Melody Wilding: I want to officially welcome you to our training today, Effortless Executive Presence. We are thrilled to get into this with you. We’re gonna use every inch of this time we have together. If you are just joining us, say hello in the chat, let us know where you are watching from today, and make sure you keep the chat open.

We love these events to be interactive. We want to hear what is resonating with you. I’m gonna be asking you questions along the way. This is a two-way conversation, so we want to make sure we are hearing from you. So, hello from, Virginia, UK. Thank you for joining us whatever time in the world it is for you.

Now, before I go any further, I, I want to make sure you are in the right place. So give me a yes if this is what you are here for, if these are things you want. You want to start having opportunities come to you instead of like you have to fight tooth and nail to chase them down, because you have a more compelling way to communicate.

You want to be getting tapped for those high-visibility initiatives that are gonna happen more and more as we get into the second half of this year before they’re even announced, because leadership already knows you are the right person because of the value you provide. You want to get your ideas approved the first time, not after three rounds of follow-up and, “Hey, just checking in on this one more time.”

You want to be able to, in those moments where you get an out-of-the-blue question, respond with composure on the spot, with clarity and confidence, so people walk away thinking, “That was great. They, they do know their stuff, even though they were under pressure in that moment.” You want to be able to influence decisions at the enterprise level.

This is something we hear a lot, that people feel capped with the scope and the level of influence they have now, so they want to be able to have that across teams, functions, departments, other people who do not report to you. So yes, a lot of you are saying, “Yes, yes, yes, all of these.” See, all of the yeses, you are in exactly the right place.

Now, I am Melody Wilding. I am a two-time bestselling author. My newest book, Managing Up, and my first book that actually celebrated its fifth birthday yesterday, my first book is called Trust Yourself. I am a therapist by training. That’s how I started out my career. A human behavior professor, weightlifter.

I am a cat mom. And, I am just honored and thrilled you are here, you are taking time out of your schedule. So whether you are new to our world, you are an OG, we are so happy to have you here. Now, for the last 15 years, I have worked with tens of thousands of top-performing, professionals at companies and organizations worldwide.

I’ve worked with individual contributors making their first push into leadership. All the way up to CEOs of publicly traded companies, top people at the UN and NATO. Our clients come from all sorts of organizations, your big tech, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple. We have finance, JP Morgan. but like I was saying, across the spectrum, healthcare, universities, federal government, local government, across every hi- kind of high stakes environment that you can imagine, we have seen it all.

And what that breadth of experience has given me is something that no single industry or exposure to one single company could, and that is because we have that breadth and depth. We clearly see patterns. We have more of a macro level view of exactly what separates the people who advance, who get chosen for the best opportunities, who shape the direction of their organization, from the people who stay underpaid, overlooked, despite being very talented and hardworking, which many of you here might be able to relate to.

And this is exactly what we teach you inside of my bestselling program. It is called Speak Like A Senior Leader. This is the system I have built from over 15 years of doing this research, the coaching, the results that we have helped our clients get, and have distilled it into a step-by-step communication overhaul that touches every interaction you have, so that you can become a crisp, clear, confident, executive level communicator, and you can do what we talked about on that first slide, you can be handed those dream opportunities before you ever ask for them.

So I know we have some alumni and even current members of Speak Like A Senior Leader here. Please say hello in the chat. We always are grateful and love having you here. Abby was saying, “I need this.” And it is very good timing for all of you, very exciting news, that during this training, we are opening the doors to Speak Like A Senior Leader for the first time this entire year.

So if you think you might want a spot, you definitely want to stay until the end to hear about the program, what it includes. We also have a special bonus for you, worth $500 dollars, if you join us by this Friday at 11:59 PM. Every other time we have opened the door, doors for this program, we, no joke, we sell out in record time.

So if you are at all curious, now will be the best time to join, and don’t worry, we will have plenty of time to walk through the program, what you get, results to expect, plenty of time for you to get your questions answered. So our clients in just the last eight, 12 weeks have done things like this. They have secured major promotions, they have advanced from two rather director level roles, they have been named global team leads, they have achieved reclassifications for their role, which if you’re in any environment where you know where you have to, I was gonna say apply for a reclassification, but more like advocate and navigate getting a reclassification, it’s not easy.

We have, we have had clients who have received executive recognition, who have been invited into strategic planning, tapped on the shoulder by their C-suite, who have been recognized as influential leaders, who have been asked to co-chair industry panels, who have been tapped, who have been personally selected by executives for committees, who have been named de facto leads on projects, who have been chosen as mentors, who have achieved awards, top ratings, more head count, who have earned the highest possible performance scores.

The list goes on and on and on. And so what we wanna do today is give you some of their secrets. That’s what we wanna do today, is give you their exact roadmap to follow. So here’s what we’re gonna do in our time together. We are going to cover why executive presence has felt just out of reach, no matter how hard you have tried to finally gain traction on that skill set.

I’m gonna give you a three-second test that reveals whether you sound like a credible leader or you sound like a lower level executor, and how do you course correct before it costs you yet another opportunity. We’re gonna take you through some actual case studies, and one of those, this is one of my favorites, we had someone who was a, a chief people officer who went through a situation where she was actually told, “I am not sure if you’re even competent at this job,” to just months later getting a six-figure bonus, so that you can model what they are doing to articulate your value to close the gap between what you are delivering and what you’re getting paid for, and the thing you are not currently saying in meetings that is keeping you stuck in promotion purgatory, and a lot, lot more.

So who’s excited? Give me a plus one in the chat. We would love to hear who is excited to dive into all of this. All right. Awesome. Let’s get going then. So I am willing to bet that you’re here because you have received feedback like this: You need more executive presence. We need to see you convey gravitas.

You need to be more strategic. I want to see you communicate at a higher level. Maybe the way you speak needs more polish. Be more confident in your delivery. Have you ever heard any of these things? Yeah. Yeah. I’m willing to bet also when that happens, you nod politely, right? ‘Cause you’re all professionals here.

You nod politely. But then you walk away and you think to yourself, what the- F does that even mean? Does it mean be more quiet, d- more loud? Should I be more direct? Should I be less direct? Should I make more eye contact? Should I buy a power suit in a different color? Like, I, I don’t know. Do I need an MBA?

Maybe I need to go back to school. Maybe I should get on top of watching those top 10 TED Talks. Maybe I just need a totally different personality. I should try to be more extroverted like Larry over there. You know what? Actually, maybe I just need to change jobs. This place is way too political. I’ve been trying.

I feel like I’m rolling a bal- boulder up a hill here. Spoil alert, you will encounter the same thing wherever you go. I like to say we repeat what we don’t repair. The most challenging part of all of this is that you might carry around with you this low-grade confusion, like it’s this dirty little secret you don’t wanna tell anyone.

You’re performing, you are proving competence on the outside, you’re contributing, you’re going above and beyond, while all the meantime, you are feeling lost on the inside about how do I actually communicate with that magnetism that just seems to come so second nature to some people. And like I said, this feels like a dirty little secret.

You beat yourself up and you think, “I should know this by now. I’ve been doing this work for 10, 15, 20, 25 years,” some of you. “Why do I still feel like I have to try so hard to get my point across?” Does anybody feel like this? Just say, “Me,” in the chat. We’re all friends here.

Yeah, I appreciate those of you who are saying that. And listen, I wanna confess to you that I get this. I really, really do. I grew up in a blue-collar household in an otherwise very wealthy neighborhood. I like to say we lived on one of the worst house- houses on the block, in a school system where all of my friends, all of my friends’ parents, they were doctors, lawyers, you know, attorneys, judges, things like that, in finance.

And me, neither of my parents graduated college. They, What I, what I jokingly like to say is they didn’t have real jobs. They own their own businesses. My mother is a first-generation immigrant. And I share all of this to say I had very, very, very little exposure to the corporate world growing up. I didn’t understand the lingo.

I didn’t know job titles. I didn’t even know for a long time that work ended at, like, 5:00, 6:00. I had no idea, because my family, our hours were completely different. I had no real, this is embarrassing to admit, I had no real conception of what salaries were. Like, wait, you get paid a certain amount, and is 100,000 good or bad?

