The unwritten rules of promotion aren't secret, they're patterns leadership already rewards. Career and executive coach Maya Sharfi says the fastest way to learn them is to stop asking for the steps and start acting like you already have the role.

"You don't want to show up in the promotion conversation like Oliver Twist: please, sir, can you please pour into my bowl the steps to get promoted," Sharfi says. "Instead, you want to show up almost as if you already have the role."

Sharfi points to a study showing that before around age five, boys and girls are equally drawn to games framed as being for "kids who are smart" and games framed as being for "kids who work hard." After five, girls start gravitating toward the "hard work" games. It's a measurable, early start to a pattern many women spend decades trying to unlearn.

In this conversation, Maya and Pippa dig into why so many capable women apologise before they've even made their point, and why "just be more direct" backfires when the advice doesn't account for how women get read differently for the same behaviour. Maya breaks down her "four zones of career alignment" framework for working out what you actually want before you chase the next title, her method for having proactive but collaborative conversations that surface the real, unwritten reasons someone isn't getting promoted, and why reconnecting with someone you haven't spoken to in ten years costs you nothing and isn't the social crime it feels like. They also talk about introversion, psychological safety at work, and the particular flavour of imposter syndrome that shows up once your clients are already getting results.

Maya Sharfi is a career and executive coach and the founder of Build Yourself, where she helps ambitious women step into senior leadership roles without burning out. Her background spans landscape architecture, Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and she now works with women navigating promotions, career pivots, and the gap between how they lead and how they're told to lead.

Find her at buildyourselfworkshop.com.

Connect with Maya Sharfi:

🌐 buildyourselfworkshop.com

💼 linkedin.com/in/mayasharfi

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives. Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living. Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week. If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

Past life regression uses hypnosis to access memories a practitioner believes come from earlier lives, then works with the emotions attached to them so they stop bleeding into the present one.

"I'm an absolute firm believer that what we see in our day-to-day life is not everything at all," says energy therapist Natasha Joy Price. "There is more beyond that, and we just can't see it, we can't sense it."

She's not exaggerating about the range of what surfaces. One client kept smelling burning at home for no reason, and driving her partner mad insisting he check the house. A regression session traced it back to a past life as Joan of Arc. "Your energy field is something that's missed off the list in our holistic health," Price says. "Nobody checks in on it. And your energy flows through your physical body — it's just a beautiful piece of organic machinery."

In this episode, Natasha talks about the accidental Reiki session after the birth of her third child that cracked open thirty years of parallel practice: a property solicitor by day, energy healer and past life regression therapist by night, the two kept deliberately separate until clients started telling her she was "the calmest solicitor" they'd ever met. She and Pippa get into what past life regression is actually for (clearing stuck emotional patterns, not proving you were Cleopatra), how she keeps sessions safe when they touch on death and trauma, what burnout looks like through an energy lens versus a purely psychological one, and the novel and workbook she's written along the way.

Natasha Joy Price is an energy therapist, Reiki master and past life regression practitioner with over 20 years of study across Reiki, Theta Healing, hypnotherapy, and her own Soul Continuum method, alongside a Master's in parapsychology. She runs Dandelion Therapies, hosts the podcast Balm to the Soul, and is the author of Freedom of the Soul and the novel The Red Magus.

Connect with Natasha Joy Price: 🌐 https://dandeliontherapies.co.uk 📖 The Red Magus: https://dandeliontherapies.co.uk/the-red-magus/ 📖 Freedom of the Soul: https://dandeliontherapies.co.uk/publications/ 🎧 Balm to the Soul (her podcast): https://dandeliontherapies.co.uk/balm-to-the-soul/

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

• Growing up in a retirement village and joining the Army at 17
• The real, unglamorous version of "battlefield to boardroom"
• Why civilian workplaces reward indecision and veterans find that maddening
• The coming skills gap: AI replacing the junior roles people used to learn on
• Star Trek, human-in-the-loop AI, and the three questions everyone actually asks a chatbot
• His mate who fell in love with an AI avatar, and where Chris draws the line
• One therapist for every 6,000 people, and why 80% of us don't need one anyway
• The WHO's loneliness data and what it means for the next decade
• The Central Park squirrel that triggered a full panic attack
• Why the friend who asked about erectile dysfunction might be the whole point

