Hello, hello, everyone. Welcome. We’re so excited to have you here. Say hi in the chat. Let us know where you are watching from today. And, uh, just give us a minute here as we get everyone settled into Zoom. Edmonton. Hey, Krista in Seattle. Good to see you. Simon in New Zealand, thanks for joining us.

It is tomorrow for you. Arizona, Illinois, DC, UK, Maine, awesome. So glad to have you. Whatever time it is for you, wherever you are in the world, we are so excited to welcome you to today’s training. We are talking about being top of mind and tapped for more. So if you are just coming into the Zoom, say hello in the chat. Let us know where you’re watching from. Vancouver, San Antonio, Maryland. Hey, Akuna, good to see you. Gina in LA.

Now, as we are getting started here, I wanna make sure you are in the right place. So before we dive in, is this what you want? You are in the right place today if you are craving more certainty, more confidence, more control over your advancement path, especially during this time where the world feels anything but certain.

So just give me a plus one if any of these things sound like you. You want to know that when you put in the effort, you will get consistent recognition from above, from champions, advocates. You will get a higher, higher-profile seat at the table. Executive decisions about your projects—those actually happen. Number two, you want confidence that when Q4 rolls around—it’ll be here before you know it—the ways you have put yourself out there will actually materialize into the head count, the comp, the title, because you are the obvious choice, and it’s not yet another year where you just get that feedback of, “Yeah, keep doing what you’re doing. We got, we got our eye on you.” You want full conviction that no matter what change or surprise lands in front of you—a reorg, a new leadership—you have the savvy to come out ahead. And you don’t have time to play around. You are busy. You want every week, every hour you spend on your career to be moving something forward for you, not just pushing tasks forward for everyone else, and you know that that requires deeper, more nuanced guidance for the complexity that you are facing now.

So I see a lot of plus ones, yes, coming in, so great to see. You are in exactly the right place. Now, here’s the thing, though. You may be energized, you may be ruthlessly committed to going after all of that, but if you’re honest, there’s a reason why you’re here, and it’s because there may be some things that are getting in your way, right? Maybe you have been told you’re in the running for that other position, maybe it’s senior manager, it’s director, it’s VP, whatever it is, for three, six months, maybe more. And you have just been telling yourself, “Be patient. You know, I, I should be grateful I have a job in this environment. Maybe I should just stop pushing so hard.” Or you’re starting to wonder, “Maybe I’m better off leaving. May- maybe it’s not going to happen here,” but that’s a tough call to make in, in this market. Maybe you have just stepped up into bigger responsibility, and now the reality is hitting, “Oh, shoot, I actually have to do this job now, and all eyes are on me, and my imposter syndrome is ramping up.”

And many of you, I’ve heard from so many of you, so many of you have been in communication with me via email about what you were hoping to get out of this, and so many of you said something along the lines of, “I need to be taking on more strategic work, broader scope, influencing at the enterprise level, strategy, but I’m in reactive mode. I’m putting out fires. I’m redoing my team’s work. And every time the thought creeps in that I should be pushing back, there is that voice that says, ‘Don’t rock the boat. Don’t rock the boat,’ right? ‘Everyone else has to do more with less, so you’re not special here. Figure it out.’” And you are sick of lifting your head up month after month, like, just seeing the time, the calendar pass when you haven’t even thought about your own goals.

So if all of this is sounding familiar, welcome. You are in exactly the right place. We have a lot in store for you today. We’re gonna talk about how do you get handed better opportunities, no groveling necessary, no sucking up, by escaping what we call the next level loop, where, ironically, working harder is making you more invisible. We want you to be like our clients. Some of those are here, who are accomplishing things like walking out of their annual review with 140% bonus, because they will use the four-part RISE formula we’re going to take you through today to turn the rest of this year, which is the busiest, most chaotic time, into a total perception reset.

And again, we’ve heard about this inconsistency that some of you feel. “I feel like I have some advocates, but then there’s other people who don’t know me, and there’s this need to build relationships with the right people.” So we’re gonna give you a tool to quickly navigate and diagnose political dynamics so you can maximize your visibility and know where your efforts should be going. And last, you will never go anywhere if you are stuck in the weeds, so we’ll talk about the number one thing to do, that you are missing now, if you feel like you are stuck in that hero mode. All right. See, this is relating to a lot of you. And, you know, at the end of the day, you just want all of that because you want return. You want results for your time, your effort, your expertise, and that is just like all of the people we work with. We have helped people in almost every industry and sector you can imagine. From your big tech, your software companies, to biotech, pharma, hospital, insurance, media, nonprofits, uh, aerospace, consumer goods, oil and gas, academia and higher ed, federal and local government. You name it, we have worked with professionals at the mid, the rising mid, and senior levels in all of these types of sectors, and everything we are going to talk about today is applicable there. So you are in good hands today. I am Melody Wilding. I’m a two-time bestselling author of Managing Up and Trust Yourself. I am an Ivy League-trained therapist. For over a decade, I have been a professor of human behavior at a top-ranked graduate school here in the East. I’m an avid weightlifter, always pushing for a new PR. I’m a cat mom to two, uh, very hungry little beasts who are probably angry at me that it is dinner time and they are not being fed. Cat owners can relate. I am not someone who just hung up a shingle yesterday or during the pandemic. For more than 15 years now, I have been an executive coach. I have been a confidant to, uh, people who have called me their so-called, you know, secret weapon in the background, to some of the world’s most powerful people. We’re talking CEOs of publicly traded companies, founders of high-growth startups that have gone on to sell for millions, top executives at Fortune 10 organizations, major, uh, organizations like NATO, the UN. My team and I have personally trained thousands of leaders, like I said, across every kind of high-stakes environment you can imagine.

And maybe you found your way here through my dozens now of LinkedIn Learning courses. I’m actually filming two more in a couple of weeks here. Or maybe it was my writing on HBR, CNBC. Um, HBR has very gratefully, uh, called me one of the top management thinkers worldwide, which is quite an honor for that to be coming from HBR. And what that breadth of experience, this background in human psychology, has given me in everything that we teach is something no single industry could, which is a pattern-level view of exactly what separates people who advance, who get chosen for the best opportunities, who drive their organizations forward, versus the ones who stay stuck, underpaid, and overlooked, despite being equally talented and hardworking.

So we want you to be in that first camp, right? We want you to be the ones who are recognized, which is why today, at the end of this training, the doors are opening for my program, Lead From Within, for the final time this year, with an unhinged amount of amazing bonuses for the next 24 hours. So you need to stay to the end to get all of the details. It’s worth over $9,000, and this is a one-time, one-time offer. So Lead From Within is the premier career accelerator for mid to senior level leaders, where you will unlock your next level title, the wider scope of influence, the life-changing comp that matches the caliber you are performing at.

So before we go further, I wanna come to a little agreement with all of you who are here. In the next 45 minutes or so, I’m going to give you, completely free, my insider tips, our clients’ secrets, their strategy for mastering politics, positioning that is required to see these shifts about how people are making future decisions about you. But is it cool with you—give me a yes in the chat—is it cool with you if at the end I share with you about Lead From Within? If it is the right next step for you, you can take it. If not, no hard feelings, but give me a yes in the comments if you’re cool with that. All right. Awesome. I see lots of, I see lots of, so many familiar names, so many of you that we’ve worked with before, and that I’ve, again, I’ve gone, uh, back and forth with so many of you on LinkedIn or via email, so it’s so fun to see your names here, so excellent. All right. Thank you, everyone. Just wanna be on the same page with all of you. All right.

You deserve kudos for being here, because you’re standing at a very important inflection point this time in the year, right? It is literally mid-July as we are recording this. The next six months are the most consequential of the entire year, and most people are completely oblivious to that, but not you, which is smart. So I want you to get very, very excited and grateful to yourself about that, because what a huge opportunity to look ahead at what’s left of Q3 and what’s upcoming in Q4, and still have so much leverage to influence what happens to you next. Right now is the time to be laying the groundwork so that your name is in the conversations where these decisions are happening. And this belief around your own agency to influence what comes next for you, this is the core mindset that we see separates the most successful graduates of all of our programs. So this is a question I wanna ask for you: Is your name right now in these conversations as they’re happening? What would you say at this moment in time? Yes, no, or maybe?

And if it’s a no, that’s okay. If it’s a, uh, some ways, but not really, I mean, there’s a reason why you’re here, so good. Good. Because we’re, we’re problem-solving around this now, which is so important because, as I was saying, mid-July, we’re gonna be in August soon. The next several weeks are when everything you want for the rest of 2026, as well, as well into way, way into 2027, they start getting locked in. This is not a, like, “I’ll get to this when things lighten up” conversation, because if we think about this tactically, budgets get… start to come to fruition three to six months before the new fiscal year. Strategic targets also tend to be announced, uh, I think organizations shoot for the end of Q3, but it often starts to happen at the beginning of Q4. We’re starting to get into calibration season, right? Those informal conversations are already happening that determine head count, which projects get staffed, how teams are shifted around, who gets merit or salary increases, who’s bonus eligible, and much of that becomes a done deal by the end of October. And here we, we have to be honest about the environment we’re in. Layoffs also ramp up big time around the end of the year. There was a stat I found, uh, that said 30 to 50% of layoffs are announced in Q4, but the decisions about who is included in that, they’re made. They’re starting to be made now.

