Career Tip of the Week! Archives

Shattering Two Ceilings: What Top Asian Women in Financial Services Have Learned on the Way Up

There is a phrase that Ida Liu now CEO of HSBC Private Bank returns to when she talks about her career. “I have a double ceiling,” she has said, “the glass ceiling on one side and the bamboo ceiling on the other.”

Ida Liu built her career at Citi around this insight. After years in investment banking in New York and Hong Kong, she detoured through the fashion industry — serving as Global Head of Sales and Marketing at designer Vivienne Tam before returning to finance with an idea: a Fashion, Retail and Entertainment practice at Citi Private Bank, followed by the creation of the firm’s North America Asian Clients Group. Her cultural fluency, her language skills in Mandarin and Spanish, and her understanding of Asian ultra-high-net-worth families became a competitive differentiator that propelled her from managing director to Global Head of one of the world’s most prestigious private banks. Today, as CEO of HSBC Private Bank — which she has described as the one institution she would have considered joining — she oversees $566 billion in invested assets and customer deposits, with her background as a central part of her value proposition.

It is a formulation that captures the particular challenge facing Asian women who have risen to the top of financial services and the Fortune 1000. They have had to break through not one barrier, but two: the persistent underrepresentation of women in senior finance roles, and the equally stubborn phenomenon that leaves Asian professionals clustered in technical and mid-level positions while remaining conspicuously absent from boardrooms and C-suites.

Yet a remarkable cohort of Asian women has done exactly that, ascending to roles that were unimaginable a generation ago. Their paths differ, from investment banking to asset management, from private wealth to regulatory fintech but their hard-won lessons form a coherent body of wisdom for women navigating the same terrain today.

A new book, Walk Away: Step Out to Step Up by Singapore-based author and executive Sally J. Clarke and US based co-author Deborah Overdeput, adds a compelling dimension to that wisdom. They gather the stories of high-achieving women across Asia who discovered that sometimes the most powerful career move is not pushing harder, but instead stepping back with clarity and intention to then reach their goals more effectively.

The Landscape: Progress, But Not Parity

The headline numbers tell an optimistic story. Yie-Hsin Hung, president and CEO of State Street Investment Management, leads one of the world’s four largest asset managers with more than $5 trillion in assets under management. Lisa Su runs AMD. Susan Li is CFO of Meta. These names have become shorthand for a generation of Asian women who have reached the commanding heights of corporate America and global finance.

But the structural picture is more complicated. According to a 2023 study by KPMG and Ascend, a global network for Asian professionals, directors of Asian ancestry hold just 6.4% of Fortune 1,000 board seats, far below their share of the educated workforce. Research by MIT Sloan’s Professor Jackson Lu has found that East Asian Americans in particular advance to senior roles at lower rates than both white and South Asian peers, a disparity that persists even after controlling for qualifications. The bamboo ceiling, a term popularized by Jane Hyun in her 2005 book Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling, is not a relic — it is a present-day reality, shaped by cultural stereotypes, implicit biases, and leadership frameworks that were never designed with Asian women in mind.

“We’re chipping away at the glass ceiling,” Liu observed recently. “But when it comes to the bamboo ceiling, there’s still a lot of work to do.”

A Cultural Nuance: Visibility Is Not Vanity: It is Strategy

One of the most consistent themes among Asian women who have reached the top of financial services is the deliberate decision to make themselves seen and heard, even when cultural upbringing inclined them toward restraint.

Ida Liu has spoken openly about conducting “elevator pitch sessions” through Citi’s Asian heritage network, coaching Asian women in the art of self-advocacy. The inherited norms of humility that serve as virtues in many Asian families such as being modest, not boasting, and deferring to the group can quietly derail careers in an industry where visibility and sponsorship are currency.

“Communication is key, and networking is everything,” she has said, describing the advice she wishes she could give her younger self.

Yie-Hsin Hung’s trajectory illustrates what deliberate visibility can achieve. A mechanical engineering graduate of Northwestern and MBA from Harvard, she spent years at Morgan Stanley and Bridgewater before becoming CEO of New York Life Investment Management in 2015 — where she became the highest-ranking Asian American and female executive at the parent company. She was the first woman and first Asian American to chair the Investment Company Institute’s Board of Governors in its eight-decade history. These firsts were not accidents. They were the product of sustained engagement with the networks, associations, and platforms that allow leaders to be recognized beyond their immediate organizations.

The lesson is practical and simply put, attend the conference, join the board, take the speaking engagement, even when the instinct is to let the work speak for itself. In financial services, work rarely speaks loudly enough on its own.

Build Relationships Across, Not Just Up

Traditional career advice emphasizes the importance of senior sponsors and sponsorship remains genuinely critical, particularly in an industry where promotion decisions are often made in rooms that exclude the candidates being discussed. But the Asian women who have reached the top of financial services have often distinguished themselves by investing equally in lateral relationships: peers, direct reports, colleagues in adjacent functions.

Yie-Hsin Hung has described her leadership philosophy in terms that go beyond conventional hierarchy. She has spoken of the importance of “engaging people’s hearts” alongside their intellects, of leading organizations that live and breathe their values, not merely execute their strategies. At State Street Investment Management, she introduced performance management processes centered on career conversations and real-time feedback, and launched leadership development programs that explicitly teach communication skills and emotional intelligence. She has made building a diverse leadership team a stated priority, noting that the senior leadership of her organization is now more than half women.

The Walk Away contributors echo this orientation toward community and reciprocity. As Clarke writes in the book’s framing, recurring refrains heard from high-achieving women across continents include the necessity of mentorship, the importance of building networks, and the value of lifelong learning. These are not soft supplements to technical excellence; they are the architecture through which Asian and Asian American women in finance have most reliably built the sponsorship, the visibility, and the trust that formal credentials alone rarely confer.

The implication for women building careers today: the relationships you cultivate with people at every level and the reputation you earn as someone who develops others, not merely outperforms them will matter as much as any individual achievement when senior roles are being filled.

By Nicki Gilmour, founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com and Evolved People Coaching.

May 21, 2026/by The Glass Hammer

Five Ways Your DiSC Profile Can Make You a More Effective Leader

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

At a certain point in your career, honest feedback becomes surprisingly hard to come by. Not because people around you lack opinions (they may have plenty) but because hierarchy has a way of softening, managing, and redirecting those opinions before they reach you. The higher you rise, the more curated your information environment tends to become.

That means you may be making daily decisions about how to communicate, how to lead your team, and how to show up in the room with less real data about your impact than you think. Waiting for candid feedback that the culture is unlikely to deliver isn’t a strategy. Actively seeking structured ways to see yourself clearly is.

Psychometric assessments, used well and debriefed with a skilled coach, are one of the most effective tools for doing exactly that. In a recent piece Beyond the Performance Review: The Assessments That Build Self-Aware Leaders we introduced four tools our coaches at Evolved People Coaching use most often. Here, we take a closer look at one: the DiSC assessment, and what it specifically opens up for leadership effectiveness and team development.

What DiSC Actually Measures

Unlike assessments that focus on aptitude or potential, DiSC is behavioral; it describes how you tend to act, not what you are capable of. It maps four dimensions: how you respond to challenge and control (Dominance); how you engage and energize people (Influence); how you handle pace, change, and stability (Steadiness); and how you approach accuracy, detail, and process (Conscientiousness).

If you’ve read Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots, you’ll recognise these as the Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue profiles. Erikson’s core premise is worth holding: communication happens on the listener’s terms, not the sender’s. DiSC makes that dynamic visible.

Here are five ways that translates into more effective leadership.

1. It Shows You the Gap Between How You See Yourself and How Others Experience You

Most senior leaders have a clear sense of their strengths. Fewer have an accurate read on how those strengths land when overused, in the wrong context, or with someone whose style differs sharply from their own.

Consider a leader who scores high on Steadiness — Erikson’s Green. She may pride herself on being calm and consistent. But Greens tend to internalize conflict, and under pressure can become passive and hard to read. In a moment of organizational turbulence, that composure can register not as steadiness but as disconnection and without awareness of how her style is landing, she has no way to address it.

DiSC gives you a framework for asking not just what am I doing? but what is that creating for the people around me? — which is a different, and more useful, question entirely.

