997: Stop Holding Yourself Back: How to Become the Most Referred Voice in Your Industry | Leadership Mindset

You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you may not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $946 by new customers who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary. Welcome to Shameless Leadership. I'm your host Sarah Dean. This show is for women, transgender people, non binary folks as well as allies who are committed to advancing their leadership while also advancing the leadership of those around them. In each episode we will offer practical tips, leadership strategies and inspiring stories to help you become a more confident, compassionate and inclusive leader. The truth is you were born to lead what might happen for you if you were to wholeheartedly embrace that part of yourself. So let's start now together. Hello Shameless Leaders. Today we are going to be talking about becoming a go to voice in your industry and really helping you develop your leadership visibility and your expertise visibility in order to create more opportunities for yourself. We've been talking a lot in recent episodes about thought leadership and about what you want to be known for and how you want to be seen and this episode really falls right in line and dovetails from those conversations. You don't have to listen to those episodes first to get a lot of value out of this one, but you can also go back and listen to those after you listen to this to see where you can use and how you can develop thought leadership in ways that support everything we're going to talk about today. So we're going to be talking about developing your voice and leveraging your knowledge, expertise, experience in ways that help you become more visible and find more opportunities in your industry. And we're going to dispel some myths today. We're going to also be talking about strategy and we're going to be thinking about talking through different ways where women tend to really get this wrong and some of the misnomers where we get in our own way and other people get opportunities because we have put self imposed rules in place that hold us back and leave this playing field wide open for others to go in our place and at our expense in many cases. So this episode's gonna be a little juicy in terms of challenging you in that way and challenging you to really go for what you want and make space for yourself, because, spoiler alert, no one else is gonna do it for you. And I'll give you some examples of how I've seen that play out over and over again today as we are talking through things. So I wanna address first that when we're thinking about becoming a go to voice in your industry and becoming an expert and becoming known for something or. Or authority in a certain area, that you are the person that gets to position this for yourself. This isn't about you waiting for someone else to say, oh, I've really recognized that now you're an expert. No, it really. This happens because you step up and say, I have knowledge and expertise and experience and a unique perspective and something that needs to be said and a way to add value, maybe in ways that no one else is adding value or talking about things or doing things right now. So it's really about you carving the space out for yourself, more so than waiting for others to carve it out for you. And that's one of the very first and most important ways that we get in our own way, is that we think that if we have the right pieces in place or that we have a certain level of expertise or credibility, that people will just come to us and create spaces for us to show up and be highly decorated, visible authority figures. And that's not how it works. It really works by you creating those spaces for yourself. So maybe you are in a position where you find yourself thinking that you want to have more influence or more impact. Maybe you want to be recognized for your expertise. Maybe you're recognizing that the people around you aren't that smart. And I say this with like, a decent level of respect, but also a little bit tongue in cheek because this happens so often with women that I work with where they start to recognize that sometimes the people leading them, and oftentimes it's in tech organizations led mostly by males, that they recognize the leaders leading them aren't any smarter than them. And yet there's this, like, pecking order that everyone feels like they have to be subservient to, and we start to recognize, oh, wait, like, I have important things to say that no one else is saying, and maybe are smarter than some of the people like, that are above me are saying, and how do I get recognized for those things? You might also be thinking that you want to be considered for bigger opportunities. You might want to be thinking that you are ready to be known for something. You'd like to be known for something. You might be thinking that you want to safeguard your career or future proof your career, as we've been talking about in recent episodes. And so all of these things, especially in the age of AI, all of these things are really, really important. And also opportunities for you to take note and notice. Are you sitting thinking about, oh, I would love this and I would like that, and maybe someday versus no, I'm going to just go make it happen. And this I will say over the course of my career and my career in multiple fields at this point, and being a business owner for 23 years now is really where I have been able to create opportunity for myself by not waiting around for other people to come to me and not waiting around because things need to be done in a certain order or I need to have a certain level of expertise or a certain, you know, a number of certifications or a certain degree to be able to be seen in a certain way or to be able to be credible or have authority in an arena at any level. And so that's what I want for you. I want you to recognize that you can be ready now, you are capable now, you have what you need now. And let's stop waiting around and