Trust is the foundation of all leadership, but how do you build it in today’s fast-paced world? In this episode, Rosie Zilinskas sits down with Jenna Stoliker, founder of the Center for Conscious Leadership LLC, to explore how women leaders can navigate the challenges of modern workspaces. Jenna shares her expertise on building trust, fostering psychological safety, and debunking myths around feminine leadership. From reigniting passion in your career to adapting to rapid technological changes, Jenna offers practical strategies for women ready to lead with empathy, clarity, and purpose. Don’t miss this powerful conversation on how to thrive as a leader in today’s evolving workplace.

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 Unlocking Feminine Leadership: Trust, Purpose, And Psychological Safety With Jenna Stoliker

We have something special lined up for you. We are going to be diving into the world of leadership with the amazing Jenna Stoliker. Jenna’s not just any leadership coach. She’s the powerhouse behind the Center for Conscious Leadership LLC. We’re going to be chatting about some important leadership topics. First up, we’re going to be talking about why trust is the glue that holds great teams together and how you can start building it then we’re going to shift into what psychological safety is, why it matters, and how it can make or break your team’s success.

We’ll bust some miss about feminine leadership and show you how women can lead with confidence and strength. Jenna is all about helping women leaders step into their power, make bold decisions, and navigate the craziness of the workplace with grace and clarity. Grab your cup of coffee or your energy drink and stay tuned for this awesome conversation. You won’t want to miss Jenna’s insights and the tools she’s using to help leaders like you thrive. Stay tuned.

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Jenna, thank you so much for being on the show. I’m so excited to talk to you about all things leadership. How are you?

I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me. I love being in the space with you, Rosie.

Getting The Passion Back

Thank you. I appreciate that. As you well know, we cater to women in the corporate space. Jenna, if someone were in the corporate space and they have lost their passion for their work or being at their job and they have to stay there because of finances or whatever. How would you suggest that they start exploring or reflecting to get that passion back?

We’ve probably all been there at some point where you realize the things that drove you into the career that you have don’t have that same pizzazz. It’s not grabbing you in the same way. As I’ve been there myself, probably a few times over my career. What I discovered not only just for myself but with many of the women that I work with is it takes us a moment to reflect. Why are we feeling that lack of energy or that connection to what drove us there in the first place? What ignited our passion?

The quick answer is, I would say, let’s take our time to just pause and reflect on what are your values. What’s driving you? I keep saying drove. I have been thinking about energizing you to say yes to the opportunities that are presented to you as you’re building your career. Are those values the same or have they shifted? You think about it.

It’s not that you know your values could change but sometimes they just get re-prioritized because your life is different than it was. Whether it was 5 years ago or 10 years ago or 15 years ago or 20 years ago. Your life and your experiences shift. Your values sometimes get reprioritized. We might overlook that and we think, “What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I have the same passion?” I was at a point to the values piece first and said, “Let’s explore what that looks like for you now.”

I love that. This conversation is perfect because I do certified high-performance coaching for high performers. Once they were done with their program, they folded into my membership and I had a member. We worked together in January to come up with her. We did this exercise where it was called the Clarity Chart. It’s nine words that define who you are and how you want to think of yourself in the future.

When we did it in January, we just happened to be able to do it again. Even months ago from where she started, she was looking for a job at the time. She was struggling with confidence. We work through the program. A lot of confidence building through preparation. When we did her clarity chart, it was night and day confident. She knows exactly where she’s going. The tie-in here is that we spent an hour revisiting the information and her values. We were tweaking around.

I love doing the clarity session because those nine words are so powerful. We played around with them and we were like, “No, that’s not the right word.” It was wonderful. I love your response as far as taking the time to reflect. Often, we’re in this busyness of our life and we’re not thinking about what we want or how we want to appear in the world. Does that make sense?

It does and I appreciate what you just shared. It is about pausing and reflecting. When I think of leadership and what makes a strong leader. There is a reflective practice that is so innate to how that person leads and revisits those values. What’s coming to mind now is oftentimes, especially when we think about our careers. We think that the trajectory looks like a straight line that heads up. It is not. We circle and we say, “We’re taking two steps back for every step forward or whatever the steps might be.”

