Stacy Mayer
Hello corporate badasses. Welcome to another episode of Women Changing Leadership. I am your host, Stacey Mayer, and super excited as always to be here with you again this week. This week's episode is part two of my three-part series called Behind Closed Doors, where I'm giving you the straight-up talk about what it's gonna take to get yourself into a higher-level leadership position, and really, quite frankly, what are some of the things that might be getting in your way?

In the form of feedback, what people actually say out loud to you that might not be the whole truth, and what is behind the feedback that you're receiving. So today we're gonna be talking about women's leadership, women in leadership, and some of the challenging relationships you might face with women in particular in leadership. But before I get into all that, I wanna give a huge, huge celebration.

We're in the first week of January, the first week back to work, quote unquote, after the long holiday break. And I have had three women start job opportunities this week alone. It is an incredible feat to begin a new role at the beginning of January. It's a fresh start. And I also want to remind you that each of these women actually interviewed for these roles and made these roles happen in December.

Right? During a time where so many people can tend to check out, they leaned in and I'm super, super excited for them. And I'm so grateful that they continued to show up as clients of mine to do the hard work of putting themselves out there in a higher level way. And I want to give you some of the examples because I got a lot of feedback after last week's episode that the tangible examples are really super helpful in terms of painting the picture of what's possible.

So one woman had been working at her organization for about 11 years, and then she received an opportunity from a friend to actually create a role for herself. And in particular, what I'm really proud of about the situation is you could say, well, that's nice when somebody reaches out to you and says, hey, let me create a role for you at my company. And you know, wouldn't that be nice? Well, she actually created that.

Stacy Mayer
Right? So she created this opportunity for herself by cultivating the relationship. And then in coaching, I was able to actually help her take it across the finish line. So, you know, could she have gotten the job opportunity without coaching? Absolutely. But could she have gotten the perfect job opportunity without coaching? I think she would probably have to say no. And not only that, but we were able to really set her up to be successful and she's already having a really fantastic week and very excited about her next opportunities and how her career is gonna grow as a result of this not only new opportunity, but a promotion at the exact same time.

Another woman who also received a promotion, she was interviewing for an external opportunity almost immediately after not receiving an internal opportunity. Sometimes I have clients who will receive bad news, right? So you put yourself out there, you do what I say to do, you advocate for yourself, you negotiate for a promotion, and guess what? You don't get it. They give it to somebody else or like a new executive comes in and brings in their own team.

But the good news is that because she had advocated for herself in such a direct way, because her interview process was so clean and she knew that she was interviewing at that executive level and quite frankly, probably overqualified for the job that she was applying for, she was quickly able to pivot and find another external opportunity without any guilt, without any remorse, without any feelings of imposter syndrome or wondering or second guessing. And she just was like, okay, well that didn't work out, next. And she created a new opportunity for herself and started this week. And it's also a promotion opportunity. And I'm so, so, so excited for her.

And the third opportunity was with a woman who I've been working with over the past year and she's been unemployed. And prior to that, she had been working at the same organization for over 20 years. And this can be a difficult pivot, especially because she was at the vice president level. And so she had worked her way up internally. And what happens when you work yourself into higher level leadership positions internally is that the imposter syndrome really kicks in.

Stacy Mayer
Now, I know that she was very qualified to do her job and she knew she was qualified to do her job, but she didn't actually have the language or the understanding of how she got there, right? Like why did she deserve these promotions? Is she qualified at that vice president level externally? And what is her value and what does she bring to the table?

And so throughout this interview process at various different companies, right? So she's unemployed, so she was applying to many different job opportunities. There were lots of highs and lows. There were times where she made it almost to the finish line, but not quite across the finish line. There were times where people opened up their network, but then closed their network and the opportunities didn't actually work out.

And then in this opportunity, because she had been looking for a job for a while, she was very hesitant, very nervous. You don't wanna get your hopes up. And so I was able to help her through this process to be able to say, hey, let's get our hopes up. I think this is it. All the stars are aligning. Everything is working out. All the work that you've done over this past year has led up to this moment for them to not only hire you, but now as well, she has an incredible opportunity where she's gonna be able to stair step once she gets into the organization.

So she's not just thinking about how to do a great job in this new role, but she's also thinking about what's next for her and how she can set herself up for future success.

Stacy Mayer
All three of these women are inside of my Leadership Table mastermind. And this is the only opportunity. It's a secret society of women leaders where we all come together along with one-on-one coaching from me to really begin to collectively elevate ourselves into higher level leadership positions, but also receive that guidance and support so that we don't fumble too much along the way.

If this is something that you're looking at joining or creating for yourself in 2026, I invite you to schedule a free discovery call with me where we're gonna map out what it's gonna take for you personally to step into your authentically powerful self.

So whether you've just started a new role, you're looking for a new opportunity, maybe you have an opportunity in front of you and you wanna make sure that you actually capitalize on it, whatever that place might be in your career, I want to invite you to schedule time to consult with me and we'll talk about what that could look like and how we, you and I, and the other women inside of the mastermind can partner together to get you into that higher level leadership position.

So go to stacymayer.com slash apply and sign up for your free discovery call so we can chat about that and see what is available for you because I would love to celebrate you on my next podcast episode.

All right, now let's get into the Behind Closed Doors strategy.