Episode 109 | How Women Executives Can Stand in Their Power with Dr. Alessandra Wall

Dr. Alessandra Wall  00:00

Whether you’re a stay at home parent or working in a fast food chain or CEO of a company where it’s the people you know and the relationships you have with them that really set you up for success or can hold you back. So it introduced these women realized that when we got to work together as a community, we accelerated the pace of their success and we made it easier to deal with the roadblocks, because it’s very lonely to lead, and it’s especially very lonely to lead as a woman.

Voiceover  00:05

Welcome to the “Lead at the Top of Your Game” podcast, where we equip you to more effectively lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. Each week, we help you sharpen your leadership acumen by cracking open the playbooks of dynamic leaders who are doing big things in their professional endeavors. And now, your host, leadership tactics, and organizational development expert, Karan Ferrell-Rhodes.

Karan Rhodes  00:36

Hello, my superstars. This is Karan, and welcome back to another episode at the lead of the top of your game podcast. Well, I have a fantastic guest on today’s show who is so focused on ensuring that all well, she’s ensuring focus on sharing that all leaders can gain their full capability. But her particular niche that she is just a superstar and is really coaching executive women leaders and all the dynamics that go with that. And we’re pleased to have Dr Alessandra Wall, who’s the CEO of a company called noteworthy, with us today. Now noteworthy is an exclusive coaching and consulting firm that supports the advancement of executive women and supports those companies that seek to retain, elevate and attract this extremely powerful talent pool. And I cannot wait to have a deeper conversation with her about her practice, her observations and some of the workplace dynamics that executive women are faced when trying to really make an impact in the businesses and in our all of our communities. So welcome to the podcast. Alessandra.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  01:56

I am honored and delighted to start my afternoon, beginning of my afternoon with you, so thank you for having me.

Karan Rhodes  02:04

Oh, we’re do happy to have you. No thank you for coming aboard. And when I had a chance to read your bio and see your background, I was like, Yep, this is someone we definitely need to have on the podcast. And so I cannot wait to delve into the fantastic work that you’re doing, but before we do that, we always love to learn just a little bit more about our guests. So for as much as you feel comfortable, can you give us just a sneak peek into your life outside of work,

Dr. Alessandra Wall  02:32

I’m an open book, so how about I get really a sneak peek? I currently live in San Diego. It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere. I actually grew up in France. I’m half French, well, French, Italian and American. I didn’t move here till I was 18. Sometimes I like to say three kids at home, but it’s really just one husband and two and two teenage boys, and we have a one to one ratio animals to humans in my household. And when I’m not working or podcasting, you can either find me reading. I love reading. I have a group of fantastic women I call my Golden Girls, and I watch them surf, and every once in a while, if we’re someplace warm, I’ll go surf with them. San Diego Water is notoriously cold, and outside of that, nearly feel boring, but that’s it.

Karan Rhodes  03:20

Okay, you’re not gonna pull the wool over our eyes. There’s no way you are a boring lady. You’re very dynamic. But I love reading as well as and a member of a couple of book clubs to share as well, but I kind of feel that out of date person sometimes. But there’s a lot of people that love books, but people get their information so much online these days, I love to curl up with a good book and kind of decompress so that we have in common

Dr. Alessandra Wall  03:50

favorite thing to do quick inside. I love it so much that here’s how I hope to die. I want to die seated in my backyard. Very, very, very old, but functional,

Karan Rhodes  04:03

Yea…old but functional, yeah,

Dr. Alessandra Wall  04:05

Reading a book, and I want to be one page away from the end, but I know that there was always more. There was always more in life. Yes,

Karan Rhodes  04:13

I love that analogy. Well, we’re gonna speak it into truth, but we’re gonna wait until you about 381 How about that?

Dr. Alessandra Wall  04:20

That, as long as I can be that and fun and yes,

Karan Rhodes  04:26

With today’s medical advances, you never know it might go true. Oh, all right, well, let’s kind of dive into a lot of the great work that you’re doing. Why don’t you start by telling us a bit about your background before starting noteworthy, and then, what was your passion to be the founder of noteworthy?