There is a circular way of how we evolved in this world and that relates to our career as well. Pausing the reflective practice and revisiting your values. Also, I heard you say is what you’re able to take your clients through is yet another pass at discerning the definition of that value because what that value meant to that person months ago, you learn more. You find the words that resonate with you more and your definition and how you define what that particular value means for you shifts.

Trust

Which brings me to the topic of self-trust and trusting others. Having those leadership styles of trust. I know that some managers and I was a manager for a long time in the corporate world. I spent over 30 years in the corporate world. You could tell the managers that were vested in their people as people, as human beings, versus just employees. Let’s talk a little bit about your knowledge of trusting in the style of trusting because that could be very different.

It is driven by our thoughts, beliefs, and values because that’s what drives our behavior. We all look at developing relationships from slightly different lands. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. First, we have to accept and acknowledge we all come from different walks of life and how we are our innate DNA and our life experiences impact how we connect with one another.

First, let’s say building trust is about respect and acknowledging that I might have a slightly different view than you. However, let me see what I can learn from this. I do that when I have respect for myself because I know what I stand for. I also respect you as an individual. You also bring your own wealth of experience and wisdom. We have an innate conversation. The two of us become even better than we were a minute ago an hour ago or a day ago.

I love that you said that trust also encompasses that respect. I’m not a political person whatsoever, but one of the things that we can do better as people is respecting others’ opinions and values and you do you and I’ll do me. I always think it’s funny when people debate something that’s so ingrained like what’s happening in the Eastern world. You’re never going to make two people agree on something that’s so fundamentally ingrained within themselves. You can respect the other person’s values.

That’s a lot of what you just said that innate respect builds that trust. Tying it back to that employee’s passion and trust. When the employee no longer trusts their leader, first of all, how can I even communicate to a leader that I don’t trust? I can’t say, “I don’t trust you.” There’s got to be some conversation that we can have so that I can cultivate that trust.

It does. In some ways, it’s simple and very complex to rebuild that trust or even how do I bridge that gap. Let’s just start with, if we’re using respect. It’s the common thread. If I’m feeling that I’m losing trust in my manager. I’m going to speak from personal experience but also with people I’ve worked with as well. What I noted that’s happened, is we start to put that manager into a particular role and we lose sight of the fact that that manager is a person.

If we’re not approaching it that person is an actual person. It feels like it becomes much more challenging because we are saddled with our own thinking and our feelings around the particular situation, but we’ve kept this manager at arms lane. In some ways, maybe we move the humanity. I would say start with accepting that person that you don’t feel completely comfortable with or maybe not feel completely safe with that the moment also brings with their stuff and having that conversation with somebody.

If you’re to be direct and say, “I just don’t trust you or I don’t feel safe around you.” That puts the other person in a bit of a real protective stance. By being direct in that way, you’re not helping to foster psychological safety for that conversation to have them. My suggestion or would have known to be true is to see that person for who they are. Forget the role and that title, if you can. Look into that person’s eyes, who is this person?

Bring to the conversation a real depth of curiosity and say, “Help me understand because here’s how I’m receiving the information or what I believe you have said would be like basically, the things I need to get done. May I offer what I’m saying? I want to enlighten you and share my perspective. At the same time, can you help me understand as best possible what might be some of these other things going on that I don’t typically see that I’m making assumptions?”

“Bring to the conversation a real depth of curiosity.” – Jenna Stoliker Share on X

I love that phrase, help me understand. That’s key and it’s not off-putting and defensive. Help me understand your thought process on whatever. It makes such a big difference. It makes it a much easier conversation as well when you’re coming from that curiosity. That’s for sure.

There’s a balance here, too. I would say start the conversation with curiosity because what you’re demonstrating behaviorally, you have a level of acceptance and respect for that individual and an openness. We talked about communication and building trust. The two foundational behaviors are acceptance and openness.

Those are the behaviors that drive our trust. It’s around the communication. Now, you can have a fabulous conversation that feels accepting and open. Yet, you might still not feel that level of trust developing. That’s because there’s another element to building trust and that is consistency. The two other behaviors that we know to be true around building trust are, how congruent am I being with my words and my actions? How reliable am I? Can I follow through on those words and those actions?

