Last week my friend Sammy, Senior Director of Accounting Operations, shared advice on how to effectively work with the C-suite. We basically peeled back the layers on becoming the person that c-level leaders want to meet with every week.

PS - There’s a special Reframed update at the end of this newsletter :)

One conversation made me stop apologizing for getting frustrated at work. Here’s what changed and why it’s effective.

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I was frustrated yesterday, so I found myself about to click “cancel” on my morning yoga class. But instead of giving in, I went. My Sunday instructor is the perfect kind of crazy, insisting that she has to kill us so that we can earn our corpse pose (Shavasana).

I’m glad she did.

Somewhere in Shavasana, I thought about one of the best pieces of advice I ever received at work.

Early in my leadership journey, I was thrust into a tense situation with an unhappy executive. Every instinct told me to fight for my life. I went into full on defense mode — over-explaining, getting snippy, digging in. After I came up for air, I was embarrassed. My 1:1 was the next day and I walked in ready to get lectured.

That’s not what happened.

I started the meeting by apologizing before my manager could say a word. I almost fell out of my chair when I realized he wasn’t angry about my little shenanigans the day before. He told me my reaction was a sign that I cared and that caring was a good thing.

He was right.

And I don’t think he realized how much those words meant, because I finally felt seen. “Defensive,” “combative,” and “emotional” were all labels that could’ve easily been lobbed at me. It’s not lost on me that they often are, especially at women that look like me.

But he didn’t go there.

Btw - women are roughly 11 times more likely than men to be labeled “abrasive,” seven times more likely to be called “opinionated,” and twice as likely to be described as “unlikeable”.

He saw what was underneath: a desire to do great work. He then challenged me to channel that energy differently in the future, to have a conversation instead of firing off emails. Not because that was the “right” way, but because he trusted me to care as much about the solution as I did about the problem.

I’ve repeated that advice more times than I can count throughout my career (and I still do) because it’s so relevant for high achievers. Hearing those words that day made me understand myself, it helped me give myself grace, and it helped me stop being ashamed when I felt frustrated about work.

He changed everything for me, in just two sentences.

THE RESEARCH

What Personality Research Reveals About High Achievers

Frustration at work gets misread all the time. Perfectionism. Rigidity. Being high-strung. If you’ve been called any of those things, you probably treat them like a character flaw — something to fix, to manage, to hide.

But in my experience, the more accurate label for high achievers is simpler: you care.

You care about the work, about quality, about the people around you. And when you think about it that way, the challenge becomes learning what to do with your intensity.

Most workplaces solve for the wrong problem, leaders wait for bad behavior to surface before addressing it. By then, you’re already under stress, already running hot, already getting told to “stay positive.” Toxic positivity fills the gap that honest conversations and candid feedback should occupy. It doesn’t help anyone.

I recently started using a personality diagnostic called Deeper Signals with my clients. It’s built on the Five Factor Model (the most scientifically validated framework for understanding personality at work) and was developed using data from over 150,000 working adults across 180 countries. The assessment identifies your core drivers and, more importantly, your risks: what happens to those drivers when you’re under pressure.

Unsurprisingly, most of my clients share the following core drivers: Disciplined, Driven, Passionate. These are the kinds of traits that build great careers. But what I love the most about Deeper Signals is that the assessment also names the blind spots associated with those strengths. When under pressure, someone with the Disciplined core driver has a high risk of seeming Rigid. And someone with a Passionate core driver under pressure? They run the risk of seeming Intense.

When high achievers are under pressure, their strengths show up as non-productive workplace behaviors.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of organizational psychology at Columbia and UCL and one of the tool's founders, describes personality as "a set of default settings rather than an immutable operating system." I agree. The times you’re uncharacteristically too emotional, too rigid, too intense? They’re really just expressions of your core drivers under stress. The way to solve that isn’t pretending to be zen all the time or by aiming to never get upset or frustrated at work, it’s knowing how to channel those feelings differently.

That's exactly what my manager was telling me in that 1:1 all those years ago. And it's what made the difference for me.

THE FRAMEWORK

How To Handle 3 Scenarios Where You Might Be Tempted to Be Rigid, Frustrated, or Intense

The advice my manager gave me that day didn't come with a manual. He gave me the reframe (your frustration is a sign you care) and trusted me to figure out the rest. What I've learned since then, through years of coaching high achievers through their own versions of that moment, is that developing self awareness and breaking your old patterns is the hard part. So I wanted to share three situations where frustration tends to show up at work and the productive and nonproductive ways to handle each.

Scenario 1: Your manager gives you zero feedback

If you’re in a situation where your manager doesn’t give you feedback, it can leave you wondering whether you’re on the right track or completely off it.

• The nonproductive response: This situation makes it tempting to fill the silence with stories you've made up. You assume no news is bad news. You tell yourself they're too busy, too passive, or that they don't support you. Before you know it, you're not focused on solving anything. You're just focused on your needs not getting met. The stories feed your anxiety slowly and eat away at your confidence over time. Your manager becomes the problem that you fixate on.

• The productive response: Channel that frustration into solving the actual problem, which is: how do I get feedback? You want to make the ask small enough so that your manager can actually answer it. Stay away from broad questions like "how do you think I'm doing?". Questions like that are too open ended, too loaded, too easy to deflect with "you're doing great." Instead try the “2 and 2 approach”. Say something like: “I’ve been here two months and I feel good about the work I’m doing. I’d love to get your perspective on two things I’m doing well and two areas I should stay focused on.”

Two and two. That’s it. Specific enough to get real answers. The use of “focus on” is purposeful, particularly if you have a manager that shies away from giving direct feedback. “Focus” is approachable enough that even the most passive manager can respond.

Remember: you don’t need a performance review to get feedback, nor should you wait an entire year to know how you’re doing! You just need to ask for it in a way that makes it easy to give.

Scenario 2: You’re handed an ambiguous project with no clear direction

There will likely be times when your manager drops something on your desk unexpectedly, a big presentation, a market entry strategy, a new initiative and the instructions are essentially: figure it out. There’s no framework. No guardrails. Just the assignment and the expectation that you’ll deliver.

• The nonproductive response: The problem you're actually trying to solve is the ambiguity itself. Your instinct is to get clear, so you ask for more direction. It feels responsible. Conscientious even. But I need to be honest with you, sometimes ambiguity isn’t an accident. At your level, the ability to exercise judgment in unclear situations IS your job. Asking for a detailed roadmap can backfire against you and signal you’re not quite operating at a senior leadership level yet.

• The productive response: Accept the ambiguity and solve the real problem — delivering on the ask. Use your judgment, put together a first draft, and give yourself time to gather feedback. Then share it: “I put the market entry plan together. I’d love to walk you through my thinking and get feedback before presenting to the leadership team.”

Scenario 3: You’re frustrated with how a leader operates

Maybe they’re scattered. Maybe they’re exacting to the point of being utterly exhausting. Maybe they make decisions in ways that feel arbitrary, slow, or political. Whatever the flavor, you’ve decided they’re doing it wrong and you’re spending your energy being frustrated about it.

• The nonproductive response: The problem you're trying to solve is their leadership style, as if getting them to operate differently is the goal. Oop! Been there, it’s tempting. The problem here is that you assume your way is right because it works for you. So you keep running your process, communicating your way, operating on your timeline, and waiting for them to come around. They won't. And the friction you're creating is hurting you more than them.

• The productive response: The real problem to solve is building a productive working relationship. Get curious about what they actually need instead of what you think they should want. What does this leader care most about? What makes them trust someone? What do they need from you to feel confident in the work? The answers become your roadmap. Not for becoming someone you're not, but for building enough relationship capital to actually influence how things get done.

The leaders who navigate difficult personalities best prioritize relationships over being right and then use that relationship to move things in the right direction.

Looking back, that manager gave me more than grace that day; he handed me a playbook.

He didn’t just help me understand myself, he was also signaling something else: that he expected me to solve problems, not just defend myself. To have an impact, not just opinions and criticism. It seems small but it’s the difference between being seen as reactive and someone who’s seen as a leader.

He gave me control over my reputation and how I showed up with my peers and execs.

If you care that something went wrong or that you were misunderstood, I’d bet money that you’re also equally as invested in caring about the solution too. Channel your care productively.

Good luck!

Ashley

P.S.

What’s a label you’ve been given at work that you’re ready to change?

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One more thing, Reframed Insiders is here.

If you’re paying attention you may have noticed that there’s an “upgrade to paid” button on my newsletter now. I launched a new tier called Reframed Insiders!

The reality is, I can’t coach everyone 1:1. So, I designed Insiders — a space where you can get critical career advice, when you need it. You’ll continue to get access to my ideas every week on Reframed BUT as an Insider, you’ll also get access to my time. You’ll receive:

• A monthly Insiders-only Zoom: you bring your real career questions (live or anonymous submission) and I coach you through them on a group call. Our first one is on May 7th at 4:30pm EST (get ready!), you’ll get a calendar invite when you subscribe.

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It’s $175/yr for the next 72 hours, after that it goes up to $250/yr.

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Ailey says “join Insiders”!!!

Last week, I spoke to Heather D’Angelo about her epic career journey that includes: founding an indie band that was featured on Twin Peaks, founding a luxury perfume brand, and now leading brand and communications for an AI company. We talked about AI, how she sees her career, and what makes leaders stand out these days. It’s worth a read.

C-Suite leaders get energized by people who make them think, who ask the right questions and level with them. Walk in ready to be that person.

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BACKGROUND STORY

How I nailed my first 1:1 with my CEO

As a manager, I took on a high visibility project and ended up on the CEO’s radar. The CEO (let’s call him Bob) wanted to make sure that my vision was aligned with his, so he put a surprise invite on my calendar. This meeting was the first time I’d have any one-to-one exposure with a member of the C-suite. Bob had a reputation for being short on patience and sometimes too direct.

I texted my friends for help.

I decided there was only one logical thing to do: immediately start working on a slide deck and talking points.

When the day came, I walked into the meeting nervous but confident I’d done all the “right” things to prepare.

I sat down and whipped out my laptop. I couldn’t wait for him to see how smart I was.

I put Keynote into presentation mode, beaming with pride at the first few slides, they mimicked the progression of his monthly all hands presentations. I kicked off our meeting with the company vision. Except, I mistakenly used a slide deck template with the old vision statement.

He noticed.

He looked at me….slightly incredulous and said “that vision statement is from 2 years ago”.

I wanted to close my laptop, get up, and quietly slink out of that windowless conference room. But I didn’t.

I pushed through, clicking through slide after slide. Although my confidence was rattled, I still landed my talking points. It just…didn’t feel like a dialogue, I felt like I was delivering a presentation to an audience of one.

Then, he paused me. He wanted my thoughts about something new happening in the industry. I was candid: “it’s an interesting concept but it’s not going to move the needle.”

THAT caught his attention.

I could offer that insight because I'd done more than curate information for our meeting, I'd formed a POV. We exchanged a few more ideas. And now, instead of leaning back in his chair looking bored like before (lol), he leaned in.

I couldn’t have predicted what he did next.

He grabbed my laptop and clicked through my deck, stopping on the slides that mattered to him so that we could discuss them further.

He walked out of the room and told the rest of the c-suite that he was excited about where I would take that line of business. I walked out of that room still slightly spiraling over my vision statement snafu.

Then someone put me out of my misery and told me that he was thrilled with how the meeting went.

The meeting went well because of my ability to think on my feet, not the slide deck I agonized over.

I grew that line of business 5x in one year after that conversation.

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Research in HBR found that companies now prioritize strong social skills above technical expertise and financial stewardship when hiring executives. The ability to navigate conversations with the C-suite isn't a nice-to-have. It’s a key factor in your ability to advance to senior levels of leadership. If you want to level up your exec comms, book a consult with me.

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How to have an effective 1:1 with someone in the C-suite

I knew immediately that I wanted my friend Sammy to weigh in on this topic. He’s a Senior Director of Finance with 20+ years of experience across luxury fashion (Diane Von Furstenberg, Frette), law, and corporate finance at General Assembly. Sammy has navigated C-suite relationships across every type of organization you can imagine. He has a knack for cementing himself as irreplaceable. Not just because of his expertise (he’s incredible at what he does, okay!), but because of his ability to say the right things at the right time to the right people.

Here's what Sammy and I recommend when it comes to having effective conversations with the C-suite:

1. They don't need the details. They need you to translate them into something meaningful.

Sammy puts it simply: “Executives care most about how your work drives the company forward, manages risk, or saves money.” So be prepared to quickly and confidently share a top-level read out about what’s happening on your team. What are the wins? What are the issues and how are you planning to solve them? How does all of it connect to company goals? This is the prep that matters.

If you’re struggling with zooming out, try this framework for structuring your thoughts:

1. Here’s what I’m seeing → “Two of our Q3 deliverables are at risk because they’re getting stuck in the approval stage.”

2. Here’s what I’m doing about it → “I flagged it for the finance team, their main approver is swamped with another initiative, so they shifted the responsibility to another team member with capacity.”

3. Here’s how it impacts the organization → “This keeps us on track for the Q3 launch and protects the revenue tied to it.”

That’s the whole playbook.

2. Come prepared, but be ready to throw your plan out the window.

This is critical. Sammy adds: don’t use this time for routine updates that could have been an email. Use it to solve tough problems. When you show that you understand their pressures and speak their language of “results,” you move from being just a staff member to a reliable partner.

Execs are constantly context switching. The most pressing thing on their radar last Monday may have shifted down their priority list by this week. That doesn’t mean they’re not thinking strategically. It just means their context changed. Bring an agenda but know they may want your thought partnership on something more pressing.

3. Don't walk out without answers to your urgent items.

Flexibility is a good thing, but don’t abandon urgent items on your own issues list in service of theirs. If things are moving fast, interject with something like: “I have something I need your input on. Do you want to start with your items or can we tackle mine quickly first?”

That’s how peers talk to peers, it’s not overstepping.

FACILITATING EFFECTIVE C-SUITE 1:1s BY SAMUEL COLON →

And, like most of the overachievers I know, Sammy made a screenshottable chart to highlight how best to communicate, problem solve, and give feedback like an executive. I found the common mistakes column particularly useful.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

The right mindset is the key to effective communication; having good meetings with C-suite executives is no different. Walk into those meetings as if you are a peer (even if you don’t share a title), because you have information and insights they genuinely need.

The moment you enter a conversation afraid to take up space, they no longer see you as a strategic partner. They see someone who needs to be mentored, guided, and developed. Someone who still needs to grow. And if you’re reading Reframed, I know that’s not how you want to be seen.

C-suite leaders get energized by people who make them think, who ask the right questions, and level with them. Walk in ready to be that person.

Thank you to Sammy for graciously sharing his thoughts. What surprised you most?

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

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Last week, I wrote a Q&A where I answered common questions that readers and clients alike has asked me recently. If you’re wanting to know what it takes to be a VP, how to stop defaulting to accepting work, and how to reinvent yourself in your job search.

“The human thing that AI will never replace is the discernment it takes to edit, to decide what’s meaningful and worth keeping. When everyone has access to the same AI tools, what differentiates the gold from the slop over time is taste.” - Heather D’Angelo

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I posted a note this weekend about getting married 6 months ago. The morning I was getting ready to head to City Hall was great…until it wasn’t. My makeup artist cancelled on me (lol disaster) and I had no time to pull together a plan B, so I did my makeup myself. On my way out the door, I dabbed my wrists with a scent from Carta. I was anything but calm, cool, and collected. I was frantic, flustered, annoyed. Picture me in the back of an Uber SUV practicing deep “woosahs”, praying, hoping somehow that I could stop concentrating on the very basic makeup job I had to do on myself.

Anywho, I didn't know it at the time but a little piece of the Dalmation Coast was sitting right on my wrists. The scent chilled me out.

I texted the photographer to not do any extreme closeups of my face, threw on my sunglasses, and the day went on without anymore glitches.

Looking back, I have to thank for that little zen moment. The perfume I wore was a gift from her. Carta is her company, a perfume brand she runs while also leading brand and communications for a company in the AI space.

And, there's so much more to her story.

FROM INDIE BAND TO HEAD OF BRAND & COMMS

What exactly is a “non-linear career path”?

A lot of my clients come to me with zig zag career paths, trying to fit the pieces together but not sure it all makes sense. When this happens we try to identify themes and transferable skills. One of my clients calls this portability — the idea that your most marketable skills travel with you through every role, every industry, every pivot not just your job titles or scope. It's the underlying way you think, lead, communicate, and operate. I remember having a similar conversation with Heather about her career when we started working together last year. Her career has lots of twists and turns and there’s not one wasted chapter in her story. Let’s start at the beginning.

She went to Parsons, then cofounded an indie band named Au Revoir Simone. They released four albums, toured the world, and ended up on Twin Peaks because David Lynch liked their music. Casual.

Then she was ready for a change. She decided to go back to school to study tropical ecology at Columbia where she did fieldwork in Indonesian Borneo. During one of our coaching sessions, she casually mentioned that Neil DeGrasse Tyson chose her to work closely with him. No big deal! For some people, their career highlights would stop there, but not Heather.

She started a fragrance company built around an essential oil that had never been used in perfume, sourced from a conservation NGO in the Peruvian Amazon. That perfume was featured in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Forbes, and the Coveteur (to name a few). Now she's at Unlearn, running brand and communications for a company building AI for clinical trials.

Heather is a true artist and creative, and she’s also someone wholeheartedly commits to her craft. So much so, that she becomes excellent at everything she decides to do.

Heather and I have been sliding into each other's DMs for months — sharing articles, our hot takes, and things that made us nervous or excited about AI. I love her insights, so I wanted to bring the convo to Reframed. Here’s some fresh perspectives on AI from one of the coolest people I know.

A Q&A on Careers & AI with Heather D’Angelo

I spoke to Heather about how the AI space has shifted, what to do if you feel left behind, and what AI is good and bad at. Here’s what she shared with me.

I was curious to hear more about the AI whiplash we’re experiencing now, going from a world where the general public had no idea what AI was a few years ago to today where it feels like AI is in every headline. Here's what she said.

My first intro to AI came years before it was something people talked about every day, when I was the comms director at an ecology research center at Arizona State University. Much of my job entailed writing about how researchers used early ML to derive patterns from very large ecological datasets. Back then, I wrote under the assumption that my audience likely had no idea what machine learning was so I kept it high-level and focused on communicating the impact of the work.

