00:08 Hi, I am Denise Simpson, a master life and leadership coach who helps women step into their authentic and feminine power so they can lead like visionaries, influence with grace, and create a legacy of contribution and service. You'll hear about real leadership clients with real problems navigating their success in life, business and career. If you're ready to become a masterful leader, then this podcast was made for you. So let's get started. Hey, what is happening? Friends? Happy Monday. I hope everybody is doing fantastic. Welcome. Welcome to a conversation that is needed, especially for those new leaders who are feeling stressed out. They're feeling overwhelmed, they are feeling inadequate, they feel like they're imposters. This is for the new folks who have just entered the pipeline of leadership. Perhaps it's a new management role. Perhaps it's a new supervisory role, maybe a director role, but it is your first position in leadership.
01:21 This is where you are right now, and there are a lot of mixed feelings happening right now. So you're stressed out, you're overwhelmed, you think you're not enough, you think you're incapable. You think you don't belong in this position. A lot of my new clients are coming to me saying, I don't know if I belong in leadership. I thought this would be different. I thought that my ambition was enough. I thought that what I currently had in regards to my abilities was enough, and I now realize that it wasn't. I now realize I need more. I need more training in my skills. I need more training in strategy and planning and execution. I really need to learn how to manage my mindset as well. And so a lot of these new clients that are coming to me are wanting leadership, training and development. They're asking for help because their organizations either don't have the budget to support their leadership training and development, or they've allocated for more senior level leadership positions.
02:37 And so these leaders, again, first in the pipeline, they are at the beginning stage of their leadership career. You may be a mid-level career person, but this is your first leadership role, right? Or you could be an emerging leader, someone who is early in her career, whose first job, whose first position is now in. So if you are new to leadership, I don't care how long you've been in the industry, I don't care how long you've been in that organization, I don't care how early or how soon after college you've entered leadership. This conversation is for us, for you and I because it's important that we keep more women in the leadership pipeline. And so what I've designed and what I am doing in my business is helping more women stay in the pipeline of leadership. And how do we do that? We do that through leadership, training and development.
03:35 That is all my company is designed to do and this is what I get to do with my coaching clients. And so if you are feeling like you made a mistake, because so many people say, I just want to go back to doing what I was doing and what you were doing before as an individual star performer was very different than what you're doing today in leadership. You have a different level of responsibility. You have different duties. You have obligations. You are now leading other individual star performers as opposed to when you were an individual star performer who did her job, clocked in and out, maybe did some overtime, if that was even available and you performed, you excelled. You didn't just perform adequately. You were excelling. You have excelled as an individual star performer. This is how you got the attention of whoever it was who promoted you, right?
04:40 You showed you demonstrated not only your current abilities, but you demonstrated capacity to lead. This is what leaders are looking for in their employees. They're looking for people who have potential, who have capacity. They don't just want a high performer because not all high performers want to be leaders, right? I used to be a high performer who was like, I don't want to lead. I just want to perform the way I'm performing. I am doing really well here. I go home at night, not worry about anybody else, don't have to care about leading anybody else, just lead myself and my work, and that's all I have to do. Those were nice days.
05:22 And then you raised your hand and you sign up for leadership because one day you changed your mind and you said, okay, you know what? I could do it better than that, dude. I could do it better than that woman. I could do it better. And if I'm given that opportunity to lead this department, this is what I would do. These are the things that I would change. This is the dialogue in your brain. This is inner dialogue that you're having before you raise your hand and then you raise your hand and you say, I'm interested. What do I need to do? What do you need to see from me? How much more value I can bring to you in this organization? What else is necessary to move into this new leadership role? And then you get the role, and now you're thinking to yourself, okay, maybe this was a mistake.
