
The CEO Sage · 2026-06-22 · 18 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
18 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
The episode explores why many people struggle to articulate and pursue their genuine desires, particularly at midlife when past achievements create both advantage and hesitation. The host, drawing on her background coaching adults through University of Phoenix enrollment and later professional coaching with Martha Beck, argues that helping yourself get what you want is foundational to helping others. She traces her philosophy back to Zig Ziglar's principle: "You can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want." The core insight is that patterns of self-sabotage require increased awareness and accountability to break. To address this, she's launching Hot Seat Summer - a four-week, Friday-based coaching program (starting July 10th) at www.thevisionary.ceo/hotseatsummer where participants attend one-hour live sessions in a hot seat format, asking clarifying questions about what they want, why they don't have it, and what concrete actions will change that. The program is designed for anyone confused about their desires, stuck in repetitive patterns, or depleted from not honoring their own priorities.
Hot Seat Summer is a four-week live coaching program running Fridays starting July 10th at www.thevisionary.ceo/hotseatsummer. Participants join one-hour sessions where they can raise their hand to sit in the hot seat and receive direct coaching on what they want, why they don't have it, and what to do about it; non-active participants learn by observing others being coached.
The host credits Zig Ziglar's principle: "You can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want." She argues you cannot authentically help others if you're depleted from ignoring your own priorities, making personal clarity and self-investment prerequisite to genuine generosity.
When you find yourself in an unwanted cycle that keeps repeating - like getting hurt by others' actions and writing policies to prevent recurrence - the solution isn't external rules but internal recalibration; turning up the heat means increasing awareness and accountability through coaching rather than avoiding the emotional work.
Helping adults complete bachelor degrees to unlock choice and opportunity showed her the power of education and advocacy; she learned that a person who believes in you and listens without telling you what to do can catalyze life change, a principle she's applied throughout her coaching career.
By midlife, you've accumulated real estate (experience, achievements, resources) that must be navigated; while this provides advantage, it also creates risk perception - you tell yourself pursuing new things is too risky because you have more to lose than when starting out.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode relies heavily on personal anecdotes and emotional appeals rather than substantive, non-obvious insights. While the core idea - that clarity on wants is foundational - is sensible, it's presented through narrative rambling rather than novel frameworks or data. The host repeats variations of 'get what you want' without unpacking mechanisms, trade-offs, or real operational insights a B2B operator would find actionable.
there's things that we want that we don't have. There's things that we want that we don't think we should want. There's things that we don't want that we think we should want
if the pattern repeats, it's time to turn up the heat, right?
The episode recycles well-worn motivational tropes - Zig Ziglar's quote about helping others, the Oprah-style 'find yourself' framing, and generic coaching platitudes. There is no fresh thinking, counterintuition, or first-principles challenge. The core argument (clarity on wants matters) is presented as if novel but is standard personal development fare.
you can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want
success is a choice, and nobody fails. They just quit before they succeed
This is a solo monologue with no guest. The host is a life/business coach selling a program. While she references her experience and clients, there is no operator-level guest with proven large-scale execution in a specific domain. The episode is primarily a sales pitch for 'Hot Seat Summer.'
I know that there are people right now who have been listening to this podcast for years and I've never met you. Please come. Please invest in yourself.
www.thevisionary.ceo/hotseatsummer
The episode is almost entirely abstract and anecdotal. A single dated example (University of Phoenix enrollment counseling in the mid-1990s) is offered, but with no metrics, timelines, or concrete outcomes. No data on coaching results, client success rates, or measurable business impact is provided. The 'Hot Seat Summer' program details are vague (one hour/week for four weeks, 'really inexpensive' pricing not specified).
