Hello, corporate badasses. Welcome to another episode of Maximize Your Career. I'm your host, Stacy Mayer. Super excited, as always, to be here with you again this week. So today's episode, I'm just going to get right into it. I have no factual evidence. I have no statistical data to prove what I'm about to talk to you about today, except for I have experiential data. So today's episode is based on a hypothesis based on the hundreds of women that I've been coaching inside of Executive Ahead of Time and in my one on one group coaching program, The Leadership Table, which you should totally join. It's now open for enrollment. I have been noticing things over the past five years working with women and getting them into these higher level executive positions. And something huge occurred to me, and I'm just going to cut right down to it. It's that we are entering a new age of Executive Leadership. We are entering a new age of Executive Leadership, and this matters to you because of who you are getting your advice from and the advice that you're receiving right now and why it feels dated and not useful. And also why some of the advice that you're getting right now feels incredibly useful. And why have I never heard this before? Great example. I'm just going to own this. I have at least one woman a week come up to me and says that I wish I knew you. I wish I had somebody like you back when I was in corporate. You're a corporate badass. You're still in corporate. But I run into people on LinkedIn and in my entrepreneurial circles that left corporate America because of not having role models like me to tell them what they actually could be doing to get themselves into more positions of influence and power and get themselves out of the crappy ones. So I'm just going to own that and say, hey, you know, I am giving you advice that feels unique and different and it's because of this new age of Executive Leadership that we are entering. And I'm going to give you this huge download. And by download I literally mean from the universe that came to me when I was listening to a recent podcast episode, and I just went, Holy wow, this is why everything that I teach works so frickin well. And this is also why I am so incredibly hopeful that we really are changing The Leadership Table. It really is working and this is why.

So the download that I was listening to was an interview with Bozoma Saint John. Bozoma Saint John was the previous CMO at Netflix. She recently left Netflix I think, in the spring of 2022, and she was on Glennon Doyle's podcast, We Can Do Hard Things. Love this podcast. It is amazing. I highly recommend it, but I don't even have to recommend it because I'm sure it's like through the stratosphere in terms of downloads. So. Bozoma Saint John is an incredible corporate badass. She is so inspiring and has really charted a path for what it means to bring your authentic power to The Leadership Table. When she became CMO of Netflix, she had a lot of press written about her, celebrating her and her leadership and what she's doing to bring more diversity to The Leadership Table. And so I first want to take a moment to applaud her. So she is a six foot tall black woman. And I say that because there was one article that I read when she became CMO that talked about how, I think it's in The New York Times. I'm going to find this and link to it. But I just distinctly remember she had a conversation with a mentor of hers and she was saying, I just wish that I didn't have to be different. I just wish that I could just be engaged in the conversations at The Leadership Table and not have to feel so unique. I wish all my ideas just weren't automatically considered unique because of the color of my skin. And her mentor said to her, look. You are a six foot tall black woman. You are different. And the sooner that you can start to believe that, embrace that, make that work for you, the more success you're going to have in your life. And she said that was such a pivotal moment in her career.

And if you see her she stands out. It's amazing. She is absolutely stunning. So gorgeous and such a brilliant, brilliant, insightful CMO. When you read the work that she's done and what she's created. Another accomplishment of hers is that she brought Beyonce to the Super Bowl halftime show back in the day when she worked for Pepsi. This is insane the work that she's doing. And she was talking about how when she worked at Apple. So she's worked at lots of major companies on their executive team. And when she was at Apple, she did the Apple conference and she said that backstage there was literally a rack full of clothes that had jeans and T-shirts. Jeans and T-shirts. That was it. Black T-shirts and jeans for all of the men that were about to present at this conference. And here she is, where she already has a significant amount of presence. And she is wearing her, as she said, her stiletto heels that had a poofy top just to, you know, add some umph to it. And I really admire her so incredibly much and just think a lot about her.