So I want you all to play another game with me. I want you to imagine, as I’m sitting here and it’s, like, 100 degrees outside, I want you to imagine it is December. You’re kind of sitting around your fire, right? It’s the holidays. You got your, your, uh, warm cup of cocoa. You’re reflecting on the year, maybe with your partner or your friend. What do you want to be saying by that point is true for you in your career? Type it in the chat, just a few words or a phrase. What do you most want to be true for you at that point? And I want you to think about, like, what if you could be saying things like, “I got this huge unexpected bonus and we were able to pay off our car early.” We have had so many people on Lead From Within the past couple of weeks who have said, “I took a real vacation for the first time in… I literally cannot remember the last time I took a real vacation, and my team just handled everything without me.” Or, “I am the one the CEO is now calling directly to take things on, and they are asking me to brief our biggest clients. Yeah, I’m feeling great, promotion, bonus, new opportunity.” Yeah. Yeah. And I’m showing you this to give you a sense of possibility, because there’s a lot of doom and gloom out there right now, especially when we’re talking about there are fewer seats as you tend to go up, right? And more people vying for them.

And the danger is, what most people end up doing is they fall into the back half of the year death slide, and you may know this very well. I’m willing to bet it’s happened to you. You kind of coast through the summer because you’re like, “I need a break. I’m tired. Things are quieter, so I’m gonna take advantage of that.” Then you come back the fall, it’s like all hands on deck. You’re slammed again. The kids are back in school. Then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, my gosh, it’s Thanksgiving already. And suddenly it’s the holidays, and now you’re starting to hear things like, “You know what? Let’s revisit this conversation next year.” Or you start to tell yourself, “I’ll think about all those goals later. Like, everything I said I wanted to do, it’s just gonna have to wait ’cause I have to get through this.” Until you get to the holidays and you’re so spent you just veg out, right? Does any of that sound familiar to people? Yeah. With that end of the year death slide, it’s then another year you’re kind of just running in place, and it’s not because you’re lazy. It’s not going to get fixed with better time blocking or, like, a new magic time management journal or whatever. It’s definitely not because you’re too sensitive to handle the pressures, the people that come with bigger responsibilities. It’s because there is an invisible cap that is holding you back. There is this cycle that keeps repeating, and it feels productive. It looks like the right thing from the outside, and that is the very thing keeping you in the muck of the tactical, keeping you seen as—I’ve heard this from so many of you—”I’m the reliable workhorse executor tactician,” and watching all the other conversations and opportunities happen without you.

And I have a name for this cycle. I call it the mid-career ceiling, where everything you have been doing is no longer sufficient to get you where you want to go, and you feel like you’re just banging your head against this wall you can’t quite see, wondering why the old tactics aren’t getting you the same results they used to. It’s like, why isn’t this working? And identifying this, putting a label on it, is tremendously important, because when you are living it, it feels very personal. It feels like proof you don’t have what it takes. But when you can break down this phenomenon, when you can understand it is a predictable one, you are back in control of liberating yourself from it.

So there is a cycle that is keeping you trapped under the mid-career ceiling. This is the next level loop. This is what’s keeping you under it again and again and coming back and banging your head. So here’s how it works. Stage one is proving yourself, where we believe, consciously or unconsciously, that if we just demonstrate our value, deliver the results, hit our numbers, solve the hard problems, we’ll be recognized that we’re ready for more, right? Once they see what I’m capable of, they’ll have to move me up. So you double down on being excellent, reliable, the person who turns everything around quickly, answers all the questions. Uh, you know, I had someone say to me, “I do my job well. I have tons of evidence of that.” And if you are someone who just stepped into a bigger role or remit, you may feel this pressure to prove yourself even more intensely, because now you feel like, “I have to justify why they picked me, so I have to have all the answers. I have to, like, solve every problem to prove that I was a good choice.” So either way, you’re operating from the same belief. If I just show I am good enough, the rest will follow. But stage two, the payoff doesn’t come from that, and you start feeling resistance, mostly from others, right? If you’re aiming for a promotion, you’re told, “Yeah, you’re on our radar,” but there’s no real movement around it. Someone—it may go to someone less experienced, and you can’t explain why. You ask for feedback, and you get the vague things like, “Well, we need to see more executive presence. You need to have a broader, you know, impact across the business.” And you’re like, “I don’t understand what that means.” Um, someone said to me, “It just doesn’t seem like things materialize for me, and I’m at this loss for what I can do to stand out.” And again, if you have just stepped into a bigger role, you’re doing more than you ever have, but somehow you may notice your boss isn’t as impressed as you think they should be, um, or you’re noticing you’re having a harder time than you anticipated getting the influence and the traction you need to be successful at that level.

So you do what you’ve always done. You double down. You try harder. You work longer. You put in more effort, because effort is something you can control. And now that leads us to phase three. You are stuck in the weeds. You are buried. All of that effort has actually made things worse. You become so reliable, no one can imagine you anywhere else. And the bigger picture work, you know, the high visibility stuff, the case building for whatever you want next, all of that keeps getting pushed to when things calm down, but they never do. It’s a version of the death slide, right? And if you’ve just taken on a bigger remit, then, or not, you notice you are becoming the bottleneck. You’re in every meeting, you’re CC’d on every thread, people can’t move forward without you. And either way, you’ve reinforced the image of you as an executor. So guess what? You get more of that work, and you are forever trapped as this doer. And eventually, what we find is that a lot of people get frustrated with this, and their conclusion is, “I need a fresh start. I just need a new company with new people.” And that feels good for a while, but you bring yourself everywhere. So unless something fundamentally shifts, you will repeat the same cycle. You recreate it with a different cast of characters, and within months, sometimes weeks, you’re right back at stage one, right? Just now, more time has been spent, right? The windows are getting smaller. Does this track with anyone’s experience? Just give me a “me” in the chat.

Yeah, it’s so common. It is so common and so predictable, and it’s because you have been taught to try the wrong formula. You are smart, but again, this was what was handed to you, and it is the reason you feel like you’re doing everything right, but you still feel like you’re standing in place. And for a lot of people, they will say to us, “I feel like I’m one step behind the politics always. I’m not in front of things.” And so the formula that you have been given is this: effort plus time plus expertise, that equals success. Put in the hours, work hard, be the smartest one in the room. Eventually people will notice you, and you will be anointed, like a fairy godmother comes down and says, “Yes, you have arrived, and here is everything you have wanted.” This formula isn’t wrong. It works. It works up to a point. It’s probably the reason you are where you are today, why you’re here. So of course, it’s like I just keep running the play. But there comes a point, and you have reached that level, where you have outgrown this, and it starts actively working against you.

So that is why I wanna introduce you today to the four-part RISE formula. This is going to replace that old, outdated formula, and I’m gonna take you through this step by step. This is a brand-new way of thinking about how you are positioning yourself, how you are getting and unlocking those opportunities, one that is more sophisticated and nuanced. We’re gonna go through every step of this, but it is reclaim, influence, scale, and embody. That is what helps equal success at this new level and get you out of, once and for all, that next level loop where you are trapped under that mid-career ceiling.

All right. Reclaim is all about reclaiming control of your trajectory, because right now I’m gonna take a guess that for many of you, your day is back-to-back meetings, it’s Slack pings constantly, it’s a to-do list that’s like a Hydra. You knock some things off, but then there’s 10 more things on it. You’re in reactive mode from the moment you open your phone or your laptop in the morning till the moment you close it at night. And this is what happens when you blink and six months have gone past, right? And again, sure, you have wins to show from it, but if you are truly honest with yourself, how many of those wins are actually things you cared about or that were advancing your career path, rather than just responding to what was thrust onto your plate? Most people who stay trapped under that mid-career ceiling in the next-level loop, they are not designing their careers. They are just kind of stumbling through them like, “This role came up and then that opportunity, and then I don’t know how I really ended up here.” It’s like it’s happening to them rather than because of them, right? It’s something they kind of just fall into and resign themselves to, rather than something they are proactively engineering. There’s a big difference between those two things. And I said before, this isn’t going to be solved with just basic time blocking. I’m sure you do a lot of that, right? I’m sure right now you already do your best to plan your day with time blocks, which is great, and maybe once or twice a year, you think about your longer term vision when you have to work on your performance review or your OKRs or your KPIs, whatever acronym your organization uses. The problem is there’s this big gap in between, this big white space, right? There’s nothing connecting today to this longer term vision, right? No bridge between what am I tackling and what’s on my plate this week with where am I trying to go. So you end up in one of two modes. You are either stuck, like we said, reacting, urgent, in the weeds, or you are dreaming and longing for this long-off future that just seems too ambiguous and far off to even act on. So you just kind of float through the day because it’s like it’s too esoteric, it’s too abstract.

So the solution here to reclaim control of your trajectory is intentional sprints. That is how you reclaim control. And some of you here who are from the product or the tech world, you’re probably familiar with the concept of sprints, right? Instead of planning a massive multi-year roadmap and just like, “Well, I hope we get there,” right? You have teams that work in short, very focused cycles where they commit to a defined set of like, “Here is what we are going to accomplish in this sprint that ladders up to our larger roadmap.” They execute against that, and then after that sprint, they pause, they reassess, they recalibrate before they go to the next thing. And so why does this work? It forces your prioritization. In our case, we like to look at 90-day sprints. That’s the specific window we use inside of Lead From Within. So it’s not like someday, it’s not this entire year. You can’t do everything. You have to choose. You have to choose what you are going to do in that time. You can’t stay in the vague. And for someone at your level, this is critical, because you are surrounded by the gravitational pull of other people’s priorities, emergencies, demands on your time. So if you do not have a defined target and action steps you are taking every 90 days, and every week frankly, you will get sucked into the orbit of other people every single time. So sprints give you something to protect, a reason to say, “You know what? I’m not gonna do this right now,” to the things that feel urgent, right? A filter for deciding what gets your best energy versus what just gets the scraps. And so when you are in reactive mode, you are setting goals in December and you just never look at them again. You are just agreeing to everything and anything because, “Well, maybe that’s gonna be an opportunity, maybe not. I also feel bad saying no.” You have no compass. You spend 90% of your time on other people’s goals because, again, you have no source of truth that you are working towards, and your career becomes that series of like, “Well, this just came up, so I took it.” And I think worst of all is living with this low-grade anxiety of like, “I know I should be doing more, but I don’t know what that is, and it’s just like every day passes and I don’t know how to get there,” right?