2. It Helps You Communicate With People Instead of At Them

Communication failures at senior levels are rarely about clarity or intent. They’re almost always about style mismatch, delivering messages in the way that makes sense to us, without accounting for what the person across from us actually needs.

A high-Dominance leader (Erikson’s Red) who values directness and speed will experience a detailed, context-heavy briefing as burying the lead. Reds want information that is succinct and results-focused. Meanwhile, a high-Conscientiousness colleague (Erikson’s Blue) who needs the full reasoning before committing may experience a bottom-line-first approach as dismissive. Neither is wrong. They are operating from different defaults with no shared language for naming the difference.

DiSC provides that vocabulary. Once you can identify someone’s style, even approximately, you can make targeted adjustments: leading with data for the person who needs it, creating space for dialogue with someone who processes out loud, getting to the point with someone already three steps ahead. Small shifts, but they compound significantly over time.

3. It Shows You How Your Style Plays Out Across the Real Work of Leadership

One of the most useful sections of the DiSC report we offer at Evolved People Coaching covers management: how you direct and delegate, motivate, develop talent, manage up and how your tendencies shift under stress.

That last piece matters more than most leaders realize. Erikson is instructive here: under pressure, default behavior doesn’t soften, it amplifies. Reds become more demanding. Yellows become more chaotic. Greens become passive-aggressive. Blues become hypercritical. Knowing which version of yourself shows up when the stakes are high and how that lands on your team is some of the most valuable self-knowledge a leader can have. The report makes these tendencies specific and situated, which is what makes them actionable.

4. It Turns Team Friction Into Useful Data

Style differences shape team dynamics in ways that slow progress, create tension and impact team effectiveness, especially when there’s no shared framework for naming what’s actually happening.

Erikson is direct about which combinations create the most friction: Red and Green are opposites: one fast, task-focused, and blunt while the other is slower, relationship-oriented, and conflict-averse. Yellow and Blue create a different kind of tension: one shoots from the hip, the other wants precision and finds the energy exhausting. These aren’t personality flaws. They’re predictable collisions between people operating from different defaults.

When DiSC is used at a team level, those dynamics get named. The team member who seems resistant to change may simply be a high-Steadiness profile that needs more context and transition time. The colleague who dominates every meeting may have a high-Influence style that generates real energy but needs structure to channel it. Both become navigable the moment they’re visible. Our team development workshops use DiSC as a starting point for exactly this, helping to move teams from recurring frustration toward a common framework for understanding where the friction is coming from.

5. It Expands Your Range Without Requiring You to Perform Inauthenticity

DiSC is not asking you to become someone you’re not. Erikson makes this point firmly: you cannot and should not try to change someone’s fundamental behavioral profile. A Red will not become a Green. Attempting to force that creates frustration on both sides.

What DiSC offers is awareness of the difference between your core behavior, how you act when nothing external is shaping you, and the adapted version you bring to professional contexts. Most leaders have more range than they use, particularly under pressure, when the instinct is to narrow and fall back on what has always worked.

A leader who defaults to independence can learn to build in deliberate moments of consultation. One who defaults to collaboration can practice holding a position when the room pushes back. Over time, that adaptation stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like genuine range.

A Closer Look Is Worth It

DiSC is not a clinical instrument and its advocates wouldn’t claim otherwise. What it is, particularly when debriefed well, is a practical window into the behavioral patterns that shape how you lead, communicate, and show up under pressure. For leaders who want concrete insight into their impact, it is consistently one of the most actionable starting points available.

If you’re ready to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader you intend to be, we’d welcome a conversation. Visit evolvedpeoplecoaching.com to explore our coaching programs and team development workshops, or reach out directly to discuss whether DiSC is the right place for you to begin.

May 7, 2026/by The Glass Hammer

Beyond the Performance Review: The Assessments That Build Self-Aware Leaders

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

Most senior women we speak to have done the work. The MBA, the stretch assignments, the careful navigation of rooms where they were the only woman at the table. They have developed sharp strategic instincts, learned to read organizational dynamics, and built reputations on delivering results.

But even with all that experience, there can be a moment where a promotion goes sideways, a team isn’t performing, or a stakeholder relationship never quite clicks. Where the question stops being what do I need to know and becomes what do I need to understand about myself?

That is where coaches who are skilled and qualified in psychometric assessments can be particularly useful as there is value in triangulating this data as a third piece to add to “you, according to you” and formal or informal feedback from others.

Why Self-Awareness Is a Strategic Necessity, Not a Soft Skill

Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, whose research involved studies with nearly 5,000 participants, found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only about 10 to 15% actually meet the criteria when objectively assessed. In leadership, that gap has direct consequences for the people you lead and the outcomes you are responsible for.

For women in senior roles, the stakes are compounded. Catalyst’s well-documented research on the double bind describes a dynamic many readers will recognize: behaviors that read as confident and decisive in a male colleague are routinely perceived as aggressive or abrasive in a woman, while collaborative and approachable behaviors can be coded as lacking authority. The margin for misreading your own impact and for having your intentions misread by others is narrower.

Self-awareness, in this context, is political and strategic intelligence and creates an opening for situational awareness. Understanding how your behavioral tendencies are landing, and to learn to watch if there is a gap between “your intent and your impact” is the growth work in coaching. What you default to under pressure is integral to separating leaders who plateau from those who keep growing.

The good news is that this is not guesswork. At Evolved People Coaching, the four tools we use most often each answer a different question and we work with you to identify which one is the right fit for where you are right now.

Four Questions Every Leader Needs to Answer:

1. How do I naturally behave — and how is that landing in different situations with different people?

Tool: DISC Assessment

DISC maps your behavioral tendencies across four dimensions: Dominance (how you respond to challenges), Influence (how you engage with people), Steadiness (how you respond to pace and change), and Conscientiousness (how you approach detail and process). It is not a measure of intelligence or potential; it is a map of your default operating style.

What makes DISC particularly powerful is what it reveals about the distance between how you experience yourself and how others experience you. Consider a senior leader who describes herself as direct, efficient, and results-focused. Her DISC profile confirms a high Dominance pattern. Her feedback tells a different story: her team finds her unapproachable, and two high performers have quietly started looking elsewhere because they feel that their leader cannot hear their ideas and it is not worth it to bring up risks. She isn’t doing anything wrong by her own logic, but without understanding how her style lands with others and adjusting accordingly, she creates an impact she never intended.

This is the gap DISC is designed to close. Not by changing who you are, but by making your behavioral defaults visible so you can choose when to lean in and when to flex.

2. Is my team actually working — or just coexisting?

Tool: Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team

Individual self-awareness will only take you so far if the team around you isn’t functioning. The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team, based on Patrick Lencioni’s widely used model, assesses team health across five dimensions: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results orientation.

The tool operates at two levels. For intact teams, every member completes and debriefs the assessment together. What typically surfaces is a shared picture of where the team is genuinely cohesive and where it is performing a version of cohesion that is actually conflict avoidance or surface-level commitment masking real misalignment. For leaders who have inherited a team, are navigating a restructure, or aren’t getting the performance they expect from talented people, this version provides data where there was previously only intuition.

For individuals, a separate assessment helps you understand how you personally show up as a teammate regardless of whether your whole team is participating. This is valuable for leaders stepping into a new environment, those who have received feedback about their collaborative style, or anyone who wants to be more intentional about their contribution to team dynamics. Rather than waiting for the whole team to be ready, this version puts the insight in your hands immediately.

3. How am I actually landing with the people around me?

Tool: Qualitative 360 Assessment

A qualitative 360 goes directly to the source: the colleagues, direct reports, peers, and senior leaders are all stakeholders who experience your leadership every day. Conducted through structured confidential interviews rather than numerical ratings, it surfaces the specific behaviors that are building your reputation and the ones quietly working against you — patterns that no behavioral profile can predict, because they are grounded in the specific context of your organization and your relationships. There is huge psychological safety for the feedback givers because the data collected is anonymized and themed by topic so no comments can be attributed to anyone.

Used well, a qualitative 360 is not an appraisal. It is a rare opportunity to hear, in a safe environment, what people genuinely think and what they wish they could tell you directly. Given the depth of work involved, this is an assessment we typically offer as part of organizational engagements, but for the right leader at the right moment, it is one of the most powerful development investments available.

4. How can I change the behaviors that are hindering my highest potential?

Tool: Immunity to Change Mapping

The Immunity to Change Map process is a tool to uncover any hidden constructs in your subconscious mind that might be covert to you and therefore stopping you from doing the things you need to do to achieve your goals (that are overtly set in a goal setting exercise).