let's go get the thing that you want. Let's go create those opportunities for yourself. So many times we think we make the mistake of thinking that opportunities will lead to visibility and that's when things will open up for us. But the truth is the opposite. Visibility leads to opportunity and that visibility that's on you. Creating visibility for yourself is not anyone else's job, and it's not a favor most people are going to do for you. And I've definitely learned this the hard way over the years. And so I've had to create visibility for myself in all sorts of different ways, many times in many uncomfortable ways. But PS it gets better over time. It gets less comfortable or it gets more more comfortable and the discomfort gets less over time. And it's in creating those moments of vis visibility for myself, that opportunities then came my way. So it's not that opportunities lead to visibility, it's that visibility leads to opportunities and that visibility is created on you so that then others can bring you the opportunities. So when we're thinking about those opportunities, we're thinking about how can we put ourselves in positions so that when there's an opportunity, someone comes to us and that we're the person that's Top of mind. And so this means that we need to be getting in front of people and in front of the right people and in the right space, spaces repeatedly. So that when there's something new on the horizon, someone isn't casting a wide net and instead they're immediately thinking, oh, Sarah's the person for that role. Jane is the person for that role. Chris is the person I've been waiting for. We are putting ourselves out there enough that people seek us out when they see some, when they have an opening come up or when they have an opportunity come up. When we're thinking about visibility and the opportunities that might come from visibility, this is things like being interviewed for an article, being invited to be interviewed on a podcast, podcasts, being asked to speak, whether it's on a panel or an industry event, being asked to lead certain meetings, being asked to lead maybe meetings or internal events where you get to, you know, build your credibility within your company or organization in a way that also you can leverage in your greater field. This might be nominated for awards or being invited to have a board position. This might be being recommended for promotions. So these kinds of opportunities come by way of establishing visibility. First, we often think that opportunities come to certain people because maybe they just got lucky or they know someone or they more qualified or they have more years or more education or that certain certification or degree or what have you. And sometimes that can be true. But when we believe that, and we believe that those are the only ways people got the things that they got, then we limit ourselves and hold ourselves back, thinking, well, I don't have that, so I'm not ready, qualified, worthy, and therefore I'm not going to make myself visible for those kinds of opportunities moving forward. So more often than someone just being lucky or knowing someone or being the most qualified person in the room, it's that the people that get opportunities have become visible in certain ways where they are associated or known for a specific idea or a specific solution and a level of expertise, a unique perspective, a solution to a problem that they, they've solved differently than others, so that when an opportunity arises, people immediately think of them because they've done something that stands out in a certain way. Now, this doesn't mean that you need to be like, you know, extraordinarily highly visible every day of your life, but it does mean that over time, you are building those visibility moments for yourself so that people see you and think of you again when opportunities present themselves or when there's space to rope you in, loop you in, and and make you a part of something. As I was thinking through this episode and thinking through, how can I put this, how can I frame this in a way that helps you see how best to help yourself and in a way that is measured and linear and like, you know, step by step process. I consulted with some AI, but I put together, I was like, here's the steps that I want to be able to use for this process and how can I put this into a pyramid kind of a framework that helps us see how people rise over time in terms of building visibility to the point of being able to then attract opportunities and create opportunities for ourselves. And so again, I created this with the help of AI, but I think it's really helpful and I am calling out the AI use here because we're going to talk about AI in a minute and I think it's interesting, helpful and also like, for the sake of transparency, I use this with the help of AI, but also it was my own work that I put into AI to say, hey, help me build this out a little bit further, help me elevate this a little bit more. And so using AI as a thought partner, and I want to be clear when we're talking about using AI as a thought partner, which is a whole nother episode, so I'm not going to go too far into this, but when we're talking about using AI as a thought partner, what can happen is that we can have an idea and we can have these certain pieces together, but when we use AI as a thought partner, it can bring it to the next level. And now we can talk about it in a certain way that that can elevate us or make us stand out from other people. And so that's what I did with this. And I think that it's helpful to acknowledge that. And also as I was putting this together, I was like, oh, this is really interesting and to me, rather fun in a nerdy, dorky sort of way. But I was like, oh, I could use this in a lot of different ways. So one of the ways we'll be here with you all today, I'm also, as many of you know, I'm leading a thought leadership workshop, free workshop. Anyone can join in a couple weeks. If you go to sarah dean.com future you can sign up for my future proof your leadership