But then four years ago, I started working at an AI startup in healthcare, and I had to start talking about the models themselves and thinking more deeply about how to do that to a general audience, especially one that had either never heard of AI, or had and were skeptical that it could be helpful in my highly-regulated industry. Even an early as three years ago, it was an uphill battle for comprehension. What’s changed most dramatically is that people now have firsthand experience with it from tools like ChatGPT. I feel like the conversation has shifted almost overnight (hence the whiplash). I now spend less time writing about AI from a defensive standpoint. Our customers are asking more practical questions, generally less dismissive/more curious because they’ve interacted with the technology themselves.

I feel like all we hear about is AI is coming to take everyone’s jobs and if you aren’t using it, your career is at risk. We’ve seen the impact on new grads and how much hiring has slowed for senior leaders. That’s scary. So I asked Heather about what to do if you feel behind.

I think what might feel overwhelming to people who feel behind is that they somehow need to “learn AI,” when the best way to learn is through use. Just pick a model (my favorite service these days is Perplexity) and leverage it like a thinking partner. You’ll start to develop a sense of what it’s good at, where it’s unreliable, and how to direct it.

There’s also just a ton of tutorials out there.

This is a great one for Claude Cowork:

How to AI

Cowork.

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2 months ago · 2642 likes · 1054 comments · Ruben Hassid

Even though everyone is talking about it, AI use cases still seem pretty ambiguous. I’m always curious to know how and why people use it to streamline their work, so I asked Heather to share some examples of how she’s using it as a marketer in a scientific/heavily technical field.

At this stage of my life, I feel like my brain is all RAM and no hard drive. I’m 46, perimenopausal, raising two toddlers, and deep in brain fog most days. So I’ve started using LLMs as a kind of external hard drive for my work. I upload many of my most important internal documents into a project space and then use the model to cross-reference them. I write all of our external-facing materials, so I’m responsible for ensuring scientific and technical accuracy. I use LLMs like a searchable database, pointing me directly to the documents where specific facts live.

For example, we recently updated our ML model for Alzheimer’s disease. I needed to write several pieces about the update, and one key question was which clinical endpoints were included in the previous version of the model versus the new one. Instead of manually digging through years of documentation, I was able to quickly surface the exact internal documents where those details were discussed, so I could fact-check my writing.

The other way I use LLMs a lot is to help me break down extremely technical material. We recently developed a new ML model in oncology, and the founders wrote a deep-dive white paper explaining the science behind it. To be honest, the first time I read it felt like reading Greek. But Gemini walked me through the concepts step by step. That allowed me to come back to our founders with much more informed questions when it came time to write external-facing materials.

What’s interesting (and a little sad) is that before LLM tools, I would just Slack our scientists and schedule interviews with them, and to be honest, that’s still my favorite part of the job. It’s the reason I wanted to go into science communication in the first place. I love talking to scientists and learning about what they’re working on.But now that I’m at a startup, I’m much more protective of our scientists’ time. Everyone is incredibly busy. Using an LLM lets me do a lot of my homework before I ask them questions, so the conversations are much more focused and productive, and I think they appreciate that.

There are so many hot takes out there about what AI is good at. I was particularly interested in Heather’s perspective as an artist. Bridging creative and technical worlds gives her a pretty unique POV on where the technology shines and where it still has significant gaps. Here’s what she thinks AI is genuinely good at and where it sucks.

AI is genuinely excellent at synthesis. If you give it a body of information/data and ask it to identify patterns, summarize themes, or explain something at different levels of complexity, it’s incredibly powerful. But it sucks at discernment and taste. For instance, I’ve experimented a bit with making music with AI, and I was blown away by the seemingly endless variations it could generate that all sound stylistically correct, but (in my opinion) are emotionally vacant. I’ve heard there are some AI-generated “musicians” topping Spotify’s charts, so I think there’s obviously an audience for anything. But for me, the human thing that AI will never replace is the discernment it takes to edit, to decide what’s meaningful and worth keeping. When everyone has access to the same AI tools, what differentiates the gold from the slop over time is taste. That gives me faith in humanity during this AI-fueled existential crisis.

I agree we have to lean into our humanity:

Good Work

rage against the machine

Welcome to Good Work - your weeklyish work therapy appointment…

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2 months ago · 70 likes · 16 comments · mallory contois

The one thing I really wanted to know and, honestly the thing most people are losing sleep over is: “Is AI coming for all our jobs?”

There’s a lot of anxiety in the public conversation right now about AI replacing humans, and I understand why. Some of the projections about job disruption are pretty dramatic. At the same time, I’m aware that I may also be a little bit inside the bubble because I work with these tools every day. Personally, I don’t feel like AI is about to replace me. Those might be famous last words, I really don’t know! But using these systems regularly, I’ve seen both their strengths and their limitations. They’re incredibly powerful in certain ways, but they still depend heavily on human judgment and context. So my instinct right now is cautiously optimistic? I think we’re going to need humans in the loop for a long time, especially in work that requires interpretation, communication, and judgment. As this technology continues to evolve, I’m sure my perspective will keep evolving with it.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Heather’s takes made me feel more solid in my own POV on AI that I hadn’t shared here in a while. The most portable career asset you have right now is judgment. It’s the ability to walk into any room, assess what’s happening, and know what needs to be said or done next. That’s not yet something AI can replicate. It’s all you.

AI can synthesize. It can surface patterns from mountains of data faster than any of us but it can’t decide what matters.

Your judgment is portable. Protect it. Develop it. Lead with it.

If you’re considering a career change and need help weaving together the pieces of your own journey, let me know how I can help.

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

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Happy Monday, friends! Here’s what I did over the weekend.

Last week, I wrote about how important it is to use language that reflects how high-level your work actually is. I can’t tell you how many times I talk to high achievers who think the key to getting promoted is taking on additional work, when the real solution is improving how they talk about their current work. Mind blowing. If you’re angling for a promotion, you’ll want to read it.

Taking ownership of your career requires you to decide who you want to be before other people do.

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I’m doing a Q&A this week. You’ve got questions, I’ve got answers.

One of my favorite things to do is help people find the right solutions to their career challenges. Every week, I hear from ambitious, talented professionals who are stuck. Not because they aren’t good enough (they almost always are) but because they’re playing a waiting game without realizing it. Waiting to be recognized. Waiting for the right moment to go after a new opportunity. Waiting for someone to hand them the title they’ve already earned.

This week’s Q&A is about what happens when you stop waiting.

I selected four common challenges that were shared with me (through this newsletter) or that I’ve helped clients work through. One mindset shift is powering every single one of my responses → taking ownership of your career requires you to decide who you want to be before other people do.

CHALLENGE #1

Q: I want to stop taking on tasks that should be done by others on my team. What are the actual phrases I need to use in meetings to stop me from volunteering to take on more work?

When you’re in a conversation with an executive and they share a problem with you, you should respond with:

• Here’s what we should do…

• The best way to solve this problem is…

• Let me check my team’s capacity and get back to you…

Say these instead of “I’ll handle it” or “I’ll do it”. When you’re Director level and above, it can be very tempting to take on things that come up in conversations with your manager (or other execs). You do this because you want to be helpful, you’re a natural problem solver. But that’s not what they want from you. When colleagues or executives surface a problem, they’re looking to you for direction on what to do about it.

So, instead of defaulting to “doer mode” I want you to imagine them prefacing their statements with “tell me what to do about…[insert problem here]”. Once you see it this way, you can’t unsee it. You will hear some version of “tell me what to do” constantly.

The three phrases above only take 5-seconds to say but they position you as a strategic problem solver instead of a task taker. The best part? You can walk out of the room and hand the work to someone on your team who is better suited to do it.

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If you're still defaulting to "I'll handle it" more than you'd like, Elevate is my 1:1 coaching program for directors and executives who are ready to start leading differently. Click the button to learn more →

EXPLORE ELEVATE

CHALLENGE #2

Q: How do I get my leadership to see me as VP material?

Here’s a quick way to find out if you’re already operating at the VP level. Answer honestly (you don’t even need your manager’s input for this!).

VP CHECKLIST:

1. Do you go into meetings with a clear point of view? Y / N

2. When your boss brings you a problem, do you respond with your recommendation instead of questions intended to get direction from them? Y / N

3. Can you articulate how your work connects to the company’s business goals, not just your team’s goals? Y / N

4. Are you spending more time evaluating and directing work than doing it yourself? Y / N

5. When your calendar fills up, are you protecting time for strategic work instead of saying yes to everything and stretching yourself too thin? Y / N

If you answered “No” to 3 or more of these, those are the exact areas you need to improve on. Don’t be discouraged, use this as a helpful guideline for being able to pinpoint exactly what you need to change.

Executives don’t create a VP layer to reward performance. They create it because they need leaders who: hold a clear point of view, make sound data-backed decisions without being hand-held, think enterprise wide, and get other people to do great work. Doing all of this requires a change in approach.

Most people are asking the wrong question. It isn’t “have I earned it?” The question is: “Am I already operating like a VP?”

Simple.

If you want a deeper dive, I wrote about a topic that is equally as important for getting to VP. It’s about leveraging political capital to fuel your advancement.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT →

CHALLENGE #3

Q: I’ve done a variety of roles over the past few years. How do I decide what I want to do next?

Not knowing what you want next is extremely common among high achievers. You've spent your career problem solving, saying yes to stretch opportunities, and delivering. Problem solving translates across departments, functions, and titles. That’s exactly why there’s so much variety on your resume.

Since most high achievers are capable of pursuing multiple paths, I created a career filter that helps you uncover which path is worth pursuing next.

Here’s how it works:

1. Look back before looking forward. You aren’t the same person that you were three roles ago. Start by identifying areas that you’ve outgrown (the skills that used to excite you but now feel like drudgery, etc). Then write down the work you’ve enjoyed that led to real impact. Think types of projects, your favorite stakeholders, your best deals, etc. Make an exhaustive list.

2. Find your Zone of Genius. Most high achievers are stuck in their Zone of Excellence: things you’re highly skilled at, that people reward you for, but that quietly drain you. Your Zone of Genius is different. It’s where your natural strengths meet your deepest motivations. It’s the work that feels like play to you but is hard work to everyone else. Make a list of what work/tasks are in your Zone of Excellence and after that, describe what types of work fit in your Zone of Genius is. Do you see any similarities with Step 1?

3. Connect with your network. Connect with people in roles and/or industries that are interesting to you. You’ll want to ask them for insights about their work, their companies, or their path. These conversations will give you more data about where you might want to go next. Review your notes from these conversations and take note of what areas interest you, what info confirmed what you no longer want to do, and who could potentially refer you to future opportunities.

Once you work through the above, the right move tends to get obvious pretty quickly. This is what architecting your career looks like, instead of just reacting to it.

CHALLENGE #4

Q: I left corporate leadership to start my own freelance business, it’s been rewarding but I want to go back to corporate. How do I reinvent myself to get back into industry?

I would start by reflecting on what you’ve accomplished over the last 5-10 years in your career (not just your titles/projects). Make an exhaustive list. Once you’re done, analyze the list and see if you can identify any patterns. Those patterns are the problem(s) you love helping companies solve the most.

Here are some examples of some common threads that my clients have identified: scaling marketing or sales teams from scrappy to structured, building creative operations that actually run on time, bringing clarity to the roadmap, improving delivery timelines for technical projects/initiatives, developing talent and culture in orgs that never prioritized it, or translating complex data into decisions that are impactful to the bottom line.

These themes exist whether you’re full-time or freelance. They’re why people want to hire you, even if your titles look disparate on paper. Also, notice how none of them are title or role specific. That’s important.

Once you get clear, two things will happen: you’ll know exactly how to position yourself to hiring managers and you’ll confidently connect with people in your network who can open doors for you. The freelance vs. full-time dichotomy in your story stops being something to explain away. Instead, it becomes proof that you’re great.

That’s how you own your narrative.

If you want more detailed advice about job searching, here’s two newsletters that go deep:

• This one gets into storytelling and positioning your experience

• This one is about overcoming the job search process

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Every answer in this Q&A comes back to the same thing. You have to decide who you are before someone else does it for you. So, who are you this week?

If you feel stuck, let me know how I can help.

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

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Join readers from Netflix, Google, Uber, Chanel, LinkedIn, and Sephora. I share fresh leadership and career insights every Monday, right before you tackle the rest of your week.

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Last week, , , and I wrote about the advice we’d give our younger selves. Some of my favorite takeaways from our newsletters were:

• Think about the optics. Work isn’t just about what you do but also about others’ perceptions of you and your work

• Being excellent isn’t enough. Excellent makes you valuable but it doesn’t make you advanceable - I’m going to be thinking about it for the rest of the week

• Sometimes a detour isn’t failure, it’s just strategy. Also invest in relationships - they pay off.

The way you talk about your work just might be keeping you stuck, here’s how to change that.

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Here’s a lesson I’ve seen play out with client after client: the way you talk about your work needs to reflect your impact if you want to continue to advance. When a friend sent me this tweet, I knew I had to write about it.

Low-level language is costing you: (1) the promotion you're qualified for, (2) the raise you've already earned, and even (3) invitations to the strategic conversations you should be invited to.

You can be the hardest working person on your team and still miss these opportunities not because you didn’t earn them, but because you’re using the wrong words to talk about your work.

CONTEXT

What’s “low-level language”?

I’ve found that “low-level language” falls into one of three categories:

Mistake #1: Centering Tasks and/or Activities

This is the most common trap for high-achievers. You lead with describing what you did, not the value your work produced. Describing tasks without impact sounds like:

• “I managed the project, ran the weekly syncs, and coordinated the vendors.” - and what happened as a result?

• “I delivered a presentation to 50 executives.” - and what happened as a result?

• “I built a dashboard.” - yay numbers, but what am I supposed to do with them?

When you’re a really great executer, you develop a habit of talking about your work without outcomes attached, because quite frankly, you don’t have to. Your work is impressive and, up until a certain point in your career, your work really does speak for itself. But this stops working at the Director level.

Mistake #2: Providing Too Much In-the-Weeds Detail

When you try to show your work by listing every step in your process, you signal to executives that you’re an executor and not a leader.

Being too in-the-weeds sounds like:

• “I pulled the data from three systems, then I cleaned it in Excel which took me 3 hours, then I built the pivot table and created all the charts we needed to visualize the data, and then I sent the deck to the executive team.” - great, but why should I care?

This example leaves out the outcome entirely and…it bores everyone with too many details. When you over-explain your work you leave people thinking “omg will he/she/they get to the point already!?”.

Mistake #3: Being Too Vague About Your Improvements

This happens when you’re trying your best to sound like an executive, but you don’t know how to “be strategic”. These statements feel like high-level language on the surface, but don’t say anything substantive at all. No specificity = no credibility.

Being too vague sounds like:

• “I improved processes.” - okay, but how?

• “I drove strategic alignment.” - also okay - but how?

• “I helped move things forward.” - People who are informed see right through this.

Maybe you’re sitting there thinking “okay, but what does good look like?” Maybe you’re even a bit shook after realizing that you’ve made some of these mistakes. It’s okay, I sometimes make them myself and I wrote the playbook!

High-level language is not the ability to string together a bunch of impressive-sounding words.

• Bad → Vague filler language/business slop: “I drove cross-functional synergies to accelerate organizational transformation.” This is bad. Very bad. Meme-worthy.

• Good → High-level language: “I redesigned how the engineering and product teams collaborated on roadmap planning. My work reduced our average new feature development time from 8 weeks to 4.”

High-level language is backed by actual work. You’re drawing a connection between the steps you're taking and the impact your work ultimately has. It’s a skill that takes practice. You’re summarizing the truth, effectively. The detail exists. You’re just leading with what matters.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Reframing Your Work The Right Way Gets You Promoted

A client came to me wanting to prepare for her promotion conversation. The playbook that got her promoted previously wasn’t working anymore. She had spent weeks meticulously building a case — a detailed document comparing herself against every single competency at her current level and the next level. It was thorough. It was organized.

As soon as I read through it, the problem was clear to me: it proved she was doing the work but it didn’t make the case for a promotion. It wasn’t landing for me, so it wasn’t going to land for leadership.

She did what most high-achievers do, they document all their tasks. Every bullet point proved effort. The way that she framed her work actually made it look like she was doing everything without judgment and that gave her leader the impression that she wasn’t managing her time well.

Her impact (the 50% YoY revenue increase she had driven) was buried in the middle of the document, in a sub-bullet.

So we rewrote it and we revised her talking points. She led with the revenue increase. She described the meeting she’d built from scratch that the executive team found incredibly valuable. She named what the company now had because of her (structure, visibility, and the ability to make the right business decisions), not the inner workings of her task list.

She got the promotion.

Her work was never the problem. The language she used to frame her work was.

INSIGHT

High-achievers assume they have to take on more work in order to get promoted, but what they need to do is reframe the great work they’re already doing.

THE FRAMEWORK

2 Strategies for Reframing Your Work As High Impact

If you want a more detailed primer on how to identify your impact, start with my IMPACT Formula. Here's how to start communicating at the level you're actually operating at:

Strategy #1: Use Outcome-First Framing

This is the antidote to both task/activity framing and being too vague about your improvements. When you use outcome-first framing, you don’t center your actions, they’re implied by your results.

Most people can follow directives, so naming your tasks doesn’t impress execs. The ability to inform strategy, make decisions, and steer teams towards the right direction all signal leadership capability. Most often, you’re already doing this but you don’t talk about it like you are.

Outcome-first framing sounds like:

• “I retained 3 at-risk accounts worth $1.2M by restructuring the QBR process.”

• “I shifted the org’s vendor selection approach, which cut procurement costs by 22% this year.”

This framing works because you’re naming the outcome (revenue protected, costs cut), the scope (at-risk accounts, the whole org), and the mechanism (QBR restructure, vendor selection approach). You land your points without listing a single step you took to get there. That combination signals three things at once: you know what matters to the business, you operate at the right altitude, and you were the architect not *just* the executor.

Anyone can manage a vendor or participate in a QBR. Not everyone reshapes how an organization makes decisions or saves $1.2M in the process.

Strategy #2: Signal Complexity Without the Details

You can show the difficulty of what you navigated without listing every step. When you do this well, you convey that you have good judgment and rigor through context, not process. That sounds like:

• “I aligned 4 executive team members and reallocated $2M in our budget, ahead of the Q3 deadline.”

Notice what’s not in that sentence: no meetings listed, no emails mentioned, no process described. But the difficulty is inferred. When you do good work, people don’t need to see how the sausage is made. If you reveal too much, you run the risk of coming across as someone who overcomplicates everything. Don’t undermine yourself by sharing too many details.

Anyway, in this example - you choose to highlight the things that matter: 4 execs, $2M on the line, a hard Q3 deadline. That’s the point. It tells the other person you understand you were in a complex situation and that your approach solved it. That’s leadership.