Nicki Gilmour, Founder of Evolved People coaching and theglasshammer.com states,

“Truly, this map is so useful early on in any work with our clients because it skillfully surfaces any or sometimes many implicit constructs that form a type of operating system or deep structure that left untouched, would result in most people wondering why they cannot do the day to day behaviors that would easily enable them to achieve their goal. This applies to any area of change, from working out to delegating work, to speaking up at meetings and even changing careers.”

Finding the Right Starting Point

These four tools address different levels of leadership insight: your default style, your team dynamics, your hidden limiting beliefs, and your real-world impact on the people around you. For most leaders, one will be the clear priority based on where you are in your career, what feedback you have received, or what challenge is most pressing. Our role is to help you identify which one that is, and to make sure the debrief and coaching that follows translates the data into something genuinely useful.

For organizations, our team development workshops use DISC, The Five Behaviors, and even Immunity to Change at a group level for leaders to build the shared visibility and common language that turns a group of talented individuals into a genuinely high-performing team.

The leaders who invest in this work consistently tell us the same thing: they wish they had done it sooner.

If you are ready to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader you intend to be, we would love to talk. Visit evolvedpeoplecoaching.com to explore our coaching programs and team development workshops, or get in touch directly to discuss which assessment is the right starting point for you.

April 9, 2026/by The Glass Hammer

Radical Candor: A Practical Approach to Accountability on Teams

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

If you have ever sat through a meeting where everyone nodded in agreement but then watched the agreed-upon action items quietly dissolve over the following weeks, you already understand the accountability gap. Not as a concept, but in its impact on execution, trust, and results.

That gap matters. Because when teams cannot reliably follow through on what they agree to, it becomes difficult to build momentum, make decisions stick, or deliver consistently as a group.

For many teams, accountability is one of the hardest behaviors to translate into practice. It is easy to agree, in principle, that teams should hold one another accountable. It is much harder to know what that looks like in real conversations, especially when relationships, power dynamics, and organizational pressures are in play.

Why Accountability Breaks Down

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team framework offers a clear model for what teams need in order to be effective and cohesive. Accountability sits near the top of the pyramid, build on a foundation of trust, productive conflict, and clear commitment. Teams first need to be able to have vulnerability-based trust, then healthy debate, then clear decisions. Only after that can people realistically hold one another accountable.

What the model does not always answer is how accountability conversations actually happen.

Even well-resourced, strategically aligned teams can struggle to sustain accountability. The challenge is not a lack of intent, but the nature of the behavior itself. Holding someone accountable requires naming something uncomfortable. It requires you to say, out loud, that an agreement was not met and to do it in a way that preserves the relationship, the trust, and the team’s ability to move forward.

When those conversations do not happen, the ripple effects go well beyond a missed deadline. People may stop raising concerns, stop pushing for clarity, and over time, stop believing the team can deliver on its shared goals.

So, if accountability is so central to team effectiveness, why is it so hard to sustain?

Because at its core, accountability requires uncomfortable conversations and many of us were never taught how to have them well.

A Framework for Accountability Conversations: Radical Candor

One useful framework for navigating these conversations is radical candor. Coined by Kim Scott in her book Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, radical candor is an approach to communication that emphasizes two things at once: challenging directly while caring personally.

This is not the same as “brutal honesty.” In fact, in Scott’s framework, brutal honesty sits in a quadrant she calls Obnoxious Aggression, characterized by being critical without caring, or being clear but not kind. For example, public callouts, sarcasm disguised as feedback, or “I’m just being honest” used as an excuse to be harsh.

Radical candor, by contrast, is about having compassion while being transparent. It means being willing to say the hard thing while staying connected to the humanity of the person you are speaking with. It assumes positive intent, even when addressing negative behavior.

Scott’s model also includes two other quadrants that illustrate what it looks like when communication is not balanced between caring personally while challenging directly.

Ruinous Empathy sits in the quadrant of high care, low challenge. This is what happens when someone avoids giving clear feedback to spare feelings or keep the peace, absorbing someone else’s missed deadline rather than addressing it or letting a pattern continue because “they’re going through a lot right now.” It feels compassionate in the moment, but the person never receives the information they need to improve, and the team quietly absorbs the cost of a problem that was never named.

Manipulative Insincerity falls in the quadrant of low care, low challenge, and looks like “nice to your face, critical behind your back.” A team member agrees to a plan in a meeting but complains privately that it is unrealistic. A leader avoids addressing missed commitments directly while venting about them to peers. This behavior is particularly toxic because it erodes the trust that is fundamental to a cohesive team.

Radical Candor Is Not Just for Managers

While the revised edition of Scott’s book is subtitled “Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity,” she is clear that radical candor is not meant to be hierarchical. It should be practiced up, down, and across. Teams are strongest when everyone feels responsible for naming issues and maintaining shared standards.

Practical Ways to Apply Radical Candor

Let us look at some examples of how to use radical candor to maintain accountability on a team, whether you are speaking with your direct report, colleague, or leader.

Leader to Direct Report

In this context, the leader’s role is not just to manage performance, but to protect the team’s agreements:

“I want to talk about the commitments we made as a team around project timelines. You committed to delivering your analysis by Tuesday so the rest of the group could build their work. I really value your expertise, and I want you to succeed here — and I also need to be clear that this is the second time it’s slipped and it’s creating delays for others. What’s getting in the way, and how can I support you in meeting this going forward?”

Here, care is shown through respect and support; challenge is shown through naming the pattern and its impact.

Peer to Peer

This is the kind of accountability that is truest to Patrick Lencioni’s use of the term in his Five Dysfunctions of a Team model:

“I want to bring something up because I respect you and I care about how we work together. You committed to owning the client update, and when it didn’t go out, I ended up scrambling to cover it. I know things get busy, but I need to be able to rely on our agreements so I can do my part well too.”

The script above works because it opens with relationship, not accusation, and grounds the challenge in shared impact rather than personal frustration.

Direct Report to Leader

While giving feedback in an upward direction may feel risky given potential power dynamics, if psychological safety is present, it can reinforce shared commitments and strengthen trust:

“I appreciate how open you encourage us to be in meetings. I also want to be honest that when decisions are already made before we walk in, it discourages real discussion. I’m raising this because I care about our effectiveness.”

When leaders invite and respond well to this kind of feedback, they model accountability as a shared value rather than a power dynamic.

Building Cohesive Teams in Practice

Accountability is not about policing behavior or enforcing rules; it is about protecting the team’s purpose.

Radical candor provides a practical way to do that without sacrificing relationships or culture. It creates a norm where people can name issues early, address them directly, and move forward together.

Ultimately, accountability is a form of respect. It says: Our work matters. Our goals matter. And we value each other and our team enough to have the conversations that matter.

Without it, teams may remain polite, but they will never become truly cohesive.

At Evolved People Coaching, the coaching arm of theglasshammer.com, we work with leadership teams who are looking to transform the way they work and bring their team to the next level. Our team development workshops draw on the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team framework alongside evidence-based communication approaches like Radical Candor, helping teams move beyond theory into real conversations. We work alongside teams to build the trust, language, and habits they need to navigate conflict productively, hold one another accountable to shared commitments, and deliver meaningful results together.

March 26, 2026/by The Glass Hammer

The Return on Investment for Executive Retreats

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

By Jessica Darmoni

Executive wellness retreats are often judged by their immediate costs: time away from work, financial investment, and short-term disruption. But their real return on investment shows up in longer-lasting gains such as clearer thinking, personal growth, and greater resilience. This makes them powerful tools for leaders operating in complex environments.

Below are a few takeaways when considering an executive retreat including: how participants can become some of your best friends, introducing you to new ideas and concepts as well as how retreats help you take action and strengthen a part of your brain called “the willpower muscle.”

A Social Media Algorithm IRL

In an era where algorithms shape what we read, watch, and believe, executive retreats offer something increasingly rare: a human algorithm designed for growth. The people you meet at retreats introduce you to new programs, ideas, books, music, leadership frameworks, and ways of thinking, but without the advertisements or agendas. Instead of being fed what reinforces who you already are, you are exposed to perspectives that gently, and sometimes uncomfortably, stretch who you might become.