06:20 Maybe this wasn't a good idea. Maybe I'm just not capable. Maybe I thought it was going to be different, and now I'm feeling the pressure and now I'm feeling the stress and I think I want to reconsider. So this is why it's important. You and I have this conversation today because number one, it's hard. Leadership is a privilege. I've always said this. There are leaders who shouldn't be in leadership right now. There are individual star performers who aren't leading yet who should be in leadership, right? These are the people who want to serve with a servant leader's heart, with a servant leader's mind. These are people who have high integrity, high morality. These are people who genuinely care about the vision and the mission of the organization. Their personal values are truly aligned with the organization's values. And so they want to stay in this organization.
07:19 They want to contribute and add value to this organization. But they didn't realize that leadership was going to be a lot harder than they thought. These are the people that I want to help. Those are the people I want to support. These are the folks that I want to keep in the pipeline of leadership. And so how do we do that? So there's many ways to do that in my leadership training and development company. But for the sake of our conversation today, I just want to share with you a few things because it starts with your mindset. Now, listen, you're going to take plenty of action. You're going to need a whole lot of skills. You're going to need to know about strategic planning. You're going to need to understand how to align your department goals with the organization's strategic plans. For sure. These are hard skills that you need to have.
08:06 But I always start my clients with the mindset work. I always say, and I've always said this, it's from personal and professional experience that I say that leadership is 70% mindset. What does that even mean? The mindset that has a lot to do with your beliefs about your capacity to lead your people, your beliefs about the capacity of your employees. Because if you hate your employees, trust me, they're going to hate you back. And if you dislike leading, trust me, it's going to show in your results. So we start with the mindset work. Do you even have an identity of a leader or are you still stuck in the individual star performer identity, right? There's a different identity shift that needs to take place. What's your attitude about leading leadership or the leaders in your current organization? What's your attitude about your people? What do you believe is possible for women in leadership or more importantly possible for you as a woman in leadership?
09:10 These are the things that contribute to your mindset. And so we start there because it is 70% of your leadership practice. The rest is strategy, skill, building, execution, so forth. 70% is mindset, 30% is the rest. So we build a strong foundation of mindset, and that's where we begin. And so if you are feeling stressed, overwhelmed, if you feel resentful, regretful, you feel like it's best, going back to this individual star performer role and leaving leadership altogether, then let's talk about why, right? Were your expectations different than what you thought they were going to be, right? Because when expectations don't meet reality, we suffer, right? Because we have expectations of a great marriage, of a great business, of a great world, of a great relationship with your in-laws. You expect a lot from folks. You expected to be brilliant at leadership off the bat. You expected to excel right away because you were so successful as a star performer.
10:33 But when expectations don't meet reality, this is when you start suffering. When you start feeling challenged, when you start feeling stressed out and overwhelmed and burnt out, and you feel like a fraud, all of those things happen when your expectations don't meet your reality. And so when we hopefully get to work together, we get to discuss, well, what is it exactly? What were your expectations? Exactly? What is it that you expected to do the first month of leadership? Were you expected to meet the million dollar goal that was set upon you and your department? Did you expect to win Leader of the Month, leader of the Year award, your first few months in leadership? What were you expecting to achieve? Because it's about really setting real clear expectations, especially when you're transitioning from one identity into another. You don't expect to be excellent at something you've never done before.
11:40 This is called mastery. We're building to mastery. There's an invitation to master leadership every single day. Every time you set foot into that organization, there is an invitation waiting for you. And so we start with the mindset work. So you tell me, and if you're watching this, put your comment question in wherever you're watching this because we're streaming all over the place, but I just wanted to come to you because I've had a few clients really challenged with this. They are ready to leave leadership altogether. They are wanting to transition out of the workforce. They want this leadership position to be left behind. They are looking for other opportunities, maybe perhaps in another department or perhaps in another organization where they enter like an individual performer, a regular employee with no additional duties or responsibilities. And these are the folks, like I said, that I want to support right here, right now.
12:48 So if you are that person, I'm inviting you to work with our company to work with us so that we can help you on the path to mastery, right? Because leadership is not supposed to be painful. It's supposed to challenge you. Most definitely as an employee, as a leader, you're supposed to be challenged, but not to the point where you say, enough, I'm done. I'm out of here. I want to go back to being a star performer. I want to go back to being a regular employee. I don't want to keep doing this, right? This is why this conversation is so important because we want to work with you so that you can work on the mindset that is necessary to be successful in your leadership role, and then we show you a proven path, an evidence-based strategic path that we design to get you from where you are right now to mastery.