Versus reclaiming. When you have intentional sprints in place, you stop saying, “Well, I hope this becomes a reality,” and it’s much more agentic. You have agency of, “Here is how I am making this happen.” There’s so much more ownership and confidence. You say no faster because you already have determined what you’re saying yes to. You know you have this huge product you’re trying to push over the finish line, so you can say no to that committee you’ve been asked to be on. You can block and protect time for your priorities instead of just like, “Oh, shoot, I know I said I was gonna work on that, but oh gosh, I have so many meetings this week, I can’t.” This is really important, too. You walk into conversations with clear asks and requests. It’s not just meandering. It’s not just you being assigned things. You have a point of view, and you have a direction that you are leading your relationships. And you have much more grounded confidence in every interaction that, “I am going somewhere with this.” So this is what happened to, um, one of our clients, Adam, a quick case study on this. He had actually spent, a rare breed now, who had spent his entire career at one company, and he had worked his way up from an associate to he was now managing multimillion-dollar projects. He had a team that was spread across the entire country, and by every measure, I mean, he had put in his time. He had evidence of his successes, so he was ready for the next thing. But for years he would ask for a promotion, and ask very softly for a promotion, and he got the same response, “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” right? “We’ve got our eye on you. Yep, you’re in the running.” And enough was enough, so he joined Lead From Within. We executed on a strategy, a specific strategy using intentional sprints to go from where he was, which was “you’re on our radar,” into “your packet has been submitted.” We coached him through, specifically with a lot of detail, how to handle conversations with his boss to formally nominate him. We were able to help him identify and secure a well-respected executive level sponsor, uh, who actually was even remote in another country, believe it or not. We crafted and refined meticulously the strongest possible promotion case for his materials, literally reviewing dozens, I think hundreds, of pages of his case that he submitted. And Adam went from being strung along for years, resigned to just like maybe I’m just gonna retire at this level, to being in the running for the first time. His packet was submitted. His sponsor was actively advocating for him. His boss was on board. So after all that time of feeling stuck, of waiting, he was now finally waiting on word that it just needed to be approved.

So this brings us to the I in RISE, which is influencing up and above you. For a lot of you here, um, I’m sure your team loves you. The people you manage, your direct reports, they think you are a great boss. They love that you are fair, supportive. You have probably built trust with many of your colleagues as well, and that feels good, but you are beloved in a bubble. I say that with so much care, that you are beloved in a bubble. Outside of your immediate team, with, uh, peers of your boss, with peers in other functions, with executives, with the C-suite, with perhaps your board, with even external partners, you may be largely an unknown quantity. Or worse, you are known for one thing, which is being good at your current job. And if you have just stepped into a new role, it’s a bit more complicated, because the credibility you may have built before elsewhere doesn’t automatically come with you, right? So you’re not known yet. The people who, uh, hired you may have moved on, right? Your new peers are feeling you out. They don’t know if you’re an ally or a threat, and now you have to possibly win over a team that used to be your equals. So, um, again, this is where the mid-career ceiling comes in, that you may be so focused on proving yourself, proving that you can do the work, that you’re neglecting all of this, right?

So what we find is that a lot of people will tell themselves what sounds like the very principled thing, which is, “I don’t play politics,” right? “I don’t wanna be political. I stay out of it. I do a good job.” But when you don’t have political capital, you don’t go anywhere. You don’t get promoted, you don’t get advocated for, you do not get protected. You do not get the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong if you do not have social and political capital. And I’m sure you have had mentors tell you you need to build influence, relationships, you need to increase your visibility, right? How many people have heard that? And every time you hear it, you probably think, “Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.” But then you go back and you’re like, “What does that mean? Like, with who? How do I do that?” And at your level, there’s an entire ecosystem of people, like I said, your boss, skip-level, your peers, direct reports, a matrix manager, stakeholders in other functions, people who are outside of your organization, and you’re trying to figure out who the players are.

Yeah, people are saying frequently all the time. So this is the tool we wanna give you. It’s called power mapping. This is very simple, also very powerful. We use this inside of Lead From Within so you can prioritize your time and effort in terms of who and where you are building influence, so you make sure that your time is well spent, because you can’t do it with everybody. So there’s two dimensions here. On one dimension, you can see you have someone’s level of influence, which just very basically speaking, is how much sway or decision-making power that person has, compared to their level of interest. How much are they personally involved or invested in your work? We don’t have time today to unpack this tool in detail, because I wanna make sure we get to the rest of the equation, but the takeaway is this: the quadrant that matters the most are these manage closely people, high influence and high interest, right? They need more contact from you, higher frequency, more touch bases, greater detail, looping them in before decisions are made, asking for their input even when you don’t technically need it, making sure they don’t feel surprised by something that you’re doing. And most of us never take the time to look at the ecosystem around us like this to understand where the players sit. And that is how you start to break out of the beloved bubble, when you’re always stuck on your back foot. In the beloved bubble, you’re finding out about decisions before they’re made, you make a pitch and you hear, “That’s interesting,” and it stalls because you don’t have cachet or buy-in with people. You are finding out about big things, like strategic shifts and reorgs, through the grapevine, possibly too late. You have strong opinions, but no one seems to really ask for them or listen to them. And you are dependent on your boss. Your boss has become a point of failure for you, which is a risky place to be. But when you have influence up and across, you are more proactively included in shaping the direction. By the time you share something, most people have already said yes privately. You are being pulled aside, you are being given a heads-up, maybe even being consulted about the direction some of those larger, broader org decisions should go. You are tapped on the shoulder as a trusted partner, rather than just a recipient of tasks. People say, “What do you think?” instead of just saying, “I need you to do this,” right? You have other allies to call on besides your manager.

Now, who here, just give me a yes in the chat, how many of you feel like every week there’s a new big change announced in your organization, like a restructure, new executive team member? Yeah. It is so tempting to let that get the best of you, ’cause it just feels like waves that keep coming. And so I wanna tell you about Brittany, who was in this exact situation. She went through a reorg that actually stripped her of her direct reports and put her under a manager she could not stand. And on paper, you’d think this is a huge step back, right? This is a loss. But Brittany, to her credit, she didn’t just wanna sit back, and she was not content letting this kind of be how things shook out. So she knew that reorgs are a time when things are in flux, which meant that there was still room to move, and in her case, to build a relationship with the person who had become her skip-level VP. And so fast-forward a few months, she was able to grow so much trust with that person that the VP said, “You know what? We are thinking of starting this new center of excellence around this particular, you know, vein of the business. Would you and this other person like to co-lead that?” And she was like, “Yes, we would.” And so almost overnight, again, she was given the budget to hire her own team. She was able to get out from under the thumb of that terrible boss. So I share this because the next time a shuffle is inevitably announced, a lot of you are saying here, “Oh, God, yes, all the time,” what if instead of fear, your first reaction could be possibility? And so I wanna plant that seed for you, that a reorg is one of the best opportunities you get to reshape your role, because the lines are being redrawn, people are more open to negotiation for scope, for title, for reporting lines. So it doesn’t have to be as big, daunting, scary as we make it out to be, if you play it correctly.

Now, speaking of hiring your own team, that leads us to the S in RISE, which is scaling yourself. And the main issue here is what we’ve been talking about. You may be leading at a new level with old habits dragging you down like an anchor, right? And when this happens, we tend to default to a few responses. You might get frustrated with your team and say, “They’re just not detailed enough. They’re not proactive. People don’t act like owners.” And I’ve even heard some people come to me and say, “I don’t know if I just need a whole new team. Like, do I just have the wrong people, and they’re lazy? I don’t know.” You then may overcompensate by spending hours redoing their work, which builds a lot of resentment on your side, and then they feel like they have been stripped of responsibility. You might decide to hire your way out. We see this a lot too, like, if I just had one more person, right? If I just had a person who gets it or who could step in to take over this piece. So you pour your energy into making the case for that. You go fight for the budget, for the justification. You go through, God, so many different interviews, only to get the hire and it wasn’t about capacity, right? The same patterns happen. Or many of you may feel like you’re at a point where you’re just resigning yourself to firefighter mode, like this is just what being in upper leadership is, right? It is just survival. The higher I go, the crazier it gets, and that’s just what it is. None of those are solutions. They are symptoms, and they are symptoms of the fact that you have not externalized what is in your head. This is by far the biggest bottleneck that keeps you in the weeds, that right now your thinking, your standards, your preferences, your judgment, your way of thinking, it all lives with you, which means that every decision, every deliverable, every question about, “Is this good enough? Is this what you were looking for?” has to run through you, and you have become the bottleneck, not necessarily because your team is incompetent, but you have not given them systems and a way to operate without you. So scaling yourself has to mean turning what’s inside of your head into assets that exist outside of you.

This is game-changing if you actually take this home and do this. That might be a decisions matrix so people understand what they can move forward with independently versus what they have to wait on you for. It may be a checklist that defines when is something ready for my review, when has something actually reached a threshold of being excellent or being able to go in front of the client. It may be a personal operating manual—this is something we work on in Lead From Within a lot—about how you work best and communicate best so people can start managing up to you in the best way possible. It may be documented escalation criteria, so you are only pulled in when it’s truly needed, and you can actually step away for a vacation. The actual format matters less than the principle here, which is that if it’s stuck in your head, it’s stuck with you. And that’s what tends to happen. It feels like a catch-22. A lot of people will say, “I am trying to be the supportive leader I never had.” But somehow you’re like, “Trying to be the supportive one is working against me now.” Right? “I’m being pulled out of the important stuff for death by quick questions. I feel trapped. I can’t step away ’cause everything would fall apart without me. If I attempt to delegate, it comes back needing more work. I am the first one online, I am the last one to leave.” And then you still get the feedback, “Well, you gotta empower your people more.” But there’s this, “But, but I’m the one on the line if things don’t go well. I’m the one whose butt is accountable for all of this.” When you externalize what is in your head, you stop being the system. You start building better ones. You increase other people’s ability to self-serve. You can finally take that week off, ’cause they can handle the crisis. You gain 10, 20 hours per week ’cause you have fewer meetings. You’re not redoing everything. You can have your mornings for deep work time. And your boss—and we’ve had this happen in Lead From Within even recently, where people have been approached and said, “Your team is, like, humming on all cylinders. Can you teach some of your peers what you are doing to scale this? ‘Cause we need them to do that, too.” So this is not externalizing your brain for scale… it’s not an overnight process. It is an investment. And if you truly care about your people and being a servant leader, this is really the only way to give them the opportunities they deserve.