When I think about my dream and I think about bringing you to The Leadership Table, I want you to be able to be yourself. I want you to be able to embrace the difference and to say, okay. If this isn't fitting me, if they're not wanting me and all of me, then I'm going to figure out some other place to be. And here's where the new dawn of Executive Leadership comes in, is that there's more amazing places to be. So when I was listening to this episode, though, so she had already left Netflix at this point. And I think she was feeling and I don't want to paraphrase her words, I really want to encourage you to listen to the episode for yourself because it's very powerful. But she seems a little bit disappointed in some of the choices. She didn't go into details about why she left Netflix, but just frustrated. And the thing that she said that stood out to me and I was just like, oh, my gosh, she said they were saying, but you're such a role model for women and diversity and what's possible. And yes, of course, all of this is true. And she said to Glennon, you know I also want my time, I want my due. I have earned this. She's like, yes, of course it feels good to be a role model in all of those things, but I just want to be recognized. I'm still that little girl that just wants to matter. And I think all of us are at our core. We're all that little girl that just wants to matter for who we are.

We don't want to be changed. We don't want to be made more into a man. We just want to matter. And I turned off the episode and I thought. Wow. The women who are in the C-suite right now had it hard. Really, really hard. We as a gender have only been invited to work for less than 50 years. We weren't even allowed to go to many universities. We don't have mothers that worked as Executive Leaders. And I say that, but actually what I realized is that now we do. So 50 years ago, we absolutely didn't. Our grandparents generation. And then what started to happen is there was this idea that if you wanted to be a woman of influence and power, you actually had to fit in. You had to be more like everybody else. And I think that type of recognition is a little bit more external focused and it says, you know what, I can make as much money as a man. I used to have this T-shirt when I was little and it said, I can do anything boys can do. Better. And I genuinely felt that way. And so what we would do is rise into these Executive Level positions by being more like everybody else. And as a leader, as an emerging leader, as an Executive Leader, right now, you see the women who have retired or who are still holding those positions of power, but really think about it in terms of decades. In the last ten years, if they were promoted into that C-suite spot ten years or more ago, a lot of the reasons that they got there was through their grit, through their tenacity, through their drive, through working 80 hours a week, through sacrificing their family, through being more like a man. And so if they have been in the C-suite for more than ten years and you're getting advice from them, that is what you're going to hear, because that is the world that they lived in. That is the world that they had to pave for themselves. So I applaud them and I say, thank God you did that because now you have paved the way for something better. Then we have this other generational thing that happens even in just the last five years. So when we see people like Bozoma Saint John, we see women in executive positions using their authentic power. We really see them as themselves. And it is mind blowing because there's so few of them. But you might have that Executive Leader at your organization right now. We have CEOs in leadership that are women that are that exemplary examples of power and influence. And they are who you want to be. So if you have a person that you admire and that you're getting advice from and they rose into Executive Leadership literally in the last five years, then they did it in a way that brought themselves into that level of leadership.

But here's the caveat, and this is where my hope comes in. They have it frickin hard. So the people who are CEOs and C-suite executives that have gotten their five years or more had to struggle to get there. Even though we had women who pioneered the way. We had Sheryl Sandberg, Meg Whitman, whoever you want to say. They still had this part of them that you were confused about because it's like but they kind of seem like a man. They seem like everybody else. And I don't want to be that way. I want to bring my whole self. So we're starting to see examples in Executive Leadership positions five years ago that are more exemplary of what we want to create, that change that we want to create. But they are so few. There are very teeny tiny amounts of examples in the grand scheme of executives that we even know. How many of you have your Rolodex or your iPhone contacts page full of C-suite executives? Probably not. So we have so few examples of C-suite executives that are that way, but they're there. Those are the women that I'm interviewing for my podcast, and there are so many executives that are really showing us what's possible. But similar to the Bozoma St John's, who are just the woman that I want to be. But when I heard her on that interview and it was so powerful to hear the raw tenderness of her heart. And how hard it still is. It's so hard. And then I think about you. And for many of you, you're not actually in the C-suite yet. And a couple of you are, because you got promoted in my programs and you listen to my podcast and you just got promoted to the C-suite in the last six months. Applause! We had several women get promoted over the summer of magic, two of which into the C-suite. So fan-frickin-tastic, right? So if you're getting promoted into the C-suite in the next five years, so we're going to go forward now. Here is my download. We are entering a new age of women in leadership, an age where we not only can bring our entire selves to The Leadership Table. That authentic power. So that it feels like we're creating our own rules, that we're writing our own path, that we're creating our own destiny. But on top of that, we can get there in an easeful way. In a way that delights us. I am sitting here right now and my eyes are watering.