Most leaders seek out retreats based on interests they already have, which immediately creates common ground. Whether it’s leadership development, wellness, strategy, or personal growth, you arrive knowing that everyone in the room has chosen to invest time, money, and attention into becoming better at something that matters. This shared intention accelerates trust.

Retreat Friends Can Be Some of Your Best Friends

What makes retreat connections particularly powerful, however, is not the similarities, but the differences. Retreat participants often come from outside your industry, geography, or social circle. They are people you would not naturally encounter in your day-to-day routine. That distance from familiarity creates space for impact. These individuals can influence not just what you think, but how you think and feel about your everyday life. Their questions land differently, their observations bypass internal defenses and their stories linger.

Over time, retreat friends often become some of your most meaningful relationships. They occupy a unique category, separate from family, colleagues, and long-time friends. There is little overlap, which creates a rare psychological safety. They can offer a clean perspective during moments of career inflection because they don’t know your boss, your board, your team or your history. It can be easier to share ambitions, doubts, and fears with people who hold no preconceived narrative about who you are supposed to be.

For executives, this matters because leadership can be isolating. The higher you rise, the fewer places exist where you can speak openly without consequence. Retreat relationships provide a neutral ground and one where insight is not filtered through politics or expectations. In those conversations, clarity often emerges not because someone gives advice, but because they listen without agenda.

Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes

Beyond relationships, retreats catalyze change in a more fundamental way. Awareness alone does not transform behavior. As comedian Theo Von succinctly put it, “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” Many leaders already know what they want to improve whether that be better health, stronger presence, clearer priorities or more balance. The challenge is not knowledge; it’s execution. Retreats create a structured interruption to routine that makes execution possible.

By removing leaders from their habitual environments, retreats disrupt autopilot thinking. They introduce friction, reflection, and intentional practice. Whether through guided discussion, physical challenge, or skill-building exercises, participants are asked to do something different and that is where growth takes place. Retreats provide a container where discomfort can feel purposeful rather than punishing, and experimentation can feel safe rather than risky.

Importantly, effective retreats do not exist in isolation from real life. The goal is not escape, but integration. The most impactful retreats help leaders translate insight into daily practice; how to bring a new habit, mindset, or leadership behavior back into boardrooms, meetings, and home life. Change becomes tangible when leaders leave with both inspiration and a practical path forward.

The Willpower Muscle

There is also a neurological dimension to this process. Addressing hard things quite literally grows the brain. Research points to the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex, also known as the “willpower muscle,” as a key region involved in resilience, effort, and decision-making. This area increases in size when people engage in productive struggle, such as intense physical exercise or learning new skills. In other words, leaning into difficulty enhances cognitive agility.

Executive retreats often create precisely this kind of productive struggle. They ask leaders to confront limiting beliefs, test physical or mental endurance, and practice unfamiliar ways of thinking. The result is not just emotional insight, but biological reinforcement. Leaders who repeatedly choose to challenge themselves strengthen the neural pathways associated with persistence and adaptability, which are two traits essential in complex, fast-changing environments.

Choose Challenge Over Comfort

The value of executive retreats is not necessarily found in luxury locations or curated schedules. It is in the connecting of people, perspective, and purposeful discomfort. Retreats act as a living algorithm, introducing leaders to ideas and individuals they didn’t know they needed, accelerating self-awareness, and making change unavoidable.

For leaders committed to growth, retreats are not a break from real work. They are the work. They sharpen the mind, expand the network, and create the conditions where meaningful transformation can occur. In a world optimized for convenience, choosing a challenge and choosing people who challenge you, may be the most strategic decision of all.

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Evolved Wellbeing – the new executive wellbeing coaching and retreat company, brought to you by Nicki Gilmour, the Founder of theglasshammer.com. This is part of the Evolved People portfolio of offerings – that connects professional development to executive sustainability. Wellness is the cornerstone of high performance.

March 5, 2026/by The Glass Hammer

Making the Most of Your Coaching Investment

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

In Part 2 of this series, we looked inside an executive coaching engagement, including how it is structured, how goals are set, and what to expect over the course of the engagement. However, no matter how well designed the process or the competency of the coach, executive coaching only delivers results when leaders actively engage in it.

Coaching is not something that happens to you. It is a partnership that depends on how you show up, what you practice between sessions, and how intentionally you apply insights in real-world situations. This final section focuses on how to maximize the value of coaching once you decide to invest so that the time, energy, and resources you commit translate into meaningful, lasting impact.

Come to Sessions Prepared

Treat coaching sessions as some of the most important meetings on your calendar. They are one of the few spaces designed entirely around you and your growth.

Before each session, take time to reflect on what has happened since your last conversation. What situations tested you? Where did you feel effective, or stuck? What commitments did you make, and what progress did you notice?Clarifying one or two priorities you want to focus on allows the session to go deeper, faster.

Your coach can work with whatever you bring, but the leaders who gain the most from coaching arrive with intention, not just updates.

Be Genuinely Open and Honest

Executive coaching works because it creates a confidential space for conversations that rarely happen elsewhere. It is the place where uncertainty, doubt, frustration, and missteps can be examined without consequence.

If you find yourself showing up polished, guarded, or overly strategic, pause. The most meaningful breakthroughs often come from exploring the things you hesitate to say out loud, like patterns you see but have not named, decisions you are avoiding, or feedback you are struggling to integrate.

This is not about oversharing or self-criticism. It is about speaking truth to what matters to move towards meaningful growth. Coaching is most powerful when it reflects what is actually happening, not what you wish were true.

Implement Between Sessions

The real work of coaching happens between conversations. Sessions create clarity and direction; progress comes from what you practice afterward.

This might include testing new leadership behaviors in meetings, applying decision-making frameworks in real time, soliciting feedback from colleagues, or carving out space for reflection. Small experiments done consistently are what turn insight into sustained change.

Coaching is active, not passive. Leaders who treat sessions as stand-alone conversations miss much of the value. Those who apply, reflect, and adjust between sessions see momentum build quickly.

Give Yourself Time to Grow

Leadership development is not linear. New habits take practice and perspective shifts happen gradually. Confidence grows through repetition, not revelation.

Most executive coaching engagements run three to six months at a minimum for this reason. Expect progress, but not perfection. Some weeks will feel energizing and clear; others may surface tension or discomfort. That is not a sign something is not working—it is often a sign you are working at the right level.

Consistency matters more than intensity. Small, sustained changes compound over time.

Share Your Development Strategically

While coaching conversations remain confidential, being open about your commitment to development can be beneficial. Letting your manager or select colleagues know that you are engaged in coaching signals ownership of your growth and often creates positive accountability.

It is not necessary to share details, but even naming the capabilities you are working on, like strategic thinking, executive presence, or navigating complexity, can reinforce alignment and invite support.

When done thoughtfully, this transparency normalizes leadership development and reinforces that growth is not remedial, it is expected.

Invest in Yourself

Executive coaching requires an investment of time, focus, and financial resources. The question leaders rightly ask is whether it is worth it.

Research consistently suggests that it is, but the return is not purely financial. Many of the leaders we profiled here on theglasshammer.com pointed to lasting and meaningful impacts of executive coaching such as enhanced emotional intelligence, more effective communication, embracing a growth mindset, and an improved ability to flex one’s leadership style. Coaching can help leaders avoid years of frustration, misalignment, or stalled growth by accelerating learning that might otherwise come only through trial and error.

Organizations recognize this value as well. Companies that invest in leadership development through coaching often see higher engagement, stronger retention, and more resilient leadership pipelines.

Your Next Steps

If you are considering executive coaching, here is how to move forward thoughtfully.

Step 1: Clarify What You Want

Be specific about what would make coaching valuable for you. “Become a better leader” is too broad. “Strengthen my strategic voice in executive forums” or “prepare for a larger role within the next 12–18 months” gives focus and direction.

Your goals may relate to advancement, transition, leadership effectiveness, team performance, or sustainability. Clarity at the outset helps ensure the coaching engagement is designed to serve what matters most.

Step 2: Explore Support Options

Start by looking inside your organization. Many companies sponsor executive coaching for leaders, particularly at moments of increased scope, transition, or growth. If coaching is not already offered, raising the conversation with HR or your manager can be a productive first step, especially when framed around leadership effectiveness and business impact.

