you can’t keep, or you’re really not sure what that person’s going to respond to, right? So you just, you get in your own head and you start going. Someone was telling me the other day, I just start telling stories in circles.

With all of this, what ends up happening is we’re talking past people or we’re talking at them instead of getting through to them. There’s a difference between talking at or past someone and getting through to them. And the difference is this.

You fix all of this by learning to operate at the right altitude.

So what do we mean by that? The best senior level communicators, we often think the best communicators are consistent. They are not. They are adaptive. They know how to adjust the level of their message to depending on who’s in the room. So I want you to think about it little like flying an airplane. When you are speaking like a senior leader, you know you have the situational awareness to know when you need to hover up high and give the 30,000 foot view, you need to stay in the strategy. The why does this matter? You also know when to dip down, when to get into the weeds, to give the details, the steps, the metrics.

When you do this, you’re not changing the core of your content. You’re not changing what you say. You’re changing how you talk about it based on your audience’s vantage point, their priorities, their pain points, their level of involvement.

We often get so fixated on what we want to say or what we’re supposed to say. We totally overlook the question, what does my audience need to hear? That’s the real question you should be asking yourself. And that is a big, big part of what separates senior level communicators from just very competent managers and employees. It is that skill of being able to translate the same information across different contexts and to do that quickly and skillfully.

So let me give you an example of this to drive home how really important this can be. I wanna tell you a story. I’m gonna call this client Molly. She, is a chief people officer at a very fast growing company, and she was someone who I’m sure like many of you here, she prided herself on being a servant leader.

She, was very well known for her empathy. She cared a lot about her team. She always went the extra mile. But her relationship with her boss, I’ll call him Alex, and Alex, happened to be the CEO. It was becoming just more and more and more strained. Molly would hop on check-in calls with, with Alex, and she would have her report’s ready. She would be ready to talk about employee engagement, turnover rates, recruitment strategies. And Alex would just kind of check out halfway through and he would cut her off and he would say, you, you know, can you just tell me what the point is here? All of this came to a head and their relationship when one day Alex told Molly, he told her point blank, these are verbatim what he told her.

He said, I’m not sure if you’re in over your head, incompetent, or both. Like talk about punch to the gut. And so you might be wondering, well, I bet she just quit. She did not. She did. To her credit, she did not.

The key that changed everything for Molly was realizing that her and Alex had totally opposed communication styles.

Her natural default was to highlight the risks, to give lots of detail, to talk about the personalities of everyone involved and how they were feeling and how morale was going. And Alex, the CEO, he was the exact opposite. He wanted to understand everything in terms of results. How was this giving us a competitive advantage?

Speed. So Molly didn’t change what she was presenting to him. She focused on highlighting the results, how she packaged and presented what she was doing. So instead of her saying, well, I’m really worried about morale because we’re hiring so quickly, she would instead start with the bottom line. New hires are not getting up to speed and that’s costing us, it’s, it’s costing us extra time and money. And so it’s because of our current onboarding process. I can cut it to five days if we make these changes, is that okay with you? Much more matter of fact, much more, here’s what I need from you. Give me a yes or no, let me go.

Rather than this kind of, well, people are feeling a bit unsettled. Can we talk about that and explore how we might make this different? Right? It totally different approach. Got her totally different results.

So when she started making these tweaks, slowly but surely, Alex’s attitude towards her, it started to shift and he stopped seeing her as this person who was too focused on feelings and too in the weeds and not decisive. And he started to see her as someone who would drive strategy, who is driving business results. And so, as you can see here, this is a message Molly sent me. She ended that year with a bonus that was worth 1.45 times her salary. We’re talking a over six figure bonus. And later when her and I were, were chatting about this, I was like that, that was amazing. And she said to me, actually, what was more meaningful to me is I don’t feel demeaned anymore. I feel like a valuable contributor. He sees me more as a trusted advisor.

Now, put in the chat for me. How many hours a week would you estimate you are spending in meetings? I’m gonna guess it’s a lot for many of you. Yeah. A lot of you are saying 30. Yeah. 25. Too many, right?

This is where visibility is built and your presence gets evaluated at scale. Which is why the second part of our speak system is presenting with poise. You probably spend hours right now perfecting your slides, refining your talking points. And when it’s your time to go, you start with the background because that’s how you started thinking about the problem. You walk through your analysis and what you considered because that’s how you got to your conclusion. You present three, five different options because you considered all of those and you wanna show, you know your stuff. You put a lot of time into this. Am I getting that right?

All of that thoroughness, which probably served you incredibly well as you were building your expertise. When you get to a mid point in your career, it starts to work against you because you are narrating your thought process and, people can’t follow your train of thought very clearly.

You are asking your audience to do the mental work of figuring out what matters most. They’re trying to follow you down this bunny trail instead of you picking them up and delivering them to the destination. And so when you are narrating your thought process, people get lost. They don’t know what to be paying attention to.

Who’s realizing, oh my gosh, I do this. This is me. I do this. Just type me in the chat if you’re realizing, oh my gosh, this actually is something I do. So instead of, we’re gonna put the long rambling explanations aside, and I want you to focus on communicating in head in headlines.

So what do I mean? This is the difference between saying something like, well. We’re having some challenges with the timeline, and there’s also some budget constraints that we have to look at, but I haven’t talked to those stakeholders yet, so that’s still up in the air a little bit. And I’m going to be looping back with them next week, although I’m not sure what their perspective will be on that.

Uh, plus we have some issues with the scope that the team has raised. I think this one is more important than this other one. So, uh, we might wanna prioritize that. But I know we also have this outstanding question about X, Y, Z, right?

You’re like, what we, what’s happening right now?

Now compare that to saying we have three issues to resolve today, timeline, budget, and scope. I’m gonna go through a plan for how we could tackle each of those, and then I’ll open it up for discussion.

Boom, right? So much more crisp. So again, it doesn’t matter how brilliant your analysis is when people can’t follow your logic. If they have to work too hard to parse apart what you are saying and what the main point is, they start questioning whether there is logic.

So you could put a ton of work into something, but the way you are presenting it make actually makes people question about whether thought went into it in the first place, which is the exact opposite of what you want. And so they start to wonder if you’re just talking out loud, hoping you arrive at a key point. People get really frustrated when that happens.

