Imposter syndrome is a systemic scam that exacerbates normal feelings of self-doubt and fails to recognize the impact of systemic bias and exclusion on women in workplaces. It's more pronounced for marginalized identities—the more intersectional, the more compounded the marginalization will be. If you're working for an organization that hasn't yet addressed imposter syndrome, you can still improve your ability to navigate it at work.
Recognize that you don't need to be fixed because there's nothing wrong with you. Your level of confidence and outcomes aren't commensurate with your competence as a professional. You may not believe it yet, but you are more than good enough.
Develop healthy confidence for your own well-being and avoid fake confidence and overconfidence. "Fake it 'til you make it" is bad advice. Instead, face it 'til you ace it. Self-confidence results from not betraying yourself, consistently honoring your own needs, and keeping commitments to yourself.
Be willing to take calculated risks and practice self-compassion to support yourself whether you succeed, fail, or something in between.
Resilience helps you cope and bounce back from adversity, but transilience provides you with the capacity to endure, flexibly adapt, and positively transform.
Do more than just survive. Let yourself thrive. Surviving is a reactive way of being whereas thriving is proactive. Resilience is primarily about survival. Transilience takes you further—beyond resilience.
Increase your capacity to embrace change in the forms of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and hyperconnectivity (VUCAH). For you or your organization, consider how you might challenge assumptions, stress-test ideas, and strategize to discover feasible alternatives to be ready for whatever the future could hold.
Develop your ability to be antifragile—when exposure to chaos and uncertainty, stressors, or risk results in making something better and stronger than before. How might embracing discomfort help you develop your antifragility?
It's unfortunate that unhealthy workplaces reward people for overworking. High work demands, too few resources, and unrealistic expectations can create long hours and weekend work that can go beyond overwork to burnout. It's now known that burnout is not actually a personal problem, but an organizational one.
Work should nurture, not encumber, the other aspects of your life. What else is important to you? Who are you outside of work? What good is an "A" in work, if you get an "F" in life?
Think about how you could be sustainably excellent at work and role model this as a leader to help others do the same. How might you better manage yourself to be most effective at work to get what's most important done well without sacrificing the rest of your life? Moreover, what can you do to cultivate your well-being that will enhance your productivity and performance at work?
You can "have it all" over the course of a lifetime, but it's unrealistic to have it all at once and be able to keep it up. Recognize the seasons of your life and what matters most to you for each point in time.
Effective leadership requires innovative thinking and doing. Most of us tend to default to leading the way we would want to be led and primarily stick to drawing upon the knowledge and experiences that are comfortable and familiar to us. To challenge ourselves to level up our leadership, we can choose to lead by design by adapting different styles of leading to best suit the situation and stakeholders involved.
Find new or unusual ways to leverage your strengths effectively. You can't get the most out of your strengths and reach your potential if you just stick to using them the way you always have.
Discover your typical leadership markers first. Then challenge yourself to move out of your comfort zone to choose different combinations of leadership markers for certain situations that allow for authenticity, adaptability, and help strengthen how you want to be perceived.
Strategically analyze your stakeholder network to engineer how you can build your influence by considering stakeholders' levels of influence and where they fall on the spectrum between support and opposition relative to you.
Dr. Ashley is an exceptionally gifted leadership coach who is committed and compassionate about helping her clients. As a woman in leadership, I needed support in coping with leadership challenges and obstacles. Rather than instinctively trying to focus on my limitations and improve on areas where I was lacking, Dr. Ashley helped me maximize the understanding of my core strengths to overcome areas of weakness. She was also able to incorporate organizational culture and context into our conversations based on scenarios from my current work setting. You will find her approach to be programmatic, realistic, effective and refreshing.
Dr. Ashley is a committed, warm, and collaborative professional, and I am pleased to have gotten the opportunity to connect with her. She is clearly interested in learning about others—and not just so she can help coach them more effectively, but also because of her dedicated interest in understanding who they are more holistically. I recommend her to others interested in career guidance, as well as in exploring and maximizing their personal strengths.