The in-the-weeds version of the same situation: “I scheduled and facilitated 8 meetings, built a budget model for each meeting, incorporated 5 rounds of feedback, and got everyone aligned before the deadline”. This describes the same work but makes you sound like a project coordinator instead of a leader.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

How you talk about your work shapes your own perception of the value you bring to your organization. It’s a variable you control — it’s leverage.

It shapes how others see you.

Try this this week → read through something you've written or said about your work recently. Then ask yourself my two questions: What happened as a result? Why should anyone care? If your description doesn’t answer those questions outright, then you need to rewrite your story.

If you’re reading Reframed, you’re doing the work. You just have to learn to lead with what matters.

If you feel stuck, let me know how I can help.

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

P.S.

Which of these do you catch yourself doing the most?

Leave a comment

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I recently reconnected with two former colleagues and . We met almost a decade ago (!!), so naturally we all decided it would be fun to write about the advice we’d give our younger selves. I loved reading through all of our perspectives, especially knowing how much we’ve grown since those days. Michelle writes First-Gen Rising and it’s about what it’s like to be a first-gen professional and uncovering the unspoken rules as you go. David writes DD4 at Work about his experience as an HR leader and provides the kind of unfiltered advice that your HR team can’t. Here’s my story and my advice.

I didn’t know I’d be stepping into a job market completely wrecked by the collapse of our banking system. The economy was in a free fall. Here’s what I wish I knew.

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I graduated college in 2008. I didn’t have a job lined up but that didn’t scare me. Up until that point, things had always worked out in my favor. I got into the college I wanted (Babson College, early decision) and I found cool and interesting marketing internships every single summer. Why wouldn’t I find a great job?

What I didn’t know was I’d be stepping into a job market completely wrecked by the collapse of our banking system. There were signs of trouble before graduation day. Some of my classmates had their job offers rescinded. Other companies chose to pause entry level hiring.

The economy was in a free fall1.

The companies I was interested in started to tighten their marketing budgets and freeze hiring. I was jobless and without a playbook. Eventually I had to make a concession: my focus was no longer finding a dream job…it was finding a job.

When I landed a job at a marketing agency, I was less than thrilled about it. I was media buying for print college newspapers — a dying industry. The work, entering paper orders into a computer system, felt meaningless. And on top of it all, I was wildly undercompensated. I had just graduated from a school where the tuition was $50k/year and I took the first job offer I could get, at a whopping $30k per year salary. I felt like a failure.

But I wasn’t. Short-term compromise is a strategy, not failure.

I kept up appearances with friends, we were at the club every weekend in our business casual attire. When I went out, I got there before 11pm (when ladies were free). A necessity because I could barely afford to buy myself a drink.

When I wasn’t having fun, I struggled with feeling like I had failed to launch. Some of my friends and former classmates had more cushy landings post-graduation and I envied them, but others had to make compromises too. Like:

• Going back to grad school (a time-honored classic!)

• Joining the PeaceCorps or similar programs to gain experience that would set them up for future career prospects in international relations

• Substitute teaching temporarily because they couldn’t find full-time teaching positions

• Moving back to their hometowns, which meant temporarily taking a lower paying job in a different field

• Working an entry level job in their field (I’m talking $20k-40k/year annual salaries), while also taking on part-time work (bartending, retail, babysitting)

Our dreams were deferred, but that didn’t make them meaningless.

One of my friends likes to say that “a setback is a setup for a comeback” and that rings true here. I remember talking to a friend that took an international role with a modest $2k/month stipend. They’re now running an impact investment firm. As for me? I went on to become a VP (with real executive level compensation) just 10 years after that first job. My friends are successful, many of them didn’t have linear career paths.

But sometimes history repeats itself.

Some might say we’re on the brink of another year like 2008. Jobs are being eliminated and dreams are being deferred again. So, I wanted to share the advice I wish I had when I was trying to start my career during a scary and unprecedented time. And “younger” doesn’t exclusively mean 22 and fresh out of college! I learned (and re-learned) these lessons when I faced other hardships like layoffs, toxic work environments, job uncertainty, and isolation during the pandemic. One might say, they’re evergreen.

4 Lessons I Wish I Learned Earlier in My Career

Sometimes playing it safe pays off

One of my current clients is someone I built a cross-departmental relationship with at my first job. That was 18 years ago. I didn't know it then, but building relationships at a job I was embarrassed about became one of the best career investments I ever made. Knowing what I know now, I think playing it safe in terms of “settling” for that job actually ended up being a good decision. It taught me grit and resilience. It kept me busy and productive during a really scary time. The work wasn’t ideal, the compensation was certainly not ideal either, but I worked and, more importantly, I networked. Relationship building is important, even when the effects are not be immediate! FWIW - this HBR article is exactly how I approached relationship building back then.

Not speaking up will cost you opportunities

I rarely spoke up in meetings, especially when execs were in the room. Early in my career, I thought I had to earn that airtime. I overthought everything and didn’t think that anything I had to say was good enough. Until I learned the goal isn’t to say something earth shattering — it’s visibility. I didn’t learn that visibility mattered as much as, if not more than, good work until later in my career.

One simple way to get started with speaking up is to name your action items. It’s low stakes but makes you look present and organized. Here are two phrases I wish I would’ve started using earlier in my career to signal I was on top of the next steps and not waiting for direction:

• “So what I’m hearing is that the next step is X — I’ll take that back to my team.”

• “I can connect with Beth offline to iron out some of those details.” (If you say this, please actually do it. The follow-up matters.)

I share more helpful phrases in this article.

SPECIAL COACHING OFFER →

I’m working on something exciting and have slots open for 1-2 people who are open to being coached on video. In exchange for being willing to be recorded, I’m offering a $1000 discount.

If you’ve been thinking about working with me and you’re open to being coached on camera, this is a great opportunity. I work best with high performers who are already doing great work, they just need structure, a trusted advisor, and a thought partner to help them build and execute the right strategy. If that’s you, this might look like:

• You’re stepping into a bigger role and want to be intentional about how you show up in it

• You’re at a level where you need to successfully increase your visibility, political influence, or positioning

• You know what you want and you’re ready to go after it, but you want a thought partner to help you get there faster

Interested? Fill out this short form and I’ll be in touch.

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Being “good” in a silo doesn’t get you promoted

You should focus on your company’s goals and objectives and make sure your best work aligns with that.

I spent too long being a great operator in a silo. I was doing excellent work on things that weren’t connected to problems that leadership was trying to solve. Unfortunately, you can be genuinely good and still be invisible to the people making decisions about your future, because being good in a vacuum doesn’t register the same way as being good in context. Promotions don’t go to the best performer, it’s not like getting an A on an exam for learning concepts. Promotions go to employees who know how to apply concepts and frameworks to the right context. They go to the people who solve the right problems at the right times and make sure the right people know about it.

If you want to understand how this factors into your promotability, I wrote about how executives make promotion decisions last week.

Show up like you're ready for the next level

It took me six years to learn that you can’t only do the bare minimum or even just meet expectations and expect great things to happen to you in your career.

Sometimes I think about where would I be if I didn’t let the feeling of defeat impact how I performed in my first job. Who knows? The truth is I didn't take that first job as seriously as I should have. But I knew enough to network and that one instinct kept the door cracked.

What I learned much later in tech was something different: how to stop waiting for someone to hand me the next thing. People are calling this "high agency" now. I just call it the thing that actually changed my career. If you want to continue to grow, show up as someone who is worthy of getting growth opportunities. The person who’s worthy of it would ask for it, they would seek them out, they would take on projects and initiatives that demonstrate their readiness for the next level.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

One thing I’m constantly learning is that the career you build is the result of a series of choices you make. Even when the unexpected happens or people make decisions that screw you over, you still have to actively decide what to do next. And that’s powerful.

newsletter goes live tomorrow and ’s goes out on Wednesday :)

What’s one thing you wish someone had told you early on in your career?

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

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I’m Ashley Rudolph. Last week, I spoke to about her advice for executives focused on rolling out AI initiatives. She runs technical learning programs at Shopify, so she knows a thing or two. A few things she said reframed how I think about AI entirely.

The key to getting promoted isn’t working harder, it’s doing work at the next level before you officially step into it. Here’s why.

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Many of my clients come to me wanting to get promoted. It’s one of those things that feel straightforward: do hard work, get promoted. But it doesn’t work that way and more often than not, the actual solution is a mystery to them.

Recently, I asked six executive women what factors they consider when they decide to promote employees internally or hire external talent. These women have scaled brands like Tiffany’s, Shake Shack, Ollie, Starface, Kate Spade, and Glowbar. One of them even sold their company for $500M and wrote a book about success. They have collectively promoted and hired lots of talent.

Their responses were revealing. But before we get into them, I want to start with a bit of intel: their answers were a roadmap for getting promoted.

Here’s what you should do if you want to be the internal candidate that doesn’t get passed over

There were 5 common themes across their responses, if you want a promotion you should:

1. Find out what skills, competencies, or scope is required at the next level

2. Build trust across functions — not just with your direct manager.

3. Operate at the next level before you have the title.

4. Chase glamour work. Delegate office “housework”

5. If they choose to bring in someone external, ask direct questions before you disengage.

Early in my career, I had real misconceptions about what gets you promoted. I thought it was dedication, hard work, taking on extra assignments. I’ve written about what those misconceptions led to: disappointment, frustration, and tears. At some point something clicked: I wasn't going to get promoted for doing my job well. I was going to get promoted when I was already doing the job above me. Once I understood that, everything changed. When I walk my clients through that same shift, things change for them too. They either get promoted or they find the right room somewhere else. There’s almost no in-between.

The data backs up that it’s easier to hire internally too: 46% of new hires fail within 18 months. Almost half. Which means every time your executive team considers making an external hire, they’re weighing a bet with a coin-flip success rate.

They want to promote you. The question is whether you’ve made it easy for them to justify it.

MY ADVICE

You can’t just be smart, you can’t just be hungry, you can’t just be good at your current role. You actually have to do two things:

1. Understand what it takes to be successful at the next level

2. Demonstrate those competencies

These two things make an internal promotion a slam dunk (in most cases). If you take the approach of waiting for them to see your potential based on your doing a great job in your current role, then they’re going to place their bets on someone that has proven experience at the next level.

Work with me

6 Executives on When They Choose to Promote vs. Hiring an External Candidate

I talked to , , , Allison Ginsberg, Lisa Rossi, and . What I got back was more candid than I expected. Career advice is everywhere but you rarely get to hear directly from people making hiring decisions. That’s what this is.

1. On why they almost always want to promote from within

Lisa Rossi, VP of People at Starface:

Most leadership teams would prefer to promote from within. It’s faster, more cost-effective, and significantly less risky than bringing in external talent. So the default assumption on promotion readiness should be: the organization is on your side.

Allison Stadd, CMO at Ollie:

I promote internally when someone is already operating at (or clearly approaching) the next level — not just excelling in their current role. The signals are things like: they’ve expanded their scope without being asked, built airtight trust across functions, and demonstrated the ability to think at an enterprise altitude.

Allison Ginsberg, Fractional Head of People:

I believe the strongest teams are built through a deliberate balance of internal and external talent. I choose to hire externally when it allows me to fill critical skill gaps, introduce fresh perspective, or bring in experiences the organization does not yet have. In those moments, I’m not looking to replicate what already exists — I’m intentionally adding new capabilities, ways of thinking, and value that strengthen the team and accelerate the business.

The next exec raised an important point: there's an underrated advantage to being at an early stage or growth stage company. New functions get built, teams get restructured, and roles get created that didn't exist six months ago. The person who usually steps into those opportunities often already knows the business well enough to run something new from day one. Sometimes institutional knowledge is an incredible edge.

Muna Ikedionwu, Founder of MKEDI Consulting:

Understanding a company’s history and brand philosophy, their product offerings, and their ideal customer is a major asset that is very rarely found in external hires. On the flipside, there’s an expectation within early stage startups that employees become jane-of-all-trades who can learn any new tactic or skill that’s needed. So when an external hire is made it’s almost always because we need someone who already has the skill set and track record that proves they can come in and perform at a high level from day one. Brand knowledge is less important in this case and being able to deliver results is the primary metric.

2. On the work that actually gets you promoted

Getting to the next level requires being strategic about your time, not just how hard you work, but what you work on. The work you say yes to is consequential. If you find that you’re not able to take on strategic work because you’re bogged down with “office housework”, this Forbes piece has practical tips for getting it off your plate.

Catherine Connelly, Author of Designing Success:

I love Jason Feifer’s idea in Build for Tomorrow that you should be working your next job. Do not just build competency in your current role. Start building the skills, exposure, and judgment required for the role you want. Make it obvious that you can handle what comes next. That might mean staying informed by listening to podcasts and reading industry news, or even starting a newsletter or building a special project internally.

One more thing, especially for women. Be mindful of the difference between glamour work and office housework. Research by Joan C. Williams and Marina Multhaup shows women are 29 percent more likely than white male colleagues to be assigned office housework like note-taking or planning events. White women are 20 percent less likely to report equal access to desirable assignments, and for women of color that gap grows to 35 percent.

Volunteering for ERGs and Bring Your Kid to Work Day is generous, but promotions often come from glamour work. The high-impact, visible projects that move the business forward. Make sure you are in the room for those. (I wrote a bit more about this here).

3. On what it means when they bring in external talent instead

It’s hard not to take it personally when your company makes the decision to hire externally for a role that you thought you worked hard to earn. I think it presents an opportunity for dialogue. As a high achiever, when you’re passed over, it’s almost never just about your performance.

Lisa Rossi, VP of People at Starface:

When a company chooses to hire externally instead of promoting you, it usually signals one of three things: (1) they don’t believe you’re ready yet and feel the business can’t absorb the ramp time, (2) they’re entering a new phase (e.g. growth, transformation, complexity) that they believe requires experience not currently on the bench, or (3) there’s a gap in trust, influence, or readiness that hasn’t been explicitly addressed.

The biggest mistake I see high performers make is skipping the fact-finding step: They either argue emotionally or quietly disengage and start job hunting. The more strategic move is to ask direct, probing questions and understand the real rationale, without defensiveness. That clarity gives you leverage. From there, you can make an informed choice: support and learn from the new leader, advocate for what you’d need to earn the seat next time, or decide your growth will happen elsewhere.

Performance matters, but promotability isn’t just about performance - especially the higher you climb - it’s about perceived readiness, trust, and alignment with the company’s next chapter.

When I read Lisa’s point about being aligned with the company’s next chapter, it gave a name to the unexplainable “politics” around promotions. Sometimes your vision for the future (how you work, what your values are, the kind of company you see yourself at) just isn’t aligned with what the company wants. That is their perspective. Sometimes they’re right and other times they’re wrong. But ultimately, once you have information, you can decide what you want to do about it.

As I was writing this, it made me think about another tricky scenario. The times when you don’t get promoted because you’re too valuable in your current role. When your manager is scared that systems would break without you, that processes won’t be followed, or that relationships would falter. So they choose to keep you right where you are.

Sometimes the better you are at your current role without making yourself replaceable, the harder you are to move.

If this is your situation, it’s a challenging one. You have to do two things at once: demonstrate you can function at the next level and make yourself easy to replace where you are. Document your processes. Develop your backfill. If leadership can't picture the team running without you, they won't picture you anywhere else. And if they still can’t see it — move on.

4. On setting yourself up for success in a new role, whether you’re an internal or external hire

Starting a new role requires a different mindset and sometimes employees underestimate how much they need to optimize their time to impact after being promoted or stepping into a new role as an external hire.

Ashley La Fleur, Vice President of Marketing & Business Development at Root3:

Once you step into the role, you’re evaluated against the full job description. Expectations shift quickly, and there’s often less grace because you’re now at a different level with different compensation. That adjustment can be challenging.

If a leader is hiring externally, it’s usually because there’s a specific gap they need to solve, and they’re looking for someone who can step in and lead. If you’re coming into a new organization, there is a short window where you have some grace as you learn the team, product, and expectations. But that window closes quickly. If you don’t use those first one to three months to ask questions, build relationships, and get up to speed, the team you’ve been layered over can start to lose confidence. You have to show why you were brought in while also listening closely to the people around you, because you’ll need them to succeed.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I hope you take this information and use it to architect your next step. If you’re a high achiever, the thing you often don’t realize is that you’re more powerful than you think. You can ask for more, you can push for the next level, you can walk away on your own terms. It really doesn’t matter whether you do it at your current job or elsewhere, the point is — you can. You just have to prove it.

Thank you to Lisa, Allison G., Muna, Ashley, Catherine, and Allison S. for graciously sharing their thoughts.

Which insight surprised you most?

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

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I’m Ashley Rudolph and this newsletter is for people who are ready for the next level in their careers and want practical advice that works.

Last week, we talked about getting taken seriously at work and what strategies you can use to get what you want (a promotion, new job, etc).

I had a candid conversation with someone who teaches people how to use AI every single day. Here’s what she shared with me (and her advice).​

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When it comes to AI, I’ve covered my fascinations (AI boyfriends) and my fears (AI cheapening communication). There’s one topic I haven’t addressed here yet: the impact of AI on jobs. On any given day, there’s a new headline about the impact AI will have on white collar work. Some companies are blaming mass layoffs entirely on AI, while others are investing in their people and preparing them for what’s next. While I don’t fully know the extent to which AI is going to change the way we work, I do know how to help you take control of your career. That hasn’t shifted just because tech is changing.

Today, I want to introduce you to a former colleague of mine: . She’s focused on solving one of the biggest learning challenges companies face today: helping people actually work with AI and integrate it into how they do their jobs. That means building programs that meet employees where they are, designing for adoption (not just awareness), and rethinking what L&D itself looks like when the tools keep changing. I reconnected with Maria after she left this incredibly thoughtful comment on one of my previous newsletters.

She works at Shopify, a company that’s been notably bullish about AI adoption internally. I’ve wondered what that actually looks like on the inside. Do employees get trained? What’s the culture like? Is any of it actually working? Why or why not?

With the recent headlines about Block, sharing our conversation felt more timely than ever. When we spoke I wanted to get tactical. Given her work, I wanted Maria’s point of view on which AI tools to use, how to get started, the difference between workflows and agents, and practical tips and advice that you all can use, today. I learned a lot.

My Interview with Maria Weaver

Maria’s Thoughts on Building A Culture of Experimentation

Ashley: How are you creating a culture of experimentation and learning at Shopify?

Maria: I’ll be honest, I feel very lucky to work at Shopify, a company where this kind of tinkering is just part of the DNA. We’re an engineer-founded company, and that shows up in how people talk about tools, how they share what they’re trying, and how they ask for help publicly. I don’t take that for granted.