At Evolved People Coaching, we partner with both individuals and organizations, tailoring engagements to leadership goals, business realities, and development needs. We offer assessments, including qualitative 360 feedback reports, to ground the work in data, providing a clear picture of strengths, patterns, and opportunities that inform a focused coaching plan from the start.

Whether sponsored by your organization or self-funded, the goal is the same: a coaching relationship designed to support meaningful, sustained growth.

Step 3: Commit Fully

Once you decide coaching is right for you, commit to the process. Protect time for sessions and reflection, engage honestly with the work, and apply what you are learning consistently.

Leaders who approach coaching with curiosity and discipline see results faster and more reliably.

Step 4: Measure and Adjust

Effective coaching includes regular check-ins on progress. Are you moving toward your stated goals? What changes are you noticing? Where do you want to go deeper?

These conversations keep the work aligned and ensure the engagement continues to serve your evolving needs.

The Choice That Changes Everything

Talent and hard work matter, but they are rarely enough on their own. The leaders who grow most effectively are intentional about their development. They seek feedback. They invest in perspective. They build capabilities before they are urgently needed.

You can navigate leadership through trial and error, learning slowly and reacting as challenges arise. Or you can engage a strategic partner who helps you think more clearly, act more intentionally, and grow with purpose.

If you are ready to explore what executive coaching could look like for you or your organization, schedule a complimentary exploratory conversation with Nicki Gilmour, founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com and Evolved People Coaching here: BOOK SESSION

February 13, 2026/by The Glass Hammer

How Executive Coaching Works

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

In Part 1 of this series, we explored why executive coaching is a relevant development choice for leaders navigating complexity, rising expectations, and fewer built-in supports inside organizations as budgets are scrutinized in the learning function. We focused on what coaching can deliver: clarity, self-awareness, accountability, resilience, and a trusted thinking partnership.

Understanding how coaching actually works is the next step. The process itself is often discussed in abstract terms, which can make it difficult to know what to expect or how to evaluate whether coaching is right for you. This article takes a practical look at what happens inside a coaching engagement, how coaching conversations unfold, and what to consider when choosing a coach.

The Coaching Process

Most executive coaching engagements follow a structured rhythm rather than an open-ended or ad hoc approach. Coaching typically begins with an initial contracting and discovery phase, during which you and your coach clarify what your “north star” will be – the overarching goals you want to work on throughout the engagement. Even if you do not exactly know this as a defined sentence or paragraph, your coach will skillfully help you ascertain “what good looks like” by the end of the engagement.

In many engagements, this early phase includes the use of assessments or 360-degree qualitative feedback reports. These may involve leadership style inventories, personality or strengths assessments, or confidential feedback gathered from managers, peers, direct reports, and key stakeholders. At Evolved People Coaching, we offer assessments such as DiSC, Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team, and the Hogan Leadership suite as well as comprehensive qualitative 360 stakeholder interviews and thematic feedback reports. The purpose of these tools is not evaluation or performance management, but insight. They help surface patterns, blind spots, and discrepancies between how leaders see themselves and how others experience them.

When used well, assessments and 360 feedback provide a shared data set that informs the coaching plan. They help focus the work on what will have the greatest impact, grounding coaching goals in both self-perception and external feedback.

From there, coaching sessions typically take place every two to four weeks and last between 60 and 90 minutes. Each session builds on the last, creating continuity and momentum over time. Sessions often include reflection on recent experiences, exploration of current challenges, examination of patterns or assumptions, and agreement on actions to test before the next meeting.

However, it is the action and work between sessions that really creates the forward momentum. Leaders apply new approaches, experiment with behaviors, seek feedback, and reflect on outcomes. This between-session application is where coaching moves from insight to meaningful change.

Most engagements last between three and twelve months, depending on the scope of goals and the complexity of the leader’s context. Some leaders engage a coach for a specific transition or challenge, while others work with a coach across multiple stages of their career.

What Actually Happens in Coaching Sessions

Coaching conversations differ from consulting or mentoring conversations in one important way: the focus is not on advice-giving. Rather than telling you what to do, a coach uses questions, reflection, and observation to help you think more clearly and see situations from new angles.

You might be asked questions such as: What feels most important here? What outcome are you aiming for? What assumptions are shaping your response? What are you saying “no” to if you say “yes” to this? What would it look like to experiment or bring curiosity to those challenging moments?

Over time, this style of inquiry helps leaders strengthen their own capacity for reflection and decision-making. Many leaders find that they begin asking themselves these questions outside of coaching sessions, applying the thinking process independently.

In addition to asking questions, a coach acts as a mirror. They may reflect patterns they notice, for example how you talk about success, where you hesitate, how you frame challenges, or where energy rises or drops. These observations help close the gap between intention and impact, allowing leaders to make more deliberate choices about how they show up.

The Coach–Client Relationship

At the core of effective coaching is a relationship built on trust, confidentiality, and partnership. Coaching conversations are confidential, even when the coaching is sponsored by an organization. This confidentiality creates psychological safety, the ability to speak openly about uncertainty, doubt, and complexity without fear of evaluation or consequence.

The relationship is also collaborative. You set the agenda for each session, decide what to work on, and choose which actions to take. The coach’s role is not to direct your career, but to support your thinking, challenge your assumptions, and help you stay aligned with your goals.

This partnership is what makes coaching distinct from mentoring, consulting, or performance management. The value lies not in expertise about your job, but in the quality of thinking the relationship enables.

Choosing the Right Executive Coach

The effectiveness of coaching depends heavily on the quality of the fit between coach and client. While there is no single “right” coach for everyone, several factors matter consistently.

Professional credentials provide a useful baseline. Certifications from organizations such as the International Coaching Federation (ICF) indicate that a coach has completed formal training, adheres to ethical standards, and has been assessed on coaching competency. While credentials alone do not guarantee quality, they signal a serious commitment to the profession.

Relevant experience is also worth considering. Some coaches specialize in particular industries, leadership levels, or types of transitions. Depending on your situation, experience in a similar context may help a coach understand your challenges more quickly. That said, strong coaching skill often matters more than industry expertise, as effective coaching centers on facilitating your thinking rather than providing content knowledge. Nicki Gilmour, our founder and head coach believes there is value in working with coaches who also have a background in social-organizational psychology, social work or clinical psychological or adult learning in addition to being a certified coach. Nicki states,

“Executives are part of a wider eco-system of other humans and their behaviors. This along with cultural norms around how work gets done, and other factors such as management practices, policies, systems and processes, means the work is powerful when seen through context of the team, manager and company itself. Empowering people to map the ‘systemic enablers and disablers’ when navigating their success in addition to looking at optimizing how they show up, creates impactful results.”

Chemistry and trust are critical. Coaching requires openness, reflection, and a willingness to be challenged. At Evolved People Coaching we offer a complimentary initial consultation or chemistry session. Use this time to notice whether you feel heard, whether the questions prompt new thinking, and whether the interaction feels both supportive and stretching. We have a range of coaches who have different styles (DiSC/Insights) and personalities and even backgrounds to ensure you get the right person to be able to be honest and vulnerable in the private sessions. We have an associate pool of ten coaches who we trust.

Finally, consider logistics and structure. Coaching is most effective when it fits realistically into your life. Discuss session frequency, format, and expectations upfront. Most coaching today occurs virtually, offering flexibility in both scheduling and access, but structure and consistency still matter. Face to face still matters and can be done, but virtual also works as well.

A Foundation for Making the Most of Coaching

Understanding how executive coaching works helps you engage more intentionally — whether you are considering coaching for the first time or refining an existing engagement. Coaching is not a passive experience. Its impact depends on clarity of goals, quality of the relationship, and the leader’s willingness to reflect, experiment, and apply insights in real time.

In Part 3 of this series, we will turn to how leaders can make the most of their investment in coaching. We will explore how to approach coaching with intention and practical next steps for beginning a coaching relationship that genuinely supports your growth.

If you are ready to start, please book in with Nicki Gilmour to have a complimentary call to explore your goals and challenges and be matched with the right coach here: BOOK SESSION

By Jessica Robaire, writer for theglasshammer, executive coach at Evolved People Coaching

January 29, 2026/by The Glass Hammer

Your Leadership Development Partner in 2026: How Executive Coaching Transforms Your Career Journey

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

The workplace in 2026 demands more from leaders than ever before. Hybrid teams still require some new management approaches to engage those in the room and on the screen. An understatement is that AI is reshaping how work gets done and will get done in the future. The result is a leadership landscape defined by ambiguity, fast-shifting expectations, and relentless productivity pressure.