If you’re challenged by a relationship, this takes to what you’ve been talking about, what if I don’t trust my manager or I don’t feel safe with my manager? Start with a conversation that’s open and curious. It’s accepting, but then don’t just leave the conversation and then go, “That felt good.” What are we going to do about whatever we just talked about? What’s our commitment to one another for what we do when I leave this office or when I leave this Zoom call? That starts to move you into the consistency that’s required to build trust around congruence and reliability. Now, you’re slowly starting to build that foundation of trust or rebuild it.

Psychological Safety

That’s so interesting because I’m working on some energy work with the energy center. There are three levels where you start with safety and stability. When that’s established, you move into trust and faith and when that’s established, you go into accomplishments. You described that. You have to set the foundation but what are you going to do about it? I think that’s super powerful. You mentioned the words psychological safety. Not everybody knows what that means. Let’s talk about what that is and why is important from a leadership perspective when you’re trying to lead a team. Why is it important to build that psychological safety?

Let me look at it from the manager’s perspective or a leader’s perspective. There is in every situation. Let’s just call it a problem. Something has to be decided. We need to decide to go any particular direction and when we make that decision to go in a direction, inevitably there’s some change. It’s going to be different than what it’s been. We addressed there’s an idea, something in front of us, a problem or decision. Let’s make a change. When we’re all faced with the change, our innate response will be, “Is this change good or bad?”

As humans, we want to put things into nice little boxes. Life is a bit more nuanced than that and yet, when we put things into a box, which is natural for so many of us. If we say this is good, the neuroscience behind us says, our oxytocin and serotonin might be up. The cortisol would be down. The cortisol tells us like, “Oh my heavens, do I need to leave from this? Do I need to fight?” The psychological safety comes from saying, “What about the people who say, ‘I don’t know that I’m bored yet?’”

Instead of saying, “I don’t know if I’m on board yet.” They may go, “This is bad.” When you say this is bad, all of a sudden, they have a cortisol spike. That cortisol spike means you’re going to sense some resistance. They aren’t feeling safe. As a leader, you’re thinking, “What didn’t you say this is where we’re going. How is there going to be any harm in this? Everyone’s going to be okay.” 

For that person, they’re not feeling secure in how to best express themselves.

Now, if you’re fortunate, you might have people who are courageous enough to speak through that fear, but not everyone does. As a leader, psychological safety is so paramount to creating trust because what you’re trying to do is create an environment that allows people to be okay with not being totally on board yet with a particular change or a direction and then talking through this. What is it that is bothering you? What is the story that you’re creating or you’ve developed or how you’re interpreting the story? What is that making you feel? What does that mean?

People will jump to like, “That means I’m not going to have a job. That means they don’t need me.” We can go into, I say call it the top shelf stuff. We go right for the premium things. Even just saying, “It’s something different and I’m being asked to show up in a slightly different way.” How might I grow from this? What I’ll say is psychological safety is important to keep not only yourself but keep your team in a growth mindset. When you get into it fixed mindset, you’re not innovative and not looking at what’s possible. Your team or organization tends to remain status quo. That status quo is not sustainable because things are changing. Not even a long way around talking about psychological safety. I could probably go around that all day.

What I’m hearing you say is that psychological safety is the emotional safety of an individual feeling courageous enough to be able to speak up or at least to process their feelings to be seen and heard by the leadership. Is that in a nutshell what it is?

Thank you for summarizing that for me, yes. Beautifully said.

Leading In A Fast-Changing World

When you’re a leader, especially in these days. I was interviewing a guest a couple of weeks ago. She’s an adaptability coach. She works with companies to help their team adapt. She was saying with artificial intelligence nowadays. She said technology is going to exponentially speed up in the next ten years. It’s going to evolve so fast in the next ten years over the entire history of technology. It’s going to go at warp speed.

A lot of leaders are having challenges bringing their team on board with all the change and trying to adapt to it so quickly because everything is moving at warp speed. I know you’re a leadership coach. How do you help the people that you work with, the leaders to bring those people with them instead of leaving them behind? This is called No Woman Left Behind. It’s important to teach leaders how to bring your team with you.