Dr. Alessandra Wall  04:47

Sure, I started my career as a child psychologist, and I was just having this conversation this morning, my clients. We I do individual work with them, but I bring them together. So once a month. Do what’s called a deep dive. This morning, we were doing a thing called an energy audit, and I was explaining to them why I became a psychologist and how it ties into what I do as a coach. And I said I grew up witnessing the impact that a single event could have on a number of people who allowed that event to define and even as a little girl, it boggled my mind. I’m like, I understand that the events in our life can shape us but not define us, right? So especially being a child, experiencing this as a kid, I’m like, Hey, you’re so helpless. As a child, became a child psychologist, and I was so sure that I would always be challenged, entertained, engaged in what I did, and the seven year itch is a real thing. And within the first seven years of practicing that career where I moved into child psychology, out of child psychology into adult psychology, I just really started falling out of love with what I did. Had never trained to be anything else. I look at my kids, I’m like, I went to grade 2222 but what I knew I loved was this idea of helping people take ownership of their lives and their choices and living lives on their terms, and trying to live life without regret, which doesn’t mean you don’t make mistakes, where everything’s fine, but you own all of those pieces. So I did what everybody does when they have a quarter of midlife crisis. I tried life coaching for a while, and built a business very reactively that I did not love. I see people do this in the corporate world all the time, right? They allow their misery to get to a certain point, and they reactively move away, like maybe they move to another company, but the other company is just a replica of the company they left, yeah, where they wait until they break completely and they have to take a medical leave, whatever it is. And I worked very hard at building a business that was not right for me. I burnt myself out. I took six months off, all this time, still practicing as a therapist, still raising toddlers and preschoolers and and I came back and started really thinking about what I love doing and what I was truly passionate or frustrated about. And I loved the work I was doing with people around their careers. I loved working with women very specifically, and I was very frustrated and feeling very passionate about the number of women I met who were exiting their fields or their careers because they just couldn’t they were just done. And what led to that place where they were just done, that set the foundation for what I do now we hit our 10 years. Congratulations. So I am glad to say I have not fallen out of love with what I do. Actually, I think I fall back in love all the time with with the work I do, with the women I get to work with, with the impact they make, first and foremost, and then the impact I get to make indirectly through them.

Karan Rhodes  07:41

Wow, that’s amazing. So can you share some of your approaches or the services that are part of your firm?

Dr. Alessandra Wall  07:49

Sure. So I initially, primarily, a lot of my work was one on one. I mapped out that same model of being a therapist, where you sit one on one, you go deep with somebody. You did a lot of that over the years, both as being a therapist for nearly 20 years and doing what I do, because by the time I was done entirely being a therapist in nearly 20 years of practice, takes a long time sometimes to realize you want to leave something or to admit it to yourself. I’ve have a lot of tools. So that’s where I started. And then what I discovered is I was constantly introducing my clients to one another. You really believe in the importance of social capital, and this idea that there comes a point, first of all, in everybody’s life, regardless of whether you’re a stay at home parent or working in a fast food chain or CEO of a company where it’s the people you know and the relationships you have with them that really set you up for success or can hold you back. So it introduced these women realized that when we got to work together as a community, we accelerated the pace of their success and we made it easier to deal with the roadblocks, because it’s very lonely to lead, and it’s especially very lonely to lead as a woman. Yes, these days I have two sets of main bodies of work. One is working individually with women, but all my individual clients also get to come together on these calls, like the deep dive, we have peer advisory calls. We bring the community together. And we’re just launching in October, our first in many, many years, group coaching program. The same thing, good now, and a lot of it is designed. These are year long programs always, because the women I work with are have high aspirations, big changes. They’re smart. If it were easy, if it was just about giving them the right tool, the right strategy, the right system, like they could figure that out on their own, sure. Yeah. So I’m really, I’m really excited and a little scared, always a little scared when I launched something. Yeah, about that. And then on the other side of it, I get. Sometimes, and we’re really working on building that to work with companies and to help them build out programs internally to do what you talked about right to support first and foremost, the women that they have. To elevate first and foremost, the women that they already have. And I always tell them this is the best recruiting process. And if your women are successful and happy, you do really well, and they will be your spokesperson. They will be the ambassadors who bring in, like, the next wave of incredible talent.