A few things that specifically make it work. Twice a year we run company-wide hack days, and these aren’t just for engineers. Everyone is pushed to find a problem and try to solve it. My team runs programming during these: we source people already doing the thing well for expert demos, build both async and live tutorials, and have an explicit support structure throughout. We also have AI labs built into onboarding, so people are hands-on from day one. And we have a Slack culture where senior people are visibly in the weeds, sharing what they tried, what didn’t work, what they’re stuck on, and people are responding! When you see someone who is more tenured or more senior than you asking a question, it really gives you permission to not know things too.

The thing I keep coming back to is that these tools just require experimentation. You have to be willing to just get in and try things, make mistakes, share them, and keep going. The structure supports that, but the culture has to give people permission to do it without it being polished.

“We have a Slack culture where senior people are visibly in the weeds, sharing what they tried, what didn’t work, what they’re stuck on, and people are responding! When you see someone who is more tenured or more senior than you asking a question, it really gives you permission to not know things too.”

Ashley: What signals to you that someone has figured out how to use AI to rewire how they work, in a positive way?

Maria: What I’m about to describe is arguably what good thinking has always looked like but I think the AI-specific version is real.

The tell isn’t that someone just has more ideas. It’s that they have more ideas and can talk eloquently about each of them. By eloquent, I mean they can unpack them, get under the hood. When you press them, they can walk you through the assumptions they made, the options they considered and ruled out, the questions still open. They’ve genuinely engaged with the thinking. Yes, this is what critical thinking looks like but AI is changing how fast people can get there and the diversity of what they bring to it.

What makes it specifically AI-driven is two things: speed and diversity of inputs. They’re getting to that depth faster than was previously possible, and they may be drawing from fields outside their own domain. That latter part is what I’m most excited about because it enables you to execute the fundamental argument of David Epstein’s book Range which argues that what drives innovation is borrowing and applying concepts from one domain to another. AI makes this identification of what to borrow drastically easier.

For me, when I’m building learning experiences, I use AI to pull out the best characteristics of video game design, medical school training, pilot learning — fields I don’t have deep expertise in. I can surface and apply those frameworks to my context in a way that would have taken significantly more time before.

“Good” thinking still looks like good thinking with AI. It’s more changing how fast you can do it and how wide you can cast your net.

How Maria Uses AI In Her Day to Day

Ashley: What’s your platform of choice and why?

Maria: I use Claude, accessing it through two tools depending on what I’m doing: Claude Desktop when I’m working in Google Suite, Claude Code when I’m working in Obsidian. That said, the honest answer is that the differences between Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are smaller than their marketing teams want you to think. What matters more than which platform you pick is knowing what features you’re actually looking for. All of them have versions of these, they just call them different things (I happen to think Claude’s UI is nicer for these features):

• Global settings / system prompts so the AI knows how you think and work without you re-explaining every session

• Projects or folders so you can organize your context and keep different work separate

• Workflows and agents reusable setups you build once and run repeatedly

“The honest answer is that the differences between Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are smaller than their marketing teams want you to think. What matters more than which platform you pick is knowing what features you’re actually looking for.”

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Ashley: You’ve said you prefer AI “workflows” over fully autonomous agents because you want control. In plain language, what’s a workflow and what’s an agent? What’s one workflow you’ve built that a reader could steal and adapt this week?

Maria:

• A workflow is deterministic. You’ve defined the output, and you’ve built the process to produce it.

• An agent is adaptive. You provide an input and a goal, but it decides how to get there.

Rule of thumb: if the output looks the same every time, it’s a workflow. If it’s making decisions and creating novel outputs, it’s an agent.

For both, the value is in controlling for context and not having to update the same thing multiple times. I use workflows extensively for planning, project management, stakeholder communication, project updates. The work of consolidating all of that doesn’t require my critical thinking. That’s where I save the most time.

I’ll also add, I’ve been using agents a lot more recently as I’ve built out my team of agents at work. My instructional design agent is a good example: I give it a problem, and it analyzes it against my learning principles, preferred cognitive frameworks, and organizational context — then generates a unique output based on what the diagnosis reveals. Every time it’s different, because every problem is different.

STEAL THIS WORKFLOW→

I record voice notes throughout the day. Whenever I do, I paste the transcript into a Claude skill. It analyzes it, moves the information to the right file, pulls out takeaways and themes, and I’ve built in constraints to maintain nuance and not iron out my voice. That part stays mine. If you’re a verbal processor, this has been a huge unlock. But the principle applies to any recurring note-taking or journaling habit: define what good output looks like once, feed it your raw input, let the AI handle the rest.

“My instructional design agent is a good example: I give it a problem, and it analyzes it then generates a unique output based on what the diagnosis reveals. Every time it’s different, because every problem is different.”

Maria’s Advice for Leaders

Ashley: What advice would you give to a C‑suite leader who wants to improve the way their teams are using AI?

Maria: Grant dedicated time to experiment. An hour a week, a two-hour session every two weeks, whatever the cadence, it needs to be protected time for people to rethink how they do their jobs and figure out where AI fits in.

So much of actually using these tools well requires thinking and unpacking, the kind of work I described above about deconstructing a problem before you know where AI fits. When you’re under a time crunch and have to deliver X by Y date, you’re going to default to how you’ve always delivered. You need space to do it differently before it becomes the default.

I’ll speak directly to the leaders here. You need to see yourselves as part of this time too. Yes, your time is overscheduled and pricey. But actually testing, experimenting, failing, and just genuinely messing around with these tools will give you the capacity to push teams to use it more extensively. This matters for two reasons. One, it gives people permission to take the time to experiment. And two, it gives you the actual understanding of these tools so you can push to the boundaries of how to use them, not just talk about them.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Talking to Maria shifted something in me. What stayed with me was her point about critical thinking. That good thinking still looks like good thinking whether you use AI or not. AI just changes how fast you can get there and how wide you can cast your net.

In a moment where it feels like the machines are taking over, that’s actually reassuring. The thing that makes you good at your job isn’t going anywhere. Critical thinking, creativity, the ability to connect dots across domains. Those things are still differentiators.

If this conversation made you want to try even one thing this week, go after it.

Good luck. See you next week!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ashley

ABOUT MARIA

Maria Weaver is a learning and development leader who builds programs that change how people think, perform, and grow. Her work sits at the intersection of learning science, program design, and organizational strategy. She’s led high-impact initiatives at Shopify, General Assembly, and Udemy, always with the same throughline: make learning useful, make it motivating, and tie it to outcomes that matter.

Maria is obsessed with learning about learning. How do people actually acquire knowledge? How do you get them from information to action? Outside of work, she writes, crafts, and is always trying to be a beginner at something — most recently, spending a month in France trying to get better at actually speaking the language.

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I’m Ashley Rudolph and this newsletter is for people who are ready for the next level in their careers and want practical advice that works.

Last week’s letter about delegating came up in a few of my coaching meetings, which means you’ll probably want to read it if you missed it. This week’s newsletter is about how to get taken seriously.

I thought a more senior title meant people would automatically take me seriously. I was wrong. Titles don’t manufacture gravitas, but your self awareness, your ability to articulate your impact, and your relationships do.

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A few months ago, I read a newsletter by about a conversation happening online: the desire to be taken seriously. I shared my thoughts:

People are wrong all the time.

In my career, if I had waited around for everyone to take me seriously I wouldn’t have made it to the executive level.

Take my promotion to Vice President as an example. It didn’t happen because someone, somewhere started taking me seriously and thought I had rightfully earned a seat at the executive table.

I wish!

Instead, I walked into my performance review as a Senior Director and left as a Senior Director, without a promotion.

Don’t get me wrong, my review was glowing, but the reward for my hard work and operating at the next level was an underwhelming 5% merit increase. When I was in that room, sitting across from my manager (the CEO), receiving the news, I had that all-too-familiar “hot” feeling come over me. I felt anger, frustration, and defeat. What do you mean my hard work, my leadership, and my scope was only worth 5%?!

I realize now that that feeling was a useful data point. It signaled that something was misaligned between what I knew to be true about my role and what I was being offered. I knew I was operating at the executive level — there was no question. So when the CEO asked how I felt about my review, I mustered up the courage to directly ask for a follow-up conversation where we would discuss becoming a VP.

I was promoted the next week.

People are wrong all the time.

THE FRAMEWORK

4 Ways to Get Taken Seriously At Work

I climbed the ladder quickly and landed in high-responsibility roles at a young age. Early on, I confused seniority with credibility. I thought the higher my title, the more seriously people would take me. I was wrong. Titles don't manufacture gravitas, but your self awareness, your ability to articulate your impact, and your relationships do.

I had to learn how to earn it, instead of waiting for the moment when people magically started taking me seriously.

When I think back to that review with the CEO, I felt comfortable pushing back because I had been building toward it for years. I just didn't have a name for what I was doing until now. Here's what worked for me:

1. Make your impact visible.

If you’ve read Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, you know what this is about. When I walked into my review, I was confident in my output. My promotion case was prepared, my proof points were indefensible. I knew I was VP material whether or not I got the title that day.

I also had an advantage: I reported directly into the CEO. He saw my impact firsthand.

PRO-TIP →

Getting good at this is important, even if you don't report into a C-suite exec or decision maker. It forces you to reframe your relationship with your manager. They are ultimately your proxy in rooms you're not in. What they say about you depends entirely on what you give them to say. If all you're sharing in your 1:1s is status updates (this project is done, that task is complete) then what they'll take back to decision-makers is "the work is getting done." That's forgettable. Instead, think about feeding your manager headlines. Not "I finished the project" but "I cut our onboarding time in half." Not "the campaign launched" but "we generated 200 qualified leads in two weeks." Those are things that get repeated. And when you do find yourself in the same room as a decision-maker, start sharing those headlines directly.

2. Build relationship capital.

This one is important for high achievers. I like to joke that I’m “Little Miss Do-it-all-myself,” and it trips me up sometimes. In this situation, I had built up enough trust and rapport with my manager that pushing back was received well. I had relationship capital. If we didn’t have a strong relationship, my pushback (while valid) could have backfired.

This works in other use cases too. In general, think about how your relationships and affiliations can help make your case stronger, no matter the context. For example, if you’re searching for your next role or if you’re trying to build your network (particularly when you don’t have an existing relationship to lean on) things like credentials, shared contacts, or brand names in your portfolio carry weight too. Relationships and brand name recognition make it easier for people to take you seriously.

3. Understand your gaps.

This one is key. Sometimes your coworkers provide valuable data. For me, observing senior colleagues helped me unpack what the expectations were for executives at the next level. That became my benchmark. One way you could do the same is by reflecting on the following questions:

• Have any of your peers reached the next level — why or why not?

• Who’s getting opportunities you’re not, and what’s actually different about their experience, credentials, network, or skill sets versus yours?

Observing colleagues at the next level helped me level up multiple times in my career. It helped me observe things like the meetings they attended, the decisions they owned, and their purview — which were useful cues for how I went about measuring my own performance and taking on additional responsibility (strategically). When I was gunning for a Vice President role, the only difference between me and the next level was my title. I had invested time in understanding my gaps and addressing them. And because I had done that legwork, I had the confidence to eventually be direct about what I wanted.

WORK WITH ME

If this feels like the kind of strategic support you need in your career, I have a few 1:1 coaching slots opening in the spring. My clients have stepped into more senior leadership roles, improved their relationships with their CEO, and found the confidence to take control of their careers. If this sounds like what you’re looking for - let’s chat.

Explore 1:1 Coaching

4. Make your ambitions known.

I walked into my review wanting a conversation about earning the next step. The CEO walked into the conversation wanting to adhere to a new compensation framework rolled out across the company. He wasn’t aware I was expecting to be promoted.

Looking back, I should’ve been much more direct about my intentions and expectations going into the meeting. Being upfront would have ensured he had the full picture walking in, and perhaps changed his approach. Our misalignment wasn’t actually a reflection of my performance, he was just a busy person with competing priorities trying to make the best decision he could. Hearing him out, sharing how I felt, and working together on next steps helped us co-create a solution.

My advice? Be direct, don’t assume that your manager knows about your career aspirations. Tell them.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

These four things are exactly what you need to do to get others to take you seriously. They are things you can control. These actions help you show up as the best version of yourself, regardless of how others *may* perceive you.

Make your impact visible. Build relationship capital. Understand your gaps. Make your ambitions known.

If you’re not confident about 1–2 of the things on my list, good. Now you have clarity about where to focus your time.

And if you do all four and someone still doesn’t take you seriously?

People are wrong all the time.

Keep going.

Good luck! See you next week, I’ve got a very special announcement.

Ashley

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I share fresh leadership and career insights every Monday, right before you tackle the rest of your week. If you’re curious, people who work at the following companies subscribe to Reframed.

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I’m Ashley Rudolph and I write this newsletter for people who are ready for the next level in their careers and want practical advice that works. Reframed readers describe the experience best: “I need to give feedback, so I searched through your newsletters. I knew you wrote about it <3”

Some of the things that made me great eventually kept me stuck. I had to give them up to grow. Here’s how I did it.

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You asked someone on your team to do something and they didn’t get it quite right.

Instead of sharing feedback, and seeing if they can deliver what you want, you utter these five words: “I’ll just do it myself.”

This is probably the most expensive sentence a leader can say.

To be clear, I’m calling myself out. I’ve said this phrase at least a hundred times. As an executive and even as a business owner.

I love the challenge of building my business from scratch, which is why I did it all by myself for two years. The big stuff (coaching, sales, writing Reframed newsletters) and the small stuff (scheduling, inbox management, file organization) were all me. After awhile, the small stuff became a security blanket. Handling those tasks on a daily basis was an easy way for me to always feel like I was productive. But in my case, “productive” did not equal strategic or growth-oriented. I realized I couldn’t scale unless I handed some things over.

So I hired an executive assistant.

Not too long after, I had a mini identity crisis for two weeks straight.

The first few days were liberating! I found myself thinking and saying things like:

Wow — I don’t have to do that anymore.

Yay! She’s so much better at this than I was!

I don’t have to worry about balls being dropped.

FREEDOM!

With less task management, I now had to sit with a much harder question: What does my new version of success actually look like?

Surprisingly, I struggled to identify the highest leverage ways to spend some of the time that freed up.

If you’re a high achiever who has gotten where you are through excellent execution, people rarely warn you about the transition from executor to leader.

We talk about delegation.

We talk about becoming more strategic.

But growth means you’ll have to grapple with this: some of the things that made you great eventually keep you stuck. You need to give them up to grow.

“Doing What My Title Requires” Was the Reframe I Didn’t Know I Needed

When I was feeling stuck, I thought about something a client said while contending with the realities (good and challenging) of being SVP. Some interactions tested her, personally. She’d sit in a meeting knowing the right call, but hold back because she didn’t want to be seen as difficult.

Until she decided to reframe things.

Instead of worrying whether her decisions would be received well, or about delegating, or feeling like she needed consensus for a major decision, she asked herself whether she was “doing what her title required of her.” Simple.

To me, that reframe was everything.

When I think about the times I struggled to delegate, my first reaction was to dissect my weaknesses. That conjured up feelings of guilt and shame. I found myself thinking things like: I should be better at letting go. I’m too controlling. I just can’t trust people to do it right.

But when I took the time to zoom out and focus on my role, that kind of role clarity sounded like: Does my role require me to update this spreadsheet? Does my role require me to take notes during meetings? Does my role require me to make a difficult decision whether or not it’s the popular one?

If you’re not doing what your title and role require of you because you’re buried in tasks three levels below your pay grade, then that’s a problem you can solve. Although it might feel like a weakness or some kind of personality flaw, it’s not. The problem of letting things go is one you can overcome with just a few practical tips. Like I’ve said before about making myself visible: once you treat this like a skill you can develop instead of a personality trait you lack, everything changes.

3 Things to Try This Week If You Want To Be A Better Delegator

So, what does treating delegation like a skill actually look like? Here are 3 things that are helping me delegate effectively today:

1. Notice when you feel the urge to “do it yourself”.

Doing things myself was my version of working on autopilot. If you relate to this and want to change, you’re not just building a new habit — you're overriding years of muscle memory in real time. In order for me to disrupt my patterns, I needed to change two things:

• I had to create self awareness around the habit. If you made it this far, you’re probably seeing yourself in some of my anecdotes and that’s okay.

• I had to create a physical or mental reminder strong enough for me to come off autopilot in the moment. That could be a post-it on your desk or a daily reminder on your calendar. Bring the observation out of the abstract and into your daily flow.

Once I did these two things, I was able to take the next step and ask myself this question → Does my role require me to do this?

If my answer was no, I had to make an intentional decision to delegate it.

2. Interrupt and replace your “automatic yes” reflex.

One of my clients had a pattern of over-committing to stakeholders, signing up for additional projects and initiatives, and then having to live with the consequences of her decisions (for herself and her team). We worked to figure out a phrase she felt comfortable saying: ”Let me check my team’s capacity and get back to you.”

Those nine words bought her 24 hours to actually think about whether she could “just do it herself” or if she could delegate it to someone else. Some things require immediate action, but for the asks that don’t, this is a lifesaver.

3. Transfer ownership, not just the task.

SOPs were most transformative for me when onboarding my executive assistant. For every task I outlined:

• What the task was

• Why it was important to me (and my business)

• My expectations and any constraints (e.g. emails must be answered within 24 hours)

Yes, this sounds time consuming especially when your time is limited. But spending an hour or two upfront saved both of us a ton of time. For most of the responsibilities I handed over, she had what she needed to execute. The process of writing things down was transformative for me because it made me put the “why” in writing. It also forced me to think about her role and what made sense for her to own. I couldn’t just offload the grunt work and keep the interesting parts for myself. I had to give up some things I loved, too, all in service of doing what the role “business owner scaling a growing business” required of me. Giving her the details also allowed me to shift my focus to providing feedback and providing more context when needed.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

My New Version of Success Has Nothing To Do With My To-Do List

I’m on the other side of it now. But I wish someone had told me what was actually happening in those first two weeks without my productivity theater security blanket.

I felt lost but I wasn’t lazy.

I lacked direction but I wasn’t failing.

In reality, I was struggling to let go of a version of myself I had to outgrow if I wanted my business to continue growing.

As a high achiever, after all, I’m allergic to stagnation.

I started this work because I genuinely love helping people. Somewhere along the way, I let the admin side of running a business quietly overtake the part that actually lights me up. Now my version of success has nothing to do with my to-do list.

If you recognize yourself in any of this, you likely just haven’t defined what your new version of success looks like yet.

Start by reflecting on what you want that definition to be and let me know how I can help.

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

P.S.

One more thing - am I effectively challenging your thinking? Are my personal stories helpful? My #1 goal is to help you level up in your career, so let me know what you need.