We started with passion and connecting your passion and building trust and psychological safety. Those all seem very foundational to what you’re just speaking to. Yes, the world is changing especially with technology so much so that it becomes very easy for us to lose our sense of purpose. Leaders that are reminding their team that no one gets left behind about, why are we here in the first place. What is our purpose?

The company might have a vision statement. They’ll call it a mission statement. I tend to use that language of purpose because it gets to, why are we here? Why are we formed in the first place? Our systems, processes and technology may be changing and changing so much so that that’s all we focus on. We forget what’s our role in all of this. Maybe the role shifts a little bit but as a leader, it’s important.

It reminded me of what we were talking about earlier is causing me to reflect back on your values. Have they prioritized? Is there a different way of defining them now? The same thing happens for a purpose. For leaders, it is coming back and revisiting, why was this team formed in the first place? How do we want to be with one another given what’s lying in front of us in the direction that we’re headed? We go back and look at it. What is our direction? Where are we headed? What are we doing? Come back to that purpose. That brings the people together and that’s the piece that the technology will not replace. That’s what makes us as human beings unique.

I agree. I think nowadays, especially with AI where you can ask it to produce anything. I’m a big proponent of AI, especially in your job search and things like that. LinkedIn gave me a year of perplexity pro. Perplexity Pro is the bomb. It’s good for research, but it’s so cool how you can use this information. A lot of people are still very hesitant to even go in that direction.

Only doing some research myself, 33% of companies are already using AI and 17% of individuals are already using AI in their job search process. If companies and employees don’t get with the program and skill up, they’re going to be left behind too. It’s a dual thing for leaders and employees as well. From the leader’s perspective, it’s stressful to be a leader with everything changing so quickly. You have your own job because you’re not there just to leave people. You have a job, duties, and responsibilities. How do leaders keep that sustainability? How do they keep that agility to keep doing what they’re doing at high-performing levels and then still be there for their teams?

First, let’s acknowledge that what you’re saying is, how do we maintain or build our resilience? All of that. I do think we are in an age where we are looking much more closely at our understanding of what resilience means, so offering up. As a leader, how do I handle myself and care compassionately for myself as well as my team? Having those conversations around how are we shifting now and how are we showing up now this week? Maybe even do like a month-end recap of like, “Team, what were you able to accomplish? What came up for us that was a surprise that made us accomplish things in a different way or something totally different that we didn’t even expect?” Celebrate that stuff.

We have spoken about a reflective practice. This is going to be paramount for us as leaders, and for the people we are leading. It’s where and how you want to weave in a reflective practice for yourself and your team. That becomes just your mode of operation because things are moving so quickly. It’s easy to feel like we get swept into that wave and we can but it’s like, are we going to fight that wave or are we going to flow with that?

Something I’ve noticed over the years, and I do some work with Equine. Leadership is groundwork with horses as our mentors. One of the things I learned early on was he goes slow to go fast. If you look at the horses in the field, they can get to where they want to in a few steps. They’re not running and scattering. It’s not chaos. Some of the way technology is moving and the way our businesses are moving can feel chaotic. We can go into that quick movement with deliberate steps. That’s if they practice.

Conscious Leadership

Again, working with leaders, you practice or you teach the seven habits of conscious leadership. What is that about?

That’s what we already talked about. I speak of gratitude and having a reflective practice in your daily practice. It is part you and there’s, how do I engage with others? It is the gratitude, appreciation, and how do I stay open to hearing other people’s thoughts and beliefs and their perspectives? Where do I want to take action? There’s an inner and an outer quality to our seven practices of leadership.

Most importantly the one I want to highlight based on our conversation is when you start with gratitude you start to ground yourself in this notion of why am I here? What am I thankful for? What that does for us mentally, the neuroscience behind that is it opens up a greater access to our prefrontal cortex, which is an area that we need in our brain to make all of these decisions that we’re faced with on a day-to-day basis. When you say, “How do I do this? How do I handle things much more quickly? How do I handle all of the resistance that I’m feeling for my teams?” It might sound simple and may not sound super powerful. The tip is to start with grounding yourself in gratitude, self-love, and compassion then extend that to others.