So it is essential you are coming to the table with a point of view. With a point of view. Now I know you may hear me say that and think, well, melody, I, I’m afraid I won’t say the right thing. I’m afraid my point of view won’t be the correct one. I hear this all the time. We got a lot of perfectionists who hang out in our world. Yes. Many of you are saying, that is totally me. Here’s the thing.

Waffling not having a clear point of view that kills your credibility faster than you stating your perspective and allowing that to be a starting point.

And here’s what I mean. We have worked with thousands of clients on both sides of the table. So we have helped, we have helped people exactly like you. Most of our clients are mid-level, mid-career. we work with a lot of people who are already at the senior level who are not being perceived that way.

So we work with people who are wanting to work on their communication skills for themselves, but we’re also the close, confident confidant rather to C-level executives. I have worked with, you know, CEOs of publicly traded companies, so, we see the other side of the coin as well. We know what they are evaluating you on and what they are looking for.

And recently I was talking to an executive at a tech company. They have about 3 million users of their product. And she was telling me about how they had let go of five people, five, mid-level managers in 2025. Four of those people were very talented, were very smart, but they could not be decisive in their communication.

And that’s why they were let go because these managers, they would come to senior leadership meetings with proposals, but instead of having a point of view and saying, I believe this is what we should do, they would present all of the options. Well, we could do A, which has benefits, B, C, and D, and that solves this problem.

But we should really be considering this as well. And just no clarity, no decisiveness. And when my client is, one of the, one of the executives would ask, okay, well what do you think we should go with? The person would continue to waffle and say, well, this option has this upside, but then again, we may wanna do XY.

They could not give a straight answer. So from the employee’s perspective, for these managers, they thought they were being collaborative and thorough by, by presenting this. Right. But from, from the executives perspective, they were not delivering what was asked. And when the executives pushed for a decision, these people would get defensive.

They would feel singled out, they would feel like they were being put on the spot unfairly and my client would tell me, well, you can’t make a decision. Now, we’ve given you weeks to research this and think about this. You’ve had all of the data in front of you. If you can’t do that now, how are you going to handle the other higher pressure situations that come with the next level?

And so they were not let go because they had made the wrong choice or presented the wrong idea. They were let go because they were indecisive. That’s how important this is.

Alright, onto the E in the speak system, which is express your impact. The single biggest misstep here is that you are communicating activities instead of outcomes.

You are probably doing very important work every single day, but the way you talk about it makes it just sound like a really big to-do list. Like this grocery list of, well, I did this and then I finish that and then I talk to this person.

It completely misses the business significance of any of those things. It sounds like you just check the boxes. You are communicating what you are doing, but not why it matters.

Again, you’re too focused on the activities, the things you did, but not the outcomes that those actions produced. And that’s the problem because when you talk about your work in terms of process, instead of the actual end impact, that’s how you stay stuck in that reliable work horse territory that many of you find yourself in.

That’s when you stay stuck, seen as the doer, the one who you get things done, you move projects ahead. And here’s the worst part about this trap here, is that you, when you make yourself indispensable in your current role, you make yourself unpromotable to the next one. I wanna say that again. When you make yourself indispensable in your current role, you make yourself unpromotable to the next one.

Because when you are the doer, when you get everything done, when you are the one swooping into fix everything, your manager, the decision makers around you, they panic at the thought of promoting you. Because if Wendy or Sarah, if they move up, then who’s going to handle all of the execution? Right?

Decision makers don’t just wanna know what is happening. They want to know what it means, what it means for them, for the business.

This is the skill of sensemaking. Sensemaking. You are connecting the dots for them. So all of that important work thinking you are doing behind the scenes, setting priorities, managing trade-offs, rallying the team. It doesn’t just sound like project management, then it ladders up to more important business outcomes. Every time you connect your work to competitive advantage, growth opportunities, revenue generation, whatever may be efficiency. Every time you demonstrate that you think beyond your immediate scope, you are showing that you are one of them. You’re showing you’re already thinking like an executive. And that makes you more top of mind when opportunities do arise. And better yet, another great part of this is there can be a halo effect that starts to take hold because you build credibility beyond your boss. And that is crucial. If you wanna get out of this indispensable and unpromotable conundrum that can happen.

Your promotion, your stretch project, expanding your scope, growing your team. That’s usually decided by multiple people. It’s becoming rarer and rarer that your manager can make those decisions in a silo. And so you need those other allies and advocates who know about your work, who see the value you bring, and people begin seeking you out when this happens, too.

So perfect example of this is a client, I’ll call her Claudia. She works at Google. And at the time, Claudia worked on the data side. She was always creating new tools, new dashboards, calculators that people across the business could use to improve how they were managing, how they were retaining and attracting new accounts to the business.

But in meetings, the way she would talk about this was, well, I created this tool. It pulls data from a bunch of different sources, or I spent some time optimizing the reporting. All true, all from a technical perspective may be impressive. None of that communicates the end business value. So we worked on something in the program.

This, there’s this concept we talk about of scope and scale. And so when we focus on scope and scale, for example, the way she talk about this would change to, well, this dashboard has the potential to identify up to $2 million in at-risk accounts that we can now reach out to and save. Or this, calculator, it can help us reduce some of these manual calculations by, I would approximate three hours a week. So you as business development, that focuses you up to work on higher value things. And over time all of these pieces come together. She was identified for a high potential program that gave her exposure to higher level mentors, higher level leadership.

You can see here, just a few weeks ago, literally just a few weeks ago, uh, she landed an incredibly competitive global role as part of an internal transfer, which is amazing. Okay. We’ve talked about shifting your style, presenting with poise, expressing your impact.

The A in the speak system is for articulate in writing. This is the most overlooked. It’s a huge missed opportunity. We are sending hundreds of messages every day, emails, slacks, texts. We’re putting together decks and summaries, and every message shapes how people see you. The people you are also trying to influence, they get hundreds of messages a day, right?

Just think about your inbox. Now, think about someone who’s two levels above you. You’re competing against all of that. And even if your message gets opened, it’s an even higher bar to get it responded to, let alone than acted upon. AI is making this all so much worse. There’s so much junk out there.

People can produce so much more communication that is lower quality. And I don’t know about all of you, but I certainly feel like two clear sentences is so much more valuable than two paragraphs of just AI slop. Right? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but AI has this, ability to make everything twice the length it should be in terms of explaining it.