Or I had no conception of this until well into college, if not after college. I don’t know if I’m the only one who experienced this. So I never had anyone take me by the hand and say to me, “This is the way the world works. Like, this is the way the work world works. Say this this way, speak that way, position yourself this way.”

I felt like I was just plopped into the workplace, and I would look around and wonder, how did everybody else seem to know exactly what to say and how to say it? Now, luckily, in my case, w- I, I had to decode it myself. I consider myself lucky for doing that, ’cause someone said in the chat, you know, “Look at you now.”

And I, I was forced to decode it, and luckily I had my psychology background to help me with that. Everything I have learned about influence, power, how you earn credibility with people in charge, I had to decode that myself. So first as a psychology rest- researcher, then I was trained as a ther- therapist, and now through 15 years of doing this executive coaching and w- running a company where we’ve worked with tens of thousands of people across the globe.

And what that journey taught me is the science has always been there. The research on how people react to authority, assign credibility, decide who to trust and invest in, it’s always been there, but it’s just been locked away in the journals, in the ivory towers, not accessible to the person who was never handed the keys, who didn’t grow up knowing how these situations work, who didn’t have the mentors.

So it’s been my mission to write this. And for a long time, executive presence has been described in the vaguest terms possible. You know this, right? Oh, it’s that it factor, a certain je ne sais quoi, charisma, gravitas. It’s just this quality that you know it when you see it. These descriptions are so frustrating because they are feeling based.

They describe an effect without ever telling you what causes it. You can’t practice je ne sais quoi. You can’t practice magnetism. So you can do nothing with this feedback except feel guilty and shameful for not magically being this way. And hot take for all of you, I would argue that this is not necessarily an accident.

When executive presence can’t be defined and it can’t be taught, it means that the people who have it, the ones who happen to absorb it along the way or get it passed down to them, it then becomes the corporate world’s most convenient gatekeeping mechanism. It is what keeps qualified, capable people out of senior ranks without ever having to really explain and own up to why.

So I don’t know about all of you, but I am sick of that, so if you are too, just give me a yes in the chat. And a perfect example of this is a client, who was in Speak Like a Senior Leader, we’ll call them Kay, and, she works in pharma. And she was promoted three levels in three years, thanks to, she’s a brilliant scientist.

And overnight, it was like she went from h- being in these very technical discussions with her peers in these small group settings, to now she was floundering because she had to manage a lot of different stakeholders, she had to speak to things across the enterprise, she had to give people the bottom line, not her entire methodology, and she was told, “We need you to step up your communication,” which only made her get more in her head.

And so when she was asked a question, she would panic. She would rattle off all the logistics, and then she would watch people’s eyes glaze over and know she would lose them, and then stumble to recover. So maybe that sounds familiar to some of you. She would sit back, meetings would go off the rails ’cause she didn’t know how to get them back.

And for her, she said her imposter syndrome was so bad that she was seriously considering getting an MBA, and she was convinced that she just needed a new credential to get that it factor. And then luckily, she stumbled across Speak Like a Senior Leader, and inside, we taught her how to do a few things.

How to respond on the spot with crisp, structured thinking that made those decision m- makers lean in with interest, not confusion. To redirect when conversations did go off the rails, and have people walk away thinking, “That was handled well,” versus, “God, that was a complete mess.” And not only was she picked to design a strategy for speeding up one of the company’s key programs, so she was picked for this, she, they also adopted that plan, but she, she said, “I overcame my self-described introvert nerves to land a session at an industry conference,” and she got elected vice president of her regional professional society, all because she had the confidence to put herself out there more.

So her story, I wanted to share this with you ’cause it goes to prove the switch I want you to walk away with today. The people you look at who have executive presence, who make it seem effortless, who make it look like magic, it feels like that it factor. It is actually invisible training. It is training that they have made invisible.

They have learned a specific set of patterns and behaviors, specific things they do or things they don’t do every time they open their mouth, every time they send a message, and when you know them, you can replicate them. The mystery around all of this dissolves when you start looking at executive presence through the lens of human behavior.

Rather than mysticism and, and magic. It is not out of reach, just needs to be, I’m gonna go back to that word I used before, just needs to be decoded. And so that is what we are here to change and to give you right here and now. So I wanna introduce you to the S.P.E.A.K system. This is the exact framework of replicable steps you can use to go from feeling like you are the most prepared person in the room, you are working twice as hard as everyone else for half the recognition, to having that e- effortless executive presence, where you sound, you come across as credible, as clear, as concise, as confident as you know you can be.

Because we want the way you articulate yourself to match the caliber of the intelligence and the expertise you have. We want those two things to match. Okay, anybody telling themselves something like this? I think I just saw something like this come through in the chat, but I would love to hear. Again, we’re friends here, so it, it’s okay if you’re thinking some of these things.

Melody, I love this, but I’m an introvert. I overthink everything. I’m too technical. I overthink. I freeze. I’m emotional. I’m not good under pressure. Anybody thinking any of these things? That is me, I overthink. Yeah, welcome. You are… Welcome to the club. You are in the right place. Here’s what I want you to know.

You have to set down these labels right now, because they are dangerous. These stories become self-fulfilling prophecies. For a long time, I told myself I was too sensitive, too sensitive to be a public speaker, too sensitive to put my writing out there. Imagine if I had let that win. I can be sensitive and perceptive and process things more deeply, and I can also do all of those things I just mentioned.

So introversion is not what’s causing you to overexplain in meetings. Overthinking is not what’s making you go silent when you get pushed back on. Those are behaviors. Those are patterns of communication that developed over time that can also change over time, and that’s the entire premise of the S.P.E.A.K system.

Not changing who you are at your core, but implementing new ways and behaviors of coming across. So once you are able to execute this, it becomes an entire identity shift. You are not replaying conversations anymore, worrying you said the wrong thing. Pan- panicked ’cause that deck is a disaster. You have structures to follow.

You stop wasting mental energy being PO’d at your colleagues because you are finally getting the credit where it’s due. You are earning more, because decision-makers actually get the value you are created. They wanna keep you happy. You have leverage to negotiate for other things, four-day work week, more flexible schedule.

You will have the satisfaction that comes from making a bigger impact, from being sought out for your opinion instead of feeling like you have to fight for a seat at the table. All right. Let’s get into it. The five aspects of the SPEAK system. I’m gonna give you a secret for each of these. So our five aspects are shift your style, present with poise, express your impact, articulate in writing, and keep your composure.

We’re gonna go through each of these and, and also go through a secret for each of them. Okay. Most common advice out there says, “Find your voice, find your style, know your strengths as a communicator, double down on them. Be consistent. Be authentic and true to yourself.” None of that is wrong. It’s just really incomplete.

Your style is not the problem. Applying your style univers- universally, that is the problem. If you are a detail-oriented communicator and you lead with data for every single audience, including the CEO who just wants the headline, you get told you don’t think strategically. If you are the empath servant leader who is always leading with feelings and relationships in every conversation, including the one with the head of sales who’s doing the mental math on the ROI, you are seen as soft and you are not seen as enterprise level.

Completely different perception and results depending on whether you know how to flex your style. So the secret is that the most well-paid, highest paid communicators, or most well-respected rather, they do not just communicate one way. They do not just communicate their way and just lean into their style and their authenticity all the time.

They are the most adaptable. They are the most situ- situationally aware, and they know who they are talking to and how that person needs to hear a message in a slightly different way to get through to them. When you are adaptable, you have done the work of understanding what a stakeholder needs from you before you ever even speak with them, instead of being like most people and treating communication like it is something surprising that happens to you that you’re just like, “Oh, shoot, now I gotta figure this out,” and you are winging it all the time.

So think of any message a little like a diamond. Depending on the angle you shine on it, it has different facets even though it’s all the same stone. So for one stakeholder you may angle the stone, the facet, towards impact and speed. For another, you may angle it towards focusing on the process and risk mitigation.