Feminine Leadership

I love that. That’s huge because when you come at everything from gratitude, you can relate to your team as people, individuals, and human beings, versus just an employee. It’s such a different perspective to look at it from. I like that. Let’s talk a little bit about tackling the myths about feminine leadership. I know being a woman in the corporate world, we still only get like 80 women promoted for every 100 men. We still only make $0.82 for every dollar. I want to talk about how women show up as leaders versus men and how we can tackle those myths that feminine leadership is not good.

The dip of why we think is not good is because historically, we’ve been thinking that to be a leader, we exert a certain strength. We looked at showing emotion or being compassionate as a weakness. Yes, it may feel soft or harder to measure. The principles of feminine leadership need to also be balanced with some of our principles of masculine leadership.

It’s been historically very unbalanced. That is not sustainable. Now, when people look at women in the workplace, one of the things that women do bring is the way they approach empathy is different from men. Historically, it is then a lot of men in leadership. A group of friends that you’re familiar with and we hang around people that we feel we are very comfortable with it and they’re a lot like us. When we bring women into leadership, oftentimes, it’s a woman who feels like she has to adapt to the boy’s club.

“One of the things that women do bring is the way they approach empathy.” – Jenna Stoliker Share on X

I know things are changing and it still is very pervasive. That adaptability is a strength for us as women in the workplace. Use that. Invite others who may not view that adaptability as a strength to show them what is possible when you adapt. When you adapt, you listen differently. There’s the empathy. When you adapt, because you are listening in a different way and empathizing with others. You find common ground so that now you can collaborate and co-create together.

It might be like it takes longer to do that from a masculine energetic way of leading. We think when we don’t get to that result fast enough that we’re failing. I would say that is completely untrue. I would say that if we take a bit longer to bring everybody along with us and walk beside us. We achieve probably more than we thought we could. If we’re timing it, does it feel like it takes longer? It may take a little longer. You know what happens at the end. You have less bloodshed.

I almost sound dramatic about it, but I witnessed this firsthand, where teams and organizations get their results. They post the numbers. The board and the investors love the numbers, but the culture of that organization is toxic and turnover occurs. People are leaving or looking for something else. When we use our gifts and our strengths of empathetic leadership and being much more collaborative using our intuitive nature along with being logical. You want to balance that. We’re creating a culture where people feel that they belong. That’s a purpose and we still hit the numbers. I’m seeing now the organizations where you have at least half of the leadership. I get the board level or the executive level of both men and women. The companies are much more profitable.

I love that you’re seeing that trend and yes, you’re right. The world is changing and many more women are acquiring secondary higher degrees than men now. The last time I checked, there were like 55 female CEOs in the Fortune 500 but that’s just only 10%. We still have work to do but the world is changing. For the first time in a long time, I feel like so many of us coaches and leadership coaches, we’re all pushing together in the same way to bring everybody to that emotional intelligence and that understanding.

As you were describing the culture is toxic and the numbers are there but the people are unhappy. I vividly remember being in the corporate world and this high senior leadership. They’re like, “You got to do this by such and such date.” All the people that were either managers or people at the desk, were like, “Why?” If we do it that way, it’s going to cause bloodshed. It’s going to cause all kinds of problems. The senior leadership was adamant that it had to be done, so okay fine. We’ll deploy it.

Sure enough, it was a crack show. That happened way more many times than I cared to remember. I always thought to myself, “I don’t understand the whole just push it out because you want to meet that check mark that it was done by a certain date but it wasn’t a successful rollout.” What is the point?

It’s certainly an imbalance. Earlier I mentioned how we build trust and approach relationships. We all commit from a very different lens or I would say our priority. If we haven’t figured out, how do I build trust? We continue to operate in the same way. Being reliable, like if I say, “This is the goal and we’re going to get to this goal,” and do it and I do it. I’m like, “I’m reliable.” What you’re just describing is, that people were saying, “Building trusting and getting what we need to do is all about reliability.”

Especially in our Western culture and organizations, we are judged by that reliability. It leaves a whole bunch of people scratching their heads and going, “I don’t understand. Why? This is taking too much blood, sweat, and tears to do it this way.” Let’s not make people wrong for those who want to check the box. Let’s invite them to say, “Is there a different process you can use along the way to get that box checked?”