And so when we think about articulate and writing, we need to optimize for the time starved decision maker. The people you are trying to reach, they are in back-to-back meetings. They are scanning emails between calls. They’re reading messages on their phone. They don’t have time to decode what you are asking. They need to understand your entire message in under 15 to 30 seconds.

So that means, direct subject lines, scannable structure, headers, white space. Every message needs a clear call to action. Not this vague, well, we should really consider, or the team would benefit from exploring blah, blah, blah. And definitely not let me know your thoughts on this. No, no, no.

What are you asking for? Are you asking for approval? A time to meet a specific date, right? If you are not specific, you will get nothing. So I wanna talk about one of our clients, Anocha, you’re gonna hear from her on my podcast very soon. She was someone who had very strong technical writing skills, but someone who would spend five, six hours preparing for an executive interaction.

She wanted to cover every possible angle. She would put together these very well crafted business cases. She was in this cycle of over preparing and then over explaining. Which made her feel smaller and it was exhausting. And all of that effort actually made her feel less confident, not more confident.

Has anybody ever been there? So she started applying the tactics we teach inside of the program to make her writing more concise, to make her requests more clear. And because she had frameworks to rely on, she has cut her prep time down from six hours to just one to two hours. That’s four to five hours every time that she can redirect now to more important work that she wasn’t getting to before.

The intangible things, building relationships, doing more of the strategy, and instead of having this back and forth, that takes weeks. She’s getting approval, she’s getting buy-in in days, and she’s being brought into projects. So much earlier to give her input. Leadership is reaching out to her personally because now they trust her perspective.

All right, the last component of our speak system is keep your composure. I bet you are fielding questions from multiple directions. You are given incomplete information. You are working under time pressure. You have competing priorities from 10 different people around you. The stakes are higher. The people around you are also probably more stressed themselves.

And when that happens, emotions flare, right? And this is where most people crack. They revert to their old patterns, when the stress gets high. They start overthinking overexplaining. They get defensive. They, treat every question like someone’s quizzing you and you just freeze in the moment. Those people who speak like a senior leader, they understand that keeping composure, going back to what I said before, it’s not having all the right answers.

It is about staying calm enough and in the moment enough to figure out what is really being asked, or what is really behind the request, and responding to that. And that is the crucial aha here.

You are probably answering questions at face value. That is a mistake. Most questions are really requests for one of three things.

Reassurance. Tell me, this is under control.

Guidance. Tell me what we should do here.

Or action. What do I need to do?

Okay. Reassurance. Guidance. Or action.

So when an exec asks you about, financial projections, they’re asking, do I need to prepare the board for bad news or not? That’s what they’re really asking. They’re not asking you every assumption you made in the model. So you have permission to skip right to what the question really is to say, we’re to reassure you, we’re on track to hit our goals. I’ll flag anything if it changes or the budget’s looking good, no surprises. We go live on Monday, so your team can start planning around that.

And when you can keep your composure, you are able to disagree by saying, I see things differently. You are able to articulate your perspective without letting the defensiveness get the better of you. And this is important. You are not just a passive participant in situations.

You are a steward of situations. Here’s what I mean. Rashmi has done this beautifully. She is a program manager at a large company who is leading a brand new, very complex project. A lot of stakeholders worldwide. Before speak like a senior leader, she would be passive in meetings, even when she was leading. She would let them drag on end endlessly. If someone went on a tangent, she didn’t really know how to jump in and bring things back, things would go in circles. But now when things go off course, she knows how to step in without stepping on toes. She said, I have calm command. I have that ability to guide the discussion without being controlling or dominating. And most people wait for permission to do this. They think, well, I don’t wanna overstep those other people have more power.

But you are being assessed on whether you can handle complexities and the ambiguity, the personalities around you. ’cause as you go to higher levels, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about managing egos and other people.

So they wanna see, can you steer a room of people that have opinions? Can you steward them towards a productive outcome, even when you are not the most senior or seasoned person in that room. And Rashmi has done this so well that her boss actually gave her this feedback. He said, I love how you’re framing things now. Because her ability to keep her composure, to keep control of the situation, that is what’s getting noticed.

Okay, so there you have it.

Our five steps to speak, like a senior leader. Tell me in the chat, which one are you saying, oh, that’s, that’s an area I need to work on. You can just type the first letter.

S-P-E-A-K, shift your style, present with poise, express your impact, articulate in writing. Okay. We got a mix.

A lot of Es. Someone was saying all of them, just the whole thing. A lot of Ks. Okay. Amazing. Now you, we’ve gone through the whole speak system and you might be thinking, okay, this all makes sense. I have no idea where to start. This all feels so overwhelming.

You might be thinking, all right, I can see what I need to do differently, but I know myself to know that I may fall back into old patterns when things get busy or stressful.

I can see what I need to do differently, but how do I actually implement this day to day? And what do I do if I screw up if someone says something I’m not expecting if I make a mistake? When you have the right operating system for these types of moments, all you need to do is shift in these five areas we talked about.

You do not need to turn yourself into a raving extrovert overnight, if you’re not one. You do not to need to become this, McKinsey level communicator. You just need specific frameworks and strategies that make these changes feel natural and automatic. So I wanna ask you.

Do you see what is possible for you when you’re able to make these shifts we talked about today? You can type yes in the chat. It doesn’t matter whether you are someone who is going from an individual contributor to a management role. You are in mid-level role and you’re trying to break through to the next level. Or you’re already in more of a senior position and you really wanna refine. You wanna polish, you wanna hone your presence and perception. And here’s the thing I see a lot of you are saying yes, amazing, because if not now, then when, right? We are standing on the edge of a new year so close. If you want different results in 2026, you have to be committed to doing something differently.

You have to be willing to put your foot down and say, no, I am no longer willing to watch those less qualified people get ahead while I stay in promotion purgatory for yet another year? No. I am not willing to leave yet another meeting, beating myself up for, I should have said something. And I’m not willing to let my overthinking steal my sleep, drain my confidence, crush the enjoyment I used to feel for my work.

And I hate to break it to all of you, but things are only getting more competitive. You know, we see all the news about potential layoffs that are coming. We hear about AI multiple times a day. Everything is getting more scrutinized. And so what I’m hearing from my clients is I need to be on my toes about making sure I’m delivering value.

