Today’s episode is about the number one mentality separating true high performers from everyone else. And I mean those people who seem to rise no matter where they are. They get promoted at one company, they jump to a different one, the same thing happens. It’s like opportunities just seem to follow them.

They always seem to know the right people. The right people know them. They refer them to things.

Now, before we get into this. Something exciting is coming. We are getting ready to open the doors again to Speak Like a Senior Leader. This is my bestselling executive communication coaching program and this is the first time this year we are opening the doors. And I have to tell you that the results our clients have been getting inside of this program have been incredible. Especially when you think about the times we are living through. We have had people secure more head count for their teams, which if you’ve ever tried to do that in a very resource constrained organization, you know, is no small thing. We have had clients win individual and team awards, people who receive the highest possible performance score in the review cycle. People who were personally tapped by the C-suite and invited to join high profile projects. We have had clients who have been asked to take on entirely new teams, expanding their scope in a way they weren’t even sure was possible just a few months ago. And I share all of this, not to brag though, honestly, come on, I am so proud of them and they deserve to be showcased. So yeah, maybe I am bragging just a little bit on them, but what really struck me, is how everything I just shared is so different than the narrative around career growth that’s out there in the zeitgeist right now.

So I want to unpack what the fundamental pattern is, because I think it’s one of the most important things you can take away from this podcast whether you ever join, Speak Like a Senior Leader or not.

If you have been on LinkedIn or you’ve been reading any business news lately, then you might have noticed there is a lot of doom and gloom. That’s the big narrative lately, especially when we are talking about career advancement success, mobility opportunities. A lot of people I talk to the, the vibe or the attitude seems to be, I want to grow, I want to move forward, but I’m not sure I can, at least not here in this current organization and not right now.

There’s this pervasive feeling of stuckness that is showing up everywhere. There was a new Gallup report that came out in late March and it found that 30% of workers describe themselves as feeling stuck in their current job. One in three people is showing up to work every day feeling like they’re going nowhere.

And when Gallup dug in to why people were feeling this way or who were wanting to leave, but felt like they can’t, lack of advancement kept coming up at the top of the list. So much so that they actually have started calling this the restless but immobile workforce. People who want more, but they don’t believe more is available or possible for them. And I think that framing is so apt. Restless, but in immobile. Because it captures that particular kind of purgatory and defeat that comes from having ambition and drive without any forward movement behind.

So if you don’t know this about me, I spent the early years of my career as a researcher, so that part of my brain has started to kick in because I was having trouble reconciling the facts that I just shared with you. What is, what is happening for our clients? The results that we are seeing for them.

On the one hand, we have people getting promotions, recognition, expanded scope, C-suite visibility. But then you look at what’s happening out there in the broader workforce, the stuckness, the immobility, the desperation, and it begs the question, what is separating the people who are breaking through from the people who are burning out and just feeling completely immobile where they are.

And yes, of course the training, the curriculum inside of Speak Like a Senior Leader, it plays a role, but I wanted to parse apart the differences more fundamentally. And, I realized that there is something more attitudinally in the mindset for these people that drives their results. Something that our most successful clients seem to carry into the program with them from day one, or they locked into very quickly, and that completely changed the trajectory of everything.

It is this core belief. So if you are multitasking, listen up, come back to me. The core belief is, you are the asset. I want to say that again because it sounds simple, it’s actually very profound. You are the asset. It is not your company, not your job title, not your team department, your manager, the organization you happen to be working for right now.

You the person who is listening to this right now, you are the asset. Now, let me explain what I mean by that, because this is not, I don’t wanna just sound like some motivational poster. This is a fundamentally different way of orienting yourself to your career, how you relate to it. And most people never even think about it because they just see things that this is the way it is.

Now, here’s the thing, many people have a deeply passive relationship with their own careers. And this shows up in so many ways. Whether you consciously think it or not, most of the time it is not conscious. You might believe things like, I have the skills, so opportunities should come to me. Right? I’ve put in the time the promotion should be mine.

