Kerry Siggins Podcast

A comment in a leadership meeting rubbed Kerry Siggins the wrong way. She did not react. She told herself it was not worth bringing up. And then she spent the next week noticing she was on edge every time she interacted with the person who said it, unable to shake a story she had built about what he meant. This episode is the first in a six-part series on the SHARES model, and it starts with the s...

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my therapist's office with my son. I didn't expect to walk out of the session thinking about myself. But that's what happened. We were there to talk about my son, about being an empath, about how he absorbs the feelings of everyone around him, about why that can feel isolating when the people closest to him don't experience the world the same way. And in the middl...

In 2025, Kerry Siggins was going through a divorce, navigating a company under economic pressure, managing her son's health issues across two households, finishing a book, and trying to hire a VP of sales who turned out not to work. She woke up overwhelmed every day. There was a constant noise in her head: am I doing enough, how am I going to get it all done, what happens if I fall behind. And she...

Kerry Siggins ran one company for twenty years. She grew up inside it, ran every department, and built it into something that reflected her personality and her instinct to fix whatever was broken. For most of that time, she thought that being the person who held everything together was evidence of great leadership. What she eventually had to face is that it was not. Every problem she solved was on...

Kerry Siggins did not arrive at this episode from theory. She arrived at it from looking back at the last twenty years of her life and asking an honest question: what actually caused the change? Not the goals. Not the resolutions. Not the ambition. What caused the change was the moment she decided to raise a standard. The moment she said, this is how I am going to show up, not just this week or th...

Kerry Siggins has spent a long time watching talented people fail not because they lacked ability but because they could not hear what was being said to them. She has watched incredibly capable adults shut down completely over a single sentence of feedback, not because the feedback was cruel, not because it was wrong, but because somewhere underneath it, they experienced it as a threat to who they...

Kerry Siggins has gotten feedback wrong more times than she can count. She has fumbled it, blurted it out, and far more often, tiptoed around what really needed to be said because the discomfort of saying it felt harder than the cost of staying quiet. What she noticed, over years of leading people at Stone Age, is that the moments where she got it right had something in common. And the moments whe...

Every communication breakdown Kerry Siggins has witnessed in business shared one pattern. It did not fall apart because someone said the wrong thing. It fell apart because nobody said the right thing for long enough that by the time they did, there was no trust left to hold the conversation. This episode is not about communication theory. It is about what silence actually costs, in dollars, in rel...

A few weeks ago, Kerry Siggins was talking with her boyfriend Shane about his thirteen-year-old son who plays baseball. The main issue is that the boy does not really want to play baseball, and wants to quit. Shane was wrestling with what that would teach him about integrity, and Kerry paused, because she has fought that exact question her entire life. This episode is about the story most of us in...

Some years ago, Kerry Siggins was sitting in her office when her COO said something that stopped her completely. He told her she was erratic. That she was the problem. That she was hard to work for. She did not argue. She thanked him, asked for time, and then got to her car as fast as she could. What followed was not a leadership lesson. It was a breakdown, and then, slowly, a reckoning. This epis...

Kerry Siggins built her success the way many of us are taught to: through drive, control, discipline, and achievement. That approach delivered results and helped her grow her company, but over time, it also came with a cost. Burnout started to feel normal, and emotional distance crept in without her even realizing it. Randy Lyman followed a similar path. As a physicist and engineer, he built multi...

“Meet people where they are” is one of the most common pieces of leadership advice, and one of the most misunderstood. In this episode of Reflect Forward, Kerry Siggins breaks down what this phrase actually means in practice and why so many leaders get it wrong. Many leaders believe they are being empathetic, but instead lower standards or project their own way of thinking onto others. Neither app...

What does real leadership look like when someone has to leave your organization? In this episode of Reflect Forward, Kerry Siggins sits down with empathy expert and bestselling author Mimi Nicklin to explore one of the most difficult decisions leaders face. Letting someone go while balancing accountability and humanity. This conversation moves beyond theory and into the reality of leadership under...