For yet another person, it might be the people, the relational implications. When your approach is crafted to the primary motivations of that person who is sitting across from you, you stop talking at people or past them. The human brain is wired to pay attention to what it already believes is important.

So when someone hears their own priorities reflected back to them, mirrored back to them, the cognitive load of processing what you are saying goes down. It more easily catches their attention. It bypasses resistance. It goes straight to relevance. So to really drive home the difference this can make, I wanna tell you about Molly.

She is that chief people officer and, she works at a very fast-growing startup. She is someone who prided herself, I see many of you, like many of you, prided herself on her empathy, her care for her team, going the extra mile for people that she served. She reported to the CEO, we’re gonna call him Alex, and that relationship was frankly becoming worse and worse, more and more strained by the day.

She would hop on a call with him, and Molly would come with her data on employee engagement, turnover rates, the recruitment, and his eyes would glaze over halfway through, and he would kinda snap at her and say, “You know, just, can we just get to the point here? I don’t have a lot of time.” Everything came to a head one day where Alex told her point blank, this is verbatim, told her point blank, “I am not sure if you are in over your head, incompetent, or both.”

And she was gutted, and she was also very confused because she knew her work was strong. The, the team was growing, engagement stor- scores were great. Her team loved her. We introduced Molly to the decoder model we use in Speak Like a Senior Leader to diagnose exactly how a specific person processes information, what drives them, what gets them to buy in, what they need to hear before they can trust you.

She always led from her own instincts, her own style, her way of making sense of the world. But the moment she ran through Alex’s decoder, she realized they were op- they were operating from two totally different orientations. Hers, which was to naturally pull out the risks, to give the full context, to talk through how people were, were being impacted, to make sure everyone was considered, was exactly the opposite of what Alex needed.

He needed results, speed, competitive framing, the business case. So she started re-angling the diamond, same information, but shining on a different facet, not changing the substance, just changing the packaging. So instead of, “I’m worried about morale ’cause we’re hiring so quickly,” she changed that to, “New hires are not getting up to speed fast enough.

I can cut that onboarding time down from seven days to about five. Does that sound good?” When she started to make these small tweaks, his entire perception of her shifted. He stopped seeing her as someone who was too focused on feelings. He started to see her as someone who understood business priorities.

And a couple months later, she came back and she said she is ending that year with a bonus worth 1.45 times her salary. That’s an over six-figure bonus. And she said, “Actually, what meant more to me is I finally got the recognition that I deserve, and he sees me more as a partner and a trusted advisor now.”

All right. Next, we have present with poise. And I am willing to bet when you get up and you share a proposal in a meeting, you set the context. You walk through the background. You build towards your conclusion the way you were taught to write a paper in school, right? Here’s the evidence, here’s the analysis, here at the end is my point.

All to prove, look at my effort. I did my homework, right? Good, good boy or girl. You restate your idea a few different ways just to make sure it really got through. You give another example, another data point, maybe a caveat thrown in there. And then you are shocked and maybe a bit offended when someone talks over you.

Anthony was saying, “Guilty.” And you think, “God, they’re not letting me finish. I was just getting there. They are steamrolling me.” Who else is realizing, like, “Oh, shoot, I do do this”? Anybody else realizing, “Oh, no, this is me”? Yes, totally. Yes. The truth here is interruptions are not necessarily a sign that everyone you work with is an A-hole.

More often, it is a sign of a lack of structure. When you just start talking and people don’t know where you’re going, how long it’s going to take, they jump in. Your thorough buildup can actually sign to people, this is going to take a while, and the executive who’s been in back-to-back meetings since 8:00 AM and it’s now 3:00 PM is not always going to be very tolerant of that.

And plus, when you are circling the wagons, as I call it, that’s, that’s what I refer to as those restatements, those caveats, those, “Well, just to be clear,” or, “What I mean is blah, blah, blah,” you’re kind of saying the same thing with slightly different words over and over again. That all says, “I’m not confident in my idea.

I’m not clear on what I’m trying to say.” So please cut me off, summarize it for me so this conversation can move forward. Now, you would be powerless if it were purely about other people’s personalities and them being a jerk. But structure is a behavior, and therefore structure is fixable. So the single most powerful thing you can do to hold the floor, to cut down those interruptions, to project authority happens in your opening.

It’s those first 10 to 30 seconds of your contribution that set the tone for everything that follows, and most people totally botch this. They say, “So, I wanted to share an update on the project,” or they say, “Well, I’ve been looking into this and, I want to walk through what I found,” and then you’re off.

You’re just into the content hoping people will follow. Your opening needs to quickly and concisely answer three things: where is this going, why should I care, and about how long is this going to take, or else people will start to get antsy and when they do not see you as a driver, they do not see you as someone who can articulate a clear argument.

So a story about this you might be able to relate to. I see a lot, it was resonating for a lot of you. One of our clients, I’ll call him Simon, he’s a senior account director at, at an advertising agency, and he was getting talked over constantly in meetings he was in charge of. He was constantly getting derailed mid-update.

He would be briefing the group on something and then he would spend the rest of the week answering questions about what he already told them in that meeting. So he implemented the signposting method we teach inside the program. This is a simple structural technique. It takes a couple of seconds to implement, and it shows from the very first second that you’re in command, that you have a direction.

You are taking people somewhere deliberately. It gives them almost a roadmap they can follow so that you keep their attention. You, they also walk away being able to retain and take action on what you said. So instead of following this windy narrative and guessing where he was trying to head, they could see from the very first sentence.

So the interruptions decreased, right? Almost, almost, he said, almost dropped substantially. He’s not spending the rest of the week answering questions. He now feels more in control. And the perception change to now being someone leadership is listening to, being someone who is not only leading the meeting but getting outcomes and driving things forward from that, that is exactly what gets you promoted, paid more, tapped for bigger and better things.

All right, onto the E in our SPEAK system, which is express your impact. The single biggest misstep here is that you are communicating activities instead of outcomes. Let me say that again. This is so important. You are communicating activities instead of outcomes. You are probably doing really important work, but the way you talk about it just makes it sound like a grocery store list.

We did this, and we did that, and we did this. It just sounds like a bunch of stuff you spent time doing. It misses completely the business impact. You are communicating what you did, but not why it matters. That’s a problem because when you talk about your work in terms of the tasks, the to-dos, that is how you get pigeonholed, and you stay stuck in the reliable workhorse territory.

When you are seen as the doer, the one who gets things done, who keeps the projects moving, the ironic thing is your leadership can panic at the thought of promoting you or you doing anything else, because if Wendy moves up, well, who’s gonna handle all of the execution and everything she was doing? So when you make yourself indispensable in your current role, you make yourself unpromotable in the next one.

So here is that three-second test that reveals whether you sound like a senior leader or a junior executor. After anything you say about your work, an update, a win, a status report, a recommendation, ask yourself one question: So what? So what? That is the three-second test. We ran the analysis. So what? I spent the week optimizing the pipeline.

So what? We coordinated across three teams to get this project aligned. So what? So what helps you get to the core of the business impact. Decision-makers don’t just wanna know what is happening. They need to know what it means. So what? Sense-making is a skill. Sense-making is about connecting the dots so that the important work you are doing behind the scenes ladders up into a business outcome.

When you drill into the so what, those become talking points that you’re almost handing your boss and other senior leaders to advocate for you because guess what? When you take… They’re going to take those things, and they’re gonna report them to their higher-ups. The other thing that changes is the type of work that begins coming to you.

So right now, if you are leading with things you got done, activities, again, people see you as the doer and executor, so they bring you more execution. Get this done. But when you consistently demonstrate that you understand what your work means to the business, that is more strategic, that is more enterprise level, people start bringing you totally different problems.

They start asking you, “What do you think we should do here? You should be involved in this, in this brainstorm or this conceptualization meeting for this.” This is a mental habit you have to train yourself into. I bet right now you are so stuck in the weeds every single day that it’s rare that you even pick your head up and consider, consider, so what?

You’re just getting tasks done. And so what we do in Speak Like a Senior Leader is we teach you shortcuts to make that translation fast, almost automatic, between here’s what I did, here’s why it matters. So this became a career saver for one of our clients. they are a senior director of operations strategy.

