In her twenties, Kerry was struggling in a sales role when her manager sat her down and told her she was not getting in front of the right people. He asked her to come back with a plan. Her immediate reaction was: she already knew that was the problem. What she did not know was how to solve it.

Rather than asking questions, understanding what she had already tried, or offering support, her manager handed the problem back to her without helping her build the skills or confidence to work through it.

Already navigating a difficult period in her life, Kerry left that conversation feeling more discouraged than before, and eventually decided to leave the company. Years later, she found herself repeating that same pattern with the person who is now her COO.

When he came to her with questions, she responded by asking why he was asking her to do his job for him. He had the experience to find his way, but Kerry realized she had not helped him think through the challenge. She had simply handed the problem back instead of creating a path forward.

In this episode, the fifth installment of a six-part series on the SHARES model, Kerry explores the “E”: Endorse a Path Forward. Endorsing a path forward is not about solving someone else’s problem or giving them an answer disguised as collaboration. It is about creating enough clarity and support for someone to take ownership of the next step.

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

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Kerry runs a company. People are constantly reading into things she does: a look she gives in a meeting, a question she asks, even her silence. And most of the time, what they conclude has nothing to do with what she was actually thinking.

Kerry has learned over many years of leading that the most damaging relationship problems inside an organization rarely start with bad intentions. They start with a story someone told themselves that nobody ever thought to check.

This episode covers the R in the SHARES model: Reflect with Questions and Dialogue. It follows directly from last week, when Kerry talked about articulating your experience.

That step says: Here is what I experienced. This one says: Now help me understand what you experienced.

Without that second part, articulating your experience becomes a speech. And nobody wants to receive feedback as a speech.

The most important relationship problems do not start with bad intentions. They start with stories we told ourselves that we never bothered to check. And dialogue is the only thing that interrupts those stories before they become someone's reality.

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Most leaders assume that when someone gets defensive during a feedback conversation, it means they cannot handle feedback. Kerry used to think that too.

Years of leading as a CEO have taught her that defensiveness almost always has the same cause. The person sitting across from you has just been handed a conclusion about their intentions instead of a description of what you actually experienced. Those are two very different things to receive.

Kerry is not sharing this as someone observing leadership from the outside. She runs a company and has these conversations every week, sometimes in situations where she does not know walking in whether someone will still have a job when the conversation ends. This is work she lives every day, not just something she teaches.

In this third installment of the SHARES series, Kerry explores the A: Articulate Your Experience. She also shares a story about someone who repeatedly canceled meetings with her and the assumptions she built around why it was happening. What she discovered was a powerful reminder for every leader: your experience can be real while your interpretation can still be wrong. When you stop presenting your assumptions as facts, you create space for curiosity, understanding, and trust.

Because that is where better leadership conversations begin.

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

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Kerry Siggins has given feedback the wrong way. She remembers a specific conversation, someone brought into her office, Kerry upset about the way they had been showing up, ready to express it. The person asked for specific examples. Kerry did not have any. She had prepared her feelings and nothing else. The conversation spiraled. The relationship was damaged. And the lesson stayed with her.

This episode is the second in a six-part series on the SHARES model, and it covers the H: have your facts and feelings ready. It is the preparation step, and it is the one most leaders skip.

Kerry also shares a recent conversation that could have gone very differently. Someone on her team had breached confidentiality, shared something they should not have with people who should not have had it. Kerry did not know, walking into the room, whether she was going to fire this person. The outcome depended on the conversation.

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

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A comment in a leadership meeting rubbed Kerry Siggins the wrong way. She did not react. She told herself it was not worth bringing up. And then she spent the next week noticing she was on edge every time she interacted with the person who said it, unable to shake a story she had built about what he meant.

This episode is the first in a six-part series on the SHARES model, and it starts with the step Kerry has found most leaders skip without realizing it: specify your outcome. Before any difficult conversation, before any hard truth needs to be said, there is a question worth sitting with. What do I actually want when I walk out of this room?

Kerry walks through exactly how she used this with her own team. Not to give feedback. Not to correct anyone's behavior. Just to be honest about how a moment had landed and to protect a relationship she cared about. She specified three things she wanted from the conversation before she ever had it, and that clarity changed everything about how the conversation went.

What she discovered when she finally said something is the part of this story that stays with you. The story she had been carrying in her head for a week was completely wrong. The intention behind the comment was not what she assumed. And the miscommunication, like most miscommunications, came down to one simple thing: nobody had said clearly what they meant.

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

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A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my therapist's office with my son. I didn't expect to walk out of the session thinking about myself. But that's what happened.

We were there to talk about my son, about being an empath, about how he absorbs the feelings of everyone around him, about why that can feel isolating when the people closest to him don't experience the world the same way. And in the middle of that conversation, his therapist looked at us and said, "Your mom is the main character in her own life. That's the disconnect."

She wasn't wrong. But I had to sit with it for a while before I understood what it actually meant.

I've spent most of my career as a performer. That's the honest version. I built things, led things, proved things, and a lot of that was driven by a quiet belief that my value came from what I could achieve. Not from who I was. From what I could show. That role worked. It made me successful. It also made me exhausted in ways I didn't fully name until recently.

In this episode, I talk through the archetypes that shape how we show up: as leaders, as parents, as people trying to figure out who they actually are versus who they've learned to be. The performer. The caretaker. The empath. The peacekeeper. The victim. The main character. Each one is real. Each one solves a problem. And each one can become a trap when it stops being a choice.

What I keep coming back to is this: the roles we play aren't the problem. The problem is when they start making decisions for us, when what began as a survival strategy becomes an identity we can't see around.

I'm still working through this. I don't think that's a bad thing.

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

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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/

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

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