Karan Rhodes  10:31

Absolutely yes, because like attracts like many times, right? So they will be

Dr. Alessandra Wall  10:36

And people talk…

Karan Rhodes  10:37

People talk.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  10:39

that have great PR like their mission statement. In good times, they’re doing all their dei work. In good times, they’re supporting but when profits are at risk, they’re walking away. They may think that they’re fooling people, but everybody’s talking. And eventually they’re going to continue hiring, because people need jobs. Yeah, but they’re not going to get the best of the best.

Karan Rhodes  11:01

Absolutely. And you know, there’s, you know, every time you turn around, there’s an article or something that’s written about women executives and the whole glass ceilings and the microaggressions they have to face, and they’re in the workplace. And I’m just curious, in your opinion, since you deal with so many, what are you currently seeing as the top trends of of things that they’re facing right now? What? What’s keeping them up at night?

Dr. Alessandra Wall  11:31

There’s a lot of glass cliffs. Have you heard of that one?

Karan Rhodes  11:34

No, I haven’t. What is that?

Dr. Alessandra Wall  11:35

The glass cliff is? When you’re you’re basically set up to fail. So you’re told, hey, congratulations. You just got placed as head of this team, head of this project, head of this company. By the way, we’re really struggling this team, this project, this company has, like, we’ve tried a bunch of things, they’re not working. So you’re a Hail Mary, and they’re not that, like nothing has shifted in the system. So they’re given the same tools as their predecessors, but they’re the last in line,

Karan Rhodes  12:03

and they’re very accountable for that.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  12:04

And, gentlemen, as you’re listening, I am not saying this is not a comment on how much effort you put into the work you’re doing. I’m just saying women have had to work 2, 3, 4, times as hard to access the opportunity to even put their name as a potential candidate for a role. That’s true, and we know this. It wasn’t so long ago that women weren’t allowed to be physicians, that women weren’t allowed to, you know, be in combat, that we just in case, people don’t realize, testing wasn’t done for pharmaceuticals wasn’t done on women for the longest time, like into the 90s. So medicine because, because our physiology is different. So they’re like, well, we don’t like women’s hormones are going to mess up how this medicate. We don’t want to test on that. It’s taken a really long time. So these women, they will show they’re like, this is my chance. I’m going to prove myself. I’m wondering, I can do it, therefore I should. Yeah. And they will exhaust themselves, and they will burn themselves out, and they will fail because they were set up to fail, and then they’re the ones we remember failing. So that’s one thing. The other thing I’m seeing a lot is I work in male dominated spaces, and there have been a number of layoffs in these spaces. That tends to be tech, biotech findings, same here, and I have a sample bias. I get it, but I feel like there are a lot more women who are being laid off. And at the senior level and at the executive level, they are taking a very, very, very long time to get jobs. So I have clients who are VP, senior, VP, some who are at the C suite who have been out of work for 6, 10, 12, 14, months and really struggling to find new roles.

Karan Rhodes  13:48

I could vouch for that, because I came from the engineering and tech spaces in my corporate career and have a ton of contacts in that area. I can vouch for that that they are being impacted, and they are taking what I would call longer than normal, especially with the low levels of unemployment technically right now, to find additional roles. And they’re going for multiple ones and getting to the final stages and not being the ones that are being selected. And these are phenomenal leaders that are leading enterprise level firms in their past. So this is I can vouch for that one

Dr. Alessandra Wall  14:29

It’s unprecedented. Actually, I saw an article yesterday. It was in one of the Forbes newsletters I get where they were saying that 81% of recruiters admit to posting ghost jobs just to get a sense of what the market is, or to post a job that really they’re going to select an internal candidate, but they just have to check the boxes so they put an external listing. Or they just want to kind of get a sense of who’s out there, so that they have a pool of potential candidates for the future. Yeah, this is another thing that’s soul crushing for these women to. They’re applying and they’re getting auto rejections, right? And the job actually never really. 81% of recruiters say that they do this, and it’s a ridiculous number. And I’d say the last thing, because this is very, very present. It’s interesting. In my line, I started off working with professional women, right? That’s was it. And then over the last few years, I’ve worked with women who are more and more senior and for any listeners, it’s because the mission of my organization is to help women access highest levels of power and leadership so that they can change the system from within, somebody who’s at a manager level, it might take her 10 years to get to a role where she has the power to change the system from the top. I don’t necessarily have 10 years to work with her on that space. But if I’m work with a VP, a Senior VP, or what I like to say is women with that level of authority, because depending on an organization, your title, might actually be director of something, we can position them to be wildly successful and deeply fulfilled. Because if you’re successful without the fulfillment, I call that a gilded cage, right? Like, okay, so you’ve got the title, you’ve got the paycheck, and you’re miserable. That’s not success,