I was an enrollment counselor, enrolling adult students into higher education. And this was back in the mid-90s
one hour with me in a room. No content, no videos, no lessons
This is a monologue with no guest interaction, follow-up questions, or intellectual sparring. The host tells long, meandering personal stories without evidence of critical questioning or pushback. The tone is promotional and emotionally manipulative (repeated appeals to insecurity, appeals to invest in the program), not intellectually rigorous. There is no conversational dynamic whatsoever.
if you're sick of yourself and you're sick of thinking about it
you have all these superpowers, but you're tied up because your arms are over here and your legs are over there
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
If the pattern keeps repeating, it's time to turn up the heat. Kris has spent her entire career helping other people get what they want. And she's watching women do the same thing. Pouring everything into helping clients, employees, family, friends figure out what they want, while their own desires sit dormant on a shelf. Here's the truth she's naming: You know what you want. You've always known. The problem isn't figuring it out. The problem is you're scared. You have more to lose now than you did when you started, so you've tempered your dreams. You've muffled the joy and aspiration. You've told yourself it's too risky. And the pattern keeps repeating. In this episode, Kris walks through her own journey of learning to help people get what they really, truly want. Not the surface answer, but the real one. She shares the Zig Ziglar quote that's followed her for decades, why Martha Beck's ten-minute coaching principle changed everything, and what it actually takes to reclaim your own wants.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Hey. Okay, gorgeous. Welcome to the podcast. And I want to talk to you this week about getting what you want.
And I've been thinking about this a lot, getting what you want. I. I, you know, obviously talk to my clients all the time and talk to people in general, and I talk to myself regularly. I talk to my husband.
I talk to all these people. There's a through line, and the through line is there's things that we want that we don't have. There's things that we want that we don't think we should want. There's things that we don't want that we think we should want.
There's things that we experience that confuse us about what we want. A lot of us are very confused right now about what we want. I was talking to Michelle about this today, and I was saying, you know, I think one of the things that happens when you're kind of in the point of life for sure, where she and I are, where we're like midlife, and we have a lot of real estate behind us, and we have a lot of real estate in front of us, and there's a lot of amazingness about the real estate in front of us because we have so much more at this point in our lives than we did when we were young.
We know so much more. We. We have so much experience. We have more resources.
You know, we've developed maturity. We have more emotional understanding. We. We just.
We. We just have so much more. But at the same time, it's almost like that all becomes kind of like. Like cobwebby, like, for us to try and navigate through when we want to see the future, want to see what we want, because we're using everything we've acquired, and we're using all of that as part of the right to see through, to.
To. To leverage, to justify, to validate all the things that I know you do when you think about what you want. We tell ourselves that's too risky. Because you know what?
We do have more to lose now at this point in life than we did when we were just starting out. We were starting out. There was nothing to lose. It was like, let's go, right?
Who cares? Let's go now. It's like, oh, my gosh, what if I do it wrong? I could lose this.
I could lose them. I could mess up. I could. I could screw.
That's very important to me or has been very important to me. And so we temper. I watch us temper what we want. I watch the.
The fizzle, the joy, the enthusiasm. The aspiration of what is our potential, what is possible. I watch us lose it a little bit because of all of this noise. And I.
I've been thinking a lot about getting what you want. A lot about it, because I. I really do believe at the heart of what I've chosen to do with my life is to help people get what they want. It's to help them figure it out, tell themselves the truth, create that resolve and go all in and get it done.
And. And listen, I've. I've rode the wave with so many people who have achieved so much amazingness in their life. Like, it's been amazing to watch people get what they want.
And I was just sitting before I was gonna record this, and I had this memory. And I remember when I just got out of college and I got this job, and I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I really have always been. I was always that girl who, like, didn't know what she wanted to do.
I just went to college because I really wanted to go to college, because I really wanted to be a college student. Not like a learner. Just. I wanted to go to college.
I wanted to live in San Die and live at the beach and just have that life. And I did. I had an amazing time. And that's why I got a degree in recreation, because it was perfect for me.
But so I graduated, and then I still didn't know what I want. Right. Wanted. All my friends were like, I'm gonna be this.
I'm gonna be a teacher. I'm gonna be a social worker. I'm gonna be a nurse. I'm gonna be a marketing person.
I'm gonna. Whatever. I didn't know. So I had a friend who had a job at Healed.
Do you guys rem. No, I take that back. She had a job at the University of Phoenix. And there was an ad in a newspaper.
Cause this is how old I am for a job at Heald, for an admissions counselor or something. And I knew she did something similar, and she was making a lot of money. And so I called her, and I'm like, what do you do? And she told me, and she said, and actually, I'm gonna go open our San Francisco office, so you should come interview with my boss.