This newsletter was edited by Rachel Aylward

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I’m Ashley Rudolph and I write this newsletter for people who are ready for the next level in their careers. Reframed readers describe the experience best: “There’s a depth here that I lack in many a Fast Co click bait article. You push beyond the superficial answers.”

The biggest mistake is thinking “If I just explain it better, give them feedback, or show them they’re wrong...then they’ll change.” Here’s what to do instead.

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Occasionally, I think back to the times I reported into difficult leaders. The managers that were sometimes volatile or impossible to please.

I remember the disagreements. The feedback that stung in all the wrong ways…vague, indirect, or avoidant.

When I reported into a manger like this, I struggled to cope. My coping mechanism was maxing out on self care just to get by. I needed yoga, a monthly unlimited membership to SolidCore, monthly massages, monthly facials, and a meditation practice. I lived for the solace that the weekends brought me because I didn’t have to deal with them. But every Monday morning sent a chill down my spine. No amount of self care took that feeling away.

Why Working With a Difficult Leader Is So Taxing For High Achievers

I am wired to succeed.

The situation with my manager felt so dire because I was in a position where I felt like no matter how hard I tried, I was going to fail. My manager and I didn’t click and I didn’t understand how to deliver what they wanted consistently.

It was a recipe for disaster for a high achiever like me.

What I wish I knew when I was trying to navigate working with a difficult manager was to parse good and relevant advice from unhelpful advice in the heat of the moment. Advice that was unhelpful kept me fixated on my manager’s flaws. For example, when I got feedback that stung, I would go and find an article on bad feedback or “bad managers”. And when I found an article that was topical, it made me feel seen by highlighting exactly all the ways my manager delivered the feedback the wrong way and why that was bad.

Ultimately, that was a waste of my time.

Eventually, I learned that their flaws are the thing that you actually don’t have power to change. In my case, I stopped searching for advice kept me angry and disempowered. I wanted solutions.

According to research from CIPD, the gap between good and bad management is staggering, here’s two takeaways that stood out to me:

• Workers with bad managers experience high levels of stress and negative impacts to their mental health. According to the CIPD study, 50% of employees with bottom-quartile managers reported that work negatively impacted their mental health, compared to just 14% of those with top-quartile managers

• They cultivate malaise and overall dissatisfaction. In that same study, only 38% of employees with poor managers indicated that they were willing to go above and beyond their job requirements, compared to 74% of those with excellent managers

The last point hit home, specifically within the context of my work with high achievers. High achievers are exactly the folks that are wired for going above and beyond and when stuck under a difficult manager without the right coping mechanisms, that innate desire to exceed expectations can go away.

When you think about it, the time lost to burnout, to increased stress, and to career stagnation cannibalizes the time you actually need to invest in getting to where you want to be.

It stalls your trajectory.

If you’re in survival mode, you’re not building the strategic relationships, visibility, or a portfolio of wins that actually advances your career.

Most people never learn how to win in a scenario like this.

When my clients say some version of “I need help navigating my relationship with my manager”. I’ve come to learn that what they actually need is a system for operating successfully with a manager that’s difficult (and likely won’t change).

Let’s talk about how to solve this.

How to Work With A Difficult Boss, Successfully. Three Simple Tips.

The thing most people get wrong about managing a difficult boss is that it’s not a person problem, it’s a systems problem.

My highest-performing clients didn’t actually fix the leaders who were constantly frustrating them. They built systems. Systems are important because they allow you to limit your emotional investment in these interactions. Every time you get “stung” by a negative interaction with a difficult leader, you’re forced to spend time recovering. These 3 tips will help minimize the sting so that you can focus more of your time on what matters.

1. Pick Your Battles Using This Framework (Not Emotions)

If you work with someone difficult, it might be tempting to change your default setting at work to disagreement.

When someone triggers us, we associate them with negative feelings. We start to notice all their flaws and missteps (whether those missteps matter in the moment or not!). When things are tense, everything eventually becomes a landmine.

But if you’re defaulting to “no” on most things, you’re actively making your life harder.

If this is you, try this filter before you push back. I want you to ask yourself two questions:

1. Will this disagreement materially improve the outcome or am I disagreeing on principle?

   1. High achievers are wired to focus on what’s right. Instead, shift your focus to impact. This question helps you unpack the effects of disagreeing with them, instead of immediately submitting to the knee jerk reaction of how their words or actions made you feel or whether they’re right or wrong.

2. What’s the opportunity cost of spending my political capital here vs. saving it for something that matters more?

   • We’ve all heard about opportunity costs. When our emotions are high, it can be hard to think through how our responses can damage our political capital. There are times when the hit is worth it and times when it’s not.

Reflecting on these two questions gives you choices, even when it feels like you don’t have them. You’re consciously choosing when it’s strategic to push back vs. when it’s not based on what serves your bigger objectives.

2. Leverage Choice Architecture. Your Secret Weapon for Constraining the Chaos

Sometimes a difficult manager is someone who has trouble with clear decision making.

Maybe you send them a presentation deck for feedback and it leads to a 2 week delay and 20 rounds of revisions. And with each round, you were both getting increasingly frustrated with each other.

In these situations, instead of asking open-ended questions like “What do you think of this deck?” Try presenting a limited set of options (2 or 3 MAX).

This approach is grounded in choice architecture. My mom is a natural choice architect and very wisely gave me two options for dinner each night as a kid. I had no idea what she was doing — I always felt empowered and in control. Little did I know that she was using a concept popularized by behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

When decision-makers are erratic or indecisive, giving them a constrained set of options (rather than a blank canvas) reduces decision fatigue and accelerates clarity.

Here’s 3 ways you can use choice architecture to wrangle an indecisive leader:

1. Instead of asking: “What do you think of the Q4 strategy deck?”, try: “Should we lead with the revenue projections or customer success stories in slide 3?’”

2. Don’t send a long document or presentation and wait for feedback. Send it and explicitly point them to/tag them on the slides where a specific question or piece of feedback is required of them.

   1. Previously you may have asked “what do you think?” and now you’re going to say “We can present the data like this (using raw data) or like this (using percentages). Which one do you think tells a better story?”

3. Frame their choices in terms of outcomes: “Do you prefer we go the fast and scrappy route or take the more polished route and delay this by a week?”

   1. Maybe they want to go with multiple rounds more feedback, but they need to know that it will cause a delay.

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My husband was just remarking on how much my mindset has changed in the past few months, to which I replied, “That was all Ashley!”. After years of not being truly seen/appreciated by the leadership team at my work, I just felt really small, invisible, and unconfident. You gave me the confidence to level-up. You also helped me to stand up for myself and be more visible at my current job.

She landed a Director promotion. Priceless.

Let’s chat about coaching and see if we’re a fit.

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3. Look For Patterns. Their Behavior May Not Be As Erratic As You Think

When we work with someone difficult, we feel the direct impact of their behavior. That makes it difficult to take a step back and do a root cause analysis (RCA) of the situation. It’s personal. Frankly, most people think about RCA in relation to solving technical/scientific problems or finding solutions to business problems, but the relationship you have with your manager IS data and you can deconstruct it to understand their behaviors.

Sometimes managers have patterns hiding in plain sight.

I recently talked a new client through this. She was convinced her executive was just “moody”. She’d watch him be perfectly reasonable with her, then turn around and absolutely eviscerate a colleague in the same meeting. It felt random and terrifying. And while his wrath hadn’t hit her yet, she was anxious that it might.

I asked her to think about the moments he blew up and whether there were any patterns she could identify. And after a few minutes, something clicked. She realized that every single time someone was delivering bad news he hadn’t heard before, he had a bad reaction.

He hated being surprised.

Her next steps were clear. Communicate clearly, early, and transparently.

My point with this tip isn’t that all difficult managers are secretly reasonable. Some really are just volatile. But some just have triggers you can learn to navigate if you zoom out.

I hope these were helpful reframes, now I want to share a few strategies that are not effective.

How Not To Work With A Difficult Leader

I don’t want to minimize the impact of working with a difficult leader, manager, or colleague. I struggled to work with the leader I talked about in the beginning of this newsletter. But now that I’m on the other side, I can say with confidence that I have a more productive set of strategies. Ones that actually work for myself and others!

Here’s what doesn’t work:

1. Hoping They’ll Change

I remember the times when I thought, if I just explain it better, if I just give them feedback, or if I just show them they’re wrong...then they’ll change.*

I was wrong.

There’s a time and place for feedback. Particularly with folks who are open to it. But feedback is not a great use of your time if you know your boss isn’t open to it or worse, could take it poorly.

I recently explained this to a client with an analogy I’ll call “The Seattle Effect”.

You don’t move to Seattle and expect LA weather year-round. That’s not going to be your reality. You can’t change the weather. You have to make peace with the fact that it will rain a lot. If that’s not your jam, maybe you decide you no longer want to live there. If you decide to stick it out because there are other things about living in Seattle that you really enjoy, then you deal with the weather by buying rain gear.

Sometimes dealing with a difficult manager requires the same mindset shift.

You need to change your perspective from “how do I fix this person?” which is essentially the same as saying “how do I change the weather?”. Your new perspective should be “how do I create the right conditions for success for myself given that this is my reality?”.

2. Fighting Fire With Fire

Sometimes you just can’t help yourself and you give into the temptation of waging your own all out war. It usually happens after the relationship takes one too many hits. There’s not a lot of trust, it’s damaged. Your passive aggressive tone turns combative and maybe even condescending. While it might feel cathartic to “win” a spat with your manager, if you intend to stay at the company - you’re essentially putting a target on your own back.

Fighting fire with fire = destruction.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

My highest-performing clients figured out that You can’t control a difficult leader. But you can control the systems you build to work with them.

The people who wait for the difficult boss to change stay stuck. The people who build systems around the difficult boss move forward.

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

P.S.

If all else fails, remember this.

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I’m Ashley Rudolph and I write this newsletter for people who are ready for the next level in their careers. Reframed readers describe the experience best: “There’s a depth here that I lack in many a Fast Co click bait article. You push beyond the superficial answers.”

The gap between the people getting promoted and the people getting passed over is often not technical skill. It’s resourcefulness: the ability to figure things out, connect dots others miss, and tell the story of how you did it.

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Early in my career, I was deep in execution mode. Every quarter looked the same: head down, shipping work, putting out fires, repeat. I was good at my job. But I was invisible in the ways that mattered.

Then one quarter, something shifted. I’d been tapped to lead a cross-departmental project that, honestly, was so incredibly complex (and messy). Three teams with three different timelines, a leadership team that wanted answers yesterday, and three vendor relationships that I had to build from the ground up. I spent weeks untangling it. Getting people aligned who didn’t particularly want to be.

And then came the test, the CEO asked for a 1:1 meeting with me to hear my strategy. We were holed up in a conference room and I was trying to look like someone who had this under control the whole time (I mostly did. Mostly). I walked them through what I’d done and my vision for the future. There was a moment right when I was sharing a timeline for what was next and my ideas for expansion, when his eyes lit up.

He walked out of the room believing I was the right person to lead the project and told everyone as much.

That quarter’s review was one of my best. Not because my overall body of work was dramatically different from the quarter before, it wasn’t. But because the most recent evidence of my impact was vivid, visible, and top of mind. They didn’t remember the nine months of quiet execution. They remembered the endorsement.

That’s recency bias. And it’s one of the most underutilized forces in your career.

Psychologists have studied this for decades. People disproportionately weigh recent information when making judgments, it’s how our memory works. And in performance reviews, it means the last 4-6 weeks of your behavior can carry as much weight as the previous 10 months. And sometimes that’s a negative thing. But what if you made it work for you in a positive way?

Most career advice tells you to start your “visibility campaign” months in advance. And that’s smart, if you have the runway. But if your review is right around the corner, there are still things you can do to shape the conversation, especially if you’ve been doing a great job up until this point.

CONTEXT

Avoiding the #1 communication blindspot

Here’s what most people get wrong about pre-review positioning: they focus on what they did.

The completed projects.

The metrics.

The tangible wins.

They matter. But having great results and being able to communicate great results are two completely different skills. And the second one is where most people fall short.

Think about it:

• Sharing a project update with a skip-level leader is executive communication.

• Reframing a task around business outcomes in your 1:1 is managing up.

• Recognizing a colleague’s work in front of senior leaders is executive presence.

• Sharing an insight in a cross-functional meeting and gaining buy-in is selling your ideas.

The stuff that feels like self-promotion is actually the leadership skill set you’ll need to advance in your career. Roles requiring high social interaction have grown by nearly 12 percentage points since 1980 and employers have tripled the share of managerial job postings emphasizing collaboration, coaching, and influence since 2007. The ability to socialize your work, bring people along, and communicate your impact clearly isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. If you’re a leader (or want to be), it’s the job. And with AI reshaping what execution looks like, the gap between the people getting promoted and the people getting passed over is often not technical skill. It’s resourcefulness: the ability to figure things out, connect dots others miss, and tell the story of how you did it. Anthropic’s 2025 hiring data showed they value adaptability and problem-solving over specific technical credentials even for engineering roles.

So the tips below aren’t just a pre-review checklist. They’re practice reps for the exact skills that get people promoted.

And the best part? Most of them take less than 15 minutes.

THE FRAMEWORK

5 Ways to Positively Impact Your Performance Review in Weeks, Not Months

So here’s the good news, you don’t have to become a different person in order to take action on any of the tips below. But, you do have to become more intentional about the next few weeks.

Here’s how:

1. Speak up in one meeting this week with a prepared insight.

Not a rambling comment. One clear, structured thought: brief context, your takeaway, and what you’d recommend. I wrote about this exact thing in 10 Non-Cringey Ways to Get Noticed and it’s true. The person who speaks with clarity and conviction is the most memorable. Every time. When you speak up, you only have a few minutes to make a strong point. Unfortunately, if your point isn’t clear, it won’t be remembered.

Most people ramble without making a clear point. That doesn’t have to be you.

Try structuring your insights in this way instead:

Brief context → Key takeaway → Call to action.

• Weak: “We should launch a mentorship program.”

• Strong: “Employee retention is down 15%, with 40% citing lack of career growth. A structured mentorship program could increase engagement and retention.”

People listen to the second version because you appear well-researched and prepared.

2. Give credit to a colleague, in front of leadership.

This sounds counterintuitive for a visibility play, but it’s one of the most powerful moves you can make. When you recognize someone else’s contribution in a meeting or a Slack channel where leadership is present, you look like a leader.

When you lift people up, they will return the favor. Think about it! That colleague you publicly shouted out may be someone that gives you 360 feedback and they’ll remember that moment.

Sharing the love with my colleagues over the years taught me that people do remember how you make them feel. They remember being seen. And long after the metrics and project deadlines have faded, they remember who acknowledged them when it mattered.

3. Reframe one accomplishment as a business outcome, not a task.

Don’t say “I managed the vendor transition.” Say “I led a vendor transition that reduced our processing time by 30% and eliminated a recurring escalation point for the ops team”. Same work. Completely different signal. This is the difference between being seen as someone who *does things* and someone who *drives outcomes*. Practice this framing in your 1:1 this week. If you’re stuck, refer to my IMPACT framework.

• I - Influence: How have you shaped decisions, strategy, or team dynamics?

• M - Metrics: What measurable results have you delivered (e.g., revenue growth, efficiency improvements)?

• P - Profitability: How have you helped the company save or make money?

• A - Accountability: What high-stakes projects have you owned and delivered on

• C - Culture: How have you improved team morale, retention, or workplace collaboration?

• T - Transformation: How has your work created lasting change or innovation?

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The tips above are a great start but if you want someone in your corner helping you build these skills in real time, that's what I do. My clients don't just prep for one review. They learn how to position themselves for every conversation that follows.

Learn more here → Elevate for High-Achievers

4. Zoom out. Ask your manager: “What would make this quarter a success in your eyes?”

A lot of people stay laser focused on their work, their tasks, their checklist and hope that their manager values it. That approach can keep you stuck. Instead try asking your manager about what success would look like, to them. It takes 30 seconds and can reframe your entire review.

Most people walk into their review hoping their manager noticed their work. The people who get promoted ask what their manager is paying attention to and then make sure their final weeks of work align with it. It’s being strategic about what you emphasize.

5. Plan out how you want to show up in your next meeting.

Most people only prepare for meetings when they have something to present. But the way you carry yourself in a room is a signal and people read it whether you’re aware of it or not. Before your next meeting, pick a mode:

• The Contributor: You’re there to add value. Come with one insight, one question, or one piece of data that only you can offer. Even a well-timed “I actually pulled the numbers on this, here’s what I found” changes how people perceive you.

• The Anchor: You’re there to bring order. When the conversation spirals, you’re the one who says “Let me summarize where we are” or “What decision are we actually trying to make right now?” This is leadership and it’s highly visible to senior people.

• The Motivator: Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone starts to pile on and are no longer focused on the topic or moving a project forward? There’s usually 1-2 people that can get a group like that back on track OR offer a different perspective that signals not all is lost. Try being that person. That’s leadership.

You don’t have to do all three at once. Pick the one that fits the meeting. The point is: you don’t have to be on autopilot. The people who get promoted are the ones who treat every meeting like it matters, because someone in that room is always paying attention.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Here’s the thing about reviews, the last few weeks before your review can reinforce a story that’s already working for you. A few visible, well-timed moves can shift how people experience your work and that experience becomes the lens they bring to every piece of feedback they give about you.

So before your review, ask yourself: *What do I want people to remember about me?*

Then go make that come true.

I’m curious, what’s worked for you in the weeks leading up to a review?

Good luck!

Ashley

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Work is complex, career advice shouldn’t be.

I’m Ashley Rudolph and I write this newsletter for ambitious people who are ready to step into the next level of their careers. People have said that I share the kind of “real talk” that you only get from a close friend. Advice that feels actionable and helps improve their relationship to work.

If you’re nervous about giving constructive feedback, it means you care. But the data is clear: managers who lead with direct, honest feedback see high team engagement rates (78%). Here’s how to get there.

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I’ve been thinking about how in many ways Reframed is about sharing some of the uncomfortable truths of leadership. And surprisingly, I’ve yet to cover giving tough feedback.

So today, we’re talking about one of the conversations almost every leader dreads. The one that makes your heart race and your palms a little damp before you click “Join Meeting” on Zoom 😬.

I’ve had to give more feedback more times than I can count. There were times when I was prepared and other times, where I stumbled my way through it. Whether my delivery was perfect or not, giving that constructive feedback was always the right thing to do.

Let’s look at a few of the times I’ve had to deliver hard feedback:

• When people repeatedly submitted work with errors (grammatical errors, typos, lacked polish).

• When someone on my team bypassed our reporting structure to undermine my leadership (yikes!).