I do good work, so people should notice. Notice there’s a lot of should, should, should. That word is doing a lot of damage. Many people are passive about their own careers while expecting active results. And it’s almost this subtle form of entitlement that I see, and I say that with compassion because it’s a mindset most of us were, were handed. That was given to us.

For a lot of people listening, your parents were baby boomers or maybe they were part of the late silent generation and they operated in a completely different world. If you think about the heyday of American corporate life, the 1950s through roughly the 1980s, jobs were abundant, right?

You could apply and you could get a job pretty easily. Companies were growing. You got hired, the system took care of you. You got a pay bump every year without fail, you got a bonus. Stick around long enough, you get a plaque, a handshake, a uh, pension, just for your tenure. 30 years at a company was not unusual back then.

It was just expected it was normal. So it makes complete sense why many people have inherited this picture that a career should be like a conveyor belt you jump on when you’re, I don’t know, 16, 18, 20. And the rewards should just come to you at regular intervals as you move down the line. You don’t have to chase anything, you just have to stay on the belt and not fall off.

That conveyor belt, it hasn’t existed for a long time. The average person now changes jobs 12 times over the course of their career. 12 times. Layoffs happen at companies who are posting record profits.

You could wake up tomorrow and be offered a severance package out of nowhere. I have seen entire departments get eliminated overnight. So the wiser path, the one true high performers have figured out is to stop thinking like an employee and start thinking of treating themselves as the asset. It is a little like the difference in sports between being a free agent versus having a lifetime contract.

The free agent understands they are hired for a season, not the entirety of their career, that whatever team they are on today, it is a vehicle. Their skills, their reputation, their relationship. All of those things belong to them wherever they are now and wherever they go next. It’s what they are bringing to market as part of their whole package as a player.

So when you are approaching yourself as the asset, the company is more like your current client. They are not your sponsor. They’re not your parent. They’re not your safety net. They are your client. And when you have a client, you show up. Yes, you do excellent work, but you never confuse the client for your entire business.

You never make yourself entirely dependent on them. You treat them well, you deliver, but you never stop building a thing that exists independently of them. You do not sit around waiting for the client to tell you what skills to develop or what direction to grow in.

Now if you are wondering where to start when it comes to investing in yourself as the asset, it’s probably no surprise. I am going to say communication, communication, communication, that is where it’s at. All skills are not created equal when it comes to career leverage, especially at this point in time.

And the data is pretty clear on this. LinkedIn recently released a 2026 Skills on the Rise report, and sitting at the top of that list, what do you think? Communication, stakeholder management, public speaking. Deloitte also had a Human Capital Trends report 2026. They looked at 9,000 leaders globally. And guess what?

The findings show that what they call the human edge, that that is everything. Which, you guessed it includes communication, influence, judgment, getting people aligned, being able to convey that you are adaptable. So are we noticing a pattern here? Right. It may go without saying that as AI is taking over more of the technical, your value is in the human.

It’s in the social and the emotional skills. The ability to walk into an interaction, a zoom call, an email doesn’t matter, but to communicate, to make a case, to build consensus, command attention, get results through other people. The thing is that your technical skills are also often role specific. They can be much more tied to a particular function, an industry, a specific role that you are doing, but your ability to communicate with clarity and authority, that is your intellectual property. It’s invaluable in your current job.

It’s invaluable in your next job, and the one after that. It makes you more effective in every room you are in, with every stakeholder you are managing on every team you lead. It makes you more valuable, more visible, more in control of where your career goes, regardless of what a single organization decides to do.

You learn these capabilities and they live in you in the most literal sense. Nobody can take that away. And this, this is what I see in the clients who come in who work with us and Speak Like a Senior Leader and get the biggest and the best results. They will explicitly say to me, I know I need to work on this today, and I know I will need it.

Every single other place I go from here. They approach this as an asset. This skillset of executive communication is an asset they will carry forward for the rest of their entire career.

And this is key because when most people invest in a course program, any sort of professional development, many times we are thinking, well, this will make me better at my current job. And look, yes, it should. That is true. But framing it that way keeps you stuck in the employee mindset that you are developing yourself in service of your company on their timeline for their goals. But this, you are the asset mindset. It flips that entirely. You are not taking communication training because your company sent you.