• Leaving Idaho with a communications degree and no clear plan — and why that turned out to be exactly right
• Why Dee Dee's professor told her she couldn't be a therapist — and the advisor who changed her career in one conversation
• The little old lady in the car: why we always make up the worst thing first, and how to train yourself out of it
• Compassion, Process, Learning — the three-part framework that underpins every difficult conversation
• Why asking "why?" is the single most powerful communication tool most people never use
• Getting Scrum certified and realising she'd been running agile communications without a formula all along
• The 14-year-old girl who worked out mid-lecture that she could never be bullied again — and what that moment looked like
• Betrayal, narcissism and gaslighting: why the second foul is always the one that gets called
• Social emotional learning in California schools — and what happens when we teach children to ask questions instead of just follow instructions
• No intense conversations after 9:30 — and other household rules that actually work
• Why driving kids somewhere is still the best communication tool a parent has

• The one-week notice that ended Kisha's Citibank chapter — and the HR woman who changed the direction of her career
• Freezing in a C-suite interview, asking for a glass of water, and still getting the job
• Why fight-or-flight in high-stakes moments isn't a confidence problem — it's a values misalignment
• Power leaks: the things that drain your agency and silently limit your influence at work
• Power literacy: why reading the org chart is not the same as reading the power chart
• The DIVA method — Deliver, Image, Visibility, Advisory Board — and why performance alone will never be enough
• Why "political" is the word people use when they haven't learned to do it with integrity
• What it means to be the best-kept secret at work — and why it's costing you
• Stakeholder mapping as a career strategy: who actually holds the power, and how to build the bridge to reach them
• The cross-cultural blind spots that hold global organisations back
• Why you either win or you learn — and there is no third option

• Being left with the dead children at the hospital — and the nurse who noticed he was breathing
• Why growing up without anyone treating him as disabled was the greatest gift he never asked for
• Breaking a Paralympic world record in front of 98,000 people and feeling nothing but empty
• The difference between motivation and passion — and why finding the right angle changes everything
• Why 5,000 hours of anything gives you a skill that can make you money, and what happens at 15,000
• Painting 100 canvases as a framework for testing whether you actually love something
• Moving from Sweden to Thailand three months after discovering the humidity cured his chronic pain
• The Avatar Resurrection app: 180 days of golden pauses, starting with 30 seconds

• How Rachel's father force-switched the TV to English the year before she emigrated — and why it worked
• The psychology of language fear: why high-achievers who command boardrooms fall apart trying to say bonjour
• Why walking into a French restaurant without saying bonjour is essentially declaring war
• The Air Canada CEO who resigned after saying two words of French in a seven-minute speech
• What 20 years in corporate America taught Rachel about what she didn't want
• The $30,000 in bad coaching investments — and what eventually worked
• Her mother telling her she wasn't successful because she had no husband or children — and the book that came from that moment
• Why 71% of professionals are always looking for a career change, and what to do if you're one of them

• How the 1% better framework was born out of a breakdown, not a breakthrough
• Why rest is not a reward for productivity — and what happens when you treat it like one
• The Super Bloom essay: what dormant seeds and desert wildflowers have to do with resilience
• Redefining wealth as freedom of time, not money in the bank
• Perfectionism, shame, and the grief of not being able to do everything at once
• Why the Internet is littered with unfinished projects — and how to make peace with that
• Kobe Bryant's thousand shots a day and what it taught Natalie about handling failure
• Embroidery, snail mail, and why analogue things matter more than ever

• The night that changed everything — and why the people closest to him never saw it coming
• What true strength actually looks like when you've spent decades suppressing grief
• How PTSD forms quietly behind a high-functioning exterior
• Faith as a framework for people who aren't religious — and what it means to just be human
• Working in a veterans' homeless shelter and becoming chaplain by default
• Why young people are more willing to talk about mental health than any previous generation
• The kindergartner who lost his father and what happened when someone finally sat with him
• Community, connection, and what the Shetland Islands fire festivals taught Pippa about mental health