And the thing about the gravitas gap is it’s like a ditch. The longer you stay in it, the deeper it gets, the harder it gets to pull out of it, because people have created a certain perception of you.

So the question isn’t whether you are capable of showing you can operate at the next level. The question for all of you is whether you are ready to stop, hoping, wishing that things magically change on their own, and instead put yourself in the driver’s seat. And so if that is you, if you want that latter option, speak like a senior leader is exactly where you need to be. As I said, this is my highly acclaimed, it is my most popular coaching and training program.

It is designed to give you all of the tools and comprehensive support to communicate in a way so that decision makers trust you with bigger projects, bigger budgets, and yes, in many cases, give you that really nice salary bump to match. Sarah, my team member has put, the link in the chat. We have officially opened the doors here, and if you will be joining us.

Let us know in the chat. We love to celebrate you, YHA. I believe I saw you, uh, earlier, had had joined, earlier. so we’re so happy to have you. But if you are joining us, please do put, let us be able to shout you out in the chat. And if you’re listening to this, then all you need to do is go to speak like a senior leader.com and you can sign up there.

And as I mentioned, we have a special bonus for you if you sign up now before Monday. So if you sign up before Monday, December 8th, 1150 9:00 PM Eastern Time, we have a limited time bonus for you. And that is two personalized and private communication critiques. So what do we mean by this?

You literally submit a piece of work to us. This could be slides, it could be an email, it could be your performance review, it could be talking points for an all hands, and we will give you surgical feedback. I am not just saying we take a look at it for one minute and go, this looks great. Here you go. Good job. No, we give you surgical input about where you might be underselling yourself, phrasing to change where you might be appearing more junior and what would make it sound more executive ready. Maybe even how to restructure your document for maximum impact.

And, many times we’ll also provide a video walkthrough with these communication critiques so you can hear and learn from our rationale for why we’re telling you to make certain changes. And until now, these reviews, they have only been reserved for clients that I work with in my very, very small group mastermind or one-on-one clients who are paying many, many multiples of what we charge for this program, and it’s also TBD if we will ever offer this again. These take a lot of work. They take a lot of effort on our part and a lot of brainpower to review. So as we continue growing, this level of personalization may not be possible. So if you, if this is something you want, we are offering it now, jump on it now.

Okay. If you have questions about the program, put ’em in the chat. I’m going to answer, all of these questions. Samantha asks, how much is the program? It is $2,000 paid in full. We also have payment plans and I will say, it is a steal for the level of support and the quality of the coaching and the content, curriculum we provide in this program. It is an absolute steal. I have had colleagues call me crazy for only charging $2,000 for this and being like, you need to double or triple that. I may in the future, but for right now it is $2,000. We are also going to talk about, how, if you wanna ask your employer to pay for the program, we’ll also be talking about that in just a moment.

And Mara was asking, what if you can’t make the meeting times? I will talk about that as well. I will answer all of these questions for you. Amazing. Love all of these coming in.

So this program, let me go through some of the key components that set it apart, because this is truly a best in class coaching and training program that shows you how to go from that reliable workforce Who’s doing the work of someone two levels up to someone who is an influential decision maker. There’s a few key aspects to this.

So first is the access to the entire speak curriculum. So today we barely, barely, barely scratch the surface inside of the program. You get bite-sized on demand lessons that walk you through each component, but not just walk you through them, in theory. We go above and beyond to make sure every lesson gives you proven very actionable, very tactical strategies drawn from my background in human behavior psychology, my over 15 years of doing executive coaching with top performers worldwide.

And when you come into the program, we also have something called the Speak Scorecard, which is an assessment you can take that, can tell you which of the elements you’re strongest on versus which of the elements you need to improve. Okay.

In terms of what we cover in the curriculum, under Shift Your Style, you will learn how to adapt your delivery, earn instant credibility with any type of stakeholder, even those people you think are difficult and get the outcome you want without feeling like you have to contort yourself into this corporate robot.

So we decode how different personalities tick, how they make decisions, process information, respond to pressure. You will stop second guessing because we will tell you exactly what to say and what not to say with certain personalities. What words and angles to emphasize versus to avoid, and how to frame your message. How to get faster, buy-in from decision makers and save hours, the agony of the back and forth by speaking their language, not repeating yourself.

We have had clients say that this module alone was worth the price of admission, and this module alone is what helped them secure a higher level role or a promotion. And so this alone is extremely powerful.

P present with poise, you will perfect the art of executive level delivery to go from someone who is being cut off or ignored in meetings, to someone people are listening to. And remember what you said and bring that up and pass it on. You will cut like Anocha, you will cut your meeting prep time in half. You’ll be able to organize information quickly and concisely, not, redoing your slides for weeks on end. And when your time slot gets cut in half, because inevitably when you’re presenting to decision makers, it’s like, oh, well you have 30 minutes. Actually, we, you only have 15 today. You’ll be able to slot in, not skip a beat. And you’re going to sharpen your ability to think on your feet. Again, this is something AI can’t do for you. You can’t like sit there and Chat GPT when you’re in the middle of a live meeting. So normal, more rambling, no more looking incompetent When you are hit with a question you don’t know the answer to. We’re gonna teach you ways to respond with confidence and that builds your credibility.

Elevating your impact. You know doing great work isn’t enough. So we’re gonna give you those very simple ways, there are, there are legitimately magic words that help connect your work immediately to the business value it is creating. So you can turn those, well, I did this and I did that. You can turn those into impact statements that show you are ready for bigger opportunities to get the resources your team needs. We’re gonna show you how to get rid of some of that wishy-washy junior language to make sure you are reflecting the complexity, the thought that is going into your work and making sure it’s connected to million dollar outcomes, so that you have a case to be paid more. And you’re going to create stronger advocates and internal allies.

So we will give you our sync process to retool your one-on-one so that your manager can become more of your advocate, that they are, circulating your wins up the chain of command so that you are the natural option top of mind, when an opportunity arises.

In Articulate Your Impact, you will know how to write for that fast, scrolling, scrolling stakeholder, we will nearly guarantee that your emails are opened. They are read, they are applied to fast, so faster approvals, no last minute scrambles, no fire drills over miscommunications. You will save time without all of that back and forth. You’ll be able to write an email in 10 minutes instead of an hour and then re redirect some of that time to more valuable work and you’ll be able to sound more decisive and confident in every message. So executives will know, will recognize, oh, there’s Wendy. I know when she gives me something, it’s easy for me to process. So they will actually read what you send them. And when you do that, your level of access it, it totally transforms and skyrockets.