• When a direct report was too in the weeds of their team’s work and I needed them to be a more strategic contributor.

• When another direct report escalated every non-urgent issue to me like a five-alarm fire. The escalations were starting to damage their reputation with cross-functional colleagues.

• When a new team member wasn’t operating at their level, a fact their previous manager agreed with but did not have the opportunity to tell them directly, so I had to.

• When someone repeatedly missed deadlines without warning and no plan in place for rectifying the issue of the work not being delivered and it being late.

Every single one of those times I was balancing a mixed bag of emotions. I was disappointed, frustrated, and apprehensive about approaching the situation head on. I knew giving feedback was the right thing to do, but I wanted to get it “right”. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t.

And I’m sure many of you can relate to this….there were times when avoiding it felt like the safe choice. In those moments, here’s what I chose to do instead:

• Avoid the issue or the person.

• Do the work myself, because it was easier/quicker/less taxing.

• Delegate the work to other members of my team who were capable of getting the task done.

• Complain to friends.

• Obsessed over giving “the perfect” feedback and, when I couldn’t arrive at the right talking points, deciding not to give it

When I took this route, the issues never improved. And more often than not, they snowballed. Avoiding the issue made me regret not addressing things sooner; even imperfectly.

CONTEXT

Why giving difficult feedback is tough for high achievers

I believe that most leaders want their team to be successful. Someone missing the mark can either feel frustrating (at best) and, at worst, like a personal failure.

If you’ve been there, you know the feeling: you delegate a project, you set a clear vision, and you outline the success criteria. In your mind, you’ve cleared a path for them to run towards the finish line.

But for one reason or another, they just don’t get there.

In my experience, the reason this situation feels so grueling for high achievers is twofold:

1. We are wired for systems. We expect to set the bar, establish the framework, and watch the team follow. When that doesn’t happen, it “breaks” our logic.

2. Some of us have a hard time understanding when others aren’t wired with the same “winning” mentality.

But the best leaders understand that managing is not a zero-sum game. People struggle to perform for many different reasons. They might have things going on in their lives that you’ll never know about. They may be in denial about the fact that they’re not cutting it and hoping you haven’t noticed. They might truly believe they are doing a good job.

DATA

And feedback, even the tough kind, is something that most employees crave. The research shows 72% of employees rated “managers providing critical feedback” as important for them in career development. And there’s a real benefit to giving feedback, leaders who rank in the top 10% at giving honest feedback create teams that rank in the top 23% of engagement. (HBR)

The reality is when you’re a good leader, empathy and accountability have to co-exist. In fact, if having tough conversations doesn’t impact you in the slightest…there’s probably something wrong with you (lol). You should feel the weight of it. Your discomfort is a sign of your humanity, not a weakness.

Some people will pull it together after receiving feedback and some just won’t. And that’s okay. It’s not your fault. You can provide the tools, the clarity, and the opportunity, but they have to own the outcome.

If they don’t, you haven’t failed as a leader; you’ve simply reached the limit of what your management can solve.

INSIGHTS

How to give difficult feedback, the human way

Here’s how I’ve learned to navigate giving hard feedback to my team members without being mean or letting my frustration get the best of me.

1. Investigate and gather your data. Don’t rely solely on your own perception or singular accounts from your team, especially if the performance issue is nuanced. To be fair to the person receiving it and to keep your own integrity in tact, you need facts. If you have the evidence (emails, missed deadlines, errors), organize it. If you don’t have clear firsthand data yet, you need to move the evidence from “subjective” to “indisputable” before you have a conversation. Try giving them a project to own from start to finish. Their ability to complete the work well and on time (or not) is a starting point.

2. Decide what kind of conversation you’re having. Before you have the conversation, define the scope. Are you talking to them about a specific issue or about a series of issues? Being clear on this will help you decide what conversation you’ll need to have:

• Corrective feedback: This is point-in-time feedback about a single issue. If you just noticed the issue and you don’t have a full blown poor performance crisis yet, you’ll probably be starting here. Here’s a few of my favorite frameworks for delivering objective and direct feedback:

  • SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact): This is a classic for a reason. Most feedback fails because it’s too vague (”You aren’t a team player”) or too judgmental (”You’re not trying”). SBI forces you to be clear and objective. You describe the scene (Situation), the action (Behavior), and the result (Impact). It is the most effective way to lower defensiveness because you aren’t attacking their character or them as individuals.

    • Situation: Be specific about the "where" and "when."

    • Behavior: Describe exactly what you saw (no assumptions).

    • Impact: Explain what happened because of that behavior.

• Cumulative feedback/performance conversations: This is about addressing a pattern that has already been established. If it’s a pattern, don’t get distracted by the most recent mistake. Address the trend and share multiple examples.

3. Try not to debate or argue. This was the hardest part for me. There were times where I had done the work and gathered the evidence, but I let their pushback get to me. I felt the need to defend my stance and “prove” I was right. Don’t make the same mistake. Understand that hearing critical feedback triggers a “fight or flight” instinct. When you deliver negative feedback, the other person might get emotional, they may offer you valuable context that frames the situation, or they might try to throw you under the bus or rewrite history. The latter behavior is actually called switchtracking; where the other person flips the conversation and then starts giving you feedback on all the things you’ve done wrong. Your job is to stay controlled and point back to the facts. You aren’t there to win an argument; you’re there to state the reality of their performance. Keep the conversation fair.

4. Be honest about the downstream effects. There were times when I delivered feedback that was about more than the work being “bad.” It was about the cost to the culture on the team. Their performance (or demeanor) had a ripple effect that spread from my team to other departments. Being objective means showing them how their actions impact others.

MORE RESOURCES ON GIVING DIRECT FEEDBACK

And if you’re looking for more resources on giving constructive feedback, I recommend this incredibly thorough compilation from HBR.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Addressing a performance gap or an issue at work is never going to be easy, and honestly, it shouldn’t be. If it makes you nervous, that means you still care. But I’ve had to learn the hard way that when I chose the "safe" route, staying silent, doing the work myself, or just venting to friends, I wasn't actually being kind to the other person. I was just protecting myself from an awkward 30-minute meeting.

The data actually backs this up. Gallup found that avoiding feedback altogether is the most expensive mistake a leader can make. When leaders give tough, corrective feedback, disengagement is roughly 22% (which means, these leaders have a 78% engagement rate!). But when leaders provide no feedback at all, disengagement climbs to 40%.

When we don’t speak up, we leave people to guess where they stand. You owe it to your team to be clear and you owe it to yourself to be the kind of leader who does the right thing, even when it’s hard.

If you have to deliver some feedback soon, good luck. See you on Thursday!

Ashley

If you enjoyed this newsletter and are interested in partnering with me, here’s how:

• I’m an executive coach that supports high achieving Directors, VP, and C-level executives with career strategy.

• You can hire me to facilitate workshops.

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Join readers from Netflix, Google, Uber, Chanel, LinkedIn, and Sephora. I share fresh leadership and career insights every Monday, right before you tackle the rest of your week.

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I’m Ashley Rudolph and I write this newsletter for ambitious people who are ready to step into the next level of their careers. People have said that I share the kind of “real talk” that you only get from a close friend. Advice that feels actionable and helps improve their relationship to work. It’s exactly what I set out to do.

I hope you enjoy today’s edition.

Hello from snowy New York! I spent the weekend trying to take a break from the news cycle by doing cozy things like playing board games, writing this newsletter, making cheese boards, and, of course, taking Ailey to play in the snow.

The “go-getter” habits that got you promoted into leadership unintentionally make you look reactive. Here’s how to fix it and be seen as the right kind of proactive leader.

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The Proactivity Trap

There comes a time in a high-achieving leader’s life when they’ll hear seven dreaded words from their manager: “I want you to stop being reactive”.

It’s a punch to the gut and, most times, you aren’t even sure what it means!

Especially if you’re someone who's built their entire career being the person who gets things done: rapid-fire email responses, being willing to jump on any task, and providing your manager with proactive updates before they’re even requested. These traits were the exact behaviors that got you promoted. But suddenly, those superpowers start showing up as a professional scarlet letter: Reactivity.

I’ve felt it firsthand.

As an executive, one of the most annoying habits to coach a senior member of my team out of was the tendency to bombard me with too much information. Here’s why. I spent my days context switching; working with cross-functional team members, preparing information for board meetings, managing 3 teams, and navigating conversations with the exec team (some good, some challenging). Outside of 1:1s with my team, I was laser focused on 2 categories of tasks:

1. things that were urgent and

2. things that were directly related to advancing our organizational priorities

Everything else was noise.

So when a senior team member shared everything with me (especially non-actionable status updates) I didn’t think, "Wow, they're so busy!". Instead, I subconsciously started to view them as someone without a filter, incapable of surfacing the right things at the right time.

Eventually, I learned how to coach my team on getting this skill right. Every single person knew exactly what to share, when to share it, and how to escalate information to me in order to get a quick response. It was a dream; not just for my inbox and my calendar, but because I finally saw them owning their roles.

CONTEXT

Why Proactivity Negatively Impacts High Achievers

The pattern of non-productive proactivity almost exclusively affects high achievers. For us, checking a task off a list is euphoric. It feels like a win because, for years, it was. As a star IC, your volume of tasks done proved your value.

But in leadership, the goalposts shift. Proactive updates that aren’t tied to business outcomes start to look like busywork. Or worse, they make you look reactive, like someone who lets small tasks dictate their day rather than business strategy.

If this sounds like you, here’s the good news: you don’t have a proactivity problem. You have a packaging and positioning problem.

Think about it. You already know how to move work forward. You can spot a deadline derailer from a mile away and you know how to inspire a team to act. Those are challenging skills to master and you’ve got them in spades.

In senior leadership, your value isn’t your ability to show you’ve done the day to day work; it’s your ability to rally the people, processes, and systems required to get the work done. Shifting your positioning is much easier than learning to work effectively, it just requires a change in where you deposit your time and attention.

MINDSET SHIFT →

One way to make this shift is to think of trust as currency. Early in your career, you have an “Execution Account.” Every rapid-fire update and completed task is a deposit that builds your reputation as a capable doer. But leadership opens a “Strategic Leadership Account” when you’re promoted into the next level. The trap most high achievers fall into is that they keep trying to fund the first account. Every time you send your manager a granular task update, you’re making an “Execution Account” deposit. When you move up, your manager stops looking at that balance. They start checking the monthly statements on your “Strategic Leadership Account”... and it’s empty.

INSIGHTS

3 Habits That Make You Look Unintentionally Reactive, Instead of Proactive

Here are three times when your proactivity makes you look reactive and unintentionally paints you as less senior than you are.

1. Solving problems that aren’t yours to solve

This might look like jumping in to solve a task or cleaning up a project the moment you see it’s off track. At the executive level, your value isn’t your ability to fix a slide deck or a single formula in a spreadsheet; it’s your ability to build a system where those things get fixed without you. When you “proactively” take the reins, you are reacting to the discomfort of a mess. This type of proactivity is low-leverage. It signals that you don’t know how to delegate or, worse, that you don’t trust your team. This is where I always point people back to a classic: The Eisenhower Matrix.

It’s a simple, four-quadrant framework that leaders have used for decades to stay sane. It reminds us that just because something is Urgent (the mess in front of you) doesn’t mean it is Important (your strategic goals).

When a task lands on your desk or when you’re tempted to snatch a task off someone else’s (lol), run it through the matrix:

• Quadrant 1 (Urgent & Important): Do it now. (These are the true “fires.”)

• Quadrant 2 (Not Urgent but Important): Schedule it. (This is where “Strategy” lives.)

• Quadrant 3 (Urgent but Not Important): Delegate it. (This is the “mess” you’re usually tempted to clean up yourself.)

• Quadrant 4 (Neither): Delete it.

When you focus on a Quadrant 3 task, you aren’t saving the day; you’re neglecting Quadrant 1 and 2. It signals that you don’t know how to delegate or, worse, that you don’t trust your team to grow.

2. Sharing too much detail about your work with your manager

We’ve all been there: you had a wildly productive Tuesday, you cleared out your inbox, and sat through at least five grueling meetings. You want your manager to see all that effort. In your mind, you’re providing “transparency” and “accountability”.

But as a senior leader, when you report at the task level, you are essentially asking your manager to do the mental heavy lifting of figuring out why your work matters. If they have to connect the dots for you, they see you as someone who can execute a task list, but not someone who can own the strategy.

So, instead of reporting on what you did, report on how your work laddered up to the organization’s goals. Instead of running through your task list, you’re going to group the small stuff (so it looks intentional) and elevate the big, strategic stuff.

• During your next 1:1, if you’re tempted to share a list, try this frame: “I spent about 20% of my time this week on operational efficiencies, ensuring the team has the resources they need to keep our initiatives on track. I spent the rest of my time on [Major Priority X] and [Strategic Outcome Y].”

See the difference? You aren’t just “doing things.” You are maintaining the systems that enable the team to win. You’ve gone from reporting on your busy-ness to reporting on the big picture.

RESOURCES

If you’re stuck on how to position your contributions as a leader, this article in HBR has more great examples about how to frame your work in ways that aren’t execution-focused.

3. Over escalating issues to your manager

You hit a snag and you want to give your boss a “heads up” so they aren’t blindsided. But in leadership, an unnecessary “heads up” often just feels like you’re handing them a hot potato you’re too nervous to hold.

Work is essentially just a series of problems to be solved. If you escalate friction before you’ve attempted to smooth it out yourself, you’re inadvertently signaling that you aren’t ready to own outcomes.

I recommend trying to solve the problem first, then using one of the three filters below to decide how to talk about it. This keeps your manager informed without making them do your job for you:

• Information aka The Olivia Pope “It’s Handled” Update: Use this for items your manager specifically asked to stay in the loop on. The heart of this update is: I encountered a problem, I solved it, and here is the result.

  • How to frame it: “As requested, here’s the update on Project X. We hit a minor roadblock with the vendor, but I got on the phone with them and resolved the issue. We’re still on track to hit our deadline on Friday.”

  • Why this works: This is SO much better than forwarding an email when you encountered the roadblock! This proves you are strategic and capable of handling “maintenance” without their intervention.

• Requests: Use this when you are know the right next steps to take but need them to clear a specific hurdle that is outside your authority.

  • How to frame it: “I’m currently navigating a resource conflict between Team A and B. I need you to confirm which priority takes precedence so I can reallocate the budget by EOD.”

  • Why this works: You’re not asking them “What do I do?”. You are asking them to pull a lever only they can pull and proving that you did the research before looping them in.

• Escalations: This is for big issues only. The rule here is: never escalate a problem without a proposed solution. You are escalating the decision, not the task. They may go with your proposal or they may have other ideas, but at least you came to the table with something.

  • How to frame it: “We hit a snag with the Q3 rollout. I’ve analyzed the options and I recommend we delay the launch by 48 hours to ensure the tech is stable. If you agree with this, I just need your sign-off on that pivot.”

  • Why this works: You’ve done the heavy lifting. You are acting as a partner in leadership, not a direct report looking for instructions.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

One of the biggest breakthroughs in my career was realizing that climbing the ladder is incredibly paradoxical. When you move up, you have to stop doing the very things that got you noticed in the first place. This shift can be disorienting. That’s normal.

Being successful as a leader is so fundamentally different than being a successful IC. It’s been that way since the dawn of professional careers and the modern day workplace post World War II. That’s exactly the moment when MBA programs skyrocketed in popularity. As the post-war economy boomed, organizations became massive and complex. Companies no longer just needed “doers”; they needed a new class of leaders trained in professional management skills like data analysis, decision-making, and relationship building.

Sound familiar?

In recent decades, the internet era, generations of MBAs and managers who passed down their leadership skills, and executive coaches have somewhat democratized access to those critical leadership skills. But the core truth hasn’t changed: these are skills that need to be developed; they are not inherent.

I share this because if this transition feels bumpy, it’s not a “you” thing. These are critical competencies that every leader before you has had to learn, navigate, and master. You can, too.

And if you (or your team) are ready to bridge that gap, let’s talk.

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

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Every other Thursday, I share a curated roundup of things directly and loosely related to the culture of work. Throughout my career, I’ve noticed that the people who get ahead typically aren’t working harder; they’re paying attention to the invisible forces shaping their careers.

This week, we’re looking at the "human" side of it all: how to stop people-pleasing (effectively), why we need more edgy and honest commentary online, and how a clean house might be the ultimate employee benefit.

Links from Fortune, , and .

Total read time: <8 mins.

The vibe this week: honesty. My favorite links just happened to be about what happens when we ask for more, lean into the snarky and humorous versions of ourselves, and stop behaviors that no longer serve us.

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My Links

THE ARTICLES I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS WEEK

#1: How to stop people pleasing for real (The New Yorker)

I loved this one. When I am contextualizing people pleasing tendencies with a client, we unpack the behaviors that are actually survival mechanisms in high-pressure workplaces. I was aware of fight, flight, fawn, or freeze responses but this article introduces “unfawning”: the process of breaking the reflex to appease others.

I’m obsessed.

When I think about work contexts, unfawning looks like not being the first to volunteer for the “office housework,” not jumping in to rescue a project when a peer drops the ball, and resisting the urge to agree with the loudest, most confident person in the room just to feel safe. (If you notice a tendency to defer to others simply because they are more senior, you might also be dealing with Authority Bias. This article might also be of interest to you.)

Another interesting point the authors made is that the internet and by extension, our digital workplaces turns us all into fawners. The article states, “sociologist Sherry Turkle described how the loose ties of digital life make us feel exposed and precarious, causing us to scrabble for status and other measures of safety. The internet, in other words, turns us all into fawners.”

Learning to “unfawn” might be the most important boundary-setting tool you use this year.

#2: Does your company offer cleaning services as a benefit? (Fortune)

I saw ’s post on LinkedIn a few weeks back about how her company reacted to her post about offering cleaning benefits as a health and wellness perk and it, deservedly, got a ton of attention. I know many of you here are executive leaders or in HR. If you’re refreshing your corporate benefits but haven’t thought about home cleaning as a perk, she makes a compelling argument.

While wellness stipends and gym perks “are fine,” she wrote, “not everyone wants to spend their limited free time on a treadmill. For a lot of us, a clean home does more for our well-being than another obligation.” Le argued a home-cleaning perk could be more “practical. It’s human. It takes one thing off the list.”

And much to her surprise, her company not only responded, but quickly acted to add cleaning services as a benefit for employees.

Her company (Slate) didn’t just listen; they acted. Very cool.