That’s where the emotional intelligence comes along. That’s the big piece because when leaders are aware of how their teams are feeling and what their struggles are with. I always share that there’s nothing wrong with you going in and stepping off from your office and going to talk to the people that are doing the job at the desk. What do you see? What are your feelings? What are you struggling with?

I never understood why senior leaders didn’t take the time to do that because they could avoid a whole lot of pain from both their perspective and the people of the deaf perspective. In this day and age, a lot of us talk about emotional intelligence but more than ever, emotional intelligence is key. Is that something that you work with your leaders on?

It is and what you’re talking about is when we talk about emotional intelligence and just getting out and asking people. It is about warmth. I have to be warm, and accepting, and bring people into the conversation. It’s understanding and asking. What is it like in your world? What’s the perspective from where you stand? Encourage people. We instill those emotional intelligence components. I would bring it down to three things: warmth, understanding, and encouragement.

That’s it. That’s been a human being.

It’s being a human being and it’s building trust. For those who say, “I don’t know those words. It feels too soft to me. I’m uncomfortable with that.” The other way I offer it up is to say, “Go out and talk to the people who are doing the work.” What you are doing then is you’re doing your own market research. You’re also getting a better handle on as a leader. People are going to have the perspective of how you lead.

Oftentimes, when I’m working with leaders, I’m brought into work with the leader who’s challenged by something. Usually, it’s because team members have said, “I’m ready to quit because of this person.” Ultimately, they’ll talk to the leader and they’re like, “Warmth the heart. Talk about it. I don’t get it.” Let’s look here. When we get this feedback here, I don’t doubt that you’re not doing everything that you think you can do or should be doing to lead. Clearly, from the feedback, you have a PR problem. Let’s fix this PR problem. Let’s go out and do some market research.

These are what I’m inviting them to do. Engage with people in a way that gives them listening and some talking. Without necessarily saying it right up front with them, I’m talking about warmth, understanding and encouragement. You build trust. It’s about finding that language and hoping people understand this is market research. It’s understanding your PR issue. If you’re not leading as effectively as you could be, should be or what.

Leadership Coach

I know you’re a leadership coach and you have your own company. Tell me a little bit about your story. I want to know how did you end up being a leadership coach and you have experience in the corporate world. Tell me about your story, how you ended up setting up your company and what you do.

Let’s see if I can do it in just a few moments. In my experience of three-plus decades, I started out my career in the learning and development space working for a small consulting firm. I love all of Psychology. That’s my educational background and I thought I wanted to be a therapist but I also need to pay for school. I happened to start working for this organization that worked with other companies to build their teams communicate more clearly and handle conflicts.

That’s when I realized I could apply my love of human behavior inside an organization and also merge it. I’m so fascinated by how businesses work. That started a career. On the outside looking into many of these organizations and at some point in my career, I thought, “This is neat. I’m learning so much.” However, I know when that consultant leaves, there’s a bunch of other stuff that happens inside an organization.

Part of my goal, some of them are intentional and some of it felt like a happy stance. I need to work internally. I want to be an internal L&D leader or somehow just work internally in an organization to better understand the dynamics we have in a much larger setting. I did that for a number of years heading up learning and development departments within other organizations. I came to this realization. I think this was the late ‘90s, I believe. When the learning and development we were doing was helpful like when we do workshops in leadership development.

It was helpful but it kept me like, how do we sustain what the aha’s are in these workshops? There was a fall-off. As an educator, I’m like, “How do we make this stick?” I started to explore this thing called coaching. A number of other consultants I was working with said that they were coaches. I said, “Tell me more.” At least the ones that I was observing, I thought, “That doesn’t seem any different than the workshops. We’re just telling. There’s something else. There’s something that’s missing.”

As I delved into this field of coaching, it just resonated with me because it felt like the missing piece of how we develop human beings and make it stick. We all want choice. We want to continue to push the envelope of our own learning in our growth. I gravitated towards coaching. I began my education and became a coach when I was internal in an organization.