Okay, and last, Keep Your Composure. So we will talk about disagreeing without being seen as combative. How do you do that? You have to walk this fine line of being able to, protect your time, but not ruffle feathers. To be firm, but not too forceful. So we will show you, we will give you actual structures to say no without tanking your reputation as a team player. To push back on unrealistic requests in a way that shows executive level acumen instead of just, I can’t do that. I’m overwhelmed. You will know how to get a micromanager off of your back. You will build the trust that can earn you more autonomy. You will know how to get direction from someone who can’t give you a clear answer to save their life. And this is a big one. Stop walking on eggshells around those difficult personalities.

Specifically, we have an entire lesson about how do you handle highly critical leaders? What do you do? How do you hold your own in those moments without getting critical yourself defensive or just kinda caving to whatever they want? Okay. I’m gonna take an eye on the chat real quick. Who is joining us? Who is joining us? Say me in the chat. We would love to be able to shout you out. All right, so we have our speak curriculum.

The next element of the program is our Skill Drill Exercises. These are practice exercises. So I bet many of you here have taken programs before. You watch a video and you think that’s useful. Great. And so you close your laptop and nothing changes. Skill drills are there to bridge that gap between, I get this and, oh, I can do this. So you will be getting more value out of the time and return on the time you invest in this program. It ensures that your effort translates into real skill, not just book knowledge that you forget by next week. These Skill Drills, they are quick 10 to 15 minute exercises. That’s all you need. This is not like put aside a weekend to do this. These are quick, they are focused, they fit into the margins of time you do have. You know that 10 minutes before your meeting, that time when you’re at your kids’ basketball game.

And these turn your real work situations into a practice ground. So these are not just theoretical exercises, you are actually using them to polish or change an email that you’re writing or an actual presentation that you’re giving, so everyone has immediate ROI.

Live group co coaching. There are so many ways to get support in this pro program, including live coaching calls. We have a live call every week, Wednesdays at 3:00 PM for 90 minutes, and we alternate formats. So one week we do workshopping. The next week we do Q&A on that topic. Workshopping calls are for where you get hands-on implementation. You get immediate feedback on the spot. So you are able to build muscle memory around these techniques before you do them in the wild and get on the spot coaching about what needs adjusting. And on our Q&A calls, that is your chance to submit questions about your situation. We will coach you through it. We will apply it, personalize it to whatever you are going through, wherever you feel stuck. And a big benefit of this is actually is the group coaching element. ’cause you will learn so much and those who are here, who are in the program can comment on this. You will learn so much by hearing others get coached.

So for example, today on our coaching call, we had two people ask similar questions about how do I set myself up for success in a new role? How do I build my credibility quickly? How do I look out for red flags in relationships or understand the politics? And clearly multiple people we’re in that situation. And so when we are coaching someone on how to think on their feet, that’s going to be beneficial to you as well.

And if you can’t make it live, I know this was a question a lot of people had. If you can’t make it live, it is absolutely no problem. We have so many people who cannot join any of the live calls. They get so much value out of the program. So a few things here. Number one, we have AI summaries of every call. So, you can scan that AI summary, you can jump to what seems most interesting to you. You can also search the summaries for any keywords. So for example, if we gave you a script or there was a certain topic that we talked about, you can search and jump right to that.

And again, we fully understand you are a very busy professional. That is who we work with, that’s who this program is designed for. We get, you may not be able to attend every call, maybe not even any of them. And this program is still designed to get you the results you came for, regardless. There is no need to carve out extra time to catch up. We add all of our calls to a private podcast. So you can listen in your Apple Podcast, in your Spotify, just like you would any other show. You can listen to the lessons, you can listen to the replays in the car when you’re doing chores or cooking dinner, and we have had multiple people in the program. Some you’ll see screenshots from them here, some you’ll hear from on my podcast, who have received promotions, huge opportunities, and rarely if ever attended a single live call.

They got those results just from the lessons themselves, the replays, and listening to other people get coached and us teaching them. Better yet, in this program, you get two coaches for the price of one. You get me and my co-coach, Wendy Carey, she is here today. I am gonna let her talk in a little bit.

 But Wendy is a professional certified coach from the ICF, the gold standard for coaching. She’s been working alongside of me for two and a half, probably going on three years now. And she works alongside of me in this program. She helps develop our tools. She helps serve our clients. She has a ton of experience, I think even more than 600 hours than I have listed here. She’s a former student of my work. Has a long corporate and managerial career in technology as well. And our clients love having access to both of our perspectives. ’cause we both bring different things to the table. Okay?

Yet another way you get support in this program through our private community. This is a members area where you can host and you get access to daily coaching from Wendy and myself. So if you have a situation that comes up, you can get troubleshooting as it happens and the community gives you a place to ask these questions in real time. You know, how do I frame this request? What’s the best way to push back on this deadline host in the community? We respond within there within one business day. So you are not left overthinking, second guessing yourself for weeks and weeks on end. And you have access to the brain trust of the other professionals who are facing these similar challenges or who can share with you what has worked for them as they have gone through handling a difficult boss, a pivot, dealing with organizational politics. So you are not reinventing the wheel. You’re able to crowdsource.

Now if you added up everything you get inside of this program, it would be worth well over $10,000. Well over that, and as I said, my colleagues have told me I could easily charge double if not triple, for this program for the value that we offer. Right now, enrollment is only $2,000. We have a three month payment plan available as well if you prefer to spread out the costs.

And, if you do want to hear about getting your company to sponsor, please type me in the chat. Please type me in the chat if that is you. And remember when you join us by the end of day, so 11:59 PM Eastern this upcoming Monday, December 8th, you also get those two communication critiques. And you can see here, people have said thank you so much. This made my participation so much more valuable. As I said, I do not know. When and if we will offer this again ’cause it’s a high level of customization and personalization that we, offer.

And some people are asking, what do you do over the holidays? The holidays are coming up. I would love to be able to jump in and learn ahead. We got you covered. So if you join us now, you’re going to get six extra weeks with the curriculum. You can jump in and start going through things now. We officially kick off January 14th. Okay? So we officially kick off January 14th, but when you sign up, you’ll be able to get into the portal, start going through the lessons, start getting things, under your feet, get in that extra learning time.