I’ll call him Mateo, and his company went through a major reorg. The fallout left him feeling completely sidelined. His scope was shrunken down. His influence with his boss and his, CIO, his chief, information, officer, it started to slip. What he realized was that the way he had been communicating was not giving leadership a way to, a reason to invest in him and his team.

He was describing problems, and he was making requests, but he was not connecting either one of those to what the executives really cared about. So instead of going to leadership with a workload argument, like we’re stretched, we need more people, which I think is where most of us default to, he built a former business case that tied he needed a new role, he needed a new resource for his team.

He built that directly around a business case that tied to outcomes and, boom, you can see here, got that approved.

All right. The A in our SPEAK system, articulating yourself in writing. This is often the most overlooked. It’s not the sexiest of all of the letters in SPEAK. This is a huge missed opportunity when you think about the amount of writing you do, the amount of articulating yourself in writing that you do every single day.

Emails, Slacks, Teams messages, texts, decks, summaries, every message shapes the perception somebody has of you. The people you are trying to influence every day, they get hundreds of messages. Take whatever you have and double or triple that, and even if your message gets open, that’s the first barrier, it’s an even higher bar to get it responded to, let alone acted upon, and AI is just making all of this worse.

There is so much more generic junk. There’s such a higher volume for all of us to sort through and review. So the secret here is the opposite of a phrase you have probably heard 100 times. Leaders are not readers, they are scanners. You need to optimize for the time-starved decision-maker, the person who is juggling back-to-back meetings, who is scanning emails and reading messages in the bathroom on their two-minute bio break between calls, who is reading on their phone.

Think about how you operate in your own inbox. You scan the subject lines. You decide in half a second whether something needs your attention now, later, I’m not gonna read that at all. You open an email. If it’s a wall of text, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’ll come back to this,” and you move on and you often probably don’t come back to it.

So what does this mean? Direct subject lines, scannable structure, headers, white space. Every message needs a clear call to action. This is something a lot of people miss. Clear call to actions are not things like, “We should really consider,” “The team would really benefit from doing blah blah blah.” And a clear call to action is definitely not, “Let me know your thoughts.”

No. This is all non-ownership language. So I don’t know if anyone, you can tell me in the chat, give me a yes, if anyone here remembers the Abbott and Costello skit, Who’s on First? Love Costello, Abbott and Costello here, watched them all the time when I was younger. Costello is from the same town that I was born in, so big fan.

Who’s on First?, the joke is that they basically go in circles. Costello asks, “Well, who’s playing on first?” And Abbott says, “Yes.” The idea is who, what, those are the players’ names, right? But they just go in circles. The point I’m trying to make here is it can feel like that when we use this non-ownership language.

Everyone is nodding, but nobody knows who’s responsible for what. Who’s on first here? There’s a whole lot of talking, but a whole lot of nothing actually getting done, except now it’s your career and the work you have to drive forward, it’s not a, a comedy s- sketch. So you have to be clear, what are you asking for?

An approval, a decision, a go-ahead? When you don’t respond, or rather when you don’t specify, the default response is nothing. Right. This was a game changer for a client I’ll call Kay. she’s a senior attorney at a global company, they have about f- 25,000 employees, and she was already a top performer.

She had been selected for a worldwide very exclusive program. So by any measure, she was already in the top echelons of her organization, but she was stuck, and her manager kept telling her, “I need you to think and act more strategically. I need you to show more executive presence. I need you to exert more influence over people who don’t report to you.”

And what we realized is one big area for improvement was her writing. Many of you who have gone through any sort of traditional graduate post-grad training, especially an attorney, we are trained to be verbose, sometimes dense, thorough, comprehensive writers to cover every angle, leave no argument unturned.

In a corporate inbox, that was getting her ignored, ’cause her messages were just sitting in purgatory unread, deprioritized by her busy partners and her Fortune 500 clients. So following what we teach, her message, messages became a lot shorter, a lot cleaner. Responses started coming back a whole heck of a lot faster.

And since so much of her job is writing, emails, proposals, briefs, decks, this created an amazing halo effect of results. So she was named de facto lead on two major projects, one led by an executive committee member who reports directly to the CEO. She advocated for new headcount for her team, new resources.

She won a peer, nominated award, so huge. All right. Last in our SPEAK system, we have keep your composure. There’s a specific aspect to this that tends to rattle the very kindhearted, like I think many of you here are, the very well-meaning professional, and that is saying no. I feel like I need, like, a sound effect, like dun, dun, dun.

And you know the drill. You are already underwater. You got 10,000 things on your plate. Then your skip level drops yet another request with an impossible deadline, and you probably do one or two things when this happens. You are so stressed that you snap back and it’s like, are you, are you serious? We, we can’t do that.

No, we’re already at capacity.” Or you go to the other extreme, you cave, and you say, “Sure. Yeah. Okay.” Right? Anybody relate to this? Give me a plus-one. Either way, your priorities suffer. Your strategic work gets pushed to the back burner. And worst of all, because you didn’t, you didn’t speak up, now you’ve put yourself in a position where it’s harder for you to follow through and do quality work, so you risk looking bad and not delivering at the caliber you want to.

The biggest threat to your executive presence is a lack of boundaries. That’s a big statement. At your level, the ability to push back is a senior level skill. And I know a lot of times we will tell ourselves, “I just need to know how to sound more confident and polished.” Some people were even saying that earlier.

And yes, that matters, but you cannot overlook this. You can never project calm, commanding authority when you are completely stressed out and underwater. When your calendar is an utter disaster, when your brain is bouncing through a million different priorities, how can you possibly be articulate, strategic, and composed?

You can’t. You can’t show up as, as the leader you want to when every hour of your day is consumed by work that shouldn’t even be on your plate. So when you decline something, redirect a request, hold a boundary, the instinct, I understand, is to worry about, “I’m being difficult. I’m not being a team player.”

I need you to see this from a different direction. When you push back and you negotiate tactfully, it demonstrates judgment and discernment. It shows you have the ability to distinguish between what matters, what doesn’t, between what serves the business, what is busy work. It also shows you are capable of handling what will come with additional responsibility.

The next level comes with a lot more competing priorities, more stakeholders, more requests pulling you in every which way. If you can’t say no strategically now, then leadership has no evidence that you will be able to handle more of that at the next level. So pushing back now diplomatically is a preview of how you will behave when the stakes get higher.

And it builds trust. It earns you autonomy because then people at the other end, they know they can trust you to flag something. You stop feeling like you have to micromanage everything. And because you’re not spread across a thousand different things, you can do work more exceptionally. And it forces better conversations.

When you push back, especially with a reason, you often surface where there are actually misalignments, where there are faulty assumptions being made, where there are resource, resources missing that no one else had the courage to speak up about. Okay, our client L did this wonderfully. She is a manager at a large tech company, and she was in a meeting where executives proposed a direction that would’ve forced her and her team into a massive amount of redoing a, a certain project.

And it was the end of the meeting, everyone was eager to wrap up, like, okay, duh, everyone’s gotta move on to the next thing. So actually, in that moment, she read the room. She did not speak up then. She made a informed choice to let the meeting end without making it a confrontation and bringing it up now.

That restraint itself was a really smart move. After the meeting, what she did was she reconnected with some of her peers. They all got on the same page about a unified response, how they wanted to approach this, so she wasn’t going back to leadership alone. And sh- she drafted a message to her boss using what we teach to present it inside of the program, setting a boundary as a win-win, and her team, they were able to do that.

She did not get the naysayer label. All right, so there you have it. We covered a lot. Those are the five steps of our SPEAK system. Want you to type in the chat, which of these are you most motivated to work on? So we have shift your style. Remember that the best communicators aren’t consistent, they are adaptable.

Present with poise. Interruptions are a structure problem. Express your impact. Use that three-second test. Always be asking yourself, what is the so what behind this activity? Articulate in writing. Leaders are scanners, they are not readers. And last, keep your composure. Pushback is a senior level skill.