13:42 Yeah, believe it or not, that can happen in as little as 12 weeks in as little as three months feeling confident, feeling resourceful, feeling free to show up as you are as a leader. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine that going from feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, full of chronic stress, burnt out feeling like an imposter to feeling like I got this. I may not know everything because they're looking to me as a leader for all of the answers, and I may not have all those answers, but I know how to problem solve because I learned how to take a plan, a strategic plan, align alignment with my department goals, and take and execute and take massive action with my team. This is what I get to do every day as a leader. I get to align my goals with my people on this team, and we get to take massive action together.
14:42 We are always executing. We are always reiterating. It's an iteration process. We're always moving forward together. And so what we did in my company is designed a course, this beautiful certification program, a certification program that will allow you to get from wherever you are, right here right now to mastery in mindset, in skillset, and in strategy. Three variables that directly correlate with your impact as a leader. That's right. So the higher the mindset, the stronger the mindset, the more skills that you build, the stronger those skills are, the stronger your strategic planning and execution skills are. Those three variables directly impact your effectiveness as a leader. And this is what the certification program that I'm introducing you to is about, and you're going to hear so much more about this in later weeks, but we are going to invite you to join us on a wait list to let us know that you are interested, especially if you're a new leader, especially if you're a new manager, someone who needs support, who's not getting support from her employer right now, you are wanting to gain clarity around your identity as a leader.
16:13 You want to build a strong foundation of leadership, and we start with the mindset, and then we go from there, and then we build your skills, we identify the gaps, we get to see where you're deficient in. We get to see where you're void in, and then we get to help you fill those gaps so that you can then move into strategy, right? Because the point of strategic planning and execution, you don't have the skills to do that. So there's a process. There's a step-by-step process. The proven process that I have used with my executive coaching clients, these are women and men who are in the C-suite. These are folks who are either CEO level or senior VPs or chiefs in their organizations. These are folks in the trenches with their multilayer of employees, and we have worked with them to create this certification program, and now we've made it for and accessible to those who are brand new to leadership.
17:18 So this is what we're going roll out here in the next few weeks, and we want to invite you to learn more about it because if you are someone new in leadership, we want to keep you in the pipeline. That's the whole point of what we get to do as a company. We get to support women in leadership who again raised their hand because they said, I want in on this and I can change the culture, and I believe I can do something differently here. So yeah, I want in on this leadership thing, and they finally get in and then super discouraged because it's not what they expected it to be. These are folks who want to stay in their organizations but are so desperate for help. They want help. They don't want to feel incompetent. They don't want to feel doubtful. They don't want to
18:10 Feel
18:10 Like
18:11 A fraud. I
18:11 Mean, who wants to feel like this? No one does, especially if you're leading and especially if you have these great responsibilities and duties. Again, leadership is a privilege. And so you are here now and we want to keep you in this pipeline as long as we possibly can. So that's a short introduction of the certification program,
18:34 Capstone
18:35 Certification leadership program that we will roll out here very soon. So again, if you are someone who is new in the leadership pipeline, we want to support you and we want to see your name on our wait list. And so wherever you're watching this right now, you are going to get a link and be sure to get on there as
18:57 Soon as possible.
18:59 All right, dear Leader, I'm wishing you a fantastic rest of your week. Enjoy your Monday and I will see you all very soon. Take
19:06 Care. Hey, leader, do you want weekly leadership tips, coaching and training straight to your email inbox?
19:16 Yeah, I thought so.
19:18 Head over to dr denise simpson.com/leadership. Again, that's dr denise simpson.com/leadership. Just submit your name and your email address and we'll get started
19:30 Right away.
19:31 I look forward
19:31 To serving you
19:32 Inside your email inbox. See you soon.