 We will be sending out the recording tomorrow. So what questions can I answer for you? Put ’em in the chat. What questions can I answer for you?

 I wanna go through who is this program for versus not for? It’s not for everyone. It’s for a very particular type of person who’s gonna see results. And if it’s not for you, I would rather be honest with you. I, I don’t want you wasting your time. We only want people in the program who can be successful, that’s good for us.

So speak like a senior leader is not for you if you are convinced everyone else around you is the issue. It’s your boss, it’s the culture, it’s your colleagues. Instead, we are laser focused on what is within your control. So we do not want you to join if you are just more interested in complaining about how things should be different rather than adjusting to how things are.

You, are not gonna be a good fit if you want the magic pill transformation comes with discomfort. Trying new approaches will feel awkward. We are here to coach you through that. And if you wanna clinging to the, I’m too busy excuse, that is fine. I know you’ve got a lot going on. We have clients in this program who work at Google, Amazon, JP Morgan, like the fastest pace of the fastest pace.

The program is designed to fit into the times you do have. If you’re someone who just wants AI to fix everything, that’s great. Good on you. But be mindful. It may become a crutch. And if you’re like, this sounds like, yeah, it’s a goal I have. If it’s a nice to have for you, maybe join later. Our clients who get the best results, see these communication skills is non-negotiable. Because they are sick of hitting the same walls. They are sick of getting the same feedback. They are facing changes like reorgs, new leadership interviews. They’re done being passed over again and again. And so if you are someone who is considered a valuable contributor, you’re probably getting more work thrust onto your plate, but you’re also getting that vague feedback. We need to see more executive presence. We need to see you influence at the next level. You’re doing great, but you need to change a little bit how you’re getting results, right? We will help you break free from that gravitas gap.

This is for you. If you do have a big life and a demanding career, we get that. This is not a course. This is not just something that’s going to gather digital dust. You have so many opportunities for hands-on application and coaching, and you will walk away with concrete skills, not platitudes.

And you want a system you can rely on. I am the lead coach in the program. What I teach is distilled from my background as a therapist doing this work for 15 years. And the speak system gives you a comprehensive, a complete communication upgrade.

And last, you are serious about, you wanna reclaim your time, your peace of mind, your confidence, the opportunities you deserve. So you are sick of overthinking every message you’re done with a constant drain.

Yes. Okay. Let’s get into, some of our questions here, and if you have questions, put ’em in the chat.

When does the program start? The program officially begins January 14th, but as I said, when you join now, you get an extra six weeks access. As soon as you get in, you can jump in to the material. So that means you can start learning over the holidays, work ahead, get a jumpstart on the material.

What happens after I enroll? So you’ll be able to select the payment, option that works best for you. We have a payment plan available. Then you’ll receive a welcome email from us with instructions about how to get started.

 Sarah was asking, how much of this is just from your book Managing Up? Is there crossover? Or is this just regurgitated content from your book? The answer is no. So the speak system is a brand new framework. It goes far beyond anything I cover in trust yourself or managing up, both in breadth and depth. So the books give you a foundational overview and concept. So for example, in Managing Up, I go through the four different communication styles. But there is not enough space, or it’s not the right vehicle to give you the really, really nitty gritty, nuts and bolts about what to say and not to say. How to deal with each of those personalities. And also there’s just, there’s content that didn’t fit into either of the books. You can see here are screenshots from some of the modules here. So, Speak Like a Senior Leader is specifically and laser focused on advanced communication challenges, specifically for mid to senior level professionals when you are positioning yourself for higher level roles in demanding environments.

So you can see we talk about things that are just not mentioned in, in either book. Um, okay. What other questions can we answer for you? I’m gonna go back to my questions here.

When are the weekly calls? As we said, the weekly calls are Wednesdays at 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM weekly, and we alternate. So NPI asked, is there role playing practice? Yes. That’s part of what the workshopping calls are. So, for each module of the speak system, we will have one workshopping call that will include role play and feedback on the, skill drills, and then an open Q&A call about, Hey, I’m having trouble applying this concept to my situation. Can you help?

What if I can’t make the live calls? I’ve mentioned this, that you might be thinking this sounds perfect, but I can’t do Wednesdays at 3:00 PM for 13 weeks straight. You do not need to attend. Every live call or dare I say, any of the live calls to get massive value from this program. And you can see these are direct statements from our clients here that really appreciate all the asynchronous options.

I’m super busy with a client project right now. I haven’t been able to step away, but I’m listening to them. They are so helpful. Thank you for making it accessible. For those of us who are trying to learn in the rare pockets we have the podcast, access has been an absolute game changer. I listen to it when I’m commuting. So as I said, every call is uploaded to the private podcast. You listen to that just like you would any other podcast on Apple or Spotify. So you can do that. You don’t have to be tied to your computer. That’s what I like about it. And people listen to this as they go about their day.

You can also get on demand answers in the community, so you don’t have to wait for the coaching call. You can post in the community whatever time of day you want. We’ll get back to you within one business day. So that is on your schedule.

And this program also saves you time in the end, yes, it is an investment of time. I would say roughly about two to three hours per week would be a good, rule of thumb for what to put aside. But you have to realize that there’s going to be a disproportionate gain because how much energy are you wasting about what you should have said, how you should have responded, fretting and preparing for those tough conversations. Like I said, Anocha, who you saw earlier, went from six hours of prep time per executive meeting to one to two hours. That’s four to five hours back. We have people who used to agonize overriding emails for 45 minutes telling us now I knock it out in 10 minutes. So it’s a disproportionate gain.

And if you don’t wanna get promoted. Totally fine. We have lots of people in the program who are like, my goal is not the climb ladder. Totally fine. This is really fundamentally about being the kind of professional people listen to respect who they want on their team, regardless of your place on the org chart. So if you wanna be the person everyone looks up to at work, whose, whose opinion carries weight, the colleague people request. At its core, speak like a senior leader is about making yourself proud. That’s what this is about. At its core. You need to know how to communicate with clarity, with credibility, with crispness, to feel confident in what you have to offer, and articulating that.