We had a client, I’ll call her Dina. She came to realize this. She was someone who came from a clinical background, so she wasn’t a stranger to leading, but this was different. She was more on the administrative side now, and she was actually being groomed to be a successor for her nonprofit, stepping in for, um, the CEO. And she had a very fast-growing team. They were scaling very quickly, multiple countries, international, and it was like the train was starting to come off the tracks. And one day they did an anonymous survey, which, you know, yes, we all love an anonymous survey, and she got some feedback on there that was just like a dagger to the heart, that someone on her team said she was playing favorites, right? And she was like, “I…” It just hurt so bad ’cause she was trying to be accessible, trying to be kind and understanding and available all the time, yet it was coming across as unfair and inconsistent. She could have gotten defensive. She did not. She was like, “This is my crucible moment. I have to change something here.” And so we worked together to completely reset her team’s values, norms, decision-making structures. Everything that had been living in her head, how she made choices, what she expected, we externalized it. We made it shared, we made it portable to others, learnable to others. And over the past months, she traveled to Asia for weeks at a time for conferences to build her profile externally. And in the past, being in Asia and having… You know, usually working from the US, she’d have to be up in the middle of the night with calls, constant check-ins, but this time the team just kept moving without her. She had a second in command who really stepped up, decisions got made, and she felt so confident she actually took two full weeks off soon after that for a self-care retreat. Fully offline, it was like a meditation retreat, you can’t have your phone. And she came back and there were no fires. It was amazing. She was like, “I can’t believe it.” And all of this has solidified for the CEO, for the board, that she can be the right hand. She is capable of taking the organization where it needs to go.

Okay, you can take every step we have covered today. You can reclaim your trajectory with the intentional sprints, you can create systems to not be the bottleneck, but none of that matters if decision-makers’ perception of you hasn’t caught up to what you’re doing now, right? They will make assumptions of you based on the limited information they have of you, and they will not fill in the blanks generously. So if you have left your brand to chance, then your perception is just a patchwork of random interactions. It’s not a narrative, right? And you may also have no external presence. Like, it might have been years since you touched your LinkedIn, you haven’t published anywhere, you haven’t spoken anywhere, and you have no presence online. You wonder why opportunities aren’t coming calling. Whenever we are thinking about advancement, most people start with the question, “What do I want to be known for? How do I want to grow? How do I want to get noticed?” That is completely the wrong question. Instead, you should be asking yourself, “What does the organization need that I can become the answer for?” Decision-makers don’t sit around thinking about, “Oh, gee, Wendy would love to grow in her career. Let me think about how I make that happen for her.” No, they are thinking about the problems and the priorities they are accountable for. And so when something comes up, they reach for whoever comes to mind first. So your job is to be that person, and you need to pick a lane based on the intersection of what excites you versus what problem, what business need is there, right? That is where you unlock advancement the most. It’s all well and good that you wanna grow, but it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t solve an actual business need, and that’s the mistake most people make.

So when you have an accidental, unmanaged perception, people may know your title, but they know nothing about the results you get or why it matters to them. You’re like your boss’s secondhand. You don’t have your own reputation. The role you want may go to someone else, and you see your colleagues getting those opportunities and you’re like, “Why not me?” right? You may also feel totally unconnected from your work. But when you have an embodied personal brand, it’s at the intersection of your interests and those business needs. And because of that, because there’s an imperative behind it, leaders brag about your impact. So like, “Look at what so-and-so did.” People say, “I’ve heard great things about you” when they meet you. You are tapped on the shoulder for opportunities. You are asked to sit on panels, to go on podcasts, or whatever it is. There becomes a thing you’re known for, and that gives you traction. That creates a sense of purpose. So I wanna tell you about Nirali, a perfect example of this. Uh, she stepped into a role as head of program and change management at a pharmaceutical company and, uh, when she came into the program, she had been advocating to build this enterprise-wide change management capability for a long time, years. And it was starting to feel like it was pushing a boulder up a hill. And what we uncovered was that Nirali was talking about change management from her lens, her language, from her vantage point, which was a lot of excitement about the frameworks, the methodology, the long-term organizational benefits, but that needed to be translated to the business problems the executive cared about. Cost, quality, timing, now, right? And so when she made that switch, among others, she got approval to build the capability. Her CFO told her directly, “You’re not just a great executor, you create things.” Her organization, her unit, was touted as an example of “this is what good looks like” for the rest of the organization. She was asked to speak on panels, to be a part of special industry, um, committees and programs around change management. Yes, she got a pay bump on top of all of this. She got headcount to hire senior members for her team.

So that is our RISE formula. Reclaim your trajectory, influence up and across, scale yourself, and embody your brand. And right now you may be feeling one of two things. You might be fired up, like, “Let’s go.” Everything you’ve heard today is a missing piece for you. But I also know some of you are like, “Okay, there’s so many ins and outs of my situation that I have to cover,” right? And I realize how tempting it is to convince yourself that going it alone is the noble path. As someone who—like, one of my top values is independence, right? You may have also grown up with that sort of pull yourself up by your bootstraps. That’s been your mentality your whole career. You are already stretched thin, so how could I possibly add anything else? And let me be, uh, brutally honest with all of you, that the notion that getting even best-in-class support to get where you wanna go—if you are attached to the notion that that is admitting defeat, that is going to be one of the biggest losing mindsets that you have inherited. And I say inherited, again, because a lot of this gets passed down to us. But the most powerful and successful people—presidents, CEOs, generals, executives in the org chart that you look up to—they have a closed-door council and brain trust guiding them to make all of those tough decisions. So why shouldn’t you, right? And once you reach your level, nothing is black and white anymore. Everything you do has shades of ambiguity. It gets more layered, not more simple. You know, should you push back on this? Should you absorb it to save face? Should you confront that person? Should you work around them? At every turn there are hundreds of moves you could make, and you need to define what is the right one for your specific situation, your goals, your stakeholders, your life consideration. You have to anticipate and decode how they will ripple through the relationships, how your own ambitions and the constraints you’re up against, your boundaries, how all of that will collide. And if you misread this, right, sometimes—I have seen, unfortunately, when people come to us and they will say, “My scope has shrunk in the next reorg,” or, “The title I thought I had in the bag, it went to someone else. The bonus I thought I was getting, that I was counting on for XYZ, it’s not coming,” right? When you are swamped, when your pressures are growing by the day, you do not have time to waffle or procrastinate. Precision and speed matter more than ever, right? You need to move through or X the wrong priority projects faster. You have to get through a politically loaded conversation instead of weeks of spinning on it. You have to capitalize on a fleeting opportunity instead of kicking yourself down the road ’cause you were too heads down. So being able to quickly and accurately diagnose the situation and get a precise approach becomes the lead domino that makes everything else faster, easier, less stressful.

And the fact is, you can’t turn to your direct reports, right? You have to have a brave face for them. You probably can’t turn to your manager, because often what you say can and will be used against you. You can’t go to your colleagues. They may be vying for the same things. Your mentor also may have very limited or often an outdated lens on what is happening. And trust me, HR, company development resources, they are not going to touch politics or help you, you know, rise above them or advocate for yourself for a more sustainable workload or to boost your comp. They’re not gonna do that, because it’s arguing against their own interest. So you are at risk of moving more slowly at the exact time when you need to be quicker and more decisive. And so all of this is exactly what Lead From Within solves, why we have created this program, and it has successfully been running for years now, and we have had hundreds of people go through it. This is the only executive readiness and career advancement program that is grounded in the science of human behavior, that is based on my clinical background, my 15 years of coaching the most powerful people in the world, so that you can unlock that next-level title, the wider scope, the life-changing comp. This is the exact time when having world-class, in-depth coaching around the messy specifics of your situation matters the most, and doing it immersed in a cohort of other high performers who raise the bar of what’s possible for you.

So as I mentioned early on, this is actually our final enrollment of 2026. The doors will not be opening again for Lead From Within for another eight, nine months, so spring 2027. So I went all out to make this a no-brainer for you. We have a bundle of $9,000 worth of bonuses, which we’ve never done before. We will probably never do again. The catch is that if you want this entire bundle of bonuses, you have to apply by tomorrow, 11:59 PM Eastern Time. So this bundle of bonuses, it includes monthly private one-on-one coaching sessions with Wendy, our senior co-coach here, included at no extra cost. You get an additional three months in the program. The program is usually only six months. You get three extra months. Uh, and you get $500 off of your enrollment. So again, the catch is, to get all of this, you have to apply by tomorrow. We wanna reward fast action takers, the people who are decisive and serious, with this premium layer of support. This is the best offer we have ever made. This is the lowest investment the program will ever be. So we have had, over the years, so many people say, “I would love a one-on-one option within Lead From Within,” and we are so excited to make that available for this enrollment for the first, maybe the only, time that we have private coaching included. So if you are at all interested, you gotta jump on this. You will get monthly 60-minute one-on-one sessions with our senior co-coach, Wendy. She has coached hundreds of our clients over the last two and a half, going on three years. And this is your dedicated monthly time for private deep dives on your most complex challenges. This alone is a $5,000 value. That’s included at no extra cost. Lead From Within is also normally only a six-month program, but for this enrollment, you are getting three additional months, so you will work with us from August until May 2027. You get three additional months, nine months in the program, at no additional cost. Again, this is a $3,500 value. Most leadership programs out there are six to 12 weeks, and the way they work is you come, you join a live call, you listen to the person lecture, you take some notes, and then you’re kind of left on your own with information. Lead From Within is entirely a different preference. You have a highly seasoned coaching team in your corner coaching you day by day through the depths, the nuances, the details, in and out. And three months from now, let alone six, nine months from now, a lot’s gonna change for you. You may have a new mandate, new executives, another reorg. You may be ready to explore new opportunities, and when that happens, you need counsel, trusted counsel, who already knows you and your situation so you can get results the fastest.

