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Leadership With a Twist episodes
- The Symbolic Language of Astrology | Astro Vibes Episode 2
Your Birth Chart Isn't Good or Bad (It's Just You)
Every birth chart is built on the same structure. In this episode, Barbara Schindler breaks down the foundation every astrologer works from, whether they lean into moon cycles, outer planet transits, or classic chart reading: the 12 zodiac signs, the inner planets, the outer planets, and the 12 houses of the wheel.
Barbara draws the line between the personal planets close to Earth (Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars) and the slower-moving outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) that shape generational and transformational themes. She uses Mercury in Leo versus Mercury in Virgo as a working example of how the same planet expresses two completely different thinking styles, and why forcing yourself into the wrong container creates friction that has nothing to do with intelligence or effort.
The core message: there is no bad placement, no bad sign, no bad chart. Squares and oppositions aren't flaws. They're invitations to bring awareness to tension you're already carrying, so you can respond by choice instead of by habit.
Starting next episode I will kickoff with a series on the stars with focusing first on the zodiac signs. We begin with the constellations represented in the language of astrology.In this episode:
- Why the birth chart is read through symbolic language first, interpretation second
- The difference between inner (personal) and outer (generational) planetary influence
- Mercury in Leo vs. Mercury in Virgo: two different operating systems for thought
- Why aspects like squares and oppositions are growth points, not problems
- The distinction between lower vibration (fear, contraction) and higher vibration (trust, authenticity) as a choice you make daily
Get your complimentary birth chart: Want to follow along with your own chart as this series unfolds? Email Barbara at [email protected] for a free copy of your astrology birth chart.
Barbara is a professional astrologer and transition & leadership coach with 35+ years’ experience. Through Astro Vibes and Leadership With a Twist, she blends astrology, psychology & mindfulness to help clients navigate change courageously.
Leadership With a Twist Podcast #34
12 min - Where Does the Sky Begin? Using Your Birth Chart for Self-Knowledge | Astro Vibes Episode 1
Barbara Schindler opens Astro Vibes with the question she comes back to again and again: where does the sky begin? We stand rooted on the ground and still live among the stars, and that tension is the whole point of this podcast. Barbara introduces the idea of the birth chart as an inner self map, a blueprint drawn from the exact moment you were born, and explains why understanding it builds real self-knowledge instead of the generalized guesswork of a newspaper horoscope.
This episode sets the foundation for the series. Barbara names the terms people hear thrown around, rising sign, sun sign, Saturn return, and promises to demystify them one at a time rather than all at once. No jargon dump. No mysticism for its own sake. Just a clear, grounded path into a language that, once you learn it, changes how you lead yourself and how you read the people around you.
In this episode:
- Why Barbara frames astrology as a tool for self-knowledge, not prediction
- The difference between a generalized horoscope and a personal birth chart
- How the "blueprint soul map" grounds you in the present moment
- What's coming in the next episode: the 12 zodiac signs
Free Resource: Email Barbara at [email protected] for a complimentary copy of your astrology birth chart.
6 min - Lead by Following: Transformative Leadership Strategies
Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler open this conversation with an idea that sounds backwards until you sit with it. Real authority, the kind that actually builds team performance, comes from following your team instead of running ahead of them. When you hold decision-making power on a project, in a department, or across an entire company, the instinct to speak first and set direction fires almost automatically. This episode pulls that instinct apart and hands you something better to do instead.
Barbara redefines active listening here, and it is not staying quiet. It is the deliberate work of drawing ideas out of people who have learned to let the leader go first. She walks through the exact trap that catches most leaders: a quiet meeting gets read as "nobody has anything to say," when really the team has learned that speaking up doesn't change what happens next. The fix is not waiting longer. It is sharing an unfinished thought out loud on purpose, so the room sees that half-formed ideas are actually welcome.
Heather brings in leadership reputation, the version of you that gets built in ordinary Slack messages and status updates just as much as in a crisis. She and Barbara talk through why the hardest moments, not the easy ones, are what people remember about working with you. Getting curious about your own stress patterns, whether you go quiet, get defensive, or push harder, gives you an actual chance to choose differently the next time pressure hits.
They close the conversation with something concrete. Pick one habit, one recurring meeting, and run a two to three week experiment leading by following before checking in on what shifted.
Key Takeaways- Leading by following means the leader listens first and invites the team to shape the thinking before adding their own.
- Active listening is not passive. It means asking open questions that pull unfinished ideas into the open.
- Leadership reputation gets built in daily interactions and cemented in the hardest ones.