As I was there, I ended up over my career moving from one of those organizations. I loved it but things happen mergers, acquisitions, and whatnot. Finally, I found my way to another organization that provides such a wealth of opportunity and yet, there were elements of that organization that weren’t resonating with me after a while. My sense was that the next step for me in my career was, I could handle a much stronger voice if I were to branch out on my own. That’s where what brought me to where I am in having my own coaching and consulting. Along the way, having that voice, figure out what is it that I stand for.

There are a lot of things that interest me, but what got me thinking about whether can I have a stronger voice if I were to show up fully as a coach and less of an L&D leader. There’s nothing wrong with that. I love the L&D department. This is not trash-talking on that. It’s what was right for me, but I also noticed sometimes as an external person, coming to share what I know to be true.

People listen in a different way. I feel deeply for those who are internal who are trying to have a voice and they’re saying the same things that I might say or share. The executive team will have been hearing this internally for however how long, then turn to the external person and say, “Great idea.” I may have gone off a bit of tangent but I want to send the love that’s working internally because I feel you and there’s a way to partner with some of the external coaches and consultants as a way to boost your voice.

It’s what happened to me. You’re going along and for me, I always say that I was like pushed into this direction. It wasn’t a choice. My whole thing started with volunteering and giving my time back to women in need of career advice and stuff like that. That’s snowballed. I’m a full-time entrepreneur and I help women in the corporate world to advance their careers with the intention of confidence.

I was one of those people who said, “I need my paycheck in the bank every two weeks.” I will never be an entrepreneur and here is me now being an entrepreneur, which I never thought would happen that way. As you said, sometimes our past carry us to where we’re supposed to be. You’re very experienced in the leadership space. What are some of the tools that you use to help those leaders when they come to you?

How I work with leaders is it’s their leadership journey and how they’re evolving. A lot of that revolves around their mindset and how they communicate. I look at it from the behavioral perspective. In some ways, I’m a behaviorist because of endless listening for and watching how is somebody working with their own thought process around something.

It’s almost like a self-communication but then it also extends to how they communicate with others. A number of the tools that I use, I do look at assessment tools that can help you better clarify your values, your strengths, and your behavioral and communication styles. Ones some of the core tools that I use are around this model of trust. We’ve been talking about it. Its acceptance, openness, congruence, and reliability.

I use that as the foundational piece to say we might understand your values, your strengths, and your behavioral style. How does that relate to you building trust? How does that relate or where does that show up like your strengths and building trust? Might there be some blind spots for that? That could be with you as a leader. It could be you leading a team or multiple teams. Whether it’s a business unit or an organization.

One of the core tools that I use with them is how to build trust and where your values drive your behaviors and drive those behaviors that build trust. Those are the four ones. There are other tools as I said if you’re leading a team. How aligned is your team? We’re going to look at trusting your team over also going to look at what’s your purpose, value, vision of the team, the roles, the goals, and the priorities.

You’ve got to be future-oriented, but then you got to get down to the nitty-gritty of what happens day to day. Zooming out even further, what’s the culture? Are you instilling trust? We’ve been talking about building trust as a leader. That’s one way, but how is that messaging and the essence of who you are trickling down and out throughout the organization? How are you building trust across the entire organization to create the culture that you want to create? The culture that creates those high-performing teams. From there, there are some other nuanced tools that will get into help you understand as a leader. What do I need to focus on first?

The phrase that you said earlier go slow or start slow to go fast. That’s what is coming up for me because when you think of leadership. Leaders don’t want to talk about trust, compassion, love, and joy, and all those things. They’re like, “Oh.” That’s like, as you said earlier, feel-good stuff. The reality is that companies that aren’t embracing the full person as a human being with problems, feelings, and things that happening in their personal world. They’re not seeing them as people.

Those are the leaders that are not going to be as successful as other leaders that are embracing the human as a whole. Companies that are like, “No, you have to be in the office every single day,” are not going to keep people as much. “We have a flexible schedule.” “I want you in the office two days.” “Any two days is fine.” It’s just such a different conversation.

It is and it reminds me of, we think about, what business are we in? What field are we in? People say, “I make electronic components or we’re in banking or mortgage. We’re in healthcare. It’s about curing a disease.” Yes, those are all true but I don’t stand backseat. What’s your real product? Your product is people because out of all those people, you won’t have the other vision or the mission that you have established.