And, uh, once again, if you also apply by tomorrow, as part of that bonus package, you lock in $500 off of your enrollment. So for pay in full, the investment is $6,500. We also do have a payment plan. The $500 comes off your first payment, so you can get started for just $300. You don’t even have to pay the full $6,500 up front. Uh, and then after the first month, it will be $800 per month for the remaining eight months after that, which is an absolute steal for the level and depth of executive coaching that we offer here. This program is designed specifically for mid to senior level professionals who have highly demanding lives. Most of our clients invest about two hours per week in the program. It is designed to be flexible to fit into your schedule. You do not have to be available live every week to get value. I intentionally crafted the program that way. So there are so many options for support to happen asynchronously so that you can do it in the pockets of time and availability you have. I’ll go through what that looks like. You don’t have to add yet another rigid commitment to your calendar. So the question is really, could you dedicate less than 30 minutes a day to change the entire trajectory of your career? Uh, Nasrin, your enrollment would start August 11th. Yeah. So for context, most private executive coaches charge well over $2,000 a month just for sessions alone, no support in between, just for your one-on-one call with them. We—um, you’re getting far more than that. We also offer complete personal branding audits. I’ll go through this, but rewrites of everything from your LinkedIn, your resumes, your cover letters, if you’re in that zone, which would be 10 to 25K if you were to work with a coach separately for that. Myself and my team, when we do advisory work with companies, it typically starts at about $30,000. So inside of Lead From Within, you’re accessing that same level of strategic thinking applied to your career for, if you pay in full with the $500 off your enrollment, for less than $725 a month, which is absolutely bonkers. It’s a no-brainer. It takes five minutes to apply. It does not obligate you to joining. You will have the option to book a one-on-one decision call with me. Those are very limited. They tend to fill up extremely quickly. Last time, they filled up within 24 hours afterwards. So if you have concerns or hesitations, I am going to cover a lot of that here. That’s also exactly what the one-on-one decision call is for. It is not a hard sell. It’s to evaluate if you are actually right for the program, to talk about your goals, to get my help putting together a plan for you that you would be able to achieve inside of Lead From Within. It does me no good to have people who can’t be successful inside of the program. So, um, apply now. Please do not put this off for later, ’cause as I said, you need to apply in the next 24 hours by 11:59 PM Eastern tomorrow if you want that whole bonus bundle. The call itself can be after tomorrow. You just gotta have it on the calendar. So you don’t have to be like, “Oh gosh, I don’t have time to talk to Melody tomorrow.” You just have to apply and have a call booked for the coming days.

So all right. I know you might be still thinking, “This is a lot to spend on myself, right? I wanna be wise.” Which I get, and in a moment I’ll walk you through everything you get, how you would maximize it, but first I want you to see just two examples. One of our clients got 140% of their bonus. We had another client who went from a first interview to a top-of-market job offer in the span of two weeks, and he was now earning the most he’s ever made in his life. So how do you know if Lead From Within is right for you or you are right for it? Our best clients are usually at one of three stages. So first, you might be on the cusp of advancement. You’re hearing that, “Keep doing what you’re doing.” You want to seal the deal on your next level, right? You need to make your results visible beyond your function, influence that we talked about today. You may want to capitalize on a leadership change or a restructure to reshape your role, to take on a bigger scope and get ahead of some of those closed-door conversations so you have advocates, so you actually can go from on the cusp to, “I landed this. I got this.” So that’s number one. Second, you might be stepping into or have just stepped into a new title or authority, right? That can be within your existing company, could be you have switched organizations entirely. Either way, this is the moment where you have a lot more eyes on you, right? And you wanna make sure that you’re establishing your credibility quickly. From day one, you’re setting the right precedence with your team, you’re building trust with your stakeholders, you’re able to hold your own in some of the higher pressure situations you are finding yourself in as well. Or number three, you are ready for a new challenge. So maybe you’ve been wrestling with, do I stay, do I go? Um, a lot of people in the program are actually working dual tracks, so they’re trying to suss out and define once and for all, is there an advancement path for me here or do I need to go elsewhere? And so we have a lot of people in the program, and this is part of the beauty of Lead From Within, is the depth and, um, the customization of what we can give you. We can work with you day to day on your advancement conversations where you are now, while simultaneously preparing you, your materials, your networking, your online brand, all of that, for making a next move either in parallel or pulling the trigger whenever you want to.

Okay. Inside of Lead From Within, your coaching revolves around what we call the four Ps of executive readiness. After doing this work for so many years, analyzing the hundreds of thousands of people we have worked with across industries, sectors, these are the targets that determine whether you get a bigger scope and a seat at the table, and whether you are successful once you get there. So number one, you need to nail your personal brand. This is the perception you deliberately create in the minds of other people. Most people are still at the most basic level of visibility. Some stakeholders know your name and your title, but very, very few understand the value of what you do, why it matters to the business, and even fewer, maybe none, know exactly what to call on you for and where you want to go next. So that highest level is where the biggest opportunities are unlocked. And this is what happened. We have a client I’ll call Juliana. Um, she currently leads a certain sector of marketing, and her team was actually delivering a ton of support to prepare executives for pitches to land these really high number enterprise accounts. But they still had this perception of being seen as, like, “we’re the events group,” uh, “we’re the marketing arm that creates the swag that you need for events,” right? So she joined Lead From Within at the end of March. We have worked side by side with her week after week to deliberately re-engineer a new perception, and you can see here some of the doors it’s already opening, including working with her president to scale a pilot that she did enterprise-wide, moving conversations forward at the C level for an expanded role.

The second pillar of executive readiness and success, workplace politics, because competence is not enough. Your success at this level comes down to mastering the dynamics surrounding the work, right? What will separate you is your ability to read them and maneuver inside the invisible psychology, to win over skeptics, to circumnavigate the people who are blockers, to create sponsors at the top. And a lot of people fail because they have never been taught how human motivation works. Why would you be, right? Unless you were a psychology major and you’re really good at figuring out how to apply it to your situation. But this is what you need to understand: how status gets protected, how alliances form, how people protect their standing, how egos shape everything. And so this has been the difference-maker for one of our clients. She recently stepped into a much bigger role in, um, finance, and this was a very critical time for the organization for their legal position, which she has been a part of. And when she came in, she immediately ran into resistance from some peers who were very well-established and had some overlap with her role. Um, politics were very delicate here, but you can see now the results. This client has been able to get acceptance at the highest levels for her transformation plan, precisely because she had input. She had our input week to week. She had edits week to week on her work, and she was able to push back against that peer when they derailed her. She actually has turned them into an ally.

Third is growing your people. We’ve talked about this so much today. You have to scale yourself. You can’t be the one holding everything together and being monkey in the middle. And so another example of this, we had our client Danny, who was able to go from 40 hours of standing meetings to half of that. Imagine if you got half of your work week back, right? And to actually having his team be excited about taking things off his plate. Totally different. And last is pitching your promotion, because you have to have relationships, access, cachet in order for people to take your requests seriously and actually, like I said earlier, sealing the deal on that comp, right? And so again, I just wanna bring back Nirali’s story, which is such a great example of this, of someone who was able to do this, to make a case.

All right. As I’m going along, I know Wendy has been pulling questions for me, but put your questions in. We will make sure they are, uh, answered. Um, what are the application criteria? Is there a minimum title requirement? No, there is not a minimum title requirement, just because titles are so different organization to organization. And so put your application in. The application is there to give me information about your situation. Like I said, I will be honest with you if you are a fit or not, ’cause it does us no good to have someone who is not a fit. So, um, titles are just not a totally reliable metric because they can vary so much from organization to organization.

Okay. So what do you get? What does your path to advancement actually look like in Lead From Within? You get a personalized path, or rather I should say you are creating a personalized path from day one, so that your ambitions are no longer just buried under everything else. You are creating a structure to make your advancement goals a reality. And when you join Lead From Within, one of your first tasks is to create a 90-day plan. You will receive personalized feedback, detailed guidance, pushing you on where you’re over-investing, you’re under-investing, pushing you to refine and get painfully specific, hyper-tactical about your action steps, giving you ideas, direction for refining your approach. You will move faster. You will avoid expensive time sucks and blind spots because we have seen patterns a thousand times. We know what to look for. And this 90-day vision isn’t just like, “Okay, I wrote down some pie-in-the-sky things,” and this sits on the shelf. Every 30 days you are creating and submitting a 30-day action sprint, so you are staying laser-focused and accountable. For these, we also have live co-working sessions, so you can come. If you would like, you can come and just get it done in that time. It’s on the calendar.