- Naming your own stress pattern gives you the chance to choose a different response before habit takes over.
Low-stakes brainstorming, on a topic with nothing riding on it, builds the muscle before you need it for the high-stakes decision.
Action Steps
- In your next team meeting, share a half-formed thought out loud instead of your full recommendation and ask the room to build on it.
- Set up one brainstorming session this month where nobody is obligated to act on anything that gets said.
After your next difficult interaction, write down how you actually responded under pressure and how you want to respond next time.
Questions to Reflect On
- When I walk into a meeting, am I setting my team up to speak first, or am I taking that space by default?
- What does my team's silence actually mean, and have I ever checked?
What is my go-to habit under pressure, and is it the reputation I want to be known for?
Want to talk through how this applies to your team? Book a complimentary coffee chat: https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechatAbout the Hosts: Coach Heather and Coach Barbara are the lead Executive Coaches of Empowering Leadership Teams. They specialize in helping entrepreneurial businesses and their teams meet the moment and become the most empowered they can be to work together and achieve optimal results. With deep expertise in leadership development, team dynamics, and navigating organizational transition, they bring practical, actionable wisdom to leaders facing the challenges of today's rapidly changing business environment.
Weekly Leadership With a Twist Newsletter:
https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribeSubscribe & Review: If you found value in this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us create content that serves entrepreneurial leaders like you, and it helps other leaders discover these conversations.
Questions or topics you'd like us to address in future episodes? Send us a message at or leave a comment on our latest post.
Cheering You On!
24 min - This Can't Be Normal: Chanie Wilschanski on the Invisible Weight of Leadership
Barbara sits down with Chanie Wilschanski, a mom of four, leadership advisor, and founder of Schools of Excellence. Chanie works with school owners and organizational leaders who have built genuinely successful businesses and still find themselves carrying an amount of invisible responsibility that never shows up on a balance sheet. Her book, This Can't Be Normal, gets its title from a question she asks leaders again and again: what have you normalized that was never supposed to be normal in the first place?
Chanie names the pattern with a story every overloaded leader will recognize. You can have systems, checklists, and a team running the day to day, and still wake up at 3am worrying about a problem that isn't technically yours to solve. You can be at your own anniversary dinner and send a Slack message. You can be doing a Target run with your grandchild while a loop that hasn't closed keeps spinning in the back of your mind. That is the invisible weight of leadership, the noticing, anticipating, tracking, and forecasting that never clocks out, even when someone else is officially in charge.
She traces the pattern back to competence itself. As the oldest of eight children, Chanie built her sense of safety around being the one who could see what needed doing and do it. That same competence built her success, and it became the thing that nearly broke her. She talks openly about getting sick repeatedly and about two miscarriages, and names them as her body's response to holding a level of responsibility no one was ever meant to carry alone.
The conversation moves into what Chanie calls infrastructure, and she is direct that it has nothing to do with adding more SOPs. Every client she works with already has systems to death. What's missing is a standard, someone who owns it, a rhythm for returning to it, and a response, decided in advance, for when it breaks. She walks Barbara through a real coaching exchange where a client's fear of not ordering crayons spirals, in ten seconds, all the way to a fear of ending up in jail, and explains why that walk-through, not a pep talk about delegating, is what actually lets a leader hand something off.
Barbara and Chanie also get into the identity underneath all of it, the idea that niceness and caretaking have quietly come to mean disappearing while you carry someone else's outcome. Chanie offers a reframe: you can care about a person without carrying the responsibility for what they produce. She closes with a practice from her own marriage, a Tuesday breakfast with her husband that is pre-decided in calm, mood-proof, and tied to their identity as a couple, and with the mission behind her book: building a version of leadership in schools, and everywhere else, that doesn't get passed down as dysfunction to the next generation.
Key Takeaways- The invisible weight of leadership is the noticing, anticipating, tracking, and forecasting that follows you home, on vacation, and into the shower, whether or not you're technically in the business.
- Competence built your success, and left unchecked, it becomes the trap that keeps you the answer person for everyone around you.
- More systems, processes, and checklists will not create the relief leaders are waiting for. Infrastructure means a standard, an owner, a rhythm of return, and a pre-decided response.
- People rarely change until the pain of staying still outweighs the pain of the alternative. Protecting your team from consequences keeps them from ever getting there.
- A rhythm only works if it's pre-decided in calm, mood-proof against how you feel that day, and tied to who you want to be, not to what's convenient.