Against this backdrop, choosing to engage an executive coach gives leaders the opportunity to think more deliberately about how they lead and how they grow. Research suggests that executive coaching supports improvements in leadership effectiveness, self-awareness, goal clarity, and resilience. Behaviorial flexing to learning, thinking styles and task styles are capabilities and can be learned as skills and have become increasingly important as roles expand and complexity increases.

To offer a comprehensive view of executive coaching, this three-part series explores not only its potential benefits, but also what executive coaching is, how it works, and how leaders can make the most of the investment. Whether you are an executive paying for your own development or an HR professional looking for leadership development coaches and team coaching in an offsite format, we want to hear from you.

Part 1 focuses on why executive coaching matters. It reviews the evolving demands on leaders, and the concrete outcomes associated with a high-quality coaching engagement.

Part 2 looks behind the curtain at how executive coaching actually works — what happens inside a coaching relationship, how the process unfolds, and how to evaluate and select the right coach for your goals, style, and context.

Part 3 turns to how to make the most of your investment, exploring how to actively engage in coaching to accelerate growth and practical next steps to move forward.

Why Executive Coaching Matters

Corporate training budgets today remain heavily weighted toward technical skills, systems training, and compliance requirements. Leadership development, when it exists, is often episodic rather than sustained. Traditional mentorship programs have largely disappeared in remote and hybrid environments. The informal learning that once happened through hallway conversations and after-work gatherings has changed in quantity and also was never a completely consistent practice by or for all.

Meanwhile, leadership complexity has intensified. Leaders are managing teams across time zones, navigating constant technological change, making decisions with incomplete information, and doing it all while maintaining work-life integration that often feels elusive.

Engaging with an executive coach helps leaders chart a path through the complexity. It provides personalized development when organizations cannot, strategic guidance when you are facing novel challenges, and accountability when it is easy to deprioritize your own growth.

This personalized approach matters because leadership is not one-size-fits-all. The skills that make you effective are deeply connected to who you are: your values, your strengths, your communication style, your life circumstances. Coaching helps you develop leadership that is both effective and authentic.

What Executive Coaching Actually Delivers

Let’s move beyond abstractions to concrete outcomes you can expect from a quality coaching engagement:

1. Clarity That Drives Action

Given the many demands on leaders today, it is no wonder that many feel like they are operating in perpetual reaction mode: responding to emails, attending meetings, and putting out fires. Coaching creates space for leaders to step back and ask fundamental questions: What am I actually trying to achieve? What matters most? Where should I focus my limited time and energy? What does success look like for me personally, not just professionally?

This clarity becomes a decision-making filter so that when opportunities arise, you can evaluate them against your actual priorities rather than defaulting to yes or getting swept along by others’ agendas. Research shows that working with an executive coach increases goal clarity and goal attainment, helping leaders move from urgency-driven behavior to intentional, strategic action.

2. Self-Awareness That Transforms Effectiveness

You cannot see yourself the way others see you. You can’t observe your own patterns, blind spots, or the gap between your intentions and your impact. This is where coaching becomes invaluable.

Through powerful questions, reflection exercises, and sometimes formal assessments, coaching builds the self-awareness that distinguishes good leaders from great ones. You discover how your communication style lands with different people, which strengths you’re overusing or undervaluing, what triggers cause you to react rather than respond, and where your assumptions limit your possibilities. Of note, leadership research consistently links emotional intelligence, of which self-awareness is a key component, to leadership effectiveness, team cohesion, and motivation, which executive coaching helps leaders develop over time.

3. Strategies for Your Specific Challenges

Leadership challenges are often maddeningly context-specific. How do you give difficult feedback to a high performer who has behaviors that negatively effect team culture? How do you influence senior stakeholders when you lack formal authority? How do you manage your energy when your role demands constant availability? How do you make the case for promotion without seeming entitled?

Books and training programs offer general principles. Your coach helps you develop strategies tailored to your specific situation, taking into account your organizational culture, your relationships, your constraints, and your goals. Generic advice rarely moves the needle; specific strategies do.

4. Accountability That Drives Change

Knowing what to do and actually doing it are entirely different challenges. We’ve all set goals only to abandon them when the daily grind takes over. Coaching provides structure and accountability that transforms intentions into actions.

Your coach holds you accountable not through judgment but through partnership. Between sessions, you implement agreed-upon actions, experiment with new approaches, gather feedback, and track progress. They then return to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what to adjust next. This cycle of action and reflection is where lasting change occurs.

5. Resilience to Navigate Setbacks

Every career includes setbacks: projects that fail, promotions you don’t get, relationships that sour, or reorganizations that derail your plans. How you respond to these moments often matters more than the setbacks themselves.

Coaching builds resilience by helping you process challenges productively, maintain perspective, develop coping strategies for high-stress situations, learn from failure without internalizing it as identity, and sustain motivation over time. Leadership coaching has been shown to increase leaders’ confidence in navigating their roles and improve trust in their direct reports, both critical factors in bouncing back from challenges.

6. Skills That Compound Over Time

Some professional development delivers immediate returns but little lasting value. Coaching is different. The skills you develop, like emotional intelligence or communication effectiveness, compound throughout your career.

A feedback framework learned today remains useful for decades. Increased self-awareness carries across roles and organizations. Communication shifts ripple through every future relationship. This compounding effect explains why coaching continues to deliver value long after the formal engagement ends.

7. Permission to Lead Authentically

Many professionals feel pressure to conform to leadership stereotypes that do not fit who they are. The charismatic extrovert. The tough boss. The relentless competitor.

Coaching offers a third option: developing a leadership style that is both effective and authentically you. This means honoring your values while building influence, leading in ways that energize rather than drain you, using your natural strengths rather than trying to eliminate weaknesses, and building teams that complement your style rather than compensate for it. Coaching helps you lead from a place of integrity and self-knowledge rather than imitation.

8. A Thinking Partner for Complex Decisions

Senior leadership can be isolating. The higher you rise, the fewer people you can speak with candidly. Your direct reports need confidence. Your boss evaluates judgment. Your peers may compete.

An executive coach becomes a confidential thinking partner, someone without agenda or judgment, providing a confidential space to think out loud, test ideas, and consider implications before acting. Having this thinking partner is not a sign of weakness; it is a strategic advantage that many effective leaders leverage intentionally.

A Deliberate Investment in How You Lead

Executive coaching is about supporting leaders at moments when complexity increases, stakes rise, and familiar strategies no longer suffice. In a workplace defined by constant change, coaching offers something increasingly rare: time, perspective, and partnership focused entirely on how you lead and how you grow. If you are ready to be matched with one of our coaches, please book a free exploratory conversation with our Founder and Head Coach, Nicki Gilmour here: BOOK SESSION

By Nicki Gilmour, Founder and CEO, theglasshammer and Evolved People Coaching

January 22, 2026/by The Glass Hammer

Radical Self-Trust: Eight Ways to Build Embodied Leadership (Pt. 2)

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

As recently covered, the prerequisite to building trust as a leader is to cultivate a deep sense of self-trust. The most important (work) relationship you have is with yourself.

Executive presence has nothing on embodied presence. When you trust yourself, you carry yourself differently. A real leader is embodied. Trusting yourself means you move with more clarity, consistency, and congruency between your values, words, actions, and outcomes.

When you internally source your power and authority, it reflects in the quality of your presence, the willingness to take decisions, the faith in your movements, and in your adaptability and resilience amidst challenges.

As Maven Miara writes, “So why do so many women leaders struggle with self-trust? Because we’ve been conditioned to seek permission instead of power. Not anymore. Self-trust fuels confident leadership.”

Here are eight ways to build your sense of self-trust, and tips on how to apply each:

1) Know Thyself

To trust yourself, you must remain true to yourself. That means a willingness to un-know yourself and re-know who you are now. This means staying connected and listening within.

Self-awareness means recognizing the beliefs, patterns, conditioning, identities, and expectations that shape how you perceive and how you show up—yet, they are not your limitations. They are protective layers.

Beneath the layers, your essential self is always there. And wherever you are living in a way that is disconnected from who you really are, the truths of your being will be seeking to reach you.