All right. This is controversial, but it needs to be said, that one-on-one coaching is not the best path to the influence and the income you want, especially at the levels many of you are operating at. It’s infrequent. With many one-on-one coaches, you’ll speak with them maybe once or twice a month for about 45 minutes. That’s enough to cover one segment of a topic, and in between, you’re navigating a lot of landmines and big opportunities that you don’t have support for. One-on-one can also be very narrow and myopic. You’re only getting coached on what you know to bring up, and you can’t anticipate situations you haven’t hit yet. So that is exactly why Lead From Within, we combine the best of both worlds. You have extensive personalized touchpoints alongside a high-performing cohort of peers that multiply your results in a way one-on-one simply can’t. So each week you have the opportunity, we have a live group advisory coaching call every week. Um, I coach, you know, 80 to 90% of those as much as I can, unless I’m traveling or I am out for some reason. And during that live call, if you submit a question, you get a dedicated block to workshop your situation. And this is not just coaching. Hopefully, you can tell we’re pretty direct here. This is not just coaching where we’re like, “How does that make you feel? What ideas do you have?” We are significantly more directive and consultative than most other coaches you will find out there. We will hand you, and work with you hand-in-hand for, what specifically to say or do for that conversation with your skip level, that political mess with your, uh, peer. This is about—Lead From Within is about application and strategy, not just consuming passive content week to week. You’ve had enough of that. So you can test your ideas, your approaches. You can get exact steps on your pressing challenges and future plans, so you are not self-questioning, you are not spinning. And plus, because you are in a cohort and you are hearing other people’s coaching questions that are related to the same level you are at, you will rapidly expand your repertoire of skills. It’s like people will tell us it’s like three to five times the coaching, and that accelerates their progress so much faster. Every live call is recorded. We use an AI note taker so you can jump straight to the parts you’re interested in, or you can go back and you can pull things out of the transcript if you would like.

And like I said, this program is specifically designed to get you results even if you don’t show up live, right? If you don’t show up live every week or at all, to get value. We’ve engineered it for the crazy busy mid-career professional with a demanding life, so you have so many options for in-depth, tailored, asynchronous support that you can tap into any time, day or night. You can get coaching, feedback, direction that works in the flow of your work week. And like I said earlier, most people invest about two hours per week, but that’s fully flexible to your schedule, and you get outsized results from it. I’ll talk about that. So you can post—we have a private community, you can post for written feedback in there. Again, you can post any time, day or night. You will get a tailored response within one or two business days. Because we know problems come up, you need follow-up on something, an opportunity comes out of nowhere, so there’s no dragging your feet on anything. And these are not throwaway responses like, “Great job,” or, “Maybe you should just be more confident in yourself.” You can see an example here of the depth of coaching people get from us.

Okay. Another thing that is very unique about Lead From Within is our weekly communication reviews. Each week, you have the opportunity to submit and get line by line tactical edits on anything from, you know, proposals you are making to your promotion case. And when I say line by line edits, about language swaps, how to be more concise, clearer business impact, guidance about the executive psychology behind how your message will be received. So you’re not overthinking it for weeks, just get it out of your head, onto the page, submit it, put it in our expert hands for feedback so the final product gets done faster, better. You have fewer follow-ups. You have better advocacy. This level of feedback is not available in any other program we offer, and I frankly have not seen it in any other program any of my peers or colleagues offer. And within this, this is also the only place we offer comprehensive job search support for both internal and external searches. So as part of your document review, you can submit your resume. We will work with you week over week to completely overhaul and rewrite it. Same thing with your cover letter, your LinkedIn, interview responses, case studies you gotta do for interviews. That kind of support alone easily costs 10 to $25,000 if you were to hire a resume writer, for example, and it’s completely included as part of your participation in Lead From Within. You also get access, even better, you also get access to Speak Like a Senior Leader, which is our tactical course on communicating concisely, thinking on your feet. This is going to amplify all of the enterprise level advancement goals and complement everything you’re doing inside Lead From Within. So within Speak, we are covering things like how to shift your style for different personalities, presentation skills, things like how do you deal with curve balls, how do you craft a presentation to deliver your ideas concisely. How do you express your impact, take your effort and translate that into tangible business value? Articulating yourself more cleanly in all forms of writing and keeping your composure when things go off the rails, whether you have to push back, say no, disagree up the chain of command. And what’s really cool is in Speak Like a Senior Leader, you also get access to our MelodyGPT, which is fully trained on my frameworks. Uh, unlike, you know, a ChatGPT or a Claude that’s really just taking from Wikipedia and all of the most common denominators on the internet, MelodyGPT is my brain. It is my brain in a robot, so you have this 24/7.

Okay, I’m gonna fly through some of this, but we also have in the program an entire job search suite for you. So that includes on-demand programs that will complement, um, the work we are doing directly with you to edit your resume, to overhaul your documents. So we have Resume Revamp. Um, we have, you can see here, you know, we have people who are going to top level executive recruiters and them saying, “This is one of the best resumes I’ve ever seen.” So that you—right now, name of the game is you have to cut to the top of the pile, so this will help you do that. Because writing resumes is not the same as it was even one or two years ago. It’s changed a lot. Compelling cover letters. You get step by step by step, literally a formula for how to write your cover letter. So again, the name of the game here is you need to get through to an actual decision maker. You need them to look at your resume and be interested enough, and most people, their cover letters are trash, frankly speaking. You might as well not write it. But we have had people who their cover letter was the thing that convinced someone to pick up the phone and call them. And expert interviewing. This is a highly, highly in-depth course that goes through every aspect of interviewing, from, uh, really crafting the stories you want to tell—we have a unique process for that—to acing the screening interview, to the different stages of the hiring manager interview, gives you templates for follow-ups. We give you, um, breakdowns for the trickiest questions you face. And of course, you can also bring all of this to coaching live, but we wanna make sure you have some asynchronous resources for that as well. And we have our full Level Up Your LinkedIn program, which again, this will walk you through piece by piece by piece on your LinkedIn, how you need to overhaul it, but you also have the, um, the private reviews that we will give you on your specific profile. This helps you know and guide you on the initial things to do.

Okay. What to expect in your first month, ’cause a lot of people say, like, “This sounds great, but, like, can you help me wrap my head around what this would actually look like day to day?” So let’s say you’re a director, you’re trying to position yourself for VP. Your team just went through another shakeup, you got all new leadership now. So here’s a snapshot for you of what your first 30 days in Lead From Within might look like. You go through a comprehensive onboarding process where you download to us context on your role, your stakeholders, your political landscape, your advancement goals. So every piece of coaching you get is tailored to your situation. You’re not just a number here. We keep a client file on you, private to us as the coaching team. So we have all of that information, we have all of the questions you have submitted, all of the notes we give to you, responses we give to you, the, uh, documents you have submitted, all in one place so there is a consistent through line on our end. It’s never like, “Um, who are you again? What do you do?” It’s not like that. As soon as you come in, you will also, one of your first action steps will be to put together and submit your 90-day vision so that you are actually translating the visibility, the scope you want, into tangible progress. Then you can join your first advisory call. You get live coaching on there. Maybe we give you some direct consulting on, how do you build credibility quickly with the new leaders who have come in? You also hear me guide someone else on pitching a new function to the C-suite or, um, delegating to a resistant direct report. And if you apply by tomorrow and you get that one-on-one bonus, which is just a bonkers value, you can have your one-on-one call with Wendy, where you are sorting through more of this strategy piece by piece. And as part of that, maybe you put together your plans for your advancement case, then you actually submit that document to us for a private review. You submit the deck. We give you a review slide by slide, every header, every bullet, making the flow stronger. And you have access to the advisory in the community, the Get Coaching channel, on demand throughout the week. You come in, you post a question in the private community. You were like, “I was interested in what you were talking about with that person who was delegating to their already overloaded team. How would I do this considering all these different factors?” Right? Within two days, you are able to confidently hand off a major project you have been hanging onto, and your team is thanking you for it. And then at the end of the month, you wrap everything up by joining the 30-day debrief session. You are so impressed with yourself about how much you have accomplished. You know, “Hey, I have an off-site coming up next month.” So you, for that 30-day plan, map out, “Who do I wanna spend face time with? What’s the demo I have to prepare? What are the deadlines I have to work backwards against to make that possible?” We give you feedback on how are you setting up your team in advance of the fact that you’re gonna be out for a week, and also more specifically, okay, how are you going to build face time with those leaders? We actually just had someone who had an off-site and, um, through our coaching with her on this, realized and got her to a strategy where she was able to secure budget for marketing for her healthcare clinic before the leadership meeting even started, and it was like, whoa, next level. It was amazing to see that.

I wanna give you a real example of a client who did this, and what a month for them looked like in Lead From Within. I’m gonna call them Emil, and, uh, they were in engineering leadership at a big tech company launching a very big product. High, high profile, got a lot of money behind it. There was a situation where the launch wasn’t going quite to plan, and, um, he had to really call an emergency situation. And for most leaders, that would be kind of like a public failure. For him, we have used it to accelerate his promotion track. So we have been in touch with Emil daily as this emergency situation has been developing. He was getting in-depth edits privately back to him on his presentations that he was giving to the C-suite and the board. He was getting written and live coaching throughout the week on positioning, having to call this emergency situation more as a recalibration, not as a setback, and he has moved through it so much faster because he has had access to the broader coaching. So we have someone in the group who is a, um, chief medical officer, and we were having a conversation with her about securing headcount budget. He used that to then go to his boss and get three, uh, contract engineers for the team. He picked up another LFW member’s coaching on being the kind of go-between between two cross-functional partners, and because of that, he was able to get out of that mess. He recovered six hours a week of time he was spending with them, and he overhauled his promotion pitch by listening to me coach someone who is in the insurance industry on hers. And a week later, his boss literally said to him, “I think you’re operating at the next level,” where months before he was saying, “I don’t think you are.” So in a few weeks, Emil rapidly compressed what it may take people years to figure out, or a lot of missteps, to turn what was a crisis into a very valuable visibility opportunity.