Karan Rhodes  16:11

No. And how hard is it, in your opinion, to achieve gaining authority? Because that is a dynamic all within itself. How hard is it for women?

Dr. Alessandra Wall  16:21

It’s pretty difficult. I was talking to a client of mine this morning. She’s fantastic. She’s in engineering. She’s absolutely incredible. And she is in a role now where upcoming goals in the long term. She’s like, I want to help my current organization redefine what’s possible for them in the future, which is what I hear from the women I work with all the time. They want a seat at the table and a voice, which is the authority piece, a voice the table, because they want to help direct the future and the prosperity of the organizations and the teams they work for. Big dreams, big impact. And that is a conversation we had. I said, Okay, well, hey, how do you get a seat at the table? How far are you? What is our process? And I reminded her, just remember, having a seat at the table doesn’t mean you have a voice at the table. That’s true. So there are a lot of women who walk in and they have the titles, and yet when they speak, they’re not listened to them. I have another client who’s also, well, she’s in the electrical engineering space, and she had set a limit with somebody on her team, and her boss happens to have an office next to this guy, and boss was checking in with the guy, and the guy was like, Yeah, I’m frustrated because she set this limit. And he goes, Well, why does well, we can. We can just change that. Let’s address it. Boss never want to go talk to my client. But why that limit was set? So immediately there was undermining, this erosion of her authority, right? And then a meeting was called that she was convened to with five other people trying to figure out how to not do the things she said and get around the limit she said. So that is…

Karan Rhodes  17:57

It all could have been avoided with the

Dr. Alessandra Wall  18:00

Or just go to her and say, Hey, so and so mentioned you did this. I’m trying to understand why, or if you just trusted her,

Karan Rhodes  18:06

right.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  18:07

And I’ve  worked with her boss, and so I know that he knows and believes that she is highly competent, like she’s a master at what she does.

Karan Rhodes  18:14

Wow.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  18:15

So this idea of authority is difficult because we make these assumptions. We assume that if we succeed, we’re going to be happy. Many of us are not. That’s what I was going to say earlier I have the higher the more senior the women I work with, the more I work with women who, on paper, have it all, but are really, really miserable, or have it all at the cost of very toxic work environments. We assume that if we get a seat at the table, because we have a voice at the table, we assume that, if we have the right title, with that title, will come the authority to make the kind of impact we want to make. And with women, at least, I don’t work that closely with men. I can tell you with women, that is not a given. Yeah, and the challenge with women, since you said, I could use it any words, the challenge with women is a woman simply walks into the space and goes, Listen, at the end of the day, I hear you. I’ve taken your thoughts into consideration, but I’m the final say. So this is what we’re going to do. She gets labeled a bitch. Yep, she sure does. She sure does. But if she says, Well, hold on a second. Let’s make sure everybody talks. Let’s get together. Let’s figure this out. Now. She’s indecisive, she’s too soft, she’s not leadership material. It is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Karan Rhodes  19:29

Damned if you don’t. Yeah, and you know what? This is nothing new. This has been going on for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, it is just insane.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  19:40

Watch, do you like movies?

Karan Rhodes  19:41

Oh, I love movies. I’m a movie official.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  19:43

I’m a Gen Xer. I’ll just throw that out. Yeah. And if you’re younger than Karan or myself, I highly recommend and if you’re a man or a woman, wherever you are on the gender spectrum, if you haven’t seen the next three movies, I’m going to mention, I recommend watching them. Just call them your. Vintage nine. So one is nine to five.