All right, I see a lot of express your impact. Yeah, it’s always great to see, the diversity of areas people wanna work on. Now, you might be wondering, all of this makes sense, but I have no idea where to start. It all feels so overwhelming. I can see what to do differently, but I don’t actually know how to implement this day-to-day.

And what if I screw up? Like, what, how do I recover? these are some high-stake situations we’re talking about right now. So here’s the thing, with the right operating system for these moments, you can become that crisp, clear, concise communicator you know deep down you are capable of being. You are already smart.

As we said, we wanna make your communication match your level of expertise and intelligence. Because if not now, then I really wanna ask you, when? We’re coming up on the halfway point of 2026. It’ll be here in a few weeks before you know it, and you have to make a decision at some point. You have to make a decision to say, “No, I am not willing to stay in promotion purgatory yet another year.

No, I am not willing to leave one more meeting with the, ‘Ugh, I should have said something,’ and then wasting my time replaying in my head. I’m not willing to cave to all of the AI economic uncertainty, to let all of that steal my sleep, to drain my confidence, to crush the enjoyment I used to have from my work.”

That’s something I hear a lot. Because work is only becoming more and more competitive, it is changing faster. Everything is more scrutinized, and you need to make sure you are on your toes, that you are delivering your best and highest value. So the question isn’t whether you’re capable of showing you can operate at the next level, it is whether you are ready to stop wishing and hoping it just magically changes, and get back in the driver’s seat.

So if that is you, then Speak Like a Senior Leader is exactly where you need to be. As I mentioned earlier, this is my wildly popular, client-beloved training program. You had seen some of the comments from our alumni and current members earlier. It is designed to give you the tools and the coaching to communicate in a way that gets decision-makers to trust you with bigger projects, bigger budgets, and yes, for you to get that nice 20 to 40% salary bump to match.

So, Wendy, if you would help me out by putting the link in the chat. We also have the link here, the QR code on the screen for all of you. It is just speaklikeaseniorleader.com. But as I said earlier, we have something very special for all of you. Better yet, when you join us by this Friday, May 8th, 11:59 PM Eastern Time, you get a limited time bonus that, I am taking a deep breath, we are offering, which is two private and personalized strategic communication reviews.

This is worth easily $500, if not more. So no more stressing the next time you have something high stakes that you need to communicate, but you are not sure how to do the message justice. Send in your document for private line-by-line feedback and guidance from us. You can get expert eyes on anything from your mid-year review, your promotion case, a project proposal, an executive briefing, a, one-on-one agenda with your skip level, big presentations.

These are in-depth edits, and we will make sure you are coming across tighter, clearer, more credible. So all you do is you submit your piece of work to us. We give you line-by-line feedback directly on your document, and sometimes, if it’s necessary, we will also send you a video walkthrough of what we changed and why so you understand our mentality and can learn from the coaching there as well.

So TBD if we will offer this again. I don’t know. These take a lot of time on our part and a lot of power, and this level of personalization is just not possible as we grow. But, we recommend for that reason, if you are at all interested in this and wanna take advantage of it, that you hop on top of this now.

So you deserve to have the level of respect, recognition, rewards you get match the talent and the value you bring to the table. Just like this client here who said she’s getting a 20% raise. And just think about what that can do for your earning power over time for the rest of your career.

If you go into a new role and you are benchmarked at that new rate, that’s where you are building from, not your current salary. So Speak Like a Senior Leader, it is a best-in-class coaching and training experience. As I said, it shows you how to go from being that reliable workhorse to an influential communicator who is getting tapped for those opportunities before anyone else.

There’s a couple of aspects that I wanna take you through that really make this program stand out and- Make it different from, our clients have tried a lot. Our clients are people who read the books, love training, have maybe done company-sponsored program, programs, and they say this is unlike anything they have tried.

So first is you get access to the entire Speak curriculum. So today we, like, barely, teeny, tiny scratched the surface. Inside of the program, you get bite-sized, on-demand lessons that take you through each of the components in depth to solve specific problems that you have. You have enough theory, so we go above and beyond to make sure every lesson is tactical, it is proven, it is actionable, it is grounded in strategies drawn from psychology and human behavior.

And when you come into the program, you can also take our Speak scorecard assessment, which is developed to help grade you on each aspect of the Speak system so you can personalize your path if you would like. So in Shift Your Style, you are going to learn how to adapt your delivery, earn instant credibility with any stakeholder, even the tough personalities, and get the outcome you want without sacrificing your own voice.

So we teach you exactly how different personalities tick so you can make quick judgment calls, how they make decisions, process information, assert control. You will stop second-guessing because you will know the exact words to say, angles to use versus ones to avoid to frame your messaging. You get faster buy-in from decision-makers.

You save hours of back and forth because you are speaking their language instead of repeating yourself till you’re blue in the face. Under Present With Poise, you perfect the art of executive-level delivery. You go from someone who is getting cut off and talked over to someone who is remembered. Our clients tell us all the time they cut their meeting prep in half or more because we show you how to organize complex information concisely so you’re not redoing slides till the cows come home for weeks on end.

And so you also know how to not skip a beat when your time is cut, because it will be cut. You have to be prepared for that. And this is a big one, how to think on your feet. A lot of people will tell us, “I ramble, I lose my train of thought.” So we teach you exactly what do you do when that happens without looking incompetent.

So, when you’re hit with something out of the blue, how do you answer with confidence? Doing great work is not enough. We’ve talked about that. So this module, Express Your Impact, shows you how to shift your language from effort and tasks to outcome and results. Again, we talked about the so what test.

That is one teeny, tiny, tiny little piece of this. We give you the magic words to instantly connect your work to business value. We give you phrases that immediately make just run-of-the-mill status updates, like, “I’m just doing my job” Into things that can position you for bigger opportunities, that can get you the resources you want.

We tell you how to eliminate some of those junior level signals, how to trade that junior level language for phrasing that actually reflects the complexity, the scope, the scale of what you mes- you manage. And this is something our clients love, have huge success with, is reworking their one-on-ones to turn their manager into an advocate and internal champion so that your results are getting run up the chain of command and you’re top of mind when opportunities come up.

In Articulate With Writing, you will learn how to get out of the, “Yeah, I’ll read this later” state. You will learn exactly how do you optimize for that fast roll- reading stakeholder so your emails are nearly guaranteed to be opened, to be read, to be replied to fast. No last minute scrambles, faster approvals, save time because you’re not going on the endless back and forth.

Write an email that used to take you an hour in 10 minutes, redirect that time towards something else. Wouldn’t that be nice? Build trust that your messages are worth opening because an executive knows, “Oh, there’s a message from Wendy. I know she’s gonna give me value.” And then keep your composure. Right?

You’re fielding requests from every different direction. You are expected to advocate for yourself, your priorities, without ruffling feathers. So we will show you step by step, how do you say no? How do you push back? How do you negotiate priorities without burning bridges? How do you get a micromanager the heck off your back so you can actually have the autonomy and the space to do what you need to do?

We will show you exact wording to say when someone dismisses or overly criticizes, nitpicks every detail of your idea. So that is our Speak, System. That is our Speak curriculum. The next element of the program after the curriculum or within the curriculum, we have what we call skill drill practice exercises.

I bet you have taken a program where you watch a video and you’re like, “Oh, that’s useful.” You close your laptop and nothing changes. So the skill drills are there to close that gap between, “Oh, I get this” and, “Oh, I can do this.” So you will get more value from every minute you invest in this program. And to complete these, 10 to 15 minutes is all you need.

This program is created for really busy mid and senior level professionals, so it is constructed to fit into the margins of times you do have. You don’t need huge blocks of uninterrupted times. We have people who will say, you know, “I do a skill drill while I’m at my kid’s soccer practice.” so you are turning, with the skill drills, you are able to take real things you are working on and turn that into your practice ground.

So every drill gives you immediate ROI. Now, I saw some people asking, “Is this a completely self-paced program?” There are asynchronous elements, but we also have live weekly elements. That’s part of the magic of this. There are so many ways to get support inside of this program, including our live calls. So every week, we have a live weekly workshop.