in your work workshop. I will definitely make sure I pop this in there as well and we'll touch on it again because I think again, I think it's really helpful for us to just see how we can start at one point, at one point from just what we know and what we've experienced, move through and elevate that to a place that really opens up opportunity for us. So here's what I created in this Authority Ascension pyramid. Basically, this is like you building authority through ascending through this pyramid. And so we're starting at a bottom level. So if you imagine a pyramid, we have a bottom level, that broad base in the bottom of a triangle. And this is where everyone gets to exist. And so in that bottom level, that first level is competence. And so in that competence level, we're looking at expertise, experience, unique point of view. Again, anyone, Everyone gets to exist in this bottom level. So this is the place that we're at the phase that we're at when we are building our expertise through years of experience, through our lived experience, through education, through learning over time. And then with all that learning and experience, we're also developing and curating our unique perspective, our unique point of view. Maybe talking about things in ways that other people don't talk about them, maybe thinking through like, these are the steps that I think are most important to solve this certain problem. Or this is the framework that we use here in my team. So we're starting to recognize where we have this competence. And anyone can build any. Everyone is always building that competence. So this bottom base of this pyramid, everyone's existing there, right? Everyone has a space here, the next piece here, this is where not everyone necessarily ascends to the next level. So the next level is the clarity level. And at the clarity level of this Ascension Authority, Ascension pyramid, this is where we're developing frameworks and thought leadership, and we are articulating it and spelling it out in a way that is really specific and unique to you. So this is where you're moving from that broad base of knowledge and expertise and experience and your unique perspective where it's just kind of all floating around and you're starting to put a few things together and building them out in ways that can be useful and helpful and highly valuable to others. And so maybe this is highly valuable to, you know, anyone who works in your field. Maybe it's highly valuable to a super, super tiny niche in your field or in a niche in the work that you do. But you have that clarity in terms of, here's the thing that I'm building that's unique and different. Here's what I'm putting together ideas and concepts and connecting dots and making connections or filling gaps and holes that maybe other people haven't been able to do or don't frequently do in my industry. So this is where your really putting things together and adding in some of your own secret sauce so that this is something that is unique to you that you are now sharing to be of service and support and helpful and high value to other people. The next step of that pyramid is contributing. And so again sometimes we, you know, everyone gets to exist in that bottom competence level. Some people choose to go into that clarity step. But contributing now is like I'm looking specifically for places to be more visible. I'm actively seeking places to share these insights and be seen sharing these insights. And so that might be on LinkedIn, on social media, this might be in team meetings, this might be in mentorship opportunities. So talking about the things that you do, the things that you talk about, the things and frameworks that you've put together in ways that can be helpful to other people. This might be in board meetings, this might be in panel discussions, it might be speaking at industry events. This might be in interviews for articles or publications. This might be creating, writing your own interviews or creating, writing your own articles and publications and books even. This can be all sorts of things where either you are being positioned by someone else as an expert or you are creating your own thing. This episode is supported by Monarch. I love using the Monarch app to get my summer spending all situated and I've been able to do that in advance this year by using Monarch. So Monarch is a personal finance app that tracks everything, accounts, investments, savings goals and spending. And you can get your first year of Monarch Core for half off, just 50 with the promo code. Shameless. 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When I was in the fitness industry, I spent a number of years hoping, trying, wishing, dreaming to get on stages of other fitness professionals at fitness events. And so I thought, okay, like here's these guys who've built these big huge fitness events for fitness business owners and for people in the, you know, leaders in the fitness industry. And I want to speak on those stages someday. And at a certain point I realized these dudes, they only have their friends on stages and I'm not even though I actually was friendly with some of them, like they weren't for the most part, they weren't bringing women on stage and they certainly weren't bringing women on stage who were not in their super tight inner circle. And so I realized, oh, hmm, I'm gonna have to create my own events if this is where I want to be able to show up and shine. So when we're looking in this contributing phase, we're not waiting for someone else, someone else's invitation. We're creating our own opportunities. And so I started doing this at my gym, I had my own gym. And I was like, okay, like I'm going to host a workshop on this topic. This is a topic I would love to, you know, go to an industry event and speak on stage about. But I don't have that opportunity right now. I'm just going to practice talking about it in my own community and create an event in my own gym and invite the community to come and make it, you know, a free or low, low investment offer where