Okay, so when you add up everything you get inside of Lead From Within, if you tried to piece this together yourself, you’d need a one-on-one coach, an accountability coach, potentially a resume writer, a job search program. You would need a personal branding program, a communications training coach or program—like, you need a lot of things. So when you apply by 11:59 PM tomorrow, you’re getting a total value, if you did these things separately, conservatively, it would be valued at over $25,000. But if you apply by tomorrow, again, you’re getting the one-on-one sessions included. You’re getting the $500 off. You’re getting the three extra months. It is $6,500 paid in full, or again, less than $725 a month. And if you take the payment plan, the $500 off will apply to the first payment. So I don’t know how many spots are available. I have not been locked in here, but this will be going out to my audience of, you know, several hundred thousand people very soon. So your best bet is to get your application in now, especially if you want one of those one-on-one decision calls with me. Once those are gone, those are gone, ’cause I can’t unfortunately create new time. I wish I could, but, um, once they’re gone, they’re gone. So apply. It only takes five minutes. It gives me some information to assess, does this look like it could be a fit? Does it make sense for us to get on a call? You will hear back within a business day. I personally review them all to ensure that you are a fit for the program. You will have the option to either get started right away if you’re like, “I’m in. This is perfect for what I want,” or to get on that one-on-one decision call with me to finalize your decision. And again, it’s no pressure. I get nothing by trying to convince you and beat you over the head to join us. We want you to be successful, so I only want people who are driven and who will be successful in the program. So I will tell you if it is not for you.

Speaking of which, is it right for you? It is if you are someone who wants to multiply your time. This is not, I want to be very clear, this is not a program where I’m lecturing at you. It is not like week one, do this, do these steps—that’s not how this is. This is real time application so that you can make faster decisions for the most consequential career choices you are making. You can neutralize the conflicts that are eating hours of your week. You can shortcut your way to those huge career moments that normally take months or years. So as you could see in some of the comments here, our clients often gain hours back in their schedule within weeks. So, yes, like I said, usually people are putting in about two hours a week. That’s like 30 minutes a workday, to double or triple your dividends right away. Seems like a pretty good trade-off to me.

This is for you if you want sophisticated direction that matches the complexity and ambiguity of your level. You are past all the junk on LinkedIn carousels. You want advisors who can give you a seasoned point of view, who can work with you to give you concrete next steps instead of just more questions to sit with. And you have to know that mastering—you have to believe for yourself and know in your situation—that mastering the unspoken aspects of advancement is non-negotiable. There are a lot of programs out there that are run by people who used to be at Amazon or Google or McKinsey or whatever, and now they offer programs that teach the methodologies they learned there. I am friends with a lot of them. They are my colleagues. I love them. That is one option. However, you do have to consider that those are things that they learned in one role at one company at one point in time, versus being able to unlock the underlying human patterns that transfer to every industry, every function, every dynamic you will face from here on out. And this is right for you if you want a longer term team. Like I said, this is not just a quick hit, six-week, four-week program and you’re in and you’re out. This is long haul. We are invested in your trajectory as you are. Because again, things are going to evolve for you, and when those developments hit, you need counsel right there who understands you, who’s evolving with your situation. And you want a space that is loyal to your goals. As I said before, company sponsored programs, they’re not gonna touch a lot of these topics because it’s taboo, and that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about navigating through change and authentic leadership, and it’s not going to get into these sticky dynamics that really make or break the difference.

Okay, I know I have some questions coming in. Uh, type in the chat. There’s so many of you hanging out with us, so type in the chat, “I’m on the fence because blank.” I’m on the fence because blank.

All right. And I wanna answer some of the most common questions. One is, uh, well, let’s start with this one, which is when does it start? Like, talk to me about the logistics. So, um, like I’ve been saying, you have to apply by tomorrow 11:59 PM Eastern and have a call booked by end of day tomorrow as well. It does not have to happen tomorrow, it can happen in the days or the week to come. But if you want that $9,000 of bonuses, the one-on-one, the three additional months, the $500 off, you have to apply and have your call booked. Your actual cohort will begin on August 11th, and it will go through nine months, May 11th. So like I said, normally you would only get six months. For this enrollment only, you’re getting three additional months, nine months total, no additional cost. Okay? So August 11th through May 11th. When are the advisory calls? So this is a quick graphic to show you. Our live advisory calls are 5:00 PM Eastern. Uh, I should say currently are 5:00 PM Eastern on Tuesdays. Um, they have not changed in the last, gosh, Wendy, what? Two, two years. So, uh, but I like to say that because, um, yes, you never know. So these are fully recorded. Again, the entire design of this program is not dependent on you being there live because we know you can’t be every week. There may be weeks where you can’t, where you are traveling, where you got a big launch happening, and you need access to all these other forms of coaching to be making progress even if you can’t join live. Um, we also have an optional co-working call to work on your 90/30 plans at the end, the last Thursday of each month.

Like I said, what if I can’t make the calls, right? We assume you won’t make every live call, or your day will just get hijacked by urgent requests. So we have designed this around that reality. We have several recent clients that have landed promotions, major headcount decisions, equity bumps. I haven’t seen them in months, some of them, live. I communicate with them via Get Coaching or via their other submissions. They haven’t been able to attend a live call for months, yet they’re still getting major results from the range of the flexible options we have. So LFW is to master executive-level influence and advancement in the pockets of time you have as your bandwidth fluctuates. So, as we’ve talked about, every live session is recorded. You have the AI summary, so you can watch the replays. You can navigate the summary right to the questions you’re most concerned about. You can pull language from the transcripts. You can post for written Get Coaching anytime, day or night. I don’t care if you post at 3:00 AM in the morning, you’ll still receive a response within a business day or two. Each week, you also get to submit for your communication reviews, and again, you can submit any time you want. We will give you feedback that you can then implement on your own schedule. And each month you are completing those 30-day sprints or your 90-day plans. Again, you are welcome to join the co-working call. We have it there as an accountability measure, and a lot of people love doing that, but it just doesn’t work out for some people. So you can submit that on your own time and schedule, and again, you will receive coaching team feedback on that so you know what to prioritize.

All right. How much time will this take? We’ve talked about this. This is perfect if you are serious about multiplying your time. But as I said, usually two hours per week, about 30 minutes a day. So that may mean I’m gonna join the live call, I’m gonna watch the replay, I’m gonna create my 90-day plan, I’m gonna submit a question for written coaching. It’s usually a mixture of those things. So really the question to ask yourself is, can I commit 30 minutes per workday to changing my trajectory? ‘Cause that’s really what we’re talking about here. ‘Cause you are getting pointed diagnosis, you are getting actionable strategy, you are getting options for personalized feedback along with this cohort of your peers. Okay? We also focus on clearing blockers to your advancement, short-cutting the path to opportunities that may otherwise take years to materialize, right? It’s like those conflicts that are eating up your time, you have that underperformer whose work you have to keep redoing. We get all of those out of the way so everything else moves faster. So that’s why we say Lead From Within is not yet another commitment. It is the thing. It is the thing that helps everything else move faster with less stress. Because also when you are busiest is when you are most likely to overthink, to procrastinate, to make mistakes, and it’s when you can least afford to look incompetent, right? Which is why we help you diagnose what is happening, we give you our opinion and our input on what to do next, and help you arrive at solid next steps for yourself to communicate in a way that protects your credibility so you’re never just left with vague questions.

Okay. “I’m swamped. It’s a busy season, I’ll wait.” Okay. We would not recommend this for a few reasons. Number one is you will miss out on that $9,000 bonus bundle that I have no plans to offer again, the lowest price the program will be, and, again, we will not be opening doors again until at least spring 2027. And you gotta be honest with yourself at some point that at your level, there are no slow seasons. There is always a big deliverable, a team issue. There is always life happening. And if you are just waiting for things to settle, you’re gonna be waiting forever. So the people who earn the biggest rewards do so because they expand their capacity for a faster pace and a higher volume, and they learn to do it, they have the support to do it, without sacrificing their health or their relationships. Because when you are busier, again, the margin for error becomes thinner. You have to get buy-in for things faster. You have to neutralize stakeholders who block your progress in record time. You have to push back on scope creep. You have to keep your own career trajectory moving when everything else is on fire. So we are helping you avoid time sucks and bad choices.

All right. And also if your organization—some people have said, like, “I don’t know how this reorg is gonna happen, if my boss will be my boss,” or whatever it is. How you show up right now through a period of major change or intensity is the most powerful evidence for whatever you want next, because it becomes the proof that you can handle the challenges at the next level. And as I was saying earlier when we were talking about the RISE format, um, upheaval creates opportunities, right? It’s redistributing power. Leaders are looking for people they can trust to come in to solve things, and so this is where we see brand-new roles get created overnight. So we’ll help you be able to capitalize on that.

Now, since 2022, I said, we’ve been running this program, we’ve had hundreds of people go through it. Um, many people focus on industry-specific or get very attached to wanting industry-specific coaching, but that keeps your blind spots intact. So that’s why we have people hailing from different domains. We have people who are international, in Asia, in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Spain, Mexico, all across the US. You are intentionally exposed to a diversity of different perspectives, so you get coaching not just on your situation, but you’re also seeing and getting the translation of how other people are navigating it. But to give you a sense, typically in the group, you can see here, the vast majority of our folks are at the director level. Um, why we don’t like to say, like, you have to be this level is, again, because depending on the structure of your organization, someone may be a VP somewhere else, someone else doing the exact same role may only be a senior manager somewhere else. But typically speaking, we have senior manager, director, VP, heads of functions. We have people at your big tech giants, Google, Amazon, government and international organizations, healthcare, hospitals, pharma, biotech, Fortune 500s and retail, consumer goods, like I said, financial management, universities, nonprofits, foundations. So it really runs the gamut.