Action Steps
- Pick one thing that has been keeping you up at 2am and walk it downstream, out loud, the way Chanie does with her client and the crayons, until you can see what would actually happen if it went wrong.
- Build one predictable rhythm of return this month, whether it's a weekly check-in with your spouse or a standing time you close your laptop, and pre-decide it in calm before you need it.
- Name one part of your life or leadership you have quietly accepted as normal, and ask what it's costing you to keep accepting it.
How we can help:
Chanie Wilschanski helps leaders build the infrastructure, rhythms, and ownership that allow organizations to thrive without everything routing back to them.
Free Download: This Can’t Be Normal - Chapter 1
https://schoolsofexcellence.com/lwatch1Barbara Schindler is an executive coach with over a decade of experience working with business leaders and entrepreneurial companies, specializing in leadership transitions and whole person development.
Want to talk through how this applies to your leadership or your business? Book a complimentary coaching call and let’s talk through what it looks like in your leadership: https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/discovery
50 min - Scaling by Subtraction: Pam Langord on Marketing, AI, and the Blueprint That Doesn't Exist
Barbara sits down with Pam Langord, founder of Simply Magic Marketing and a fractional COO who spent over 30 years in marketing and operations, including years inside one of the fastest-growing online coaching companies in the country. That experience showed her exactly what scaling without heart does to real client relationships, and in 2023 she built Simply Magic Marketing to prove the opposite is possible. Her HEART method rests on one premise: you don't have to choose between scaling and staying human.
The two dig into what Pam calls scaling by subtraction. Before she touches a single new tactic with a client, she spends the first 30 days mapping the entire customer journey, line by line, to find out what's truly working and what's quietly draining time, energy, and money. She compares it to feng shui for the back end of a business. Clear what's blocking the flow before you add more furniture. One story lands hard: a client's lead gen looked strong on paper, people opting in and booking calls, but the calls weren't converting. The wrong lead magnet was pulling in the wrong people from the start. Once they swapped it, conversions moved from around 5 percent to over 50.
Pam and Barbara also talk through AI without romance or panic. Pam automates research and prospecting on LinkedIn but writes and sends every message herself, because discernment isn't something a tool can fake. She keeps her AI avatar in her own branding and doesn't chase every algorithm shift, because reach that costs you your authenticity isn't reach worth having.
The conversation closes on the belief Pam returns to again and again with clients who are stuck comparing themselves to someone else's success: there is no blueprint. There's only your true north star, built from your own goals, your own way of working, and the impact you actually want to have.
Key Takeaways- Scaling without a clear picture of your client journey just multiplies whatever is already broken.
- A high volume of leads means nothing if they're the wrong leads. Quality converts. Quantity distracts.
- AI can research, sort, and save time, but sending, deciding, and connecting stay human jobs.
- Chasing every algorithm change often costs you the audience that actually fits your business.
- There is no universal blueprint for growth. Your true north star is built from your own goals, not someone else's.
Action Steps
- Pick one client or customer and map their entire journey from first touch to conversion before adding anything new to your funnel.
- Audit what's running on autopilot in your business right now. A broken welcome sequence or an outdated lead magnet can bleed money for months unnoticed.
- Write one sentence defining your own true north star, in your own words, not borrowed from a leader you admire.
Questions to Reflect On
- Where in my business have I been adding instead of subtracting?
- Am I using AI as a research tool, or letting it make decisions I should be making myself?
- If I stopped comparing my business to someone else's blueprint, what would I build instead?
How we can help:
Pam Langord is the founder of Simply Magic Marketing and the person coaches call when their systems are held together with tape and good intentions. Known as the Automation Queen, she helps heart-centered entrepreneurs build AI-enhanced marketing that scales without losing the human part.
Book a Pulse Check with Pam: PamLangord.com
Connect on LinkedIn: @PamLangordBarbara Schindler is an executive coach with over a decade of experience working with business leaders and entrepreneurial companies, specializing in leadership transitions and whole person development.
Book a Discovery Call with Barbara: Let’s Chat!
Subscribe to Leadership With a Twist!45 min - Navigating Business Evolution: Strategies for CEOs and Business Leaders
Every entrepreneurial business starts as one thing: the founder's brain and the business are fused together. Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler open this episode by naming the moment that fusion breaks apart. As a company matures, the business develops its own identity, its own reputation, its own momentum in the marketplace, separate from the person who built it.
That separation isn't a problem you solve once. It's a gap that keeps shifting, and CEOs who ignore it end up either forcing personal passions into the business without asking whether they belong there, or watching their team push back on good ideas simply because nobody built a process for filtering them.