people can come in. So that's in that contributing space where we are creating moments of visibility for ourselves. We're putting ourselves out there in different ways and some of those ways are going to be lower stakes and some of them might be a little bit higher stakes and we might feel a little more uncomfortable. But you're pitching yourself and sometimes you get a yes, sometimes you get a no. You're getting comfortable with rejection and you're getting comfortable handling objectively to be like, oh, okay, like, I asked if I could do this thing, they said no, no big deal. And then there's other things, other visibility opportunities that we might create where it's, we're creating it in a way where we don't need a yes or a no. So for me, like, like I started a podcast, like, no one can tell me no, right? So maybe you don't want me to come speak on your stage, but I'm gonna build my own podcast where I don't need an invitation. I can show up here every week and talk about what I wanna talk about. The fourth level of this authority ascension pyramid is gonna be credibility confirmed. And so in that credibility confirmed position or phase, you are becoming increasingly known and trusted. So you are getting yourself out there, you're getting, you know, you're making these visibility opportunities for yourself and people are seeing what you're doing and you're starting to become a little of this. So people are recognizing, like, oh, I went to this event and I heard this person speak, or oh, I was at this, you know, organ, this meeting for our off site today and this one leader said this great thing and oh, my gosh it just blew me away. Like I want them to come talk to my team too. So this is where we're being seen and that credibility is being established and people are noticing and, and recognizing like, oh, that was a great thing that that person said or did or I love the way that they talked about that. So people are starting to see you and know you for what you talk about, for what your unique perspective position is, your unique point of value that you're adding. And then the last final point, the peak of that pyramid is called upon. And that is where people are calling upon you, that is where they are bringing the opportunities to you. So instead of you needing to go out and create those opportunities for yourself constantly, some of those opportunities are starting to land in your lap. Now as someone who has been in the place of being called upon, I still do a lot of that middle, middle part of the pyramid where I'm contributing. So there's always a balance of, yeah, I'm gonna be, I wanna be available if someone calls upon me. And also I'm still creating a lot of visibility opportunities for myself all the time. So it's not just like you get to the top of the pyramid and then you just sit there and opportunities just come to you all the time. We're usually almost always, in fact probably always also still participating in that contributing phase. And so we're contributing, we're continuing to build credibility. That's like never ending journey. And then those opportunities are coming and we'll be able to be at that apex. So again, not everyone's going to climb this pyramid, not everyone wants to, not everyone needs to depends on your goals. But I want to argue that in an AI driven world, people that are climbing this pyramid are the people that are going to still be standing after we really see how this whole age of AI plays out. Because these are the people that are going to be more indispensable because they're going to be known for something that can't be replaced by AI because they're going to have a unique perspective, they're going to be great critical, critical thinkers. They're going to be able to connect dots and engage in conversations. And so we'll dig into that a little bit more in just a minute. There's now an opportunity equation here which looks like expertise plus visibility plus credibility equals opportunity. So when we climb that pyramid, we're putting those pieces together, expertise plus credibility. And that gives us that opportunity and that allows us to become one of those go to voices in the industry. So where do women miss the mark? Women miss the mark here with visibility and opportunity because they focus entirely on expertise, and they think, well, I just need to get smarter at this thing. I just need to learn more. And they don't focus on visibility, and then they miss out on the opportunity that comes from visibility. And so I see this in people that are heavily invested in academia and so, so smart and have multiple degrees and multiple masters and maybe multiple doctorates, and yet they haven't positioned themselves as an industry expert to get some of the opportunities that they want outside of academia, even though they are so well qualified. We see this when we have people who are really smart, but maybe they've stayed in the same role for so long and they've been so comfortable in that role or so comfortable in a particular organization or industry that they haven't challenged themselves to step into different kinds of visibility in order to create opportunity for themselves. The next way that women miss the mark is that we wait too long. We wait until someone else deems us expert enough or we wait until we feel ready. And P. S, you'll never feel fully ready for more visibility. We'll always feel awkward and uncomfortable and a little bit messy and probably a little bit scrappy. We tell ourselves, oh, I need, like, more another certification or I need to get through this one thing, or I need to figure this thing out first. And while we're doing all of that, telling us the story about how we're not qualified enough, someone else else gets the opportunity. Someone else gets to do whatever it is that we are waiting to qualify ourselves for. The next way we miss the mark is that we think that there's some formula or order of operations or timeline or protocol that we must follow in order to get from point A to point B rather than just diving in and