Developing self-trust means coming back to trusting your own senses, instincts, values, preferences, perspectives, and intuition. You are able to sense what feels right to and for you and to discern what is not for you. Validating your intuition and inner knowing helps you to build self-esteem. Inner congruence reflects in your vitality.

Apply: Create moments of solitude to check-in with yourself. Keep small intentional rituals such as a five minute morning meditation. Journal to insightful questions that guide you to strip away stories and reconnect with your inner voice. Practice asking yourself what your needs or preferences are.

2) Practice Compassion and Emotional Awareness

Self-trust is also built on being connected to and responsive to your emotions and creating inner safety. Speaking to relationships, Linda and Charlie Bloom write in Psychology Today that self-trust is “having the conviction that you will be kind and respectful to yourself regardless of the outcome of your efforts.”

Self-trust requires you can trust that you will not be self-punishing when making mistakes. If the inner critic is constantly blaming and berating you, you will not feel safe to experiment and learn. If you are caught at self-protection, you will be unable to examine your experience for new insights.

Yet integrating the wisdom learned through mistakes is part of building self-trust and growing. It’s hard to do that as a non-forgiving perfectionist.

When self-criticism is usurped by self-compassion—the ability to be as understanding, supportive and encouraging as you would to someone else you deeply care about—you are able to expand as a human and leader.

Apply: When feeling triggered, breathe and check in with yourself about what you need. Ignoring your needs corrodes self-trust. Practice allowing feelings to be felt and pass through you, while garnering insight they may offer.

Create a self-gratitude journal where you acknowledge what you appreciate about yourself, challenges you’ve taken on, decisions you’re proud of, wins and successes and ways you trust yourself.

3) Be In the Present

If you lack self-trust, you are caught in past ruptures of credibility or you are worrying about the future. Sometimes, you are simply looking at the entire mountain, instead of taking each step as it comes.

Either way, you are caught in stories and removing yourself from the potent present moment. And, you are displacing your personal power instead of stepping into it exactly where it is—in the here and now.

Regret, worry, or burning out to make it work can parade as certainty and be oddly comforting. We project a false guise of certainty backwards or forwards, even if it’s unwanted: I won’t follow through or I won’t succeed or if I don’t force, it won’t happen.

The familiar story may feel safer to a tightly wound nervous system than embracing uncertainty and trusting in the moment (and yourself) to guide you and give rise to the right decisions and right actions.

As the Blooms point out, the paradox is fear and worry do not exist in the present, so being in the present is the ultimate protection.

Apply: Serious question. Have you ever thought of building your tolerance levels for being in the present moment? Without distraction? What would it would mean for you?

4) Release External Validation

At some level, when you don’t trust yourself, you will feel like an imposter not just at work, but in life. So you will be caught in seeking external approval and validation.

Chronic reassurance-seeking outsources the emotional labor of fear and anxiety and is crippling to self-trust. According to Gravitas Founder, Lisa Sun, the self-sustaining confidence of knowing your worth is most common among women over 50 years old. Tempering the urge for external reassurance certainly plays into this.

The ability to intentionally examine various angles or perspectives of an issue is a gift. Chronic second-guessing is a nightmare. When you have self-compassion, you are more willing to embrace uncertainty and make decisions, because your worth is not on the line.

Apply: Before you turn to someone else for an opinion or advice, get quiet, and ask your own. You may wish to both write the question and answer yourself. You may be surprised how much wisdom you’re sitting on.

5) Honor Your Boundaries

As Paulo Coehlo wrote, “When you say ‘yes’ to others, make sure you are not saying ‘no’ to yourself.” Author Caroline Myss talks about how ‘boundaries’ emerged into our everyday social language as we began to recognize ourselves as not only physical but also energetic beings.

Boundaries matter because self-trust requires a ‘sense of self’ to trust, and a sense of self requires discernment. When you lack integrity, you can be pulled in any direction or towards any whim, regardless of whether it’s aligned or resonant to your own inner truth.

Boundaries are not to keep others out, but to keep you whole and integral. They reflect an inner valuing and authentic contract with self. Some people even create an inner boundary with their inner critic. Your boundaries discern between what resonates and nurtures your being and what does not.

Sure, you could commit to your boss, meet every deadline, and keep every promise you’ve made to your team. But let’s say you’re entirely misplaced in this area of work and burning yourself out to do it. Will you trust yourself? Well, you may trust yourself to betray yourself.

Keeping promises to others does not alone build self-trust, if the promises violate your inner knowing or are inauthentic to you. Real self-trust and organic boundaries come from being aware enough of what your inner truths and values are, and knowing that you will not betray them.

Apply: Identify where are you saying ‘yes’ when it’s truly a ‘no’ for you. What would ‘no’ feel like? Is there anywhere in life where you are violating your own boundaries?

6) Keep Your Word With Yourself

If you habitually break your word with yourself, how can you build self-trust? Lying to yourself, even in small ways, wreaks havoc within. When you don’t believe yourself, you don’t believe in yourself. But nothing builds self-trust faster than keeping your word with self.

Keeping promises with yourself means validating what matters to you and assigning this as much importance and priority as outside demands. When you meet the commitments you make with others, but always compromise the ones you made with yourself, you are sending your cells a message: you don’t matter.

If someone treats you like you’re not important to them, do you trust them? In order to rebuild self-trust, you need to treat your word with yourself at least as importantly as you do your word with others.

Identify what is really important to you, and be transparent with yourself about it. Show up consistently to yourself in small ways, and let it build, step by step, towards momentum, results, and more self-trust.

Apply: Listen in and clarify what is important to you. Where are you ignoring this? Where are you keeping your word with self and where are you bending it? Set reasonable and achievable commitments, treat them as real, and acknowledge when you fulfill them. Be realistic.

7) Take On Risk And Challenge

If you rarely take on new challenges, explore new expressions, or take yourself out of your comfort zone, you won’t have the experiences which build more self-trust.

One risk you can take to build self-trust is to speak up in a room where you’d normally hold back. Put your weight behind the value of your voice and your perspectives, rather than asking permission to.

Expanding into new skills is a way to build self-efficacy and increase a sense of personal competence. Through putting yourself into the valuable role of beginner in unfamiliar territory, you learn you are capable and adaptable to challenges and setbacks. You may discover gifts and capacities beyond the ones you knew.

Apply: Choose one thing you are already curious about and invest in growing in that area. Check the first challenge that comes to mind—is it truly out of your comfort zone? If you’re an adrenaline junkie, a marathon may not be the challenge. Yin yoga might be.

8) Practice Accountability

When you take accountability for your own perspectives, actions, behaviors, and outcomes, you build self-trust. Accountability is a sign that you trust yourself, because when you err, you do not collapse into shame or deflect responsibility. Rather, you see the moment as an opportunity to step even more into integrity.

Even more than to others, ownership demonstrates your credibility to yourself. Not only do you hold what happened differently, you feel and experience it differently, too.

You know you have grown when you can own your part in an undesirable outcome. Or when something that would have wilted you becomes an insight from which to learn. Equally, owning your part helps you to discern what is not yours to own or internalize.

Being accountable also means a willingness to see and honestly assess the reality in front of you. Because when you do this, you can move from a place of grounded empowerment. It means being honest even when it’s hard to, including with yourself.

Apply: Notice how taking accountability, and owning your part, has helped to liberate you and for you to grow. Where in life would you like to see more clearly and take more accountability? How can you start?

BONUS: Trust in Life

Self-trust is not hyper-independence and it’s also not being a control freak.

It’s trusting yourself enough to cultivate dynamics of interdependence, because you are able to extend that trust to others who have also earned it. Connection, collaboration, and co-creation depend on this. How we trust others (or don’t trust) reflects our self-image and how much we trust ourselves. If you required others to always do exactly as you wished, you would never trust them.

If you require yourself to flawlessly do exactly as you wished, you will likely never trust yourself. From models of understanding such as Human Design, not everyone is meant to work or create or make decisions the same. What makes us effective and what fulfills us expresses differently. Being curious about how we work helps us to build trust.

But it goes even further, if you require life to always be exactly as you wish it to be, you will not trust in life. Paradoxically, self-trust requires a willingness to surrender. When you trust in something greater than yourself, call it life or universal forces or the divine, not everything comes down to you and what you alone can control.

When you value yourself, humility breeds self-trust. And the more you are able to release your grip on the wheel, and be receptive to be guided by life, the more willing you may be to trust when you know your hands belong there.