How big is the program? This is, obviously it is application only. It is vetted. It is a high-touch cohort. This program is about 80% smaller than my other program, Speak Like a Senior Leader. We don’t share the exact size because enrollment can vary slightly, but what we can tell you is this is the closest proximity way to work directly with me and my team. So usually when people ask this, they’re asking, “Will you know me? Will I actually get personal support?” And I hope you can hear from everything I’ve been describing, the answer is, like, heck yes, right? This is truly the closest thing to one-on-one coaching in a cohort container that you can find. We will know the ins and outs of your goals, your workplace dynamics, the specific situations you are navigating. You will not just be a name in a Zoom room. You have daily access to the live coaching, the asynchronous coaching, the messaging. And like I said, at this price point, there is really nothing comparable that offers this depth and sophistication of executive level coaching. So you are getting access to a team that directly advises CEOs, NATO leaders. We train professionals at the Microsofts, the Metas of the world on communication and influence, and the cohort format only multiplies the value you are getting ’cause you’re not just seeing your situation.

All right. And again, I saw a question come in about, does country or geography matter? Um, a full 80% of our clients come from outside, you know, your big tech and software. So I’ve mentioned some of them ad nauseam, but this is the only program of its kind grounded in human behavior, psychology, and political skill. And those dynamics play out because humans are humans, even if the specific stakeholders change. So best of all, though, nothing ever stays abstract or generic. It’s why you can submit a question and get coaching, and you will get a tailored response, because, yes, you do need a strategy for your situation, your workplace culture, your context, right?

Okay. Um, let’s see. How do you handle confidentiality? So a few things about this to put your mind at ease. First, you never have to share anything you don’t want to. You never have to share, and you shouldn’t share anything proprietary. If you don’t wanna share anything identifying, you don’t have to. You can generalize details. You can change names. You can swap out specifics. I don’t care if you call your boss Ronald McDonald. It doesn’t matter to me. We don’t need to know those things to give you powerful coaching. What matters is the dynamics, is the challenge behind it, not the specifics of, “My boss is named Bob, and my coworker is named Susan, and we work on Project Elephant.” It doesn’t matter. So you can throttle how much or how little you share. Second, everyone in the program signs a program agreement not to share anything from the calls outside of the community. Our AI notetaker is the only one permitted in the calls, so this is a locked-down professional space. We take that seriously. Third, your communication review feedback, whether that’s, like, an edit to your email, a presentation, your 90/30 plan, that is submitted to you privately. That is not shared with others in the community. The calls, as I’ve stated, are recorded. Those recordings do live in our program library, and they are only accessible to Lead From Within clients, current and future. They are never shared outside of the program. And plus, as I’ve said, this is a space that is loyal to your goals, right? Our number one goal is to make you successful. We’re not trying to protect a certain company’s interest, right? I don’t know who these people are that you work with, and part of the, um, beauty of actually having a cross-industry and cross-world cohort is that it’s very rare you will encounter someone from your immediate circle in this room, right? Even though people will bring up very similar dynamics, like, “Oh my God, my peer is doing the same exact thing to me,” it’s an entirely different context, industry, country, right? So it’s not this echo chamber.

All right. What other questions do you have? Let’s see here.

Okay.

Sorry, I’m reading through the questions here. Yeah. All right. I’m gonna keep rolling on these ’cause I think it will answer some of these. Um, if you would prefer one-on-one coaching, the good news is if you apply by tomorrow 11:59 PM, you will get that. You will get the monthly one-on-one coaching included with our senior co-coach Wendy here. Hiring a dedicated executive coach runs over $5,000 for this by itself, but you’re getting that white glove support included. And as I’ve said many times, we combine the best of both worlds. You’re gonna get plenty of opportunities for personalized, tailored coaching on your specific challenges and goals, plus the multiplier effect of the cohort, right? Because one-on-one, as I’ve said, it can be limited. You’re limited by yourself, your own challenges, your own assumptions. In Lead From Within, you’re learning from dozens of other real-world scenarios. Even just yesterday, we had someone who was in final, um, talks for a job offer, and we were talking through the specifics of how she might negotiate this offer given everything that had transpired, and also how she might leverage the offer internally, perhaps with her own company. We talked through all the specifics about that, and I also said, “You know what? In Get Coaching a couple weeks ago, someone else asked a similar question about this,” because they were in final stages. I gave them a specific negotiation script and I said, “Here’s the link. Go read my response to their Get Coaching question.” The person was like, “Perfect. Everything I need. Wonderful.” That is the power of this here. Those people are in two totally different industries. One is in CPG, in marketing. One is in, uh, tech, in recruiting technology. Like, two completely different worlds. So you’re learning and getting value even though it’s different functions, different personalities, different cultures. So your repertoire is expanding faster because when someone else is going through a coaching moment, you still get language, strategy, perspective you can apply. You’ll be prepared for more challenges you wouldn’t have seen coming otherwise, and have a less trial and error, less pain associated with it because of that.

Okay. Um, a lot of people do come in and they’re hesitant. They’re hesitant about the group format. A few weeks in, you can even see this person here, a few weeks in they say it’s become one of their favorite parts because they are shocked. They are shocked by the level of depth we can give them, but also the value that they get through the encouragement and the exposure to others who are there. Yeah.

What if I’m looking outside of my company? I’ve seen in the questions some people are saying, you know, “I feel a little limited by my role as an IC. I’m trying to get a different position.” If you are exploring—Lead From Within is a fit for you as long as you are currently employed. Especially if you have been out of work for a long time, it is not necessarily the right fit. You are still welcome to apply. I will review your application. But we tend to work with people who are on that dual track of currently employed somewhere, but starting to look for what is next and actively work towards that. Many mid and senior level searches now, it’s totally different than it was a year ago even. Now it’s happening through warm opportunities, recruiter outreach, internal referrals, under the radar conversations, which means your positioning needs to be on point, right? And also we’re talking about a time when—I was talking to, uh, one of my recruiter colleagues the other day—the average job posting on LinkedIn is getting 2,000 applications within, like, a week of it being up. So you gotta be really creative. You have to have a very strong value proposition that stands out that is not, “I am a strategic problem solver who runs high level programs.” That’s not enough anymore. Inside LFW, we help you navigate the modern search, whether that is—we have people applying for roles within their current company, perhaps with different leaders or in different divisions or at the parent company. We have people who are looking at completely different organizations, right, and launching a more traditional job search. But you get the personalized feedback and overhauling of your resume, your LinkedIn, your cover letter, your interview responses, your interview stages, your overall positioning.

Okay. Even if you don’t manage a team yet or you’re not executive level yet, I’ve said before, titles don’t mean the same thing from one company to another. So you may be a senior manager somewhere and have the scope and complexity of someone who’s a VP elsewhere. So LFW is really the best fit for you if your work impacts multiple parts of the business, not just your own team, if you are managing and navigating a wide range of powerful stakeholders, internally but also externally, if you are positioning for a senior level role, um, broader scope, possibly a new function. Whether or not you lead a team is also not a deciding factor. We have plenty of people who are very seasoned individual contributors and want to stay that way, but a lot of their work centers on influencing others without direct authority over them. So they are using Lead From Within to influence peers and sometimes peers’ direct reports, which is a whole different challenge. We have some people who are not yet leading a team who want to, like that client I mentioned earlier who got stripped of her team and had to rebuild it. So we work with a lot of people who are building and scaling their headcount as well.

So, uh, I mean, as we’re getting through this, I want to say, if any of this is resonating with you, just apply. Just—there is no harm in applying, in putting it in. I will be honest with you, I will review it and let you know. Takes five minutes. There’s no obligation.

And so what’s the difference between Speak and Lead From Within? Speak Like a Senior Leader is eight weeks long compared to Lead From Within, nine months. Speak Like a Senior Leader is highly tactical. It teaches you specific tactics and structures for communication. How do you speak more concisely, think on your feet, connect your wins to business impact, things like that. Lead From Within is much broader. It’s nine months, right, if you join during this enrollment. We cover areas, yes, connected to but well beyond communication, so navigating the politics, making high-pressure decisions under pressure, developing your team, securing your promotion, the job search support. Yes, uh, Seppi, yes. Uh, oh my goodness. Words now. Speak Like a Senior Leader is entirely included in Lead From Within, and so, um, you get access to the whole thing. You are welcome—we have some people who are in Lead From Within who also show up to all of our Speak Like a Senior Leader calls. You’re welcome to do that if you want. But yes, you have full access to all of those calls, all of those replays, that entire curriculum, all of the lessons there, as well as MelodyGPT, which is, uh, through there as well. So yes.

And the last question, Wendy, if you could pop those resources in the chat. Some people, you may have the option for your organization to pay. Um, many times organizations are happy to invest in leadership development like this because they will see a return on your performance. And so we have some resources. Wendy’s gonna put them in the chat. We have a letter of request that you can literally copy and paste, fill in the blanks, share with your manager or decision-maker. We also have an employer PDF guide that explains the elements of the program framed as, uh, how they benefit your employer. Okay? Now, the thing is, many companies, their approval processes take a while. Uh, and so if you know this is right for you and you wanna take advantage of those bonuses, the most reliable option is to move forward with your application. And what most people end up doing is they will enroll personally, so they can get in before the deadlines, they can lock in their spot, they can get the bonuses. And then most of our clients then pursue reimbursement after that. So we’re happy to give you whatever documentation you need. Receipts, you know, a memo about high level what we cover in the program, um, any additional documentation you need, we’re happy to provide you. And one other thing to keep in mind, a lot of people will say to us, “My company’s not gonna pay for it, so I’m not gonna do it.” That is your decision. Your company’s willingness to invest in you should not be the measure of whether something is a good investment in your career, right? And the skills you will learn here will stay with you far, far beyond your current role, right? They will influence your promotion, the money you make, the bonuses you get for years to come. So while employer reimbursement is amazing when it’s available, more power to you, it’s worth considering whether this is something that you, for yourself, want to invest in regardless.