When Jennifer, who you've heard on this podcast several times, was promoted, gosh, just last month to chief sales officer at her organization. And she's been working with me for the past three years. I'm going to get her on the podcast to do an interview about her three year journey to the C-suite, from vice president to the C-suite in three years. And she talked about how there is this beautiful combination of ease and effort that she felt to get there. There were definitely hard bumps in the road. But when she did make it to chief sales officer, it was, of course, of course she is the chief sales officer. And she had created through 15-Minute Ally Meetings, through the thought leadership work that I teach. She had created this army, literally an army of support around her to lift her up. And now Jennifer is in Executive Ahead of Time, lifting other women up. She runs our monthly roundtable discussions where we go into breakout rooms and we talk about in a more concentrated small group setting our personal challenges. And Jennifer leads all of that to pass on the baton to other future corporate badasses that are rising through the ranks of leadership. She is giving back now because she has proven what it means to not only bring your authentic self to the Executive Suite, but to do it in a way that feels connected and compassionate and growth. It doesn't have to feel so hard. And so for those of you who are going to get promoted in the next five years, I do not think that this is a pie in the sky dream.

We can get promoted in an easeful, effortful way. It needs intentionality. Promotions don't just happen to us. That's part of the problem. But I think the reason that we're not going for those promotions is because they think it feels hard. It's exhausting, but it doesn't have to be exhausting. Yes, sometimes you're going to get told no. But personally, I would rather be told no than to find out when it was too late. Meaning they hired somebody else for the role that I really wanted, but I never spoke up for it. So I want to be told no, and I want to be told what I can do differently. And I want to get feedback that's actually actionable, that tells me what I need to do to create that easeful, effortless life, or effortful. That creates that easeful effortful life that we really want to create for ourselves. In Buddhism, when they talk about meditation, they talk about it as a discipline. This was so impactful for me. And I think it is that discipline of letting go, that discipline of ease. That is what easeful, effortful promotions look like. That is the new era that we're leaning into. More people are recognizing that they are going to lose their best leaders if they don't step up. We're still weeding out those men, quite frankly, like one by one, I'm chipping away at them.  Because we do still have jerks.

I have a woman inside The Leadership Table who was recently told, you know, just don't worry about it. Stop asking. Just chill out. It'll happen. Your time will come. But what this man doesn't realize is that she's a woman. Our time doesn't just come. Because for him it does just come because he gets promoted or he doesn't get promoted, he can go work at another company. But we have to lay the foundation. We have to build those relationships and that's where it feels hard for most women. It feels like an extra effort on top of our already overwhelmed workload. But we can do it in an easeful, effortful way that allows us to bring our authentic power to The Leadership Table. That is the new face of leadership that we are creating over the next five years. We are creating women in these positions of power. We are creating the new age of "of courseness." And you are already doing that. So I want you to get into my programs, to get into Executive Ahead of Time, to get into The Leadership Table. If you are not creating that sense of ease, if it feels really hard day in and day out, and you're like, I don't even know if I want to pursue this anymore. I just want to kind of do my job. But yet your heart is pulling and you're saying to yourself, look, there is something more for me, I want something more. 

Then get into Executive Ahead of Time and let us figure out what that ease is for you, who those relationships are, where you're going to start making the biggest impact so that we can get you into those higher positions and start creating that legacy, creating that life, that army around you of supporters that is available to you now. That is the next five years of Executive Leadership. Again, I don't have any statistical proof that everything is shifting, but I see it. I see women who now have choices. I see women who are now able to speak up in such an easy way that their conversations are wrapped around their promotions. And it doesn't even feel hard anymore. When they feel like they're really included and they know what to say and they have that grounded confidence to get there. So I'm really excited about this next level of Executive Leadership. I hope you are, too. I hope you are one of the women in those higher Executive Leadership positions. I have no doubt I'm going to be quoting your name and singing your praises in the weeks and months and years to come. And I am just absolutely thrilled at all of the work that we're doing inside of Executive Ahead of Time and The Leadership Table and just blessed to help you get there. Take care and I'll see you next week. Bye.