And maybe he would put you here where I work in San Jose. And I was like, okay. So I went and met with her boss, and he was an amazing guy. Bob Barker.
That was his name. For real? No, not Price is Right. Another Bob Barker who has since passed on.
And he he just switched. He was a delightful, funny, incredible human. And he hired me. He had no business hiring me other than I was relatively good at interviewing, I think.
And so I got the job. And so here I was being an enrollment counselor, enrolling adult students into higher education. And this was back in the mid-90s, when, you know, University of Phoenix was just getting really. Just getting started.
And I know a lot of people know about it now, but I assure you, like, it was such a credible, incredible organization to work for. And anyway, that's another conversation. So regardless, somewhere along the line, I picked. I struggled, though.
I struggled in the role. I struggled to be successful. I got all sorts of great tutoring from a really amazing mentor of mine. And I know I've talked about this in a previous podcast, so I won't bore you with all of that, but I decided, right, to believe him.
And he said that success is a choice, and nobody fails. They just quit before they succeed. And I have kept that mantra for years. And then I also found this little quote, and it was a zig Ziglar quote, and many of you may know it.
And it was, you can have anything you want in life if you help enough, enough other people get what they want. And I had that. I. I don't know if I typed it.
I'm not. Or I put it in my computer, and then I printed it on a little piece of pink paper, and I. I taped it to my computer at my monitor, and I looked at it every day because I was talking to grown adults who were mostly in their 40s who had not completed their bachelor's degrees. And this, again, this is in the mid-90s.
It was a really big deal to not have your degree and to have arrived at a level of success that they were at. There was fear in these people because if they got fired or laid off, they would not replicate their salary or that. And they also knew they had no ascendancy opportunity without a degree. And they were.
They were genuinely scared about their limitations because they didn't have a degree. And so I just knew how powerful it would be for them to get an education to unlock choice. And I was really passionate about what I did, and I ended up being very good at it. And then I became a manager, and I just decided to treat my client or my customers, excuse me, my employees, like my customers, my clients.
I'm going to help these people who work for me get what they want. And that has been what I've been doing for most of my life. Even when I was Young and I didn't even know it. I was, I was helping friends and things figure out what they want and how to get it.
It's just something I love to do and it comes very naturally to me. And I know that there is a power in allowing yourself to be seen and heard in that way. When somebody who really means it looks at you and says, what is it that you want, my love? What do you really want?
And you. And they listen to you, they listen to your answer and they don't tell you what to do. They remind you of why you can absolutely haven't. Are there steps to follow?
Of course. Will it be hard? For sure. But that moment where we recalibrate your belief in yourself is magic.
So then I did coach training and I did that with Martha Beck and she had a mantra and her mantra was that her coaches needed to be able to change someone's life in 10 minutes. And I've always taken that seriously. When I talk to someone for the first time, I really do believe that within that 10 minutes I can help you change your life. It doesn't mean I'm magic, it doesn't mean I'm a guru, it just means that I know how to help you believe yourself.
And there is nothing more powerful than a woman who regains her own self belief and self agency. Seriously. And then I started to do these Hawaii Retreats, right, 2012. I did my very first one and I had been in a mastermind where someone asked me the question, what is it that you really, really, really want?
And that you've got to ask it three times, what is it that you really, really, really, really want? Like, cut out the fluff, what do you really, really, really, really want? And so when I went to Hawaii for the first time, that was the question I led with. And I watched the room, I watched people like not give the I really like, you know, Mercedes, I'd really like.
Which listen, is fine. If that's what you really, really, really, really want, I think you should have it. I don't have any judgment about what you want. But.
But what happens when we ask it that way is we peel back to the source of want. What is it? And then what am I willing to do to get it? How will I know?
What am I not doing? What do I keep repeating that's getting in the way? What are my patterns? There are so many things we can unearth for ourselves, right?
And so, you know, I have been really focusing on this. I went to Disneyland last week. I had a mastermind with my good friend Jody Moore, which she's amazing. And if you, you know, if you're a coach and you want to start a business, you should for sure be working with Jody.