Typically, those are on Wednesdays, 3:00 PM Eastern Time for 90 minutes. On these workshopping calls, they are designed to give you hands-on implementation to actually get practice with the techniques you are learning in the program, so you can build them into muscle memory, you can do the, do it in a safe environment so that when you go out and take them in the wild, you already have some sort of a baseline under you.

Okay. As I said, so many ways to get support. Twice a month, we also have open Q&A sessions where you can come, and you can get coaching or clarification on any aspect of the Speak system. So this is your chance to get real-time coaching on your specific situation. So you submit your questions ahead of time, and we will coach you on that.

So this is a level of personalization to you wherever you feel stuck or having trouble applying something. And a huge benefit is also being in the group coaching environment because someone else will ask a question about, “I lose my train of thought in meetings.” The coaching we give them, you’re gonna be like, “That was really useful.

I’m gonna use what she said for that person,” ’cause there’s so much, overlap, even if the exact situations are different. Within Speak, you also get two coaches for the price of one. You get myself and my seasoned co-coach, Wendy Carey. Wendy has worked alongside of me for three-plus years. She has hundreds of coaching hours under her belt.

She has had a 30-year corporate technology, and, she’s also a former student of mine. So you’re in great hands having both of us inside of this program, and our clients say all of the time they love having access to both of us, both of our brains, both of our perspectives. Okay. What questions do you have about the program?

Put ’em in. I’m here to answer them. There’s just one last component I wanted to mention here. So yet another way you can get support in this program is through our private community. We host this on a platform called Circle. This is a private members area where you can post and get daily coaching and input, so on your actual situations as they happen, if you get stuck on a lesson.

And this is, this is yet another touchpoint that you have. So post in the community, get written feedback within a business day or two so you are never left overthinking, second-guessing what to say. All right. If you added up everything inside of Speak Like a Senior Leader, the full value would be over $8,000.

But- Your enrollment, if you join us now, is only $2,000. We could easily offer this for $8,000 or more. I have colleagues who have told me I’m crazy to offer it for only $2,000. And the truth is, we will likely be increasing the investment in the future because of the results that we get people and the power of this program.

So I would encourage you, you never know what the future may bring, I do want to encourage you, if you are at all interested and you want to make sure you get that $500, communication review bonus, you have to sign up by this Friday. All right. This is where you could be in just a couple of weeks. You could be distilling down that complex, rambly update into something crisp.

You could be responding to those curveball questions with that steadiness. You could disagree with your boss and have them thank you for doing that. You could be well on your way to getting the head count, the budget, the resources that you need. And I had a client tell me something recently that really stopped me in my tracks, and she said, “I realize that I tell my daughter to take up space all the time, but I do the opposite at work.

I stay quiet. I don’t push back.” So I want to say, for those of you who have children or you, you have children in your life, they are watching you. They are watching and listening for how you handle these types of conversations, whether you advocate for yourself or you stay small. They are following your example.

And so if you are telling them to be bold, to speak up, to ask for what they deserve, but you’re not doing that yourself, I just want you to think about, is that the example I want to be sending? All right. Let’s see here. I see we have some questions coming in, so let me answer those. A couple of people have asked, when does the program start?

You get immediate access as soon as you join today. So you can jump… You can, as soon as you join on this call, you can jump right in. You could start going through the orientation, and you could be on, you could be asking a question in, in the private community tomorrow. You could be joining us. We have our next speak Q&A coming up on Tuesday, and we have a live workshop on Wednesday.

So you could be joining us right next week. How long is the program? The program is eight weeks. We know you don’t have a ton of time. You don’t want this to take forever, so the faster the better to get the results you want. So this is optimized for action. If after those eight weeks you would like to stay longer, many people do, there is an option to upgrade for more time.

So you will feel and you will see the difference in just eight weeks, as you are seeing from all the comments, all of the screenshots, every- everything here. But, you do have the option to stay on if you would like to. So what happens after you enroll? You are going to select your payment option. We do have a pay-in-full option or a split-pay option.

Complete your registration. You will be sent a welcome email and prompted to fill out your profile in our platform called Circle. You’ll get a confirmation email from me with some instructions that include diving right into your orientation. The orientation takes you through everything you need to know about the program and to get started, and then you are in.

Yes, and we had a question here about the, $297 a month. So yes, it is something after the eight weeks that you can cancel. Jamie, do you have to start right away? You start as soon as you join the program. Yeah. When are the weekly workshops? I mentioned before these are typically Wednesdays at 3:00 PM Eastern.

They’re about 90 minutes long. Everything in the program is recorded, so if you miss it is absolutely no problem. we record everything. We put it on a private podcast within 24 hours, sometimes a lot sooner. And a lot of people love the private podcast because they can listen without being tied to their computer.

So you can listen on Spotify or Apple Podcast, in your car, when you’re doing laundry. And for a lot of our people who are very busy, that is what they, that’s the flexibility that they need. When are the Q&A calls? The Q&A calls are twice a month. Typically, the, second and fourth Tuesday of the month, and those are at 3:00, also at 3:00 PM Eastern, and they are 60 minutes.

And a lot of people will say, “This sounds great, but I can’t do those call times. It’s in the middle of the night for me,” whatever it may be. You do not have to attend live to get massive value from this program. we have people in the program who had never showed up for a live call and got a promotion or got tapped for some gigantic project.

So as I said, every call is added to the private podcast within 24 hours, so you can listen wherever you are, commuting, walking the dog. And our clients will say hearing the coaching insights as they’re just going about their day, applying them in the moment, that, that is powerful. So you don’t have to block off your calendar, you just need some earbuds.

You can get on-demand answers inside of the community. You don’t have to wait for the next call. You can just post your question whenever it’s convenient to you. We get back to you within one to two business days. So you have expert support on your schedule. And the full Speak curriculum is pre-recorded.

It’s taught by me, but it’s pre-recorded lessons, so you can go through those on your own time. If you wanna watch a lesson at, I don’t know, 1:00 in the morning your time- Go for it. It, that can be done on your time because we know you are in all different parts of the world, you are working in the mar- margins of time you have.

What other questions do you have? As a reminder, you must enroll by this Friday, 11:59 PM Eastern, New York City time, to get those two strategic communication reviews. This is a perfect use if you have your, mid-year review coming up. That is a perfect use for at least one of these reviews. It’s one of the most high leverage documents you write all year, right?

It shapes a lot. Are you ready for more responsibility? How are you teeing up the case for more comp- compensation? Most people completely bomb it without realizing. They make that mistake. They say things like, “Manage cross-functional stakeholders across multiple s- work streams. Successfully launched Q1 initiative.”

Your manager reads those and thinks, “Okay, good that they’re doing their job,” but it’s forgettable. It’s fine, but none of those really go the next step of, “Oh, this person is promotion material. Oh, this person, we need to pay them more so we don’t lose them.” None of it makes your boss incentivized to go to their boss and say, “We need to make sure we’re keeping them happy.”

So again, it comes down to are you describing activity or impact? And most people have no clue how to do that. It can be really hard to see on your own, so that’s why this is a great use for one of those communication critiques, ’cause it is a rare chance to hand your mid-year review to us and get detailed line-by-line feedback so you have total confidence in what you are bringing to the table there.

All right. What is the time commitment? we suggest putting aside about two hours for your participation in this program over that eight weeks. We would encourage you, though, to think of this as, and our clients tell this, tell us this all the time, which is that this ends up saving them time. Because think of how much energy you are wasting replaying things.

How do I respond? Right? Redoing the deck at 12 at night. We had one client who said she used to spend six hours prepping for each executive meeting. She’s cut that down to one or two. That’s four to five hours a week back in her life. And like I was saying, best of all, you get access to the program right away, so you can dive in now.

You can start posting in the community, getting coaching and support there. You can start joining our calls next week.

Okay. Some people, we hear this a lot, this sounds great for people at big companies, the, the tech world. My world is different. Good. You will be right at home with us. So yes, we work with- People at NVIDIA and PayPal and, like I said, the Amazons and Googles and all of those. But we teach you a communication system that gets you heard, trusted, and tapped for more, regardless of what industry you are in.