Inviting all leaders regardless of what field you’re in or what industry you’re in, to stand back and say, “What’s my product?” My first and primary product is my people. The most important when you have people, now we need to talk about heart, understanding, compassion, and curiosity. It’s all of us like that soft stuff. Which many ways, the work that we do, we can create a guidebook on that.

Many people feel like there is no guidebook. “Give me the playbook or guidebook for this and I can figure it out.” People are a little more nuanced than ones and zeroes. It gets confusing and it’s so complex. We can’t fit it into an easy box and we want to step away from that. We see this in leadership. They’re like, “I can’t deal with that.” That does not mean anything. What if you people are your product, isn’t it your thing?

That’s so ironic. Jenna, we’ve had such a wonderful conversation about leadership. Is there maybe one actionable takeaway that you can leave our audience with?

I would say given what we’ve talked about, an undercurrent thing that I’m picking up on is it’s staying open. I’d say curiosity is what’s possible. I’d invite people because we also talked about reflective practice and how important that is. When you feel that you are lacking passion or lost that pizzas, invite people to explore what’s possible through reflective practice and rewrite your story. Rewrite your story like what’s the situation? What’s the story I have about this situation? What else is coming up for me? 

Those are the feelings or the thoughts and the beliefs that are coming up because of that story then examined. Given what I’m feeling about that situation and that story, what is or is not possible based on those feelings or thoughts?

I like that and certified high-performance coaching, we talk a lot about bringing the energy and how you can shift your energy. That reminds me a little bit about that because you can make a decision and a choice to rewrite your story as you said and become passionate. In spite of everything that’s happening around you and still be happy and grounded. Versus, “I hate this job.” “I don’t want to be here.” It’s just such a completely different story in your head. Thank you for that.

You’re welcome. Please, rewrite your story. See what else is possible and shift your energy. Go towards the energy you want.

Jenna, thank you so much for everything. This has been a wonderful conversation. Any final words?

Thank you so much for holding a space for our conversation, Rosie. It’s been such a delight and find words are, ignite your passion by exploring what else is possible. Anything is possible. It’s your choice.

Thank you so much for your time.

Welcome. Thank you.

—

I am so happy when I’m able to have insightful conversations like the one that I just had with Jenna. I just wanted to break down a few of the key items that we chatted about. First off, Jenna emphasized the importance of reflective practice. Taking time to reflect on your values, your purpose, and your goals isn’t just something that you want to do once in a while. It’s important for you to keep that passion in your career alive.

She also reminds us that trust is the backbone of effective leadership. You want to build trust. You want to do it by building respect, acceptance, and being open, and also having a little bit of consistency and reliability. These are all tools that make a leader stand out. Let’s not forget the importance of psychological safety. Creating that where people are free to be themselves speak up, share their ideas, and collaborate is so critically important for you to have a team that is going to be able to be innovative and grow together.

As far as generous actionable takeaway, she says to focus on incorporating warmth, understanding, and encouragement into your leadership style. By doing this, you’re not just building trust but you’re fostering a culture where the team feels safe. I like that actionable tip for sure. All of Jenna’s contact information is going to be on the episode website.

If you haven’t done so already, please take the Promotion Readiness Checklist. This is where you will figure out how ready you are to be promoted. Also, take a look at the Unlocked Leader Within Membership. My goal with this membership is to get you promotion-ready to be able to gain confidence, advocate for yourself, and build an amazing community of incredible women who support each other. Those links will also be on the episode website. With that, remember to be brave, be bold, and take action.

Important Links:

• Jenna Stoliker
• Promotion Readiness Quiz
• LinkedIn – Jenna Stoliker
• Unlock the Leader Within Membership link to Join
• Certified High-Performance Coaching
• 4-Hour VIP Accelerator Bootcamp

About Jenna Stoliker

Jenna Stoliker is a visionary conscious leadership coach and the driving force behind the Center for Conscious Leadership LLC. She empowers emerging and seasoned women leaders to harness unshakable confidence and crystal-clear clarity, leading from their strengths and values. Jenna’s coaching transforms communication, fosters trust, and enables decisive, powerful choices amidst chaos and change.