If you are not in corporate. A large, a good number of our clients are not in corporate. We have people that come from all sorts of different disciplines. We have people who are in local government, federal government, healthcare, hospital systems, pharma, nonprofits, NGOs, education systems, you name it. Wendy, is there anything that I’m missing, like in terms of where people come from? Um, universities. Yeah, all of those. And we had a chef. Yes. I love that. Yes. Yes. So a, these are, Swiss Army tools that adapt to your situation. Uh, so even if you’re not in corporate, we’ve, we have seen it all.

And for those of you who are interested in asking your company to support. We fully endorse this. We have some materials to help you. So many companies cover programs like this under professional development budgets, continuing education funds. Now is a great time of year to be asking for support because you can tie it directly to your performance review goals or feedback you have received to say, in order to help me reach these goals that we’ve outlined in my performance review. As part of that, I would like to request funding for this program. Here’s the information. And so Sarah has put in the chat, we have an employer letter and an employer PDF. So the letter is something you can copy and paste, just fill in the blanks to send to your manager or HR to make this request. And the PDF outlines benefits to the organization for you taking this program as well as everything that’s involved.

And if you need help getting the funding through your company. So sometimes, we may need to. Do something special with a company card or invoice, just email us at hello@melodywilding.com. If you need a more detailed receipt or anything like that, we’re happy to get you that information. So it’s hello@melodywilding.com.

All right. I’m also seeing questions about how long do I have access to the material. So the program runs from January 14th to April 10th. You have access to all of the materials during that time if you would like to stay in the program. We do offer the option to continue on at a lower monthly rate so you can retain access to the teachings, to the coaching.

A lot of people, as you could say, you heard me say earlier, we have so many people continuing because they’re thinking, I wanna master this. And they know that continued practice, they know the coaching and the support we provide is that valuable to help them do that. and also you do, when you stay in the program, you do open up additional resources. So, we do have that option. Okay. What other questions?

Wendy, do you wanna come on and say hello? I didn’t give you the chance to introduce yourself, but do you wanna say hello to everyone here?

Sure. Hi everybody. Happy holidays. So happy to be here today. And, yeah, I love this program. We’ve been, we did this this fall for the first time and, it’s, we weren’t sure quite what to expect, but there was such great participation and, so many great questions from people, a lot of things that we were able to help them out with and, know, accommodate some unique situations that were some, that people were in. So, I hope to see you in January.

Yeah, and I, I wanna touch on this question. This is sadly something I’m hearing from more and more people, which is, I’ve done coaching programs before, or I’ve done a training program and I had a, I had a bad experience. If you’re, if this has happened to you and you’re willing to share in the chat, let us know. Give us a plus one or this, this is unfortunately happening more and more since there has been a boom in the coaching industry and a boom of people offering programs like this and who are not necessarily trained. Uh, I’ll, I’ll stop there. And so we have been hearing this more and more that. People have had a bad experience in coaching. Maybe the person who was the face of the program then disappears once they get in the program. And I wanna assure you, I don’t disappear after you enroll. I am the creator of the program. I’m the head coach in the program, so you will see me in every video. I am on 95% of our live calls. I am active in the community, as is Wendy. The, this curriculum, it is built on decades of expertise. This is not just some, I decided to hang a shingle one day ’cause I got a weekend certification. That’s not what this is.

I’m a Columbia trained therapist. As I said, I’ve been doing this work for 15 years. So the training you get, it is directly drawn from studying human behavior, influence what makes people trust you and respect you.

And we follow a system. I’ve worked with learning designers before, so I know how to design a program for the way adults work. This is not like we give you a two hour video to watch and it’s just me rambling on about some topics for you to get one nugget. This is not just me saying, you should be more confident. Use your voice, speak up. You belong at the table. That’s not what this is the speak system. It is a repeatable framework. It is highly, highly tactical.

And you are not left to your own devices. So this is a hybrid coaching and training program. Of course, we can’t come to your house and force you to use it. We would if we could. If it was legal, we would if we could. But we give you so many opportunities for support from. And and options to learn.

We have the on-demand curriculum. You can watch the lessons anytime day or night that you want. We have the live workshopping calls that give you opportunities for practice and role play. We have Q&A calls where you can come ask your questions. We have the community where you can ask questions as well. You are supported every step of the way, but we do count on you to use that support.

And our clients always tell us that our energy as coaches, we are warm, supportive, and we are honest. We are not the coach that is gonna make you feel demeaned or small. So our clients always remark on how they feel and they see how invested we are in their success, how we believe in their potential, which gives them confidence to believe in themselves and to take risks.

We’re also not just blind cheerleaders who are just gonna tell you what you wanna hear. As I said before, if you’re coming into this program, you need to be ready to see things as they are, not as you wish they could be. So we will gently call you out on your excuses. We will push you when we see you are capable of more.

We will do it with respect and with empathy, and also a deep commitment to see you win. That’s what we’re here for, is to get you the best results. What other questions can we answer for you, Wendy? Anything you wanted to add to that point?

 Nothing specifically. No? Mm-hmm. Yes. Well, Marta, I know you were saying you have to drop. Hope to sign up. We would love to see you there. What other questions can we answer for you? This is your chance. There’s no question that’s too big, too small, too silly. Nothing. What questions can we answer for you?

Wendy, is there anything I didn’t mention that you wanna make sure we talk about? Oh, One person asked, newy asked, uh, her performance review self-assessment is due, uh, before Christmas. And if she joins today, can she get feedback on that in time? So, great question. And it was Newy correct? Is that Yes. Yeah.

 I think Sarah said in the chat, email us. What I will say is one thing that we can provide that we actually offered as a bonus last time is our, Performance Review Playbook Masterclass. I think that’s gonna be perfect for your situation. It’s our process for how to prepare for your review and even how all the way down to specific things for how do you present your areas for growth in a way that doesn’t shine a light only on your weaknesses.

 Fantastic. do we talk about personality culture types? Myers-Briggs, we talk about the model I use for communication, style types, which is based on, it is based on the psychological research that many assessments are based on, which is the fact that people are communication styles come down to two dimensions and many of the systems you see out there are based on the same thing, the same underlying psychology. But we break that down and we put it into our system, specifically apply to this senior level communication. Yeah.

So we’re coming down to it folks. We’re here to answer your questions, but you do have a choice to make. You can continue relying on ChatGPT, right? It can’t read the room. It, you know, it doesn’t know what your VP likes and doesn’t it?