Our clients span over two dozen industries. 75% of people in the program come from outside the tech and software world. So we have people in pharma, biotech, healthcare, medicine, so hospital systems, academic, medical centers, finance, banking, insurance, education from major universities, small colleges, K through 12, government, public sector, local agencies, city government, federal, even places like UN.

We have people in consulting, aerospace, construction, engineering, mining, manufacturing, nonprofits, media, energy, fashion, retail, automobiles, real estate, food production, sports, you name it. So we have seen it all. You can’t surprise us with anything. So regardless, your stakeholders might be attending physicians, they may be law partners, they may be school superintendents or generals or regulators.

Doesn’t matter. You will walk away communicating with the type of authority that turns you into an influential voice, because these are human problems. These are not necessarily corporate problems. Yeah. So, Arun was asking, so two hours a week per eight weeks. Yes, that’s a good rough estimate. Now, some people like to say, “I would like my employer to pay for this.

Is that possible?” So yes, many companies cover programs like this under professional development or continuing education. Wendy just popped in the chat a letter of request for funding to your employer, as well as a PDF that describes the details of the em- of the program to them. So once you enroll, you will receive a receipt.

You can use that for reimbursement. If you need help with that process or you need any other documentation, you can email us, hello@melodywilding.com. And also these, these materials that Wendy put in the chat, the employer letter and the PDF, those are also on the registration page if you scroll down.

They are also there too. I saw this question come through before. How is this different than your books? I don’t just want a regurgitation of this. The Speak system is brand new. It goes far beyond what I covered in either book in terms of both breadth, depth, and specificity. So my books focus on foundational concepts around confidence, navigating upward relationships.

Speak Like a Senior Leader is specifically designed and tailored for advanced communication challenges that you as a mid or senior level professional face, things you face every single day when you are trying to position yourself in a demanding environment. And- so you can see some of the lessons here, which are topics that are not covered in any of my books.

And also, of course, we provide hands-on coaching. You’re getting, real-time feedback on your actual work situations. That’s just a level of specificity and personalization a book just can’t provide, so you get the most and fastest ROI. Okay. If you need a payment plan, as we said, there is a split pay option.

However, if you need something further than that because of your financial situation, please email us, hello@melodywilding.com. We’ll see what we can, work out for you. All right. I want you to type in the chat, “I am on the fence because blank.” I am on the fence because blank. Put that in the chat.

I am on the fence because of my capacity as a working mom. Great. What else? I’ll come back and I’ll answer that specific question, but if you are on the fence and you’re like, “This, this sounds like something I wanna do, but I don’t know,” there’s three diagnostic questions I want you to ask yourself. Do I think this will get me closer to my goals?

If you were to enroll in Speak, you had us as your coaches to guide you, you had the expert curriculum, you had all the different touchpoints for support, do you think that would get you closer to the goals you have for your career? Yes or no. Does it increase my chances of success versus doing it on my own?

If you had step-by-step guidance, tools, accountability, would that increase y- your chances rather than just being like, yeah, I know I need to work on this, or I’ll try to cobble things together from another book and another free webinar and another podcast. Yes or no. And can I figure out how to make the investment work?

Can you do the payment plan? Do you need to ask your company? Could you see a clear path to how this could easily net in a $2,000 ROI for you in the next three or six months? Yes or no. If no to any of these, then don’t sign up. We, we don’t– We want people in the program who can be successful. That is better for you and it’s better for us.

But if yes, then, then we would love for you to join us. It is your best next step. So, let’s see. I wanted to answer the working mom question, and that, that really goes back to, I’m concerned I’m not gonna have enough time to make the most of it. And what I wanna say is, actually, I’m not making this up, the two people you see here, while I’ve cut their names out, they are both working moms.

One of them has multiple children. these are, school-aged children. They are in multiple different sports, so they are running all over the place. They have really demanding jobs. They have a household. They have pets. They have to feed and clothe and bathe themselves at some point as well. And so these are their words about how they made it accessible.

And like I said, we have crafted this program specifically for those of you who are crazy busy, who do not have time, because you can watch the lessons whenever is convenient to you. You can listen. We also upload the lessons to the private podcast, so you can listen to those in your car or when you’re on your commute or whatever.

You can listen to the replays of the workshops or the Q&A’s also on the private podcast. You can submit a Get Coaching question anytime day or night, doesn’t matter to us. We’ll get back to you within one to two business days. You can do the skill drills as it, as your time allows. I should also add, you can submit your skill drills to us for feedback.

As long as you ask a specific question that you want feedback on, we will give you feedback on that. all right. Let me go back over to this question doc. All right. What other questions do you have? Put them in the chat. I’m just taking a look. Wendy has been gathering the questions for me.

Okay. Someone was asking, “If I, if I stay after the eight weeks, what do I get then?” a, a couple of things. So first of all, you retain access to everything in the program. And actually, I just realized, oh my goodness, something I left off of here is our brand-new MelodyGPT. Oh my goodness. How did I leave that off of here?

Shame on me, Wendy.

Wendy Cary: I’m not sure.

Melody Wilding: So recently, maybe about two months ago, we launched a brand-new tool that our clients are loving. We call her MelodyGPT. She is our 24/7 AI communication coach. She’s trained on all of my frameworks, methods, the entire program. Wendy has painstakingly tested and refined this over, over months now before we even released it.

But our clients are using MelodyGPT, again, anytime day or night. They’re having conversations with her to sharpen up, you know, proposals they need to make or talking points. We had someone use it to, build a business case for something that they got approved. so that is yet another tool you have if you’re working in the margins of time you do have.

but I also wanted to mention that because when you remain in the program, yes, you retain access to all of the replays- of the call recordings, the workshops. You can continue attending the calls and the workshops so you get ongoing coaching for a fraction of the price of typical executive coaching, which often goes for 1,000-plus dollars an hour.

and we are always switching up the… we’re rotating in new activities into our workshops. So you’ll get practice with different elements of the lessons and different exercises. We do some teaching, some demos, sometimes case studies, during those workshops as well. And, you retain access to MelodyGPT.

But another really cool thing about remaining in the program is you do open up what we call the vault, which is a more advanced track of trainings that go deeper on each of the elements of the SPEAK system. So that is something special you only get when you remain in the program after the eight weeks.

Okay. We had some questions about when does the program start? I think I clarified that. It starts as soon as you sign up, you’re in the program. okay.

If you need a certificate of completion for your organization, all you need to do is, email us at the point that you need that, and we will produce that for you. It’s no problem.

Wendy, anything you wanted to mention that I did not cover yet?

Wendy Cary: Yeah. Right now, we have a couple of questions in about job seekers and whether this is the right place for somebody between roles and how it might help them- Yeah … in their job search.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. We, we have, we have people who are either by choice or unfortunately by circumstance, in the program looking for a new role. And, what we will say is that we, while we do not cover job search specific topics in terms of, the applications and your, the job search strategy on LinkedIn, your LinkedIn profile, we cover all of that in my other program.

It’s called Lead From Within. We help with your full comprehensive job search strategy, your networking plan, reviewing your resume, your cover letter, all of that. We do that inside of Lead From Within. But within SPEAK, we focus on, we are laser focused on communication skills. So if you know going into your next role it is going to be imperative for you to hit the ground running to talk about the impact you have made, and you even need to speak to that in your interviews, and you need to, convey that you have been operating at an enterprise or a bigger level of complexity- we have had people in the program who have gone through, for example, Shift Your Style, and while they are applying that to stakeholders within their current role, they realized, “Oh, I need to shift my style in this moment for this interviewer.”

And we had someone who, a story I presented at one of these recent webinars was someone who, ended up landing a very competitive go- role, at Google as a result of being able to shift her style for the interviewers she was talking with. So yes, there is a lot of trans- transference or translatability, but I want to be very clear and just upfront with you that if you are looking for, resume review, fully in-depth interview prep, then Lead From Within is the better fit for that.

What other questions can we answer for you?