getting started. And so we think that, like, oh, I can't do it till I get to this level, or until this person says I'm ready, or until, like, my boss gives me the right steps, or until my boss approves of me doing this thing, or until my company, like, you know, says that we can go do these things. And so we. And I'm not saying, like, you should go against your boss or your company, but we get in our head with, like, thinking that there's some sort of order of operations to creating visibility and becoming a goat, a known person in our industry. And that's not true. You get to make your own rules. And anyone who's getting opportunity, the opportunities that you want, have done it in some way by making their own rules and not waiting around for things to be done in a certain order. We also stay too long in someone else's system or someone else's timeline. And so again, thinking that like, well, the system works in this way or the timeline works in this way through these steps and waiting for that to play out and letting other people dangle carrots for us, telling us that this is the way that things operate instead of going and growing our own garden. And I've seen this with so many of my clients, especially women in middle management positions who have male bosses who keep telling them, you just need to do this, this and this to get to the next level. And they keep doing all those things and not getting promot to the next level. They're letting people dangle carrots without going and growing their own garden. And when they come and coach with me and we start cultivating their own garden, it is wild to see the opportunities that start to open up. I also see women missing the mark by getting in their own heads about outshining others and thinking, you know, I don't want to be shinier than my boss. I don't want to like be on a stage that my boss hasn't been on or I don't want to like, we get this weird thing about power dynamics and understandably so in many cases, but it holds us back. And then with all that we create or live by rules that don't actually exist, that limit us and benefit others. So what I want you to be thinking about as we're working through this, as you're thinking about this Ascension authority, Ascension Pyramid is what are the things that you want to be doing and how can you start doing some of those things? Getting, speaking about the things, you know, the frameworks that you've developed or that, or developing a framework to speak in internal meetings, facilitating new kinds of discussions and conversations within your department or within your organization, intentionally developing a specific point of view, building out a framework, getting published, insights, you know, becoming a known entity, whether it's on LinkedIn or someone that's just talking consistently about the same thing in multiple places, or talking about the same thing in the same place over and over again so that you get recognized for that, mentoring others, volunteering to be in discussions and on panels, saying yes to small opportunities for practice and getting in the reps. This is the kind of thing that over time, these small visibility moments will position you for major opportunities down the road. Code and this is also where your perspective, your judgment, this context, the development of trust all allows you to become this known entity, this known expert that cannot be replaced by AI. You become your own commodity and you become known for something. And you are now not someone who just holds information. You are actually a guide of information. And now you can help people because you're someone who's proving yourself. You're someone who can step up and lead. You can show up and be unafraid of visibility. You can be nimble in chaos and change. And this all makes you AI resistant. So how can you start to incorporate these things so that you can be visible in these smaller ways to then become positioned, well positioned for the opportunities that you really want to get for yourself. So leaders who get invited into bigger conversations are not necessarily the smartest or the most credentials or the most decorated in the room. They're often the ones who've done the work clarifying what they stand for for what they know and how they want to contribute. And then they go after those small opportunities and sometimes bigger opportunities stretching themselves. And this is all what I'm going to be talking about in my Thought Leadership workshop coming up on June 24th. So if you're interested in joining us for that, go ahead and pop over to sarahdean.com future and you can join us for how to future proof your work and how to future proof your leadership on June 24th at 9am Pacific, 12pm Eastern. Can't wait to see you there. But regardless of whether or not you join us on the 24th, know that these are the steps that you can start taking today. To be known for what you want to be known for and to be a go to voice in your industry. Right now. You're already qualified. You don't need to wait for something more. Thank you for being here. I can't wait to be back with you next week. And until then, know that I'm in this with you always. Thank you so much for being here and allowing me to spend time in your ear today. I take that responsibility very seriously. If you're interested in learning more about my speaking training and executive coaching services, you can go to Sarah Dean. That's S A R A d e a n.com if you have follow up questions or comments about this episode, please come join me on LinkedIn@Sarah Dean.com LinkedIn there's nothing I love more than a listener dropping into my DMs. Thank you for taking the time to show up for yourself today. I see you, I hear you and I am holding space for you today and every single day. This is a Monday.com ad. The same Monday.com helping people worldwide getting work done faster and better. The same Monday.com designed for every team and every industry. The same Monday.com with built in AI scaling your work from day one. 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