Can’t teach you to think like an executive. You can’t, like I said, under the, maybe you could under the table just chat GPT something when you’re caught off guard, but it’s not gonna be a good look.

You could attend a company sponsored program. Some people will say to us, you know, I wanna, my company offers this program, I wanna try that first. Totally fine. What I will say is that often people end up coming back to us and say, that was generic. It was one size fits all. You are lumped in with people who are fresh outta college. It’s things you’ve heard a thousand times on LinkedIn before. And, many times in company programs, because it’s offered by the organization and because of the nature of the people who might be involved, there’s less, there’s less getting into the real situations, the, the politics and the sticky situations because you have to work with these people afterwards. So just something to consider.

You could continue piecing things together from books and podcasts. That takes forever. And I don’t know about you sometimes I’m like, oh, I should go back and listen to that podcast and I never do. Right? So there’s no feedback loop.

You can, of course, continue hoping things magically get better, but again, the pressure, the scrutiny, the competition, it’s only gonna keep getting higher.

So if you want a place where you get that proven system, the frameworks, the techniques to rely on so that you have adaptability in the moment, you have situational mastery, flexibility, to respond to what’s happening in the moment, not relying on ChatGPT, so you can have a space where you can tackle some of those tricky, sensitive topics.

How do you disagree with your boss? How do you push back on ex extra work when they’ve given you a totally unreasonable deadline? You deserve to be coached by professionals who know their stuff, who bring the coaching chops, the psychological rigor. Again, we’re not just people who hung up a shingle yesterday.

You are getting such a high quality in depth coaching here. And you all work, here’s the thing, yes, the program is $2,000. Again, the value you are getting for this is wild, but also, think of it this way, you can recoup your investment with just a 5% increase. One time, one time of your salary. So if you do the math, let’s say you’re making a hundred K, right? A 5% increase on that is what? Five? 5K, right? You’ve already made your money back. So the program pays for itself instantly in just one time over, and that has compounding effects on your career. It happens the other way too. You stop leaving money on the table. ’cause every year you stay stuck at your current level, that is tens of thousands of dollars you are not earning. So this is designed to compress that timeline to faster earnings to the next level. And this is one of the most leveraged investments you can make in your career because you can spend, like I said, you can spend all this time trial and error figuring out on your own, or you could join us for 13 weeks.

And people have said, I feel like actually there was, a client on my podcast today, Lindsey, who said, I feel like I was handed the keys to the castle. I never had a mentor or a leader who was willing to take me by the hand and teach me these things, and that’s what I needed. And she was saying, I feel like someone handed me the keys to the castle that I was missing.

Okay. What else? Any other questions we can answer for you?

 I want you to fill in this sentence. I’m on the fence because blank. If you’re still here with us, finish that sentence. I’m on the fence because blank. Just type in the chat. We’d love to hear.

 What’s on your mind? If this is you, there are three questions I want you to ask yourself. The first is, does this get me closer to my goals? If you were to enroll and speak like a senior leader, you had Wendy and myself to guide you, you had the curriculum behind you, do you think this would get you closer to the goals you have for your career in the near future? Yes or no?

Second question, does this increase my chances of success versus doing it on my own? So if you had the guidance, you had the step-by-step tools, does that increase your chance of success versus you doing it on your own? Yes or no?

And third, can I figure out how to make the investment work? Can you take a payment plan? Do you need to try asking your company? Could you figure it out if you wanted to? Yes or no? If you said no to all of those, then don’t sign up. Now is not the time you’re not ready. If you said yes to all of those, then it is the best next step for you.

Some people are asking, alright, is there ways to spread out the payments further? Sarah, if you wouldn’t mind stepping in on that one. Frank was saying, I will also ask my company company though. Nupi was saying, I don’t know if I can or should ask my employer, versus just figuring out how to do it on my own.

Does that reveal too much about my current insecurities? Yes. Great, great questions. Okay, so a few things. Number one, here’s what we find. If you’re like, I wanna see if my employer will pay for it, but I know I wanna get the bonus and I know this is only open for a limited time. Here’s what a lot of people do. They will pay personally for the program and we can work with you on the backend when many times the company will pay, we will give you a full refund for what you have paid Once the company pays us. So that is an option. Or actually what is often even easier is that many times the company will just reimburse you. So you submit your receipt of what you paid, the company reimbursed you personally. And we’ve had many people over the years in our program do that where they join because they’re like, I know I wanna get in, I wanna start now. I want that bonus. And then, companies move a little bit slower, so they’ll take the time, they’ll talk with their boss, they get approval, and then voila, they get the money reimbursed to them.

So that is absolutely an option. And Nupi was asking, is it going to reveal my insecurities? Nupi, this is your first, coaching around framing. It’s all in the framing. If you approach it as, I know I’ve been struggling with my communication and I have a really hard time thinking on my feet. Yeah, it’s going to shine a light on your insecurities, but if you approach it as.

For example, I’m just making this up, but if you approach it as, you know, as I look towards the year ahead, we have some of these big opportunities on the docket. We have this project, this project, and this project that’s going to require me to be in front of higher stakeholders. I wanna make sure I’m bringing my best to that scenario.

And so as part of that, I would like to do this program. It’s going to make sure that in those stakeholder presentations, I’m giving the most crisp, compelling response to this. Do you see? It’s all in the framing, right? Yeah. And Nupi, like I said, you were saying, I wanna approach them without them feeling like I’m pressuring on timing, the option I said about many people will pay personally and then work out reimbursement. That’s a very common thing that happens.

Okay. Wendy, unless there’s any last comments from you, I think we will wrap things up in just a moment. Is there anything else you wanted to add, Wendy? Uh, no. No? Okay. Amazing. Well, we, yeah, we are so excited to see many of you. It sounds like a lot of you have, joined us seeing comments in the chat, to that effect.

So we are so excited to get started with you. And remember, uh, let me just bring this up, head to speak like a senior leader.com. That’s where you can grab your spot in the program and you have to sign up by this Monday, December 8th, 11:59 PM. That’s how you’re going to get those two communication critiques.

Okay. You have to sign up by that time. Alright. Thank you so much everyone for joining us today. It was. Such a pleasure being with you and having you here. We hope this was useful to you. We appreciate you so much taking time out of your schedule. We hope to see you inside of the program. And we will talk to you all very soon.

Okay, take care everyone. Bye everybody.