Karan Rhodes  20:02

Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  20:04

The other one was baby boom,

Karan Rhodes  20:06

yeah. Diane Keaton

Dr. Alessandra Wall  20:08

And the third one is working girl

Karan Rhodes  20:09

Watched all those many times in

Dr. Alessandra Wall  20:12

They were all made in the early 80s, so at this point, 40 years ago.

Karan Rhodes  20:16

Yeah,

Dr. Alessandra Wall  20:16

And it is depressing, nearly as depressing as parts of the Barbie movie.

Karan Rhodes  20:21

Yeah,

Dr. Alessandra Wall  20:22

How contemporary and still relevant, the quotes, the interactions, the issues in those movies are.

Karan Rhodes  20:31

You’re You’re so right. I didn’t think about that until you just mentioned that every last one of them, and I’ve watched that, and I’m one of those crazy people that watch movies about 10 million times and hitting meetings and stuff. You’re so right. Oh my goodness, that’s crazy. Okay, you on the listeners. You need to add that to your list, especially my younger following. I promise you, you will not be bored. They’re still very interesting and relevant, even though they

Dr. Alessandra Wall  20:58

They’re going to remake nine to five. And I have to say, really, really heartbroken about that.

Karan Rhodes  21:03

That one, that’s not one that I would probably want to remake, because it was gold as it was. I don’t know how you would remake it and make it even better. So, but you know, that’s just me. So, Alexandra, I’m dying to know about this whole two second reset that you mentioned, what is that all about, and how does that help Executive Women increase the perception of their authority and ability?

Dr. Alessandra Wall  21:30

Ok. I love it. So I had the incredible privilege this year to talk at San Diego women’s week and to be with their keynotes and silly old me. They’re like, what topics would you like to address? I’m like, I could do this one or this one, but I really want to do a talk on authority. Haven’t written it yet. Let me do it. So a few months ago, I created the talk, and I was thinking about the challenges we have so we address some of the points. I just said, we all think that our experience, our title, our years, our education, those things give us authority. But really, authority is predicated on a number of things. Who you know, your social capital, how you show up in the world. I talk a lot about taking advantage of human psychology, right? So social capital is a human psychology thing. Humans are social animals. So since the dawn of time, humans are survived by relying on one another. Guess what that’s baked into you? That idea of nepotism or those things. It’s just what we do guaranteed the last hairdresser you found you asked a friend first that person got work, not because they were the best, because your friend liked them. That’s right. Same thing for hiring a CEO. Saying, we talk about presence, and it’s a difficult thing with women to talk about presence, because we’re told a lot of things, you should do this, you should do that. You should straighten your hair, you should look you should wear heels. You shouldn’t wear heels. Yeah, 55% of people’s initial impressions of you are based on non verbal factors. People start forming an opinion about you within 10 milliseconds of seeing you. Yes, joke about this, because if you’re a speaker, within the first seven seconds of standing on stage, you haven’t even opened your mouth. People in their brain have decided whether your talk is good or not. It’s like you could write on stage, say hi and leave. They’ve made up most of their mind the way we speak, the tone we use, the way we move our body, the way we hold ourselves, plays an incredible role in supporting or eroding, undermining our authority. You can be the smartest, most powerful woman in the room if you walk in or man in the room, if you walk in frumpy, like collapsed on yourself, yeah, not making eye contact, you will lose authority points. Yes, likewise, you could be the most junior person in the room, but if you walk in and you carry yourself with authority, you will gain authority points. People will listen to you. They’ll pay attention to you. Yeah, a quick way to see that. If you’ve ever stood at a busy intersection waiting to cross, everybody’s waiting, and then some really confident looking person just walks. They like Jay walk, and suddenly everybody follows them. That’s what we’re talking about. People assume that if you look like you know what you’re doing. You know what you’re doing. So here’s the two second mix for those of you who are listening, may I please recommend that you go watch this, the video of it, but because we’re on cell phones and computers and comfy couches all day long, and I’m gonna step away from my mic in a second, we tend to start collapsing on our diaphragms. So all of us and I see this, my kids are so annoyed with me always repeating this to them, we’re all walking around like old, defeated people, right? And I’m talking 105 years old, right, right? Where just osteoporosis is what it is problem with that posture and all, and I’ll move away and show it in a second to the camera. Better is that that posture mimics the natural body posture we adopt when. We’re feeling defeated, we’re scared. So it’s a victim. It’s a victim posture. As a psychologist, I really hope somebody’s doing research, but I really believe that a lot of the anxiety we’re seeing these days is actually in part, reinforced or tied to posture, that if we can get this whole generation to pick themselves up and straight, because there’s a feedback loop between our body posture, our facial expression, and our mood and mindset. There’s a lot we can change. Second trick, it’s really simple. I’m going to say it. I’m going to demonstrate it for people watching. I hope I’m going to be able to explain it for people who are just listening. Okay, if you pay attention to your body, you’ve probably somewhat collapsed on on your diaphragm. You probably think you’re standing straight, but your shoulders are probably somewhat hunched forward. Your neck is probably somewhat forward, like your head is poked for a little bit like a turtle. If you simply take yourself off your diaphragm and roll your shoulders back, not only do you gain about an inch in height, if you’re concerned about your weight, you lose about five pounds. But more importantly, that posture is a really strong posture. It’s the right one for your back and mindset wise, it makes you feel stronger, more certain, more grounded. Externally, it looks more powerful. So I’m going to step away from this microphone. I’m going to demonstrate the two postures for people watching. I’m going to demonstrate it from the front and from the side. I’m always going to start with the one you don’t want to adopt, that you probably naturally adopt. And the shift