Heather and Barbara walk through a real coaching example: a CEO deepening a company's identity around social responsibility through an animal rescue fundraiser, and how that decision plays out differently when it's run through the strategic plan versus dropped on a team as a surprise. They dig into why AI is accelerating this challenge for a lot of founders right now, why the spark of a new idea still matters even as a company grows past needing the founder to be its only source, and what a real strategic agreement between CEO and team looks like in practice.
Key Takeaways
- The founder and the business start as one identity and separate as the company matures. That gap needs regular attention, not a one-time conversation.
- New ideas, whether from the CEO's personal life, AI tools, or team members, need a filter. Not every spark belongs in the business.
- A strategic plan only works as a decision-making tool if it's treated as a living document the whole team revisits together.
Action Steps
- Pull out your strategic plan before your next new idea conversation and use it as the anchor, not an afterthought.
- Build a standing brainstorm process, weekly or monthly, where new ideas get vetted by the team before they reach the CEO.
- Name, out loud with your team, what personal interests or passions you're considering bringing into the business identity, and ask if it fits the plan already in motion.
Questions to Reflect On
- Where has my personal identity started blending into my company's identity without a real conversation about it?
- When my team pushes back on a new idea, am I hearing no, or am I hearing we need a process for this?
- Is my strategic plan something we actually use to make decisions, or a document we wrote once and filed away?
Want to talk through how to build this kind of strategic filter with your team? Book a complimentary coffee chat: https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechat
About the Hosts: Coach Heather and Coach Barbara are the lead Executive Coaches of Empowering Leadership Teams. They specialize in helping entrepreneurial businesses and their teams meet the moment and become the most empowered they can be to work together and achieve optimal results. With deep expertise in leadership development, team dynamics, and navigating organizational transition, they bring practical, actionable wisdom to leaders facing the challenges of today's rapidly changing business environment.
Weekly Leadership With a Twist Newsletter:
https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribeSubscribe & Review: If you found value in this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us create content that serves entrepreneurial leaders like you, and it helps other leaders discover these conversations.
Questions or topics you'd like us to address in future episodes? Send us a message at or leave a comment on our latest post.
Cheering You On!
24 min - The Power Shift: Embracing Team Authority for Entrepreneurial Success
For decades the model was simple. One brilliant leader sits at the top, holds every answer, and the team waits for direction. Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler open this episode by naming exactly why that model breaks down in a business moving at today's pace. When change outruns what one person can track in their own head, authority has to move too, out into the team.
Barbara shares a coaching story about a team member who owned the leadership meeting agenda on paper but kept getting overridden by a supervisor determined to hold the room. The fix wasn't a louder voice. It was sharing her thinking alongside her draft, so there was nothing left to talk over. Heather follows with a story from her own Thanksgiving table, where a guest tried to rewrite a menu that wasn't hers to control. Different rooms, same pattern: authority gets fuzzy the second someone forgets whose lane they're actually in.
They close on the tension so many capable leaders carry between being kind and being direct, and why "too nice" is often a sign of not trusting the authority you already have.
Key Takeaways
- Top-down authority and control cannot keep pace with how fast business moves today.
- Authority belongs to the role, anchored by a job description and a functional org chart, not to personality or seniority.
- Confusing kindness with hedging keeps capable people from stepping fully into their authority.
Action Steps
- Pull up your job description and your team's functional org chart this week. Confirm every role has three to five clear responsibilities attached to it.
- Next time you draft something for the team, an agenda, a proposal, a plan, send your thinking along with the draft instead of just the draft.
- Notice one moment this week where you say something "nicely" instead of clearly. Rewrite it with more direction, same care.
Questions to Reflect On
- Where in my role am I still asking permission for something I already have authority over?
- Am I overriding someone else's role because I need to feel like the expert in the room?
- If my next performance review addressed exactly how I'm showing up in this situation, what would it say?
Want to talk through how team authority is showing up on your leadership team? Book a complimentary coffee chat with Heather and Barbara:
https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechatAbout the Hosts: Coach Heather and Coach Barbara are the lead Executive Coaches of Empowering Leadership Teams. They specialize in helping entrepreneurial businesses and their teams meet the moment and become the most empowered they can be to work together and achieve optimal results. With deep expertise in leadership development, team dynamics, and navigating organizational transition, they bring practical, actionable wisdom to leaders facing the challenges of today's rapidly changing business environment.
Weekly Leadership With a Twist Newsletter:
https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribeSubscribe & Review: If you found value in this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us create content that serves entrepreneurial leaders like you, and it helps other leaders discover these conversations.
Questions or topics you'd like us to address in future episodes? Send us a message at or leave a comment on our latest post.
Cheering You On!
30 min - Mastering Intentional Leadership: Where's Your Energy Really Going?
Heather McGonigal opens this episode by naming energy as a resource with real limits, and Barbara Schindler builds out the framing they use at Leadership With a Twist: mindset, intention, and self-awareness. The conversation grew out of coaching a client returning to work after maternity leave, someone who suddenly had to get specific about where her hours and attention were going, work versus family versus herself. Heather and Barbara use that real situation to unpack something every leader deals with, whether their circumstances are changing or not. Energy leaks happen quietly, usually through worry, rumination, or carrying a hard meeting's emotional residue into the next task.
They introduce the pause as the tool that catches a draining pattern before it spreads, and they're specific about the dose: 90 seconds to two minutes, not a long break. Barbara shares her own ritual, making a cup of tea, as a way of creating space to process before moving on. They also walk through what they call the advanced power of the pause, giving a tense team situation 24 hours before deciding whether it needs your intervention at all, because distance often changes what you see.
The second half of the conversation covers building end-of-day and end-of-week reviews as agreements with yourself. Heather shares a client example of a Friday note that previews the coming week's priorities for herself and her team, and her own flexible Friday practice, structured meetings early in the week and open space at the end to finish on her own terms.
Key Takeaways
- Energy is a limited resource, and leadership starts with managing your own on purpose.
- A 90-second to two-minute pause interrupts an energy leak before it compounds into a drained day.
- Daily and weekly self-agreements build a rhythm that steadies you when the workload doesn't cooperate.
Action Steps
- Build a 2-minute end-of-day check-in: where did my energy go, and what does tomorrow need?
- Try the advanced pause. Give a tense team situation 24 hours before you decide to act on it.
- Set a flexible Friday, or an equivalent open block, to close out your week on your own terms.
Questions to Reflect On
- Where did my energy actually go today, and where did I intentionally direct it?
- What agreement could I make with myself that would steady me during a chaotic week?
- Am I pausing to process, or am I carrying yesterday's meeting into today's work?
Want to build habits like these into your leadership rhythm? Book a complimentary coffee chat: https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechat
About the Hosts: Coach Heather and Coach Barbara are the lead Executive Coaches of Empowering Leadership Teams. They specialize in helping entrepreneurial businesses and their teams meet the moment and become the most empowered they can be to work together and achieve optimal results. With deep expertise in leadership development, team dynamics, and navigating organizational transition, they bring practical, actionable wisdom to leaders facing the challenges of today's rapidly changing business environment.
Weekly Leadership With a Twist Newsletter:
https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribeSubscribe & Review: If you found value in this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us create content that serves entrepreneurial leaders like you, and it helps other leaders discover these conversations.
Questions or topics you'd like us to address in future episodes? Send us a message at or leave a comment on our latest post.
Cheering You On!
23 min - Navigating Modern Leadership: Authenticity Amidst AI Disruption
Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler open this episode from opposite coasts, one in a Vermont rainstorm, one in a California heat wave, and use the weather as an entry point into something bigger. Disruption is the current condition of business and life, not a phase to wait out. AI is only one piece of it. The political climate, the economy, your family, your role, your company's response to market pressure, all of it is shifting at once and rarely in the same direction.
Heather and Barbara name three capabilities every leader needs to build right now: mindset, intention, and self-awareness. They walk through a real coaching example of someone newly promoted into management who caught herself spiraling over a small mistake and used self-awareness to reset her thinking mid-thought. Heather makes the case that in an economy where companies are investing less in training their people, no one is coming to save you from your own overflowing plate. You have to build that muscle yourself.
The conversation lands on authenticity as something you co-create with the disruption around you rather than something you protect by staying quiet. Barbara reframes it as leading your part: speaking up when something needs to be said, revising your approach when it doesn't, and staying grounded enough to choose on purpose.
Key Takeaways
- Disruption isn't a phase. It's the current operating condition, and your relationship to it matters more than the disruption itself.
- Mindset, intention, and self-awareness aren't soft skills. They're the leadership skills that determine how well you navigate everything else.
- No one is coming to rescue you from an overflowing plate. Self-advocacy is now a required skill, not an optional one.
- Authenticity isn't about avoiding disruption. It's about co-creating your response to it while staying true to your values.
