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Harsh truth: People overthink because they don’t trust themselves to make a decision

Imagine it’s the end of a long week. We’re sitting together over a cup of coffee, and I ask you one question: where do you want more influence? Not where you have a gap to fix. Where do you want to matter more, be heard more, and shape more of what happens? This is the final episode of our October series on influence without authority, and I’m slowing things down on purpose. I’ll walk you through it like a one-on-one coaching conversation. Over the past three weeks, we covered the influence you’re already having without knowing it, four ways to build more without formal authority, and the skills of reading a room and understanding how influence really moves. Now you point all of it somewhere on purpose. In this episode, you will: Find the one room where you want your voice to countName what’s in the way: an outside obstacle, a story you’ve been telling yourself, or discomfort with influence itselfChoose one small move to make this week Then I take three listener questions: How do you build influence when you’re the most junior person in the room and you freeze when it’s time to speak?What do you do when your manager is the one blocking you?How do you read a room when the room is a grid of video tiles? Come with a coffee and a little time to yourself.

The relationship paradox: the happier you are alone, the better your relationships become

You’ve felt it: a meeting shifts underneath you, nobody says why, and you have half a second to decide whether to push forward or hold back. Nobody ever taught you how to read that moment. You just learned it the hard way. This week on the podcast we are breaking down the two skills that quietly decide whether good ideas actually land: reading the room in the moment, and understanding the political map underneath your organization over time. You’ll learn how to tell real interest from a polite no, why the quietest person in the room is sometimes the one who actually decides, how to catch an energy shift before it becomes a problem, and when saying nothing is the most useful thing you can do. Then it gets practical: how to map who really holds influence, what people actually need before they’ll say yes, and how to build trust before you ever need to spend it. And the honest part: where savvy crosses the line into something you don’t want to be. If you’ve ever had the right idea land at exactly the wrong moment, this episode is for you.

“Consistency isn’t exciting, but it’s how ordinary people get extraordinary results.”

You’ve watched it happen: someone with less context, less experience, maybe even a weaker idea, makes the call, and yours gets quietly set aside. Not because you were wrong. Because you weren’t the one with the title to decide. This week on Leading Yourself, Carolina gets practical: four specific ways to shape decisions, lead projects, and get heard in rooms where the org chart says you shouldn’t have a say, none of which require anyone to change your title first. You’ll learn why asking the right question beats making the strongest statement, why the real decision usually happens before the meeting does, how to attach your idea to someone else’s authority without losing it, and how to write something that travels to rooms you’re never invited into. And then the honest part: what to do with the nagging feeling that none of this counts if your name isn’t on it. If you’ve ever had the right answer and the wrong title, this episode is for you.

Stop measuring your beginning against someone else’s decade of work.

Most of us were taught that influence looks like the big moment: the promotion, the title, the seat at the table. It doesn't. Real influence is quieter than that, and you're already building it, in rooms you're already in, whether you've noticed or not. This week kicks off a new month on Leading Yourself: four weeks on influence and leadership, built around the reality of Q4, when priorities for next year are being set, and the people who get asked to lead them are chosen from what's already visible, not what's hoped for later. In this episode: why most impact is invisible until someone tells you about it years later, the three things that actually build influence (credibility, attention, and time), the four different ways influence shows up at work, and why "I'm not senior enough yet" is costing you more than you think.

You can be grateful for your life and still want more for yourself. Appreciation and ambition were never meant to be enemies.

This is the last episode of the September series, and I wanted to close it differently. Instead of teaching the framework one more time, I'm answering the nine questions I get asked most, about the Career Squad, about the book, about my own life. Some are practical: where do you even start if most of these nine relationships are missing? Isn't this just networking with a new name? What do you do when the person who should be your sponsor is also your manager? Some are more personal than I usually get into. Which relationship has been hardest for me to build, even now. Whether I've ever watched someone quietly fade out of my own squad. Whether a seat has ever stayed empty for years before the right person finally stepped into it. And I close with the question that's stayed with me the longest: if I could say one thing to my own squad right now, what would it be. I answer it by name. Thank you for driving this road with me this month. The 9 People You Need in Your Career Squad: How to Build the Relationships That Drive Every Career Breakthrough is available now, paperback and Kindle. Get the book: amzn.to/4f4yFtmMore info: https://buildyourcareersquad.comComplete your Career Squad Audit here: https://careersquadaudit.netlify.app/

“No one glows more than someone who didn’t get what they thought they wanted, healed, and realized something better was on the way.”

Since 2023 I have talked about the Career Squad Framework with hundreds of people. Two gaps come up more than any other, every single time. The Sponsor is the most common gap people have. The Critic is the rarest relationship most people have ever actually built. That's not a coincidence, and today I'm going deep on both. Not just what these two relationships are, why they're so hard to build in the first place, and exactly how to go build them anyway. How to get visible to the right people, without it feeling like self-promotion. What to actually say when you're finally ready to ask for support. How to find someone who'll tell you the truth, and the exact words that get you a real answer instead of a polite one. This is one of the most personal episodes in the series, including the professional setback that taught me what sponsorship actually costs, and the year I spent unable to hear the truth from someone who was only trying to help me. The 9 People You Need in Your Career Squad: How to Build the Relationships That Drive Every Career Breakthrough is available now, paperback and Kindle. Get the book: https://link.amazon/B06ie96iDLearn more: https://buildyourcareersquad.com

“Your next level might have less to do with working harder and more to do with you finally believing you’re allowed to have a life you actually enjoy.”

What if the most important infrastructure of your career has nothing to do with your skills, your credentials, or your hard work, and everything to do with the people you have intentionally built around you? In this special episode of Leading Yourself, I am sharing the full recording of my live book launch event for Build Your Career Squad: The 9 People You Need in Your Career Squad , the book I have been carrying for a long time and that officially came into the world on September 5th. This is not a typical book launch. It is a real conversation. I walk you through the full Career Squad framework, nine relationships organized into three families that determine not just how far your career goes but how you feel getting there. We do a live assessment together so you can see exactly where your own squad stands right now. And then I sit down with two guests who have built extraordinary careers and who know this framework not because they read the book, but because they lived it. Joining me on the panel: Charlie Ackerman — former SVP of Human Resources at Bosch North America, executive coach, and one of the people in my own Career Squad. Andy Storch — author of Own Your Career Own Your Life, keynote speaker, and host of the Talent Development Hot Seat podcast. Together we talk about what it actually takes to find the right people for your squad, how to onboard a new relationship without it feeling transactional, what it means to show up for someone else's career over a long time, and what most professionals leave on the table in the relationships they already have. Whether you have read the book or this is the first time you are hearing about it, this episode will change how you look at every professional relationship in your life. Grab a copy of the book: https://buildyourcareersquad.com

This week, I'm doing something different. Instead of talking about the book, I'm reading it to you, straight from the opening chapter. It starts in Honduras, at a wire harness plant, where I was twenty-two years old and had just been handed the wheel of something I'd never driven, HR Manager for a manufacturing facility of 4,200 employees. I had no business being in that role. I didn't tell anyone how terrified I was. What got me through it wasn't talent. It was people. I just didn't have a name for them yet. This is the story behind the whole book, the moment the road trip metaphor was born, and your first real introduction to the idea that no career was ever meant to be driven alone. The 9 People You Need in Your Career Squad: How to Build the Relationships That Drive Every Career Breakthrough is available now, paperback and Kindle. Get the book: https://amzn.to/46abYicLear more: https://buildyourcareersquad.com