Karan Rhodes  26:28

All right. So right now everyone she is demonstrating the one that you don’t want, and then now she’s showing the one that you want to and you can compare the two and see how confident and how different the aura is that she’s displaying.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  26:51

It sounds so silly,

Karan Rhodes  26:53

but eye have witnesses, it can definitely tell the difference.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  26:56

There are so many things that are so hard to do. There’s so many things that take a long time. If you have a fixed mindset and you’re trying to develop a growth mindset. Takes a really long time. If you’ve been beaten down and you in a toxic workplace and you’ve lost your confidence, it takes so much work to build that up. There are teeny things we can do, all of us, that have to do with our neurochemistry, our biology and our evolution, that can make a massive impact, and they’re really easy on their own. They’re not enough, but they’re part of it. So even if you’re on zoom all day long, the difference between this is my normal, like, I’m not paying attention to my posture. I’ve got what that that C shaped. I wish I weren’t wearing black today.

Karan Rhodes  27:37

You look great. Yeah.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  27:38

Even on Zoom, it makes a difference.

Karan Rhodes  27:40

It does make a difference. It definitely does.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  27:43

It makes a difference for how people see me. It makes a difference for how I feel about myself. They did a study where they asked people in prison who were who had been accused of violent crimes to choose a victim, and they just showed pictures. The number one factor that was associated with their choice of a victim was posture. It was not age, it was not gender, it’s not race, it was posture. It’s posture.

Karan Rhodes  28:07

Wow. Well, listeners, you know, those of you who are just listening to audio, as you know, we also have our podcast on YouTube, on video, this is the episode you definitely want to also check out on YouTube, because just witnessing it, just taking this few minutes, just to witness what Dr Alessandra has shown us is just nuggets a goal. Just absolute nuggets a goal.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  28:32

Just one more thing. This just goes back. I just want you to remember, 55% of what people think about you or believe about you is based on non verbal.

Karan Rhodes  28:40

Yes, absolutely, and a lot of people don’t realize that, but I can vouch for that too. I’ve read that study, so that’s wonderful. Well, Dr Alessandra, I literally blinked, and now it’s almost time to close. I can’t believe this. We’re just gonna have to have you back, because this has just been fantastic and such great nuggets. But as you know, we cannot let you get out of here without asking you our signature question. And as you know, my firm did extensive research on leadership execution, and we out of that research came five buckets of target areas that are critical to any leadership initiative, and we always ask, Which of the seven all equally is important. Which of the seven really popped for you, and you were so kind to share that leading with courageous agility really resonated with you. And for my new listeners, leading with courageous agility is all about having the fortitude to take calculated risk and stand up for what you believe in and take baby steps forward to do the right thing, even when the future is uncertain or unclear. It’s all about having that courage to go forth, even if you haven’t don’t have it all figured out yet, but you do make calculated risk. You know that means you take in data, information, your expertise, and make the best decision you can, but still charge. Forward. And I kind of think I know why you selected that one based on your practice, but we want to hear it from you. Dr Alessandra, why did that really resonate with you?