#3: The internet’s newest “secret” guide to rich people is on Substack (Rich People Sh*t)

The first newsletter on RPS () is about invite-only fake Birkin parties on the UES, which scratches both my nosey itch (*cough, cough* curiosity) and my love for humor. I can’t wait for more. But beyond the gossip, Carson’s writing made me reminisce about the workplace/tech rags of the 2010s. We need more of this.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand why this type of writing disappeared. Rich people became increasingly litigious (remember when Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel went after Gawker?!), the internet became polarized (internet mobs chomping at the bit to find their next cancellation victim), and content became a monetization engine that rewards being deferential. Quite the compound effect. And as a result, you have more of what we have today: content that lacks a clear POV or any edge. So whenever I see something like RPS, it immediately grabs my attention.

And I’m locked in, I immediately texted my friend Chris about it and we took a trip down memory lane.

If you subscribe, I’m curious to hear what you think of it.

Leave a comment

My Newsletter

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: RECENT NEWSLETTERS

You get a 2-for-1 deal this week because both of these will help you start off 2026 strong. They’re both about incredibly effective low-lift/high-leverage ways to get ahead.

Politics has a bad rap. And when I think about the political games some people play at work, it should. The backchanneling, maneuvering, and throwing people under the bus for your own personal gain - yeah, that stuff is nasty. But this newsletter is about playing good politics: understanding how to wield power and influence to actually get things done.

Did you know that experts have blindspots? And those blindspots make them register their expertise as “easy”, rather than the complex skills they actually are. And often, leveraging those exact skills are how you get ahead at work. This week’s newsletter is about identifying those "easy" wins and flexing them to build a strong internal brand.

That’s it for this week! From my browser to yours.

Ashley

I can’t stop thinking about the cabin we spent a few days in in over the weekend. So here’s another picture of the snow. Since we’re getting more snow in NYC this weekend, I’ll be cozying it up once again.

And if you haven’t yet, subscribe to Reframed to join leaders from Google, YouTube, Chanel, Meta, TikTok, and Starface Beauty every week →

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I’m Ashley Rudolph and I write this newsletter for ambitious people who are ready to step into the next level of their careers. People have said that I share the kind of “real talk” that you only get from a close friend. Advice that feels actionable and helps improve their relationship to work.

It’s MLK Day here, so if you’re in the US, enjoy your holiday!

I spent this past weekend with friends in a sprawling cabin on the Connecticut River, watching the Vermont snow create a very specific kind of magic outside the window.

I was so analog this weekend that I didn’t even need to Brick my phone to stay off it.

My friends Jen and Romaine were our incredible hosts for the weekend. Jen shares her Vermont cottage life and culinary genius on TikTok. Her toks are addictive (and calming!). The weekend was filled with oysters and champagne, fondue, a beautiful roasted chicken, and games.

It was restorative in every way.

CLIENT STORIES

Why Your “Easy” Work Is Your Biggest Career Asset

There’s a theme that’s been dominating my coaching calls recently, particularly as we hit the “New Year, New Me” cycle. High achievers want to push themselves; they want more challenge and more fulfillment.

I love that energy, so I lean into it with them. The thing that shocks them is the realization that sometimes the quickest path to the next level isn’t developing new skills; it’s capitalizing on what already comes “easy” to them. I don’t mean this as an invitation to be mediocre or lazy, that’s not what we do here on Reframed! It’s about recognizing that your natural strengths are your highest-leverage assets. When you focus ruthlessly on what comes naturally to you, you aren’t taking the “easy way out”. You’re identifying the most efficient way to stand out and get ahead.

Take me, for example. Pattern matching comes incredibly easy to me. Specifically, the ability to do things like look at an org chart, assess talent, understand an organization’s goals, and see exactly who needs to be where to win. It’s why I was a great operator and it’s how I scaled teams so effectively. It’s my unfair advantage and leaning into it is what also makes me an excellent career strategist.

Recently, I coached a client through identifying her edge and using it as leverage. I want to share that with you all.

Two weeks into her new role at a growing tech company, Maya called me feeling uncertain.

“I think I might be overthinking this,” she said. “Everything they’re asking me to do feels...straightforward.”

Maya had just landed a strategic operations role after years of project management experience. When she arrived, she discovered teams were operating without basic coordination frameworks. There were smart people everywhere working in silos, missing deadlines, and generally unclear on who owned what. The kind of situation that is simultaneously an operators worst nightmare (if it persists) and their dream problem to solve (if they’re empowered to fix it).

So Maya did what felt natural: she created a simple project management template that teams could actually use.

“I literally made a basic framework,” she told me.

“When I showed it to the head of finance, he said ‘Where have you been all my life?’ But Ashley, this was just standard project management.”

I want to pause here for a second and address the obvious question: how do we know Maya wasn’t just doing something actually simple that anyone could have replicated (lol)?

Recent research from HBR offers some insight. When testing experts versus novices, researchers found that genuine expertise actually prevents people from “overclaiming.” True experts are more accurate about what they know and precisely because they know it so well, they often undervalue its complexity.

Maya’s ten years of project management experience allowed her to quickly assess what was missing, synthesize a solution, and implement it effectively. What felt "standard" to her was actually sophisticated pattern recognition. And that simple tool enabled teams to work in ways they weren’t able to previously.

Easy for you, game-changing for them.

I loved hearing this scenario from Maya. It was a signal to me that she’s somewhere where she can make an impact and her repeatedly doing what she’s good at is going to be consequential for her career, in all the right ways.

THE RESEARCH

What Gallup's Management Research Gets Right About Professional Growth

If you created professional goals for 2026 - I want you to check in on them. How many of your goals are hinged on your natural gifts, the things you do incredibly well?

Sometimes we forget them. Self improvement and professional development culture is so oriented around patching up our "weaknesses" and closing all our gaps. And while I do think those things are important, your real leverage will come from doubling down on your zone of genius - the things that feel “easy” for you.

My POV was shaped by my experiences and influenced by the core philosophy behind tools like CliftonStrengths: your greatest potential for growth lies in your areas of natural strength, not your weaknesses. We even chatted about it briefly in our interview with Babba Rivera on our podcast last year.

Gallup’s research on management confirms this as well. The highest-performing teams aren’t the ones who fix every individual’s weaknesses, but the ones who obsessively sharpen their “genius” skills. You will always get a higher ROI by taking a strength from a 9 to a 10 than by dragging a weakness from a 3 to a 4.

THE FRAMEWORK

Find Your Hidden Competitive Advantage With These 3 Simple Questions

So let’s dig into yours. If you haven’t done this type of reflection, you’re probably thinking “well, what am I good at?”. If you feel stuck, try starting here. Reflect on things like:

• What have you done at work recently that feels “obvious” to you, yet consistently elicits a visceral “thank goodness you’re here” response from your peers or even your manager?

• When you’re working on a project and things aren’t going as expected, where do you focus your time and energy first?

• What types of problems do you look to solve time and time again at work? For example, do you instinctively focus on the people, the process, or the data?

Take a few minutes to jot down the answers to the above questions today. Save it on your phone, your computer, or keep it pinned to your desk. The next time you catch yourself saying, “I literally could have pulled this off the internet,” I want you to look back at that list and shift your energy.

The internet has the information, but it doesn’t have your judgment.

It doesn’t have years and years of pattern recognition that allowed you to know which information on the internet mattered to your unique situation.

It doesn’t know how to apply that information to a room full of complex teams all operating in your specific context.

But you do.

At a certain point in your career, you’re being paid for the years it took to know exactly which template to build. And that’s not cheating. It’s actually the highest form of mastery.

Good luck! See you on Thursday.

Ashley

One more thing, subscribe to Reframed.

Join readers from Netflix, Google, Uber, Chanel, LinkedIn, and Sephora. I share fresh leadership and career insights every Monday at 8AM, right before you tackle your week.

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I’m Ashley Rudolph and I write this newsletter for ambitious people who are ready to step into the next level of their careers. People have said that I share the kind of “real talk” that you only get from a close friend. Advice that feels actionable and helps improve their relationship to work. Enjoy!

Real power players don't just work harder, they operate with a level of agency that most people think is reserved for the C-Suite. Are you one?

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Three or four years into my career, I was in my “lost and figuring it out” phase until one night, a boozy mid-week hang with a friend changed my life.

Picture this.

Me: 26 and disillusioned and my 27 year old but very grown up friend chatting it up over dinner and glasses of wine.

She was ~6 years into her career and the top salesperson at her company. She had outpaced colleagues that had been in sales for decades.

That night, she talked to me about her upcoming performance review. I noticed right away that her posture was different, she didn’t have the same trepidation that my other peers did. They were putting their heads down, working really hard, and nervous about the outcome. Not my friend.

She imparted some wisdom on me that left me shook. There is no other way to describe it lol.

Ahead of her performance review, she told her manager that if he wasn’t ready to discuss a comp increase that was at least $50k above her current base salary, he may as well cancel the meeting.

My jaw dropped.

Her request wasn’t delivered combatively; it was delivered in a very charming way, like only an incredible salesperson could.

She told her manager that if he wasn’t ready to discuss a comp increase that was at least $50k above her current salary, he may as well not even have the conversation.

And of course, she got what she wanted and more.

It wasn’t just bravado that got her what she wanted. My friend had the results to back it up. She was closing deals. Her clients loved her and she had a direct impact on the bottom line. On top of all of that, she was a pro at building relationships. Her positive attitude was infectious.

After that conversation, I made some changes.

It was inspiring to hear a young woman managing her career with the kind of confidence I thought was only reserved for men much older than we were. More importantly, she gave me a lesson in what confidence, competence, and real leverage look like in action. And she didn’t have to rely on tenure to wield it.

After talking to her, I realized that career momentum is something you actively build.

Our chat exposed a category of employee that stands out amongst the rest: the “Power Players”. She showed me what being one looks like and I’ve been studying the playbook ever since.

So, I’m sharing my insights with you today.

I realized that night that she was checking boxes most of us don't even know exist. Since then, I’ve seen these same patterns play out across my highest-performing clients whether they are in tech, finance, creative, or another industry entirely.

What Power Players Do Differently Than Everyone Else

Here’s what it takes to move from “reliable achiever” to “chosen one”. Power Players operate with a level of agency that most people think is reserved for the C-Suite.

Run down this checklist and do your own mini-assessment. If you want the more automated option, where you answer a list of 10 questions and receive the results directly in your inbox, take my Career Influence Index.

They Focus on Impact and It Earns Them Access

Power Players focus on impact. Focusing on impact might mean that they have to veer away from what’s written in their job spec or even evolving what’s expected of someone in their role.

Where others might focus on the fact that they’re doing lots of work or are juggling lots of tasks, Power Players can pinpoint exactly how their work is moving the needle for their department, team, or company overall. Information flows freely to them, especially before decisions are made. They are regularly in meeting rooms where strategy is discussed and decisions are made. And if they’re not, they’re briefed soon after.

Answer yes or no to the following questions:

• In terms of your performance at work, do you consistently exceed expectations? Is your work high-impact and measurable?

• Are you the go-to person for leadership? When executives are making strategic decisions, do they proactively ask for your input?

• Are you in rooms/meetings where strategic decisions are made?

• When a major opportunity arises (think: promotion, high-visibility project), do they tap you first?

When you’re navigating organizational politics, managing people twice your age, or trying to be seen as “strategic” rather than just “tactical,” you don’t need motivation. You need a playbook that works. Subscribe to Reframed.

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They Build Their Reputation Strategically and Have Leverage

Personally, I think your reputation is built on being good at your job (you have to have results). The other key is the effort you put into building the right relationships. It doesn’t just happen, it’s hard work.

I’ve noticed that Power Players don’t leave their reputation to chance. They know exactly how they are perceived by leadership and key decision-makers. They don’t just have a "boss"; they have a champion who would vouch for them behind closed doors, without a second of hesitation.

Answer yes or no to the following questions:

• Are you intentional about building strategic relationships with the right people (even the difficult ones) rather than just the people you like?

• Do you know whether your manager would vouch for you in critical executive/leadership conversations? And if not, do you know how to strategically shift their perspective?

• Do leadership and key decision-makers see you as a leader? Do they trust you with high-stakes decisions?

They Can Command a Room and Influence Key Decisions

More than any of the others, I think that these two qualities are the ones that people think “just come naturally”. You’re either a leader or you’re not. You’re extroverted or you’re not. You’re comfortable in front of a room, or you’re not. People listen you or they don’t.

I disagree. You can learn how to command a room and you can learn how to be influential. And to be clear: the “command” skill I’m referring to is not about being the loudest person in the room or steamrolling your colleagues. It’s not domineering. I would never recommend that here.

Power Players don’t just participate in meetings; they own their domain. Their ideas carry weight because they understand the context of the business, not just their specific lane. They’ve mastered the art of getting people to lean in when they speak. They aren't waiting for permission to have an opinion; they are constantly in the driver’s seat.

Quick Note: if you’re afraid of being wrong, this will be a challenge for you. Putting your opinions out there means that sometimes you will be. You have to work to get over that fear.

Answer yes or no to the following questions:

• When you participate in meetings, do people lean in and listen? Are your contributions overlooked?

• Are you a “go-to” person for strategic advice? Do executives proactively seek out your input before making a big move?

• Do you have a roadmap or a general direction for where you want your career to go?

YOUR RESULTS

Where do you stand?

If you answered “yes” to at least 6 out of 10 of these questions, chances are you’re a Power Player. For the ones where you couldn't give a confident 'yes,' think about the shifts you can make in your day-to-day. Notice that none of the criteria for being a Power Player require you to take on more responsibilities or work incredibly long hours. It’s about how you choose to spend your time, how you position yourself, and relationship building.

I’m really curious to hear from you all! Do these feel true? Have you noticed any of these as well throughout your career?

Leave a comment

If you just ran through the questions and didn’t see yourself in any of it, don’t spiral.

Being a Power Player isn’t just about your personality or how you show up at work, it’s also about your environment. You can be smart, capable, and ready for the next level, but if you’re at a company that keeps you in a box, doesn’t value transparency, or locks you out of leadership conversations, it might be a case of right skills / wrong environment. Food for thought.

And if you made it all the way to the end of this post and are thinking, this isn’t a post about politics. That’s the point. Somewhere along the way, we stopped being honest about the fact that playing “good” politics advances your career. We tend to think that politics is just the icky stuff; the underhanded, self-serving behaviors.

But…

Getting invited to the right meetings? Playing politics well.

Having your ideas heard? Playing politics well.

Being seen as “ready for the next level”? Playing politics well.

People trusting your judgment? Playing politics well.

And now you have the guidebook.

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

Want the quiz results delivered to your inbox?

If you want the more automated option, where you answer a list of 10 questions and receive the results directly in your inbox, take the quiz.

One more thing, subscribe to Reframed.

Join readers from Netflix, Google, Uber, Chanel, LinkedIn, and Sephora. I share fresh leadership and career insights every Monday at 8AM, right before you tackle your week.

If you’re curious, people who work at the following companies subscribe to Reframed.

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I’m Ashley Rudolph and I write this newsletter for ambitious people who are ready for the next level in their careers. People have said that I share the kind of “real talk” advice that you only get from a close friend. I agree.

Sometimes self-awareness and external validation is the only permission you need to finally step into something bigger.

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Welcome back! I’m on my way to the airport heading back to NYC from Cali. It was a rainy holiday break but I feel more ready than ever to get back into the swing of things.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably still leaning into your new year energy. You may find yourself reflecting on your career, your habits, and what you want to accomplish. Maybe you even sat down with your journal over the break and went through the reflection exercise that and I put together 😉

At this point, some of you may be wrestling with whether this is the year you go after something bigger, better, or more fulfilling.

And as I was writing this newsletter, I started reflecting on what it sounded like when people came to me wanting to get to the next level last year. I thought about how they described where they were at in their career and the signals that made me sure that they were ready for the next thing. They often came to me sounding something like this:

• “I’m getting to this place at work where I think that there could be a ceiling and I want to basically break through that ceiling”

• "I want to feel less reliant on this job... I want to steer my own career with intention and with a sense of agency"

• “I just feel like I’m the intern. I feel like I’m just waiting for my manager to tell me what to do. Like, waiting for her to give me feedback, to tell me to start something… I want to get to a place where I almost see her as a peer”

• "I know I'm smart. I know that I have good experience, I know that I'm coachable and I know that I would be an asset"

• “I want my title and salary to be commensurate with what I’m actually doing”

• “I feel like I have more to give”

• “I find myself getting bored, which is untenable to me”

• “I don’t know what the perfect role looks like for me”

Maybe you’re feeling some of these things too.

RESEARCH & INSIGHTS

Why Some People Lack Clarity About Whether They’re Ready for More

Did you notice a pattern in their quotes? Most people don’t walk into consults with me saying “I want more”. More often, they describe frustration, misalignment, or a nagging sense they’re capable of something bigger but something just feels off. It’s my job to help them start to untangle it, whether we work together or not.

Their uncertainty typically centers around one of two things:

1. Whether they were ready for the next step or

2. Whether they were confident that the next step was achievable

And it’s not just my clients.

New research published in Psychological Science found that women typically wait 8-9 years in leadership feeder roles before pursuing higher positions, while men pursue them after just a few years. They found that women don’t apply early because they don’t have confidence in their ability to succeed in the role, while men often recognize they’re not fully prepared but pursue opportunities anyway. IMO, I think how you’re socialized and encouraged to pursue opportunities probably matters quite a bit, which leads me to my next point.

The most fascinating part was that once women become aware this pattern exists, they’re more likely to apply for those roles. Sometimes a little bit of self-awareness and external validation is the nudge you need to feel ready. This is why I'm always encouraging people in my circle to go after it.

This week, I’m sharing the 4 telltale signs I look for to understand whether someone is ready for the next step. If any of these feel familiar to you - I hope this newsletter gives you the permission you need to step into something bigger this year. You deserve it.

THE FRAMEWORK

4 Signs You’re Ready for the Next Level in Your Career

Maybe you'll recognize yourself in several of these, or perhaps one will land in a way that finally makes it all click.

1. When your frustration shifts from “this is hard” to “this is inefficient”

This is about systems thinking. Most early-career frustration (or sometimes new role frustration) sounds like “I don’t know how to do this”. Mid and senior level career frustration sounds more like “Why are we doing it this way?”

When you’re ready for the next level, you start to evolve from questioning to solving and advising (ie. “Here’s a better way for us to handle this”). You aren’t just proposing the “right” way in theory; you’re focused on what actually works within your company’s specific constraints, culture, and resources.

When you’re at this level it’s clear to others that you've outgrown your job responsibilities and have started focusing on scaling your impact. You no longer just see tactical challenges; you see the organizational patterns holding teams back and you can visualize realistic strategies to fix them that account for politics, budget, and timing, not just business school case studies.