That's an aside. But we were talking about getting what we want, and I sat in my bed that day, and I just designed a whole experience that I wanted to create, and I brought it to Michelle and I said, I just want to coach people on what they want. Like, I know that's really simple, but I believe it is, like, the most important thing I do and could continue to do. I just want to help people get more of what they want.
And she was so cute because she said, hot seat Summer. And I'm like, what? And she's. She's like, let's just do it.
Let's just do, like, four weeks of coaching and call it Hot Seat Summer. And I was like, oh, my God. Hot Seat Summer. And then here's what's really funny is a week ago, I was coaching a client through Voxer.
I hope you guys are following my crazy brain. Anyway, a week ago, I was coaching a client on Voxer, and she's. She sort of runs into this same challenge, and it's a challenge that so many of us face. People do things, in her case, in her business, that hurt her feelings, and then she gets mad, and then she wants to, like, write policies to fix it, right?
And I'm like, no policy is going to change your feelings. What's going to change your feelings is your decision to redefine how you define these experiences that you've been having. How do you want to think about this instead of the way that you've always thought about it? And I.
I told her that I was in the shower thinking about her. Not that way, people. I was just. That's where I tend to have a lot of ideas.
And I had this thought, and it was, if the pattern repeats, it's time to turn up the heat, right? And I told her that. She was like, oh, my God, I love that. And so, because you need.
If. If you are. You are in a pattern, if you are in a cycle that you don't want anymore, you're working against yourself. It's like you.
You. You know, you don't want to do what you're doing, but you do it anyway, then we need to turn the heat up. And not in like a toxic, icky poo way, but in a. Like.
No, let's pay attention to that. Let's put a light on it. Put you in the Hot Seat. Let's do some coaching.
And so we created it. We created Hot Seat Summer. So we're gonna do four weeks of coaching starting July 10th. One hour with me in a room.
You have to be in the room. No content, no videos, no lessons. You know, hubbub that gets you distracted and that makes you feel like you're behind. You're just gonna come and you're gonna raise your hand and you're gonna have a chance to be in the hot seat.
And once you're in the hot seat, I'm gonna talk to you about what it is that you want, why you don't have it, and what we're gonna do about it. And we're gonna do that. We're gonna do it for four weeks. And after four weeks, you will see and learn.
First of all, you're gonna learn a tremendous amount just by watching other women get coached. And third, second and third, you're going to now have all these questions that I ask, all this way of going through this process that you don't have right now. And you're going to get all of this on a replay, and it will all be part of a podcast. I have never, ever done something like this before.
I don't know if I will do it again. It's four weeks. Go to www.thevisionary.
ceo/hotseatsummer. www.thvisionary.ceo/hotseatsummer and grab a seat.
It's really, really inexpensive. We're doing this because this is what I want to talk to you about. I can help you, mama, but you have got to get in the seat. So if you're sick of yourself and you're sick of thinking about it and there's something that you know you want, or you're like, dude, I don't know what I want.
And I'm sick of being confused. I am sick of stand standing still. I am stick sick of being, like, frozen, like Mrs. Incredible.
Like, you have all these superpowers, but you're tied up because your arms are over here and your legs are over there, and you can't do anything. Let's unwind you. You have so much left to do. To create, to be, to experience.
And just like I honored that quote for myself, if you. When you help enough other people get what they want, you can have what you want. I didn't say that right. You can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
The same is true for you. But it's really hard to help other people. It's really hard to lean into the needs of other people when you're depleted because you have not honored what's important to you. This is your opportunity for your personal investment.
Four weeks, one hour a week, Fridays. We're doing it on Fridays starting on July 10th. www.thevisionary.
ceo/hotseatsummer. The doors are open now and we will limit it because I don't, I want, I really do want to be able to talk to people. So, but we'll, I, I have no clue what to expect about how many people are going to register for this, but I'm, I'm excited because I just can't wait. I just can't wait to help you.
I know that there are people right now who have been listening to this podcast for years and I've never met you. Please come. Please invest in yourself. Please do this.
Come on. It might just change your life. Love. Let's go.