By: Aimee Hansen is a long time writer and heart coach with theglasshammer.com. Her recent work includes “This Book is a Retreat” co-written with Marianne Richmond.

If you would like to work with Aimee or any of our coaches including Nicki Gilmour our head coach and founder, please click HERE for a free, exploratory call with Nicki who can match you with the right coach for you (we have six coaches, all with different backgrounds who can help you depending on what you need).

December 18, 2025/by The Glass Hammer

Words of Wisdom from Women in Leadership 2025 (Part 2)

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

Part 2 of Words of Wisdom 2025 features women leaders who highlight the power of owning your identity, trusting your instincts, and creating environments where others can excel. They also speak openly about navigating visibility in male-dominated spaces, redefining success on their own terms, and choosing collaboration over competition. Their reflections remind us that leadership is not just about what you achieve, but about how you show up, what you stand for, and the communities you build along the way.

These insights paint a picture of leadership that is grounded, human, and deeply personal. And as we share their perspectives, we also look ahead to how coaching can support leaders in living these principles more fully and navigating their careers with clarity and confidence.

On Being Yourself – Truly:

“I wasn’t out in the first decade of my career at the NFL…Everyone always says, ‘Be yourself,’ but that’s easy when you look and act like the default person at an organization,” she reflects. “It’s a lot more challenging when you are a member of the gay community, or the Black community, or the Latinx community…when I felt confident enough to make the change to come out and be myself unapologetically, I started to thrive.”

Sam Rappaport, CEO Blue80

On Being Bold and Owning What Makes You Unique:

“There’s a big real estate conference I go to every year,” she says. “You queue to board the flight, and it’s just a sea of men in navy suits. I make a point of wearing something bright and own the fact that I’m not the guy in the navy suit. I’m the woman in the bright red dress. It’s an opportunity to be seen.”

She emphasizes, “Being different can make you more memorable. It’s not just about gender. You might be younger, newer, or from a different background. Whatever it is, don’t be afraid to be visible. Have confidence and own it.”

Nicola Free: Managing Director, Head of CRE, EMEA, Wells Fargo

On Fostering Growth Over Competition:

“My Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu coach always says he never hides the best parts of his game because if someone can master it in two weeks and beat him, they deserve to win.” The same philosophy, she says, applies in leadership. “Helping my associate grow, bringing her along and giving her what I can to help her succeed doesn’t threaten me; it strengthens the team, and if I ever move on, she’s ready to step in.”

Marie Bober: Chief Compliance Officer and Senior Counsel, Moelis Asset Management

On Redefining Success:

“Your career is not a ladder, it’s a landscape. Don’t be afraid to move sideways, take a leap, or build something of your own and test a hypothesis. Solving a big problem is where the real growth lies. If you opt to build a hobby business that’s fine too. Just define what success means to you.”

Sally J. Clarke: Entrepreneur and Author

On Leading Collaboratively:

“I used to wait until every idea was perfect. Now, I bring it to the table early. It invites feedback and makes the work better.”

Heather Plumski: President, Stearns Bank

On Leaning on Your Values to Navigate Challenges:

“In facing challenges or change, I always go back to the questions: Am I in the right place? Am I surrounded by the right people? Am I learning? Am I growing? When you can identify core tenets to return to and hold yourself to them, they become a guide for navigating almost anything.”

Johanna Diaz: Global Head of Alternatives Product Strategy, Goldman Sachs

On the Importance of Building Community:

“I’ve moved and started over several times. Managing those transitions successfully is only possible when you make community, when you connect with people, when you find affinity and appreciate differences. The differences are where you learn.”

Angela Cruz: Sales Effectiveness Leader, Sales Excellence, Accenture

On Effective Communication in All Directions:

“With my team that means ensuring they understand the vision, are aligned around the priorities and the mission, and are inspired to do their best work to deliver for our clients. To do that, I spend a lot of time with the team individually and in groups.”

In communicating up and out to executives, regulators, and the board, Young explains, “It’s about taking the complex and making it simple, understanding your audience, and tailoring your message with the right level of detail.”

Nicole Young: Head of CRE Portfolio Management, Wells Fargo

On Building Teams Through Talent:

“High-performing teams are not built by accident; they come from spotting potential others might overlook and giving people the chance to prove themselves. One of my best hires did not meet the checklist on paper, but I knew she had what it would take. She went on to become a star. As Steve Jobs once said, it does not make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. My role is to create the conditions for their talent to shine.”

Deborah Overdeput: Chief Operating Officer, Innovative Systems (FinScan, Enlighten, PostLocate)

Moving Into 2026 With Intention

The experiences shared in this collection show how leadership grows when you are willing to know yourself, trust your values, and stay open to learning. Whether you are choosing to be seen, strengthening communication, empowering talent, or building community, these moments of growth rarely happen by accident. They come from intention and support.

Executive coaching provides a dedicated space to strengthen these muscles. Research shows that coaching enhances emotional intelligence, builds communication agility, and helps leaders make more grounded, aligned decisions. A coach helps you explore what matters most, see patterns you may overlook, and translate your aspirations into meaningful action.

As the year comes to a close and you prepare to enter 2026, this is an ideal moment to pause and consider where you want to focus your energy next. If these stories sparked recognition or inspired a shift in how you see your own leadership, take that as encouragement to invest in yourself. An executive coach can help you clarify your direction, accelerate your development, and step into the new year with confidence and purpose.

Book your free exploratory coaching session today and begin 2026 with intention and momentum.

December 8, 2025/by The Glass Hammer

The Landscape: Progress, But Not Parity

A Cultural Nuance: Visibility Is Not Vanity: It is Strategy

Build Relationships Across, Not Just Up

What DiSC Actually Measures

1. It Shows You the Gap Between How You See Yourself and How Others Experience You

2. It Helps You Communicate With People Instead of At Them

3. It Shows You How Your Style Plays Out Across the Real Work of Leadership

4. It Turns Team Friction Into Useful Data

5. It Expands Your Range Without Requiring You to Perform Inauthenticity

A Closer Look Is Worth It

Why Self-Awareness Is a Strategic Necessity, Not a Soft Skill

Four Questions Every Leader Needs to Answer:

1. How do I naturally behave — and how is that landing in different situations with different people?

2. Is my team actually working — or just coexisting?

3. How am I actually landing with the people around me?

4. How can I change the behaviors that are hindering my highest potential?

Finding the Right Starting Point

Why Accountability Breaks Down

A Framework for Accountability Conversations: Radical Candor

Radical Candor Is Not Just for Managers

Practical Ways to Apply Radical Candor

Leader to Direct Report

Peer to Peer

Direct Report to Leader

Building Cohesive Teams in Practice

A Social Media Algorithm IRL

Retreat Friends Can Be Some of Your Best Friends

Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes

The Willpower Muscle

Choose Challenge Over Comfort

Come to Sessions Prepared

Be Genuinely Open and Honest

Implement Between Sessions

Give Yourself Time to Grow

Share Your Development Strategically

Invest in Yourself

Your Next Steps

The Choice That Changes Everything

The Coaching Process

What Actually Happens in Coaching Sessions

The Coach–Client Relationship

Choosing the Right Executive Coach

A Foundation for Making the Most of Coaching

Why Executive Coaching Matters

What Executive Coaching Actually Delivers

1. Clarity That Drives Action

2. Self-Awareness That Transforms Effectiveness

3. Strategies for Your Specific Challenges

4. Accountability That Drives Change

5. Resilience to Navigate Setbacks

6. Skills That Compound Over Time

7. Permission to Lead Authentically

8. A Thinking Partner for Complex Decisions

A Deliberate Investment in How You Lead

1) Know Thyself

2) Practice Compassion and Emotional Awareness

3) Be In the Present

4) Release External Validation

5) Honor Your Boundaries

6) Keep Your Word With Yourself

7) Take On Risk And Challenge

8) Practice Accountability

BONUS: Trust in Life

On Being Yourself – Truly:

On Being Bold and Owning What Makes You Unique:

On Fostering Growth Over Competition:

On Redefining Success:

On Leading Collaboratively:

On Leaning on Your Values to Navigate Challenges:

On the Importance of Building Community:

On Effective Communication in All Directions:

On Building Teams Through Talent:

Moving Into 2026 With Intention

The Glass Hammer

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