You are investing in a skillset that belongs to you. The company benefits from it right now, which is great, but you are the one who owns it. It. The people who get the most out of speak, like a senior leader, they are never the ones whose company paid for it and told them to show up. They’re the ones who came because they decided, this is mine.

I am building this for me. Yes, their company may sponsor it, but they know at the end of the day, this is something I’m doing for myself.

I want to tell you why I get so fired up about this. This is not abstract to me. I believe and I have seen the stakes are high and they are real, and you should too. I have watched people have careers that they have spent decades building. Teams they have poured themselves into roles, they have sacrificed vacations and time with their family for. I’ve seen those stripped away from them literally overnight. Through no fault of their own. A reorg, a new CEO, the market shifts and it’s gone. You might be listening and maybe you live through the 2008 financial crisis or any other financial or tech bubble. You live through a go global pandemic that turned the world upside down in a matter of days. So you know what I’m talking about, how quickly things can change.

I have sat across from people who went from a seemingly stable, secure role on a Friday to completely having to rethink where they live, how they support their family, what their life looks like by the next week.

So yes, I get fired up about this and I wanted to talk about this because I have seen the consequences of what happens when you move through your career passively letting it act on you instead of you acting on it. So let me drive this home with an example. Right now, speak like a senior leader is an investment of $2,000.

That is a good chunk of money for a lot of people, and you may feel like with everything going on in the world right now, I’m better off with that in my pocket. Here’s the math you are not doing, though. I totally understand that instinct. But if you are at the mid or senior level and you are not advancing in the way you should, the cost of that stagnation, it is not free.

It is not zero. A single missed promotion is tens of thousands of dollars in base salary bonus in every future offer that gets benchmarked to where you are now. So over a few years, we could be talking about what, 25, 50, a hundred k or more in earnings you didn’t capture. And that’s a conservative estimate.

The compounding effect of that is something most people never even stop to consider because it’s invisible and it just accumulates over time kind of in the background without your awareness.

This entire episode I have been driving home the mindset that you are the asset. Another dimension of that is the hard truth that no one is coming to save you in your career. You can take that pessimistically, you can think that sounds bleak, or you can view it the way I do. I invite you to do that which is pragmatically, that that is reality. And maybe even consider this optimistically.

No one is coming to save you, which means you don’t have to wait to be saved. You don’t have to sit around. No one is coming to build your brand, which means you get to build it exactly the way you want. No one is coming to decide what you become, so that means the decision, your future is yours. I look at that and I say, what an extraordinary amount of freedom that is, and so I want to invite you to see it that way as well.

I hope this episode today has served as a bit of a call to action to stop outsourcing your career advancement and your success. To stop depending on a single point of failure. One job, company, one manager’s opinion of you for your entire sense of security and stability. And to start building something that really is a long-term investment in your growth. Not that it’s just the illusion of stability that comes from a steady paycheck, a job title that could frankly disappear tomorrow. But actual durable stability that comes from knowing that you are so skilled, you are clear, you are competitive, you are compelling, you are marketable. So much so that opportunities find you wherever you go.

If any of this resonates with you and you are committed to treating yourself as the asset, I want you to RSVP for that free Effortless Executive Presence training. It’s happening May 5th, 3:00 PM Eastern, and this is your psychology backed roadmap that shows you how top performers at some of the world’s most successful organizations, how they are communicating to land promotions, get 20 to 40% salary bumps, surprise bonuses.

And doing that all without having to kiss up using annoying buzzwords like synergy or feeling like they have to put on a mask and a fake persona.

At the end of the training, we will be opening enrollment for Speak Like a Senior Leader. That is my bestselling eight week program that gives you the complete system to become a crisp, clear, concise, executive level communicator.

But even if you’re not interested in that, make sure you come to Effortless Executive Presence. It will give you strategies you can use asap. So make sure to head to melodywilding.com/training. The link is also in the show notes. I will see you there and I will catch you on the next episode.