Dr. Ashley is a consummate leadership professional who focuses on empowering her clients to show up at their best each and every day. At times, I disliked the discomfort of being challenged and led beyond my comfort zone, but I realized that this facilitated me to develop more holistically as an executive and entrepreneur facing the difficulties and chaos inherent in managing a startup. Her interpersonal skills, genuineness, and compassion provided me with a rewarding experience that was invaluable to the success of our collaboration.
Coaching is a process that can be powerful and transformative. Its value is in creating improvement by unlocking potential. Having a coach is a typical component among high-performing individuals.
You might be good at something already and with coaching you could achieve a higher level than on your own. What would a talented athlete be without a coach? Coaching takes you from ordinary to extraordinary, from good to exceptional.
You need a coach if you want to be dedicated to what you do in a personally sustainable way. Coaching opens the door to possibility. Help yourself to the possibility of showing up to be your best every day.
"Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast, or a bridge player."
~ Bill Gates
View his TED talk.
—Holistically cultivate your leadership to be personally sustainable
—Develop yourself as an inclusive leader
—Strategically position yourself to build influence and modern executive presence
—Comprehensively build your emotional intelligence (EI) in all 12 competencies
—Leverage your Gallup CliftonStrengths
—Maximize your organization's social impact (the effect of the actions of an organization on the well-being of communities or society while still earning a profit)
—Disrupt and dismantle unhealthy workplaces and inequitable systems to create psychologically safe and inclusive organizational cultures
—Leverage the Gallup CliftonStrengths of your leaders, managers, and teams
—Cultivate workplace well-being and foster sustainable excellence
—Navigate difficult conversations, effectively manage conflict, and communicate assertively
—Build emotional intelligence (EI) through team-building activities
To be collaborative designers in the health of individuals, organizations, and communities throughout work and life through well-being advocacy and empowering people in their ability to unlock their potential, achieve success, and thrive while promoting innovative ways of thinking for creating social impact and wellness optimization.
By helping people to thrive in work and life and creating organizational cultures to promote and sustain well-being, our vision is to create a global social culture of well-being among individuals and organizations across communities and workplaces that support compassion through the application of positive psychology.
Self-determination and agency unbound by judgment, discrimination, bias, and fear.
Courage to seek change, face uncertainty, embrace discomfort, and overcome fear to create, evolve, and flourish.
Demonstrate ethical leadership, kindness, and doing what's right to nurture the authentic and constructive development of people.
• We start where you are
• You'll be empowered through self-awareness, reflection, insight, action toward accomplishing goals, accountability, and provided with constructive feedback on your progress
• Structure and tools are provided while process is a partnership
• Use of a design-thinking, strengths-based, and whole-person approach that incorporates evidence-based practices
• Doctor of Social Work (DSW) in Social Change & Innovation
• International Coaching Federation (ICF) Professional Certified Coach (PCC)
• Certified Red Team Thinker
• Certification in Emotional Intelligence (EI)
• Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach
• Certified Financial Social Work Coach
• Recognized as One of the Top Leadership Coaches by Coach Foundation
• Coaching since 2010
• Typical industries of clients are entertainment, technology, healthcare, corporate, government, and education
• Typical clients are new and emerging leaders, C-suite executives, VPs and SVPs, directors, new managers, and high-potential individuals
• Global clientele—Asia, Europe, and North America
People exceptionally talented in the Deliberative theme are best described by the serious care they take in making decisions or choices. They anticipate obstacles.
People exceptionally talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. The process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.
People exceptionally talented in the Maximizer theme focus on strengths as a way to stimulate personal and group excellence. They seek to transform something strong into something superb.
People exceptionally talented in the Achiever theme work hard and possess a great deal of stamina. They take immense satisfaction in being busy and productive.
People exceptionally talented in the Input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information.
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