Wendy Cary: There’s another question, Melody- Mm-hmm … about very strict rules on protecting information within their company, export control.

Melody Wilding: It’s

Wendy Cary: okay. And, how does our system work with that? They have to cut out information and ban from using specific LLMs and AIs, et cetera, that aren’t vetted.

Melody Wilding: Yes. So, we like to say you know your company’s privacy and ethics best. a couple of things we will share with you is you only have to share in this program what you are comfortable sharing. Most– Some people come into the program and will introduce themselves, where they work, what they do. Other people say, “I am just in this industry,” or, “I am just a senior director.”

You only have to disclose what you want to disclose. If you are asking a coaching question, we do not need to know Bob and Sue don’t get along and you’re on Project, Kangaroo. We don’t need to know any of that. We just need to know the broad strokes of where you’re struggling. “Hey, I have a biweekly meeting with two C-suite people, and I find that I completely lose my train of thought when they ask me questions about some general area.

What can I do to get better at that?” That’s all we need to know. So you can make it, sanitized enough that you’re not giving away any, confidential company information. And if for your commu- your strategic communication reviews, a few things, you are welcome to strip out any identifying details.

Some people will do that. Some people submit things when they are just in, rough idea form before they become company property and IP so that we can give them high-level overview on strategy or talking points- before it gets turned into a true company asset, for example. but also know that when you come into the program, everybody does agree in their program agreement to a, a privacy clause.

So there is a shared understanding, and this is a group of highly competent professionals who everyone is in the same boat. Everyone wants their information respected. So you can make your own decisions. we give you the tools. You can make the decisions about how you interact with it, but those are a few ways that people have approached it.

Anything you would add, Wendy?

Wendy Cary: No, I think you covered it. Yeah. Yeah. the privacy agreement is, is really great, and, and we do, check in and make sure that, no egregious,trans- transgressions of that are-

Melody Wilding: Mm-hmm …

Wendy Cary: are happening.

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Wendy Cary: Yeah.

Melody Wilding: Yeah, exactly. let’s see.

Just remember that the two strategic communication reviews, that ends on Friday, so if you are at all interested in that, you have to sign up by Friday, 11:59 PM Eastern, New York City time. It expires after that. Okay.

 

Wendy Cary: I’ve been- … answering questions in the chat. Yeah. I’m not sure how thoroughly you covered, asking your company to pay, but there have been several people, and I haven’t put all the questions in there, but- Mm-hmm … concerned about, “My company takes a long time to approve it,” and things like that, and what can they do about that?

Melody Wilding: Yeah. If you know you will be asking your organization to pay and there’s a certain timeline you may be working around, please email us, hello@melodywilding.com. We can work with you to, temporarily secure your spot so it’s put aside in the program, because we also do need to account for how many people we are going to be serving and having in the program.

So if, if you know that is something you are interested in and you wanna get the ask in the queue, please reach out to us. Let us know that is the case. We can work with you on the specific process. Sometimes there’s also paperwork they may need, so we’re happy to work with you on that. and then we can get you signed up, when that comes through.

So just email us. We know sometimes there’s a case-by-case basis with that.

I wanted to go back to some of these. I am on the fence. Talked about the company paying for it. Yep. Between roles, we talked about Someone asked about the fees and the duration. The program is $2,000 currently. let me go back to this slide.

The program is currently $2,000. We do suspect that that will go up, because of the results that we get for people and the, the value that we are providing. So, right now, if you added up everything separately inside of the program, it would be worth over $8,000. And I have colleagues who are encouraging me to charge $5,000 or more for this level of, coaching and the caliber of the content and the support we provide.

But for right now, it is $2,000, and, if you sign up by Friday, you also get that $500, those two strategic communication reviews where you can submit things to us. We will give you line-by-line feedback. Could be anything from your mid-year review, talking points, an agenda, presentation, anything you want feedback on.

Okay. So I want to be very clear about who this program is not for. It is not for everyone. A very specific type of person benefits. If that’s not you, I want to be honest now, we don’t want to waste your time. So Speak Like a Senior Leader is not for you if you are convinced everyone else is the issue.

And listen, I get it. Your boss, the culture, your colleagues may contribute to you feeling like you are not communicating at your best, but to succeed in this program, you need to be laser-focused on what is within your control. So if you join, we are going to coach you around what is within your control to be doing differently instead of just wishing and hoping and complaining that things are, would be different than they are.

This is not for you if you expect transformation without any discomfort. Trying new things will feel awkward before they feel natural. We will coach you through it. that’s why we are here. If you are clinging to the, “I’m too busy, I’ll do this next quarter,” listen, you are always going to have a lot going on.

So do the people who join us who are at JPMorgan and UnitedHealthcare and all these gigantic companies. This program is designed to fit into the pockets of time you do have. There will never be a perfect time. There will always be something else. If it’s, if it’s now, you may be saying, “Well, it’s the summer.”

Then if it’s the fall, “Well, the holidays are coming.” There’s always going to be something. This is not for you if you just want AI to solve everything. We are big believers that, more and more, your real-time communication is becoming what you are judged and evaluated on, ’cause anybody can put an email into AI and make it sound half decent.

So it’s really these real-time interactions that are going to matter more. And if executive level communication feels like a nice-to-have, like, yeah, this would be okay, this is for you if you know it is non-negotiable for you getting the results that you need, either because you’re sick of hitting the same wall, you are facing challenges like yet another reorg, you have to establish yourself with new people all over again, you don’t wanna be passed over.

So you, you want results like these, right? You wanna show up to work confident you can handle whatever gets thrown at you, to stop wasting the emotional energy on things that should feel easy by now. We talked about that earlier. You want your capabilities to finally match how you are compensated.

So we’re getting to, down to the wire here, down to the end of our time today. You could just go ChatGPT route, but ChatGPT can’t be in the room with you. It can’t teach you strategy or to think like an executive. That’s actually a big part of what we do in Speak Like a Senior Leader, is teach you to think more like an executive.

You can’t type into ChatGPT, like, under your desk when you get caught off guard in a meeting and you don’t know how to answer. Can’t do that. You could attend a company sponsored training. These are usually one size fits all. You’re usually lumped in with people who are fresh out of college. It’s the same things about authentic communication you’ve heard a gajillion times before.

You also can’t get into as real situations, because there’s people there that you then have to work with or who may be involved. You could piece together all the things from books, articles. That takes forever, right? There’s also no feedback loop, right? That’s part of what you get here is the coaching.

And of course, there’s just wishful thinking , right? I’ll just wait. I’ll just wait until this happens, until that person leaves, until this project starts, and just keep hoping the challenges disappear on their own. But the pressure, the scrutiny, the competition, as I said, it’s only getting higher, so you need a proven system.

You need clear, repeatable frameworks, techniques you can adapt across situations and people so you are flexible and you are responsive when needed. You need a space where you can tackle some of the tricky stuff. You can talk about the sensitive situations, how to disagree with difficult people, how to push back on extra work.

You deserve to be coached by people who know their stuff, who bring scientific and psychological rigor- Who have best-in-class coaching chops. We are not just gurus that hung our shingles up yesterday. I’m a Columbia-trained therapist. I have been doing this for 15 years now. You wanna recoup your investment.

If you do the math, if let’s say you’re making 150K, you get a 5% raise, which is typical, that’s $7,500 right there. The program pays for itself multiple times over with that, just one, just one salary increase over the rest of your entire career. So the compounding effect of that can be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So this is one of the most leveraged investments you can make in your career, and you don’t have to do it through trial and error. unless there were any other questions, yeah, I think we will go ahead and leave things there. Thank you all so much for joining us today. It was wonderful to have you here, to be with you.

Remember, one last plug for the fact that our special bonus, those two strategic communication reviews, expires this Friday, 11:59 PM Eastern. So make sure you sign up for the program by that time. We are excited to see you inside. We will send out this replay within the next 24 hours, and we’re looking forward to having you in Speak Like a Senior Leader.

All right. Thanks for joining us today, everyone. Take care of yourselves. Bye, everyone. Bye, everybody.