2. When you start seeing the work behind the work

This builds on the previous point. If you’re thinking at the organizational level, you’ve evolved past the point of just executing tasks.

You’re ready for the next level if you’re able to do things like automatically identify what’s missing in a work stream or project, spot risks before they become problems, and think three steps ahead of everyone else. You probably also catch yourself thinking about stakeholder management, timelines and dependencies, and resource allocation even when “it’s not your job” to think about those things.

There is a clear line between being “observant” and being ready for the next level though. It comes down to this:

• Do people come to you to help solve the inefficiencies you spot? OR are you just dropping a list of problems on your boss’s desk for them to fix?

If you are the person the team turns to for the solution, you’re already operating at the next level. If you’re still in “problem identification” mode, you may not be there yet.

3. When people start treating you like the exception, not the rule

This is the one that sets your spidey senses off, because it’s when people start treating you differently. You’ll notice it during seemingly innocent interactions. Your manager starts saying things like “Well, I know YOU can handle this” or “I don’t have to worry about your projects.” Colleagues preface their requests with “I know you’re busy but...” You’ve become the person others assume has their stuff together, which probably means you’re operating above your pay grade.

Here’s what’s really happening:

• People assume you’re busy because you are.

• They assume you’re doing important work because you are.

• They assume you can handle complexity because you can.

It’s recognition of your readiness for more responsibility. It’s not a coincidence.

4. When you start feeling resentment about your compensation not matching the work

I added this one because it might be the most important reframe you can make this year. If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably taking on challenging work, learning, growing, leading. You’re a trusted voice at work and making an impact.

But sometimes those exact things create a nagging feeling of unfairness - especially when your title and compensation haven’t caught up AND you don’t have clarity around when or whether they will. You start zeroing in on the fact that you’re doing more than others, being treated like the next level, but not getting the recognition.

It’s easy to feel like you’re being taken advantage of. But try this reframe: this isn’t about them undervaluing you. It’s about you outgrowing your current container. You have agency here. If you’re operating at the next level, have the conversation about what’s next - or find that next level somewhere else.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

If even one of these themes resonated with you, there's your sign that you’re ready for what’s next.

The new year energy you're feeling? Trust it.

That nagging sense that you're ready for something bigger? It's probably right.

You don't need anyone's permission to want more, but if you needed a gentle push to go after it - just imagine me nudging your shoulder. You’re ready, I know it, it’s time to start recognizing it yourself.

Good luck. See you next week!

Ashley

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Reader favorites

Okay, so my newsletter about the 5 habits that make you seem less senior really struck a chord this week. (If you’re new here because of it - hello!!) Back to the letter, it makes sense that it resonated, because who hasn't felt like they weren’t being taken as seriously as they want to be at work? We’re even chatting about it over on ’ recent newsletter.

This week, I wanted to share 3 newsletters from my archive that tackle a few of the things I'm constantly talking through with clients. I think you’ll enjoy them.

I’m Ashley Rudolph and I write this newsletter for ambitious people who are ready for the next level in their careers. People have said that I share the kind of “real talk” advice that you only get from a close friend. I agree.

Today, I’m celebrating 100 (!!) issues of Reframed.

When I started this newsletter, it was an experiment. I had just launched my coaching business and was figuring out how to navigate entrepreneurship on my own.

I wanted to build a community of people who shared my values. People who weren’t afraid to admit they cared about their work and wanted to be great at what they do. So I built it.

And I didn’t just build a great newsletter, it translated into real results for my business. This year was about the three things I write about the most: doing great work, being visible, and telling compelling stories.

I’m sorry to report that this approach is, in fact, effective (lol).

So today, I’m pulling back the curtain and sharing what worked for me this year. Because results like these don’t happen by chance. This year, I:

• Grew my business revenue by 50%

• Grew my newsletter subscribers by 1,600% (for context my ‘25 target was just 200 subs lol)

• Was featured on 15+ podcasts

• Was featured in Teen Vogue (twice) for my expertise on the job market

• Launched an entirely new website that became a conversion engine

• Relaunched this newsletter as Reframed

• Introduced Open Tabs, where I share my takes on the culture of work

And 2026 is going to be bigger.

STRATEGIES & INSIGHTS THAT WORK

Here’s everything I did to level up this year

On doing great work

I started my coaching business after 15 years climbing the corporate ladder. I’ve always been ambitious. I’ve been a high achiever since grade school, it even landed me on the Today Show when I was 17.

I applied the same frameworks I used to scale corporate operations function to grow my business. I can trace my growth back to a few specific, strategic choices. They were the areas I focused on consistently. They’re applicable whether you’re running your own business or focused on getting to the next level in your career.

• Becoming customer obsessed. I smile every time someone tells me a newsletter felt like I was inside their brain. It’s because I coach high achievers. My friends are high achievers. I read what they read. I’m in the ecosystem. Most people view their careers through the lens of what they want, but real progress comes from centering the people you serve. It’s the difference between trying to convince someone they need you and providing the solution they were already looking for. It’s the shift from being a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have.” Going into 2025, I ran a detailed strategic planning exercise and brand retrospective, analyzing every single testimonial and piece of feedback I’ve ever received. Those insights became the backbone of my business strategy. It’s 33 pages long. I went DEEP. My advice? Center your customers, your stakeholders, or even your manager’s needs, and I promise you’ll feel the difference. (If you haven’t done ICP work, this piece in Forbes is aligned with my thinking on this topic.)

• Focusing relentlessly on outcomes, not effort. This year, I got rid of low-ROI activities, busywork, and getting distracted by what others were doing. Instead, I focused on outcomes. That meant prioritizing sending a weekly newsletter because it led to opportunities. In my coaching, focusing on delivering results for my clients turned them into a referral engine. One client alone has referred SEVEN people. In a job, it works the same way. Your manager, colleagues, and stakeholders become the ones who connect you to opportunities…but only when you do great work.

• Getting your hands dirty. One of the biggest differences I see between average managers and great ones is this: great managers don’t just design strategy, they execute. They stay close to the work. They understand how their decisions will actually impact their teams and the business because they’re in it. I hated the idea of becoming an “armchair expert”, so I became a player/coach. I’ve been embedded in one of my client’s businesses one day a week for the past 1.5 years as a fractional leader. I’m in leadership meetings. I run 1:1s. I help shape their people strategy in real time. That proximity matters. It’s the reason why my coaching is effective. My own version of dogfooding.

• Pushing past discomfort. Talking about yourself and your work is hard. When I talk about “committing to writing every week” in the next section I know it will sound like an oversimplification. It’s not. There were plenty of weeks when I felt a real tinge of embarrassment before pressing send on this newsletter. But on the other side of that discomfort was always someone telling me that something I shared mattered to them. You’re going to encounter challenges in your work when you take on new roles or new projects. You might feel like giving up—don’t. Don’t let your own high standards hold you hostage.

Great work travels, especially when people know you exist (*wink*).

How to work with me

If you want to make 2026 the best year of your career, let’s chat. I help my clients do all the things I’m writing about today: doing great work, crafting the right stories about their work, and getting noticed by the right people.

Explore ELEVATE

On being visible

Great work creates momentum. When you amplify your work by talking about it, you’ll keep your career flywheel moving. Focusing on visibility is what moved me from the individual contributor lane into management and then from management into the executive level. Focusing on visibility is not political. It’s not distraction from “doing actual work”. It’s practical. Talking about your work and building relationships are critical if you want to move up and avoid stagnation. Creating visibility wasn’t instinctive for me as a professional. Once I treated it like a skill instead of a personality trait that I lacked, everything changed. Here’s what I focused on:

• Working through personal limiting beliefs. Whenever I talk about speaking up or sharing ideas at work, someone inevitably says they can’t because they’re an introvert. That’s when I pull out my favorite party trick. I tell them Oprah’s an introvert and the conversation takes a turn. You can be introverted and still speak up in meetings, go to events, and talk to people you don’t know (Susan Cain wrote an incredible bestseller about introverts btw). The cost of not talking about yourself (or your work) are real:

  • Only 24% of women feel comfortable talking about their accomplishments at work (PRSA).

  • 84% of women feel uncomfortable talking about their professional or academic achievements (US News & World Report)

  • Even when self-promotion directly impacts pay & promotions, women still downplay their achievements (Harvard Gazette)

• Finding helpful frameworks. One of the most actionable books I’ve read on evangelizing your work is Share Your Work by . It’s a quick read. If you’re good at what you do, but not great at sharing your work, buy it and keep it on your desk. I promise it will accelerate your career. Also, many of you have reached out to me about two of my newsletters on this topic that were particularly helpful. Here they are: 15 easy phrases to say in meetings and 10 non-cringey ways to self-promote.

• Finding the right arenas. For some of you, that might mean presenting regularly in meetings, posting on LinkedIn or Substack, or being quoted in a trade publication. For me, that arena was podcasting (in addition to this newsletter). At the start of the year, I’d been on a guest 3 podcasts. is the reason I was a featured guest on 15 (!!) podcasts this year. I followed her advice in this newsletter to a T.

• Running high quality experiments. My customer obsession helped me decide which experiments were worth trying. I tried clarity calls to see if I could deliver real value to my subscribers in 15 minutes (I did!). I facilitated single topic workshops in communities (and got incredible feedback!). Both of those experiments landed me real clients, which means that these calculated risks (when centered around delivering value) paid off.

  • Here’s some inspiration → one of my favorite pieces of content is sharing all the unhinged things she did to get Ceremonia off the ground. We also spoke to her about the evolution of her career this year on The Impactful Conversations Effect podcast.

Visibility is important but it’s only a career accelerant if you tell great stories.

On telling compelling stories

This year, I caught myself downplaying my own accomplishments at times in conversations, especially at events. It sounded like, “Oh, I’m an executive coach,” or “I work with high achievers,” or “I run my own business.” All technically true. All completely flat.

I help people craft their stories in my coaching and I was out here dimming my own light! So I decided to make the shift from quietly observing on the sidelines to sitting on panels, guesting on podcasts, and openly sharing my perspective instead of keeping it to myself. Here’s how I improved my storytelling:

• Becoming a good written communicator — consistently. I used to “try to sound smart” by writing like a textbook. One of the best investments I made this year was taking 5–6 workshops with Writing Workshops. They helped me focus on telling real stories like crying at work, how I dealt with tough feedback, and the things I wished I had learned earlier in my career. Those became my most popular posts this year. Proof that good writing matters.

• Becoming good at formulating opinions. Ten years ago, workers used to spend 20% of their time researching and gathering information. Now information is cheap in the age of AI. Developing the ability to craft real insights is not. It’s why companies are scrambling to hire storytellers. Being interesting, well read, and informed is a differentiator. It’s why I write Open Tabs! In your day to day, formulating opinions may look like sending a weekly recap email or sharing more of your own POVs in Slack.

  • Here’s an example → anyone can ask an AI tool “what is affiliate marketing?” But what people actually care about is how someone with real experience in affiliate marketing got good at it. It’s why this piece from is resonating.

• How you present is also part of your story. When I felt my best this year, I was put together. I focus a lot on intelligence and communication here but your appearance is a critical part of demonstrating gravitas in professional spaces. It’s so relevant that etiquette schools for founders are trending in tech. One of the modules is styling tips for work outfits lol.

  • If fashion and style is a focus area for you, some of my favorite voices on Substack are: , , , , , , , , ,

  • Falling in love with new scents changed my life this year. There must be a scientific reason for the impact it had on my confidence lol. My new faves are: Acne Studios for Frederic Malle, Celine ZouZou, and Portrait of a Lady

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I shared all this to highlight the fact that none of this was magic. I got here by committing to the right plan and executing on it, one decision at a time.

Careers work the same way.

Some years, you’ll feel stuck and spend most of your energy trying to get unstuck.

In others, you’ll experience incredible growth and wonder how you’ll ever top it.

And then there are years where you can feel something big on the horizon. Where you just know it’s going to be your best one yet.

At the center of all of it is you.

You already have the skills. Now it’s time to take action. If you want a partner to help you plan and execute the best year of your career, here’s how to work with me.

I’m in California for the holidays and taking a break from the newsletter until the new year. It’s time for me to do what I often encourage others to do: slow down, reflect, and unplug. I’m turning 40 (!!) next year, so I need to rest up lol.

Thank you for reading. See you in 2026!

Ashley

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This week, I’m partnering with , former marketing executive turned freelancer and author of where she shares career advice for early to mid-career marketers. We’re sharing our advice for making 2026 your most successful and fulfilling year in your career.

Want to level up in 2026? Your biggest career moves will be shaped by clarity, smart choices, and creating the right plan. Here’s your blueprint.

Subscribe now

Together, we’ve completed 25+ performance review cycles.

Reviews serve a purpose, but rarely is that purpose meaningful (and vulnerable!) self-reflection. That’s why we’re teaming up to bring you a more human year-end review reflection exercise: one that’s actually for you, not your manager.

We know a thing or two about the role self-reflection plays in career growth — both from our own experiences and from helping other people uplevel at work.

We designed this exercise to help you:

• Get clearer on what energizes (and drains) you

• Name what no longer works for you

• Set a direction that feels inspiring for next year

Below you’ll find three sections, each with a few prompts and a short anecdote from one of us. You’ll see how this kind of reflection has shaped both our careers as executives and, now, as entrepreneurs.

Journal through the prompts, talk them out with a friend or partner, or jot down notes while you’re traveling this holiday season. There’s no right or wrong way to approach it.

Let’s jump in.

Level Up Next Year With These 10 Questions

PART 1

Looking Back – What This Year Revealed About You

So, you know how you enjoy reading our Substacks because we share lessons rooted in our personal experiences? There’s a reason for that! Personal experience is the best guide when you’re trying to uncover what’s next. Below are four questions to bring you more clarity about what the future holds for your career next year.

• What kind of leader did you become this year? Note: Everyone is a leader in their own way, even if you don’t have the title or lead a team.

• Where did you feel most like yourself at work?

• What did you keep telling yourself “wasn’t that big of a deal” but actually bothered you this year?

• What felt hard this year that used to feel easy? What changed? Was it you or your environment?

Kate’s Story

At the end of 2016, I was wrapping up my role at my second job, an early-stage media startup. I had secured a new role for January and was excited for something different. As I reflected on my experience at the startup, I realized I was embarrassed by the way I had handled myself in several situations. A few examples: I had gossiped with coworkers, cried in front of my boss, and reacted irrationally to organizational change. (Don’t judge, I was 25.) I wanted to be proud of how I conducted myself, and I had noticed that my more experienced coworkers carried themself much more professionally. This became my goal for 2017, and it’s stuck ever since.

PART 2

Defining Your Edge – An Energy & Strengths Audit

Before you roll your eyes, this is not the standard interview question: “What are your greatest strengths?” Even if you’re self-aware, it’s a difficult question to answer honestly. So we created a slightly different approach to helping you figure out what you’re best at, what you love doing, and what you might want for the future. Reflect on these three questions:

• What parts of your work or projects made you feel energized vs. drained?

• When teams come to you for help and what are they usually hoping you’ll do?

• What or who did you feel envious of this year? Jealousy can tell us a lot about what we want but may not be ready to consciously acknowledge yet.

Kate’s Story

I realized I was unhappy in my job around August of 2024, but I had no idea what I wanted to do instead. I was burnt out and exhausted, and every time I tried to imagine a path that might energize me, I came up empty. So I started paying attention to my envy. I noticed it was always directed at people who had more freedom and flexibility in their careers — people who started their own brands, went freelance, or stepped out of marketing entirely.

Jealousy is uncomfortable, but it turned out to be the most useful signal I had. Paying attention to that feeling pushed me to go freelance and start writing on Substack. In hindsight, both were undoubtedly the right decision.

PART 3

Building Your 2026 Career Plan

This is where you turn everything you’ve learned from the earlier prompts into a plan. A plan that moves you closer to the version of yourself you want to become next year. As you think about what 2026 could look like, use these questions to define your direction and sharpen your focus:

• If nothing changed for 12 months, would you still be happy about where you’re at?

• What are 1-2 skills or qualities that you want to work on? These can come from feedback you’ve gotten, things you’re envious of in other people, etc.

• What are 3 things you can do to help yourself level up? What support systems do you have vs. need? Examples: presentation or public speaking workshops, professional development resources (HBR or newsletter subscriptions), a buddy at work who has skills that you don’t, a coach

You’ll start to notice that intentional action makes your goals feel possible, instead of feeling theoretical.

Ashley’s Story

When Kate and I were talking about this part of the exercise, I thought back to one of the most defining times in my career: when I made the shift from Manager to Director and eventually to VP in 5 years.

Before my initial promotion, I was a program manager at a startup, fully leaning into the fantasy of “cool startup life”. I loved the casual clothes, the freedom, the energy. But over time, I noticed something: the people I admired in leadership didn’t look or operate the way I did. They were always “polished” and prepared. They dressed the part AND they seemed to know what to say in spaces where I stayed quiet, afraid of sounding out of my depth.

So I made two goals that year:

1. I found a “lewk” that felt like me but more elevated. I revamped my wardrobe (Rent the Runway Unlimited was my bff). This one small shift made me feel more serious and more grounded when I walked into work every day.

2. I stopped waiting to be invited into higher-stakes work. I started talking to colleagues and superiors about what I was good at and what I wanted to do more of. I sent thoughtful emails to leadership. And eventually, I found myself presenting 1:1 to the CEO and nailing the conversation (after obsessing maniacally about it for days).

Those choices shifted how the organization saw me before my title changed. I focused on what was fully in my control: how I showed up, what I took on, and how prepared I was.

And when the opportunities came, I landed them.

WHAT’S NEXT

Resources & Support

We hope this exercise brings you the clarity you need to level up next year. Here are a few of our best resources to support you with next steps:

How to Get Promoted / Get a Raise

• Do This To Get Promoted (Most People Don’t)

• What People Who Negotiate Successfully Actually Do

• I Negotiated 9 Raises in 8 Years – Here’s My Playbook

Finding a New Job

• How to get a job in marketing from someone who’s had eight.

• A guide to vetting new opportunities

• What eight role changes in 12 years taught me about job hunting

• How To Build Your Luck and Find Your Next Big Opportunity

• Feeling Overlooked? Here’s How to Stand Out in a Crowded Job Market

Pursuing Self-Employment

• What I wish I knew before going freelance

• How I turned job insecurity into $30k (and a freelance side hustle)

• How to sign your first freelance client while working full-time

• How I decided to go freelance — and everything I did to prep

And, if you want to connect with either of us 1-1, here’s how:

• Book a consult and explore coaching with Ashley

• Book office hours with Kate

Good luck! Thank you to for her insights. See you next week.

- Ashley

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