Dr. Alessandra Wall  30:09

First of all, your buckets are gold.

Karan Rhodes  30:12

Oh, thank you. They’re based on data. I didn’t make them up, so

Dr. Alessandra Wall  30:18

You put them together. And those of us who don’t want to go through all the research. Really appreciate that.

Karan Rhodes  30:23

Thank you.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  30:23

So if you haven’t read the book, read the book, they are really gold. The reason that one resonates the most with me is I tend to work again, with high power, high impact women in spaces where it’s a lot of stress and there’s a lot of risk in messing up. So a lot of the people I work with tend to be perfectionist. They want to get everything right. They want to write. Doesn’t always mean right for you, but there’s too much deliberation, not enough action, too much time spent second guessing, and not enough time spent trusting. Yeah, and when I think of that courageous agility, there are a few pieces again, marrying my background as a psychologist. When I do there’s a piece of self confidence, which is simply the faith, the belief that I can handle this. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be successful. Doesn’t mean I’m going to be the best. Yeah, I can do it, even if I mess up, I’ll figure this out, right, right? So there’s that piece, there’s the piece about action, yeah, if you’re not going to take action, you’re not going to create change. And then there’s that piece of understanding that success comes from failure. So anything you do has to be iterative. You start with the smallest step, you assess naturally, the success or the downsides of that step, course correct. Iterate and slowly you move in the direction you want to go,

Karan Rhodes  31:35

Awesome. Well, we’re just gonna drop the mic on that one that is so insightful. Thank you. Dr Alessandra, well, unfortunately, we run quite out of time. I’m so sorry about that. We’re going to have to bring you back to learn more. But I know a lot of executives listen to the podcast, and for especially my Executive Women, you definitely want to check Dr Alessandra wall out and her company. Noteworthy. She’s absolutely phenomenal, as you can tell, and is definitely the right ally that you will need as you continue to try to thrive in the workplace. We’ll have information about her bio, links to her website and everything in the show notes, but I always like to give a little air time for you to do so as well. So, Dr, Alessandra, where can people find you and noteworthy?

Dr. Alessandra Wall  32:25

LinkedIn is a great place to find me. I post every day. I spend a little bit of time, therefore on it every day. So that’s Dr Alessandra, one L, two, S’s wall, and then the website is noteworthy. Inc, I n, c.co, did not forget the M It’s noteworthy, inc.co, and there’s a lot of great information there on our programs, talks and resources. There are free resources there for anybody who needs them.

Karan Rhodes  32:50

There you go. And we’ve got to have her back you all, because she is in the process of writing a book. I won’t ask her to spill the details yet, but hopefully when the book is published, we’d love to have you back Dr wall to talk more about that, because I’m sure there’s some additional nuggets that we’re dying to get an overview of. So hopefully you’ll be open to that as well.

Dr. Alessandra Wall  33:14

I’m going to take you up on that. I will thank you so much.

Karan Rhodes  33:17

Absolutely and thank you to listeners for the gift of your time as well. We are know that there are literally a million other podcasts out there for you to listen to, and we do not take your patronage lightly. All that we ask is you like and subscribe to the podcast and just share it with just one friend, because by doing so, that will help us all to better lead at the top of our game. Thank you so much and see you next week. Bye, And that’s our show for today. Thank you for listening to the lead at the top of your game podcast, where we help you lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. You can check out the show notes, additional episodes, and bonus resources, and also submit guest recommendations on our website at leadyourgamepodcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn by searching for the name Karan Rhodes with Karan being spelled K a r a n. And if you like the show, the greatest gift you can give would be to subscribe and leave a rating on your podcast platform of choice. This podcast has been a production of Shockingly Different Leadership, a global consultancy which helps organizations execute their people, talent development, and organizational effectiveness initiatives on an on-demand, project, or contract basis. Huge thanks to our production and editing team for a job well done. Goodbye for now.