In this episode of Reflect Forward, Kerry Siggins challenges one of the most widely held beliefs in leadership: that we are open-minded. She explores a more uncomfortable truth. Open-mindedness is not revealed when we agree or even when we appear composed in disagreement. It is revealed in the moments when our identity, beliefs, and sense of being right feel threatened. Drawing on her lived experi...

Are you climbing higher, or just climbing the wrong mountain? For many leaders, success is supposed to feel like arrival. Instead, it becomes the beginning of a deeper question. What happens when you’ve achieved what you set out to do, but it no longer feels aligned? In this episode of Reflect Forward, Kerry Siggins sits down with Nathalia Del Moral, co-founder of Next Mountain Life, to explore wh...

Sometimes leaders just want people to do their jobs. In this episode of Reflect Forward, Kerry Siggins shares a moment from a conversation with a group of CEOs that struck a nerve with everyone in the room. After dealing with workplace drama, she said something out loud that many leaders think but rarely say: sometimes we just need people to do their jobs. The response was immediate. Not frustrati...

Most leaders assume chaos is simply the cost of growth. As companies scale, complexity increases, communication breaks down, and decisions slow. The instinct is usually to reach for a new tool, new software, or another piece of technology that promises to make everything work better. But what if chaos is not actually a technology problem? In this episode of Reflect Forward, Kerry Siggins sits down...

What happens when a leader’s greatest strength becomes their identity? In this episode of Reflect Forward, CEO Kerry Siggins explores how high-performing leaders can unknowingly tie their self-worth to how they are perceived and why feedback can suddenly feel threatening when it challenges that identity. The catalyst was a boardroom moment. After presenting a three year strategic plan, Kerry recei...

In this episode of Reflect Forward, Kerry Siggins sits down with Yvonne Trost, Subconscious Performance Coach and former Fortune 500 strategist, to explore how subconscious programming shapes leadership, ambition, and results. Most leaders believe change requires more discipline and stronger habits. But what if the real constraint is not strategy or effort, but the invisible patterns driving your...

Most leadership breakdowns are not strategic. They are emotional. In this episode of Reflect Forward, Kerry Siggins explores why emotional skill is the true foundation of modern leadership. As AI accelerates and complexity increases, leaders who cannot regulate their nervous systems, understand their emotional impact, and create psychological safety will quietly erode trust. Emotional skill is not...

Executive presence is not about polish, performance, or personality. It is about trust. And trust is built long before you say the right thing. In this episode of Reflect Forward, Kerry Siggins is joined by executive coach Nataly Huff to unpack what executive presence really is, why so many leaders misunderstand it, and how your nervous system is shaping how others experience you in real time. Thi...

Hustle culture teaches leaders that exhaustion equals commitment and rest must be earned. But what if the constant push is not discipline at all, but fear in disguise? In this episode of Reflect Forward, Kerry Siggins breaks down the difference between working hard and hustling, why success often increases pressure instead of freedom, and how constant self-enforcement quietly undermines leadership...

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that does not come from workload. It comes from living under an internal verdict. Not good enough. Not worthy. Not capable. Leaders can deliver results while quietly chasing approval from a story they accepted long before they had the awareness to question it. Because it often looks like ambition and high standards, we reward it. We call it leadership. In thi...

Most leadership frustration begins with expectations we carry silently. Expectations that people will call us back, take initiative, own things the way we would, or move at our pace. When those expectations are not met, we often experience irritation or disappointment without stopping to examine their origins or whether they were ever articulated. In this episode of Reflect Forward, I unpack why p...

"Automate or Fall Behind" sounds dramatic, but it points to a quieter question leaders are facing in 2026: are our systems designed for how we want to lead? In this episode of Reflect Forward, I sit down with Nadav Wilf, founder and CEO of Align Coach, to explore how AI and automation can either amplify leadership clarity or reveal where teams still rely on outdated structures. This is not a conve...