In 2025, Kerry Siggins was going through a divorce, navigating a company under economic pressure, managing her son's health issues across two households, finishing a book, and trying to hire a VP of sales who turned out not to work. She woke up overwhelmed every day. There was a constant noise in her head: am I doing enough, how am I going to get it all done, what happens if I fall behind.

And she kept avoiding things. The difficult conversation she needed to have with someone on her team. The decision she knew she needed to make. The boundary she needed to set with her ex-husband. She told herself she was just waiting for the right moment, that things might resolve on their own. What she eventually understood is that she was spending more energy worrying about and avoiding those things than it would have taken to just face them.

This episode came out of that realization. Not the challenges themselves, but the weight of carrying everything unaddressed, was what was creating the suffering. And the moment she started doing things one at a time, one conversation, one decision, one boundary, the anxiety lifted. Not because her life got easier. Because she stopped accumulating what she had not yet faced.

Kerry also draws a distinction that runs through the whole episode: some stress is a calling, and some stress is a burden. Learning to tell the difference, and asking whether a given stress is worth carrying because of what it is helping you become, is the actual skill. Not eliminating stress. Becoming someone who can carry more of it without losing themselves in it.

To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com

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Kerry Siggins ran one company for twenty years. She grew up inside it, ran every department, and built it into something that reflected her personality and her instinct to fix whatever was broken. For most of that time, she thought that being the person who held everything together was evidence of great leadership.

What she eventually had to face is that it was not. Every problem she solved was one less chance for someone else to own their work. Every time she stepped in, she was teaching her team that ownership was optional. And the culture she was trying to build could not take root as long as she was the one holding the ground together.

This episode stays inside that realization and the harder question it forced. Not whether her team needed her. Whether she needed her team to need her.

To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com

Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok!

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Kerry Siggins did not arrive at this episode from theory. She arrived at it from looking back at the last twenty years of her life and asking an honest question: what actually caused the change?

Not the goals. Not the resolutions. Not the ambition. What caused the change was the moment she decided to raise a standard. The moment she said, this is how I am going to show up, not just this week or this month, but every single day, because this is who I am choosing to become.

She has done this with drinking, with writing, with her body, with her leadership, with the way she communicates inside her company. And what she has found, consistently, is that goals pointed her in the right direction but standards determined whether she actually got there. Goals are external. Standards become part of who you are.

This episode sits inside that distinction. Kerry talks through what standards actually are, how to identify the ones you are already operating with, and why the most dangerous standards are the ones you have stopped noticing, the behaviors you have quietly accepted as normal that are preventing the very thing you say you want.

She also brings this into leadership in a way that reframes the entire conversation around feedback. Leaders do not have a feedback problem, she argues. They have a standards problem. And the SHARES framework she built is not another goal to add to the list. It is a communication standard, a repeatable way of showing up that makes honest, clear, trust-building feedback almost inevitable.

To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com

Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok!

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Kerry Siggins has spent a long time watching talented people fail not because they lacked ability but because they could not hear what was being said to them. She has watched incredibly capable adults shut down completely over a single sentence of feedback, not because the feedback was cruel, not because it was wrong, but because somewhere underneath it, they experienced it as a threat to who they are.

She has done it herself. She has gotten defensive. She has over-explained and justified and listened to respond rather than to understand. And she knows exactly what it costs, because she has seen what it does to a team when a leader cannot hear the truth.

This episode follows that cost all the way through. It starts with how cultures accidentally train people to protect themselves, by punishing mistakes, by rewarding the appearance of competence over the reality of learning, by making the truth feel dangerous. It moves through what defensiveness actually looks like inside an organization: meetings that go political, conversations that get softer and softer until nobody says what needs to be said, leaders who over-explain their decisions because trust has already eroded.

Kerry also shares the story of an executive she hired, demoted, and eventually promoted back into their original role after they did something most people will not do: they stopped defending themselves and started listening. The transformation that followed was not just personal. It changed the entire dynamic of the team around them.

The thing Kerry keeps returning to is this: feedback frameworks matter, and she believes in the one she has built. But no framework in the world works if people cannot hear the truth without protecting themselves. Ownership is the foundation. Everything else is built on top of it.

To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com

Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/

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Kerry Siggins has gotten feedback wrong more times than she can count. She has fumbled it, blurted it out, and far more often, tiptoed around what really needed to be said because the discomfort of saying it felt harder than the cost of staying quiet. What she noticed, over years of leading people at Stone Age, is that the moments where she got it right had something in common. And the moments where she got it wrong did too.

This episode is about what she built from that pattern. The SHARES model is a six-step framework Kerry developed for herself and eventually for her team, not from theory or consulting frameworks but from the accumulated weight of conversations that went well and conversations that did not. It was built from necessity. From the sleepless nights before difficult conversations. From watching someone shut down in real time after feedback she delivered poorly. From asking herself, afterward, what she would do differently.

She walks through each step in this episode, from specifying the outcome you actually want before you walk into the room, to staying grounded when the other person becomes emotional or defensive, to asking questions rather than delivering a speech. She also shares a recent conversation where she used the model with someone on her team, a forty-five minute exchange that was emotionally charged and ended with real clarity, a path forward, and a relationship that held.

The question she keeps coming back to is one worth sitting with: you are shaping your culture not just through the conversations you have, but through the ones you avoid, the ones you rush, and the ones you handle poorly. The SHARES model is her way of taking ownership of that.

To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com

Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/

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Every communication breakdown Kerry Siggins has witnessed in business shared one pattern. It did not fall apart because someone said the wrong thing. It fell apart because nobody said the right thing for long enough that by the time they did, there was no trust left to hold the conversation.

This episode is not about communication theory. It is about what silence actually costs, in dollars, in relationships, in credibility, and in the quiet internal weight of carrying what you are not saying. Kerry traces the full arc of avoidance: how it starts as rationalization, compounds into resentment, and ends with someone getting fired who should have been coached, while the leader feels both justified and guilty at the same time.

She also brings this home through her own experience. A few years ago, she avoided a difficult conversation with a fractional executive on her team for six weeks. The fit was wrong, the team was losing stability, and the cost was visible. She still waited. When she finally had the conversation, it was over in minutes. He understood completely. The story she had built in her head bore no resemblance to what actually happened.

The question she leaves with is a specific one: what conversation are you currently avoiding that is already costing you more than having it would?

To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com

Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/

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A few weeks ago, Kerry Siggins was talking with her boyfriend Shane about his thirteen-year-old son who plays baseball. The main issue is that the boy does not really want to play baseball, and wants to quit. Shane was wrestling with what that would teach him about integrity, and Kerry paused, because she has fought that exact question her entire life.

This episode is about the story most of us inherited about commitment. That quitting equals weakness. That integrity means always doing what you said you were going to do, even when it no longer fits. Kerry traces how that story shaped her own decisions, staying in college programs, staying in relationships, saying yes to things she did not want to do, not because she was weak, but because she genuinely believed that saying yes was what a good person did.

She also shares two commitments she backed out of in the weeks before this conversation. A board seat. A judging panel. Both things she cared about. Neither of which she had the capacity to do well. What she felt when she made those calls surprised her, it was not just relief, it was ownership. She did not ghost the commitments. She also did not ghost herself.

The question underneath all of it is one Kerry is still working on: what does it mean to have integrity with yourself, and how do you know the difference between discomfort worth pushing through and misalignment worth acting on?

To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com

Let’s connect on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-siggins-166b66/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kerry.siggins/

TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@kerry.siggins