Let's Get Real

Sharmin Banu is an executive leadership coach, speaker, and author of Mid-Career Momentum: Design Your Next Phase with Purpose and Joy. A former Microsoft engineering manager, she has spent the past 17 years helping leaders navigate career transitions, build resilience, and lead with greater purpose, confidence, and joy.

Sharmin has coached leaders across Fortune 500 companies, startups, government, healthcare, and nonprofit organizations. She has served as the President of the ICF Washington State Chapter and currently serves in a leadership role with Braver Angels, where she helps foster respectful dialogue across political differences. Through her coaching, speaking, and writing, Sharmin is passionate about helping people grow as leaders while creating workplaces and communities where people can thrive.

We get into what actually depletes people at the height of their careers, why hustle culture makes resilience harder, and the difference between chasing a title and chasing a vision that means something to you. Sharmin also walks through two frameworks from the book: the 3A model for navigating setbacks (acknowledge, analyze, act) and the 3C model for sustaining resilience (care, connect, create).

If you're navigating a career transition, feeling stuck, or just trying to keep your own tank full while doing meaningful work, this one's for you.

Mid-Career Momentum on Amazon

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A gifted Executive Coach and Facilitator, Jeaneen serves executives who are committed to realizing and achieving their deepest potential. She guides individual leaders and their teams to transform and grow from the inside out for the sake of thriving in all ways. Her work spans private coaching, offsite retreats and trainings for individuals and teams.

Jeaneen’s areas of expertise include leadership for high potentials, executive development, communication, executive presence, conflict management and assimilation. Her industry experience includes Technology, Philanthropic Foundations, Financial Services, Public Utilities and Health Care.

Jeaneen Schmidt 

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit 

A World Appears by Michael Pollan 

Returning the Self to Nature by Jeanine Canty 

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Tina Meyers is a former environmental and social justice attorney turned coach and spiritual warrior.  She coaches high-performing women advocates and leaders, designs and leads feminine leadership programs for nonprofits, and is the founder of Women Advocates Rising and Warrior School. Tina and Nina explored what feminism means to each of them.  They also spoke candidly about what it would be like to live in a world where women were fully empowered to bring their full selves and where leadership was more balanced between the masculine and the feminine.  Nina even learned a new term, spiritual bypassing!

Leading through Complexity Peer Group

Warrior School

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Let's Get Real on Instagram 

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Anna is a leadership and embodied presence coach, facilitator, and coach educator. She has trained around 1,000 coaches globally and serves as a Faculty at the Co-Active Training Institute. She is the founder of Wholeness in You, where she works with leaders in transformation to develop an embodied leadership presence, so they can lead with clarity, creativity, and power without shutting down.  In this conversation, Nina and Anna explored how:  

To Move from a Reactive to a Centered State — We all have a default "reactive" mode driven by old subconscious programming. Anna explains how to recognize when you're in it and how to shift back to your centered state, where your real leadership presence lives.

Your Body Knows Before Your Mind Does — The vagus nerve and nervous system are constantly processing information your conscious mind hasn't registered yet. Anna breaks down why embodiment isn't a wellness trend — it's actually a better way to increase your self-awareness.

Presence Can't Be Performed — Executive presence isn't about posture or polish. We make the case that authentic presence is energy, and people feel it whether you're trying to project it or not — which means the real work is internal.

To learn more about Anna’s work, visit: www.wholenessinu.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annasumara/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wholenessinu

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Mark Rovner and Rebecca Scott are Washington DC-based coaches with specialities that include mindful self compassion, adult development and immunity to change.  Mark is the founder and principal at Sea Change Strategies and a trained facilitator in Dr. Kristin Neff’s Mindful Self-compassion program.  Rebecca focuses on making work suck less with humor and compassion, one coaching conversation at a time.

Mindful Self-Compassion Course 

Lisa Feldman Barrett 

Sea Change Strategies

Rebecca Scott on LinkedIn

https://substack.com/@stumblr

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Jeff is an executive coach and leadership facilitator with 30+ years of experience in the coaching world. He works with clients to manage change, discover cutting-edge solutions, bring humanity to work, and create sustainable workplaces.

Additionally, he leads the Co-Active Training Institute’s (CTI) Leadership Program, working with executives and other professionals to ignite their inherent strengths and create mutual, powerful alliances.

In this conversation, Nina and Jeff explored the myths of kindness and the five pathways for being truly kind when you are coaching and developing others.  They also talk about their own superpowers when it comes to kind coaching and where they see coaches get tripped up.  

The Kind Lab

The Five Pathways of Kindness 

Jeff Jacobson World 

Jeff's LinkedIn 

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Over the past two decades Julie Davidson has served thousands of leaders throughout the United States, as well as Latin America, Europe, and Asia. As President and CEO of The JD Group, she built customized and sustainable leadership development programs for organizations. 

Julie shared how she is using AI to serve clients better. Nina and Julie explored how coaching platforms are shaping the coaching profession.  They also explored what Gen X leaders have to learn from Gen Z's approach to career and life.  

Julie’s background includes reproductive justice advocacy and policymaking, progressive grantmaking, conflict resolution skills, improvisational theater, storytelling, and direct feedback. Her breadth of professional experience creates a unique toolkit that unleashes clients’ strengths and supports them to get big results. She also delights in collaborating with colleagues who are making good trouble in nonprofit, small business, education, policy, and fitness/wellness spaces.

a) plan 

Strawberry

Savor PNW

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Nina sat down with Rick Rodriquez, Ed.d., co-founder of The Rooted Life. Nina and Rick explored how to create spaces of healing, why sharing our stories of identity matters in developing leaders and building culture, and ways to create workplaces where everyone feels safe and can do meaningful work. 

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Wiebke Renner is a leadership coach and Systemic Dialogue faciliatator. In addition to working with private clients, she is a supervisor and trainer for the nni (no-name-initiative), a South African born NPO and social enterprise.  nni started out as a big vision with a big heart for greater inclusion and real dialogue, a call to service and engagement, and a commitment to action and accountability. To this end, nni has been hosting free public transformational dialogues since 2012, as well as training citizens as powerful dialogue facilitators across the globe. 

NNI Dialogue Institute

Renner Resonanz

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Deina M King is a sales leader turned executive coach dedicated to transformation and impact.  As a sales executive over the last 10+ years, she lead teams through hyper-growth and massive change curves while maintaining high levels of performance.  Her executive coaching practice focuses on growth and performance for senior executives and those looking to advance their career and transform their leadership.

Deina shared about her motivation to add coaching to her leadership toolkit.  Nina also asked her about her work scaling coaching training inside her org at LinkedIn. Finally, the two talked about what drew them to building community in Seattle for Co-Active coaches.  

The Coaching Habit

DMK Coaching & Advisory

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