Action Steps
- The next time you catch yourself spiraling over a mistake, pause and name your mindset out loud before you react to it.
- Write down your intention for one recurring meeting or interaction this week, and check in afterward on whether you led from it.
- Identify one place at work where you've stayed quiet assuming someone else would speak up. Decide this week whether that's still the right call.
Questions to Reflect On
- Where in your work life are you waiting to be rescued instead of advocating for yourself?
- What's your default reaction when you make a small mistake in a high-visibility moment, and does it serve you?
- What would change if you treated self-awareness as a skill to train instead of a personality trait you either have or don't?
Want to talk through how to build these three skills on your team? Book a complimentary coffee chat: https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechatAbout the Hosts: Coach Heather and Coach Barbara are the lead Executive Coaches of Empowering Leadership Teams. They specialize in helping entrepreneurial businesses and their teams meet the moment and become the most empowered they can be to work together and achieve optimal results. With deep expertise in leadership development, team dynamics, and navigating organizational transition, they bring practical, actionable wisdom to leaders facing the challenges of today's rapidly changing business environment.
Weekly Leadership With a Twist Newsletter:
https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribeSubscribe & Review: If you found value in this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us create content that serves entrepreneurial leaders like you, and it helps other leaders discover these conversations.
Questions or topics you'd like us to address in future episodes? Send us a message at or leave a comment on our latest post.
Cheering You On!
20 min - Mastering Mindset: The Path to Thriving in Business
Overwhelm rarely announces itself. It creeps in through the meeting that keeps repeating the same way, the fix that keeps resurfacing under a new name, the sense that you're pulling something off again without knowing how many more times you can pull it off. In this episode, Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler name what they're seeing across their coaching work right now: leaders and teams sustaining the unsustainable, and the three very different paths available once you notice it.
They break down the difference between surviving a hard season on hope alone, fixing it by patching the surface without touching the root, and leading the change by starting with your own mindset, intention, and self-awareness before you ask anything of your team. Barbara shares a coaching story about a client who spent a full day cold-calling volunteers, script after script, and caught herself getting cranky mid-call. She stopped. That small moment points to something much bigger about self-awareness as a leadership skill.
If your team meetings keep happening and the real conversations keep happening after the meeting ends, this episode is for you.
Key Takeaways
- Overwhelm is the feeling of powerlessness, and it doesn't hold still. Left unaddressed, it spirals into burnout, then breakdown.
- Surviving and fixing both keep you circling the same problem. Survival runs on hope that circumstances will change. Fixing patches the surface and moves the issue to a new spot.
- Leading the change starts with the leader, not the team. Mindset, intention, and self-awareness come first, in that order.
- Self-awareness means noticing your own limit before it shows up as irritability, shutdown, or a decision you'll regret.
Action Steps
- Notice one place right now where you're sustaining something unsustainable. Name it out loud, even just to yourself.
- Before your next fix, ask whether you're solving the surface problem or the one underneath it.
- Take one small, honest risk this week — share the thought you'd normally keep to yourself, or change a habit that no longer serves you.
Questions to Reflect On
- Where in your leadership are you surviving instead of leading?
- What problem have you fixed more than once because you never got underneath it?
- What would it look like to be more true to yourself in your next difficult conversation?
Ready to talk through what leading the change looks like for you and your team? Book a complimentary coffee chat with Heather or Barbara:
https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechatAbout the Hosts: Coach Heather and Coach Barbara are the lead Executive Coaches of Empowering Leadership Teams. They specialize in helping entrepreneurial businesses and their teams meet the moment and become the most empowered they can be to work together and achieve optimal results. With deep expertise in leadership development, team dynamics, and navigating organizational transition, they bring practical, actionable wisdom to leaders facing the challenges of today's rapidly changing business environment.
Weekly Leadership With a Twist Newsletter:
https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribeSubscribe & Review: If you found value in this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us create content that serves entrepreneurial leaders like you, and it helps other leaders discover these conversations.
Questions or topics you'd like us to address in future episodes? Send us a message at or leave a comment on our latest post.
Cheering You On!
18 min
About Leadership With a Twist
From the publisher's feed
Where mindful leadership meets practical action... Empowering Leadership Teams' Podcast, Leadership With a Twist, features mother-daughter executive coaching team Heather McGonigal and Barbara…
Schindler sharing actionable leadership strategies, team empowerment tools, and mindful practices for today's leaders. Join them and guest experts to elevate